05-06-2021, 05:32 PM
The room was comfortably cool just the way she liked it. Once the work began, and her own muscles wove like cloth through a loom, Elsie’s natural heat would compensate for the draft. For it was indeed a drafty place, this room of cinderblocks and brass lamps. The woman that laid on her table was chill to the touch. Her thin skin draped and tugged beneath Elke’s hands. She groaned a bit when a knot was rubbed out, but Elsie added some of the warm oil and continued without acknowledgement.
Ninety minutes passed in the blink of an eye and the stroke of Elke’s many thoughts. Her imagination could paint a rainbow, her sister once said. Elkeen loved to hear Elke’s fantastical stories even since they were girls. Long ago, when the north wind howled across the shutters and snow darkened the night blindly, Elke’s stories soothed her scared twin. They huddled close together, Elke stroking Elkeen’s hair, until sleep overcame. It was only then that Elke slipped away. Such moments were the only opportunity to watch That What Must Not Be Seen.
Once, when she was eight years old, a bat flittered from the rafters, startling the young Elke as she squat on her perch. A wide room opened far below like a cavern, though Elke had only seen such places in picture books so she wasn’t completely sure about the comparison. The room was one of several such chambers carved into the bedrock beneath the sanatorium. The commotion was just enough to disturb the silence. People in white coats looked up at her in unison. One pair of eyes burned with an energy that she would never forget. A pad was dropped, shattering on the stone floor. Elke gasped and hurried through the shadows, praying to anything that listened that her face wasn’t seen.
She was back in her room, Elkeen sound asleep, only moments before the door was thrust open. A man in a white doctor’s coat hurried in. For his neatly cut hair and perfectly buttoned shirt, he was disheveled in the face. His eyes were all screwed up, heat and energy incinerating Elke where she stood. For all the horrors that followed, Elkeen never even woke that night. Elke made sure to stay silent to not disturb her sister.
The following four years passed much as it always had. Elke acquired a bicycle along the way that she strangely found abandoned along the path to town. The down-hill village was little more than a collection of shops and an inn, baker and grocer. The residents were usually delighted to see her, as Elke could tell by their smiles and happy waves. She longed to sit and talk with as many as she could. Alas there was never time. She always hurried the winding path home back to her sister. Elkeen had grown sickly over the past few years, frail and thinner even than Elke’s slim silhouette suggested her twin should otherwise be. She couldn’t handle riding a bicycle anymore, nor navigating the treacherous trails up the mountain.
One day, Elke was perched on a stone wall overlooking a paved path when her life was about to be changed. She was raised in a castle hundreds of years old. The original structure was said to have been destroyed by fire in the 1800’s. Despite Elke’s searches, she found little evidence, except for some ancient scorch marks scoured into stone foundations and soot staining attic rafters. Their family’s ancestor at the time was a Baron of some sort whose land the current village now resided and for whom was named. But the riches of the past seemed to go up in the smokes of the fire. Since then, the castle was used as a place of secrets in WWII before transforming into the sanatorium of today.
Such was why Elke liked to sit on the wall high atop the road. She watched cars creep their way up the winding road and spill out old men and women alike onto their courtyard doorstep. A nurse always helped the ambling elderly inside, and Elke would watch with curious interest over what sorts of treatment they chose to submit themselves to. Usually her father chose the regimen, and true to promises, everything about their countenance changed. Stooped, angry people glowed in the fresh air of the steely Alps. Their skin pinked up. Their eyes lost the sting of long-carried stress. Shadows stayed, though, even if they changed their potency.
Elke wandered the grounds one day, searching for one of the elderly women she befriended. She was always outside for her sunshine treatment, but oddly, her chair was found empty. She died, Elke learned after eventually asking one of the orderlies about the missing patient. Elke was disappointed but should be accustomed to death. Many old people stayed for months at a time, only to die in their twilight hours. Her father said the healing process sometimes released the evils of a modern, sick body too stressed for too long to overcome.
