The Guest Who Came in Secret (2)
The nation of the elves, Nuardel, was said to lie beneath the Kalian Mountain Range.
Its precise location, its culture, its plant life, and the nature of the land itself had never been made public. That secrecy was a consequence of what elves were. A long-lived people, they feared any death that was not a natural one, and they held it a virtue to spend the whole of those long lives tending the World Tree, the root of elvenkind. Contact with other nations and other races had, as a matter of course, come to be treated as taboo. No one could say what an outside variable might do to a greenhouse like Nuardel.
But as with every group in the world, there were heretics.
"Iseria! Didn't I tell you not to go near human territory!"
"The Great Forest is the same every single day. It's boring!"
Iseria, only just past the age of adulthood among the elves, hated being bored. A living creature's temperament is something that will not change even if the heavens turn upside down, and hers was the precise opposite of the elves' even temper. She craved stimulation. One might have said it was only natural, given that she had just come of age — except that elven adulthood began at fifty. For fifty years after opening one's eyes in the blessed forest, an elf learned the duties their people were meant to uphold, and the happiness of peace. Ordinary elves spent those fifty years and came to seek a peace without so much as a ripple.
Iseria was not one of them.
"Dad! A snake!"
"H-hey, put that down, Iseria!"
She spent whole days racing through the forest, and anything that caught her interest went straight into her hands.
"Spirit juggling!"
On the strength of an elf's natural affinity for spirits, she would give them form and juggle them. Thwack! Crack!
"So this... is what the World Tree tastes like."
She had even committed the outrage of prying the World Tree's bark off with a rock and tasting the flesh beneath. Afterward, of course, the elven high elder gave her five hundred strokes of the switch.
That was Iseria. Stimulation — more stimulation. She wanted dopamine. And so, in the end, she escaped Nuardel without a soul knowing.
Slipping away under the moon in search of freedom, the flutter of it, the delicious guilt, the thrill — together they gave her the most extreme stimulation she had ever known. But the heartbeat of adventure lasts a day or two at best. However much Iseria might soar and scramble, the place where she had run wild was Nuardel, a sealed greenhouse. However roughly a mere hothouse flower had lived, could it survive beyond the glass?
A safe roof was out of the question. She snatched what sleep she could beneath leaves that barely kept the dew off, and on the days she failed to find even a handful of wild berries or tree fruit, her stomach growled itself hollow.
"Ugh... I can't live like this!"
Worn raw by cold and hunger, Iseria at last took out the emergency rations she had packed when she left home: Elskit.
Elskit was a simple hardtack the elves made. Even so, faced with it while starving, the smell was so nutty, so tempting, that she swallowed hard. With a trembling hand she drew a single piece from the pouch and was just lifting it to her mouth—
"Kweeeek!!"
"Kyaaaah!!!"
Whether it had caught the scent of the Elskit or had been tracking her all along, a monstrous boar roared and charged. Iseria screamed and flung the ration pouch far away. The boar turned from her at once and went after it.
She used the opening to run. She ran like mad. Not even when she had gnawed the World Tree and fled the high elders had she run this fast. When she came back to herself after sprinting in a blank daze, the boar was gone. The relief did nothing for the road ahead. It felt hopeless.
My Elskit... I didn't even get a single bite.
If cold and hunger had been the only problems until now, cold, hunger, exhaustion, and sheer mental strain were all driving her on. Even a reckless nature takes a step back before an environment that is physically merciless. Stripped bare in body and in mind, Iseria trudged through the night forest.
The original plan had been to make for Silbaerin, the nearest human city. Now she didn't care. Not even knowing whether the path ran the right way, she walked — though it was less a walk than a motion meant to show how hopeless she felt.
And then a smell brushed the inside of her nose.
Wh-what is that?
A ferociously delicious smell that scoured her gutter of a mood clean in a single breath. Not even an elven dish from the greatest elf chef alive could have put out a fragrance like this. There was nothing animal in the aroma at all, and yet it was deep and rich, bright and savory. Could food like this actually exist in the world?
Forgetting how tired her body was, Iseria hurried along the path as the smell grew thicker. At the end of that fragrance stood the rear of a building she took for a restaurant. It was the first human civilization she had ever laid eyes on in her life, but she had no attention to spare for that. She vaulted the backyard's wooden fence with ease, went to the back door, and opened it without a moment's hesitation.
"U... uugh..."
