Burning Woods

   The company crested a hill that looked down into a wooded valley. The horses and the men sputtered and choked from the colossal plumes of smoke that wafted up from beneath them. Large swaths of trees blazed in the wind and the air was alive with the snapping and crackling of the burning wood. But alongside the sound of the men and the burning trees lay a low humming, a chanting, wistful but beautiful.

    "What is this?" Prince Norvar asked, dismounting and drawing closer to the edge of the hill.
    That was when he saw them. Elves, rendered miniscule from the distance and the height, clutching torches and singing. They threw the torches into the trees before throwing themselves into the flames.
    "Stop them! Hey! Hey!"
    Norvar shouted and waved his hands, trying to catch their attention but his shouts and his cries fell upon deaf ears. Numbly, the prince stood and watched, horrified by the desperation and carnage that was unfolding before him.
    "They're burning the forest," his captain, Sylder, said lowly as he came up besides him. "Rather than surrender."
   "Why? Why do they do this? We do not kill our prisoners -"
   "It is because they they fear us far more than we fear them, my lord. You must understand; the elves were once immortal, blessed by the creators above. But they lost that immortality during their first war with mankind. There were atrocities on both sides, culminating in a pogrom against the elves, lead by the greatest generals and warriors of our kind. It was wanton slaughter.
   The great elven kingdom fell and the others were burned or sunk into the sea. Elven women and children were raped and killed, just as the men. We afforded them no mercy, no remorse. And it ended only in the greatest tragedy both of our peoples have ever faced."
   The forest was now an inferno and the elven singing had stopped. Norvar swallowed hard, his body covered in cold sweats.
   "What tragedy, captain?" he whispered.
   "We cornered the elves in the North, far from their homeland. The armies of men were encroaching on all sides, offering death and slaughter. There, in the North, the elf we know as Athedil, the ruler of his kind, our black Enemy, conducted a ritual that called for the sacrifice of a hundred elven children. The ritual," Sylder paused, voice lowering. "Bound the Creator to the earth, where Athedil -- he killed her and devoured her power for his own. And of the armies of men, he unleashed that power - and killed every soldier, down to the last.
   Of Athedil and the elves, they disappeared for decades. Now, now..... the patterns are reoccurring."