A Snap-Fiction story By Micah Siemens
They called it the Fallen Winded Path because it descended without ever seeming to slope.
Wide enough for armies, old enough to forget its own beginning, it breathed cold even in summer. From a distance it looked passable—almost welcoming—but those who stood upon it felt the weight of somewhere already lost.
A traveler walked there at dusk, bearing nothing that marked rank or kin. The Path took from him first: warmth, then certainty. When the shadow-thieves came, they did not rush. They unfolded themselves from the dark places between stones, deliberate and knowing. They were not beasts. They did not hunger.
They remembered.
They stripped the traveler of what guarded him, struck not only his body but the names that held him upright, and left him half-living—breath still moving, will broken, soul loosened like a torn seam. The shadows withdrew, satisfied. What they wanted was not death. It was abandonment.
Not long after, High Elves passed along the Path, robed in pale sigils that caught the last of the light. They saw him. They stopped.
But the Path was cursed ground.
To touch blood there was to risk binding oneself to the Fall. Their laws were old, hammered into them when the world was younger and more afraid. They spoke words of grief and lifted hands of blessing from a distance, yet the runes on their wrists burned warning.
They moved on, their backs straight, their faces turned toward the HighTower on the horizon—white and unassailable, raised to watch all roads and heal all wounds that reached its gates.
Another followed: a keeper of rites, sworn to preserve what remained untainted. He knelt, close enough to see the traveler’s eyes still tracking the sky, and felt the pull of duty split in two. If he stayed, he would fall with the Path. If he carried the man, he would break the law that made him who he was.
He rose.
He did not look back.
Night deepened.
Then footsteps came that did not belong to the Path.
A Dark Elf approached, skin like cooled ash, eyes marked with the sigil of a heretical order long cursed by the HighTower. They were said to twist healing into bondage, mercy into defiance. Their kind was barred from the gates.
The Dark Elf knelt without hesitation.
They poured oil that burned and wine that stung, binding wounds with hands already scarred by other refusals. The traveler cried out—not in pain, but in memory returning too fast. The Dark Elf did not stop. Mercy, in their order, was never gentle.
They lifted him onto a beast bred for long descents and turned toward the HighTower, whose white walls caught the moon like a blade.
At the gates, horns sounded warning. The Dark Elf did not argue. They spoke a name instead—the name of the Sanctuary vow, older than the laws that hated it. The gates opened, grudgingly.
Within the fortress-hospital, the wounded were many and the healers tired. The Dark Elf laid the traveler down and pressed a token into the steward’s hand: a coin of dark metal, warm as a living thing.
“Spend this,” they said. “Bind what can be bound. If the cost exceeds it, I will return.”
“You are forbidden,” the steward said.
“I am promised,” the Dark Elf replied, already turning away.
From the HighTower’s height, the Path could be seen winding endlessly downward, wide and waiting. The traveler slept, not whole, but held.
And far below, the shadows watched—knowing the rescue was not yet finished.
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