I stood frozen with the broom raised to head height. They say that when you meet a situation you never saw coming, you don't jump or run — you freeze. This was exactly that.
I'd been braced for some mean, ugly thief and gone in swinging, and it had to be an elf. I didn't know whether ordinary-looking elves existed, but this was no ordinary face either. Platinum hair as bright as lemon, green eyes as clear as new leaves. She was on the short side, but her face was lovely enough that no one would balk at calling it a beauty to topple kingdoms.
So why was an elf who looked like that raiding our refrigerator in the middle of the night?
Startled by my ambush, she toppled over and dumped the bibimbap vegetables she'd been stealing all over herself. It was a miserable kind of funny, but I got my bearings soon enough and lowered the broom. She seemed to understand I had no intention of attacking. She flinched, then let a little of the tension out of her shoulders.
"Um... who are you? No, before that — why are you here...?"
"Slurp!"
"Hey, those are seasoned — they're seasoned!"
Paying my question no mind at all, the elf gobbled the vegetables stuck to her cheeks. One thing about her was now certain. Shame and all the rest could wait: she was hungry. She reacted when I spoke, so she understood me, but her eyes were glued to the vegetables and showed no intention of coming off them.
There would be no talking until she'd been fed. What was I even doing, out here under the moon. I heaved a sigh and stepped toward her.
She scrabbled backward across the floor with her legs, trying to get away. Not a chance. I reached for her without hesitation.
"No!!"
"Yes!"
"Give it back!"
I snatched the side-dish box of vegetables in one quick motion. Robbed of the food, the elf thrashed, wild to get it back, and I stopped her by planting my other hand on her head.
"Quit squirming and hold still! I'll make you something to eat."
"Huh? Uh... okay..."
"Yeah, yeah. Get the vegetables off you and go sit down."
I sat her at the table and set about making bibimbap. There was leftover rice I'd meant to eat myself, so I simply warmed it and arranged the seasoned vegetables neatly on top. A spoonful of gochujang, the red chili paste, in the center, a ring of sesame oil around it, and it was done.
The elf watched me throw the bowl together. She swallowed when I loosened the gochujang, and when I finished by drizzling the sesame oil, her eyes went wide with shock and her hands trembled.
What was that. Was she that hungry?
I had the bibimbap finished in under five minutes. I set it down in front of her.
"Here. Mix it up well with the spoon and eat."
"M-mix it? Like this?"
"Oh. You're good at that."
She hesitated a little at the thought of wrecking a bibimbap laid out like a picture, but once she had sniffed the air she mixed the rice without mercy. Stirred until it looked delicious.
I wasn't sure I had the lore right, but she was an elf, so I figured she wouldn't touch anything from an animal and left off the fried egg. Whether that mattered or not, she lifted a heaping spoonful of the glossy, glistening rice and put it in her mouth. She chewed. She crunched. Mouth packed full of bibimbap, the elf girl ate in silence for a long while — and then, all at once, tears poured from those pretty eyes.
"Hic—! Uuuu!!"
Not a single clean track, the way Duke Kailan cried. This was a flood. She sobbed the way a pure little child sobs, and still the spoon never stopped. She was eating the tears right along with the rice. The seasoning was going to come out salty, I thought.
A famous clip from the army popped into my head.
"Have you ever had a Choco Pie soaked in tears!!"
I couldn't speak to the tear-soaked Choco Pie, but a tear-soaked bibimbap — that, I felt I understood.
The elf only stopped crying once she had scraped up every last grain. Her eyes, a fresh yellow-green like a summer forest, were swollen, and gochujang was smeared all around her mouth. I handed her a napkin and a glass of cool water without a word. Watching me from the corner of her eye, she dabbed at her eyes and her mouth, then drained the water in one go.
A little late to start minding your manners, isn't it?
The thought crossed my mind, and I let it go. If she'd been hungry enough, maybe that was simply how it went. Her stomach was full now. It ought to be fine.
I dragged out the chair across from her with a scrape and sat. The elf startled and looked at me.
"So. Who are you, and why did you sneak in?"
I asked as gentlemanly as I could manage. Feeding a thief I'd caught stealing food in the middle of the night already put me past gentleman. Beyond gentle. Ultimate gentle.
At the question, the elf's lips moved.
"You..."
"You?"
"A mere human!!!"
Crazy bitch.
For the first time in a while, a distant dizziness washed over me.