Which was why, upon taking up the trade of a masseuse, Elke clung to her elderly, frail friends as long as she could. Sometimes, a woman would leave her room spritely and energetic almost unrecognizable. It took Elke by surprise at first, but eventually she came to replicate the process that kept her friends from the clutches of death.
Until today.
Elke finished cleaning up just as her patient, a silver-haired rich woman from England, revealed that she planned on departing their wellness center in a few days. A pain struck Elke straight in the stomach.
“Leave? But you can’t leave,” she said, crossing to her and taking up the wrinkled hands in her own.
The old woman shook her head softly, patting the young Elke on the cheek.
“I’ll miss you dearie, but I am greatly improved. I look forward to returning home.”
This was worse than if the old woman died. She was choosing to leave.
Elke frowned, and a heat gripped her heart in a way that she never felt before.
After a moment, the old woman groaned and coughed. She put a hand to her head and laid back on the table dizzy.
Elke gasped, and helped her into her wheelchair, steering her quickly back to her room.
The woman ended up staying another three months before finally passing in her sleep.
One day when Elke was sitting on her wall-top perch dully watching the road, a strange sort of car meandered the winding passage, rumbling over the bridge and made its way to the gatehouse. One of the workers at the gate came out and tapped on the window. Elke couldn’t see who was inside, but something was odd about this arrival. She hurried across the balustrade, long hair floating on the mountain breeze, to get a closer look.
Out emerged a middle-aged man, maybe more on the upper end of that range, wearing a nice suit and fedora hat, but what struck Elke most was the second person. It was a boy. A young boy. Or so much younger than all their other clients as to practically be a child by comparison, yet Elke guessed him to be close to her age. She’d only seen other teenagers in the village on her rare excursions down the mountain.
It was almost like he sensed someone watching, and when he looked up to find her, he was startled. He had a nice face that lacked any manly facial hair. He was dressed well but he was pale and leaned on two canes, one in each hand. Elke thought him in need of their health treatments and assumed she would be massaging him within a week.
She never got the chance.
The first person she relayed the news to was Elkeen. Her ephemerus twin was eager to see the newcomer. She even managed to get his name from father’s office: Leon Finnegren (20).
Elke finally dredged up the nerve to ask her father about Leon. Everyone had seen him stumbling through the grounds. With their castle’s many stairs and centuries-old rocky paths, his canes struggled. Yet he spoke so rarely, Elke was curious if he was a mute.
She took a breath and knocked on the door to father’s office. The glass was frosted over for privacy and the word DIRECTOR was stamped in the middle. She found him holding a vial of liquid up to the light, peering into its depths as though waiting for something to emerge. He wore his white coat like always, with a button-down shirt and tight tie beneath. His hair was neatly cropped with many flecks of gray. He also kept his face clean shaven, though Elke remembered him with a mustache when they were children.
He looked up, studying her like one of his samples, probably unable to tell which of the twins was there. Though Elke was startled when he spoke, “What is it, Elke?” Guess he did know after all.
“Leon Finne-“ she started, but her father cut her short. He rounded the desk and was in front of her, gripping her shoulders tight.
“You didn’t speak with him have you?” He demanded with that wildness in his eyes that frightened Elke as a child.
“No I just .. why?” she stammered.
“Because he is to marry your sister and I don’t want you filling his head with confusion,” he said, but the explanation left Elke more shocked than ever.
“Marry her?” Elke gasped.
Her father dismissed the shocked response and continued almost immediately. “Yes, I’d have done it a year ago but the Finnegrens insisted she be 18. I don’t know why,” he shrugged.
Elke couldn’t imagine her innocent twin married. And to a boy they’d never even spoken to?
“Father?” she began, but he’d returned to his specimens by then. Elke’s shoulders ached from the gripping.
“Stay away from him, Elke. And I don’t want you filling Elkeen’s head with any of your dissent. Now go do your work, I am busy.” He was head down by then, and Elke left with a furrow to her brow.
She didn’t tell Elkeen the news, but she continued to watch Leon with greater interest than ever before.
The next few days were uneventful. Leon drifted from one of their health treatments to another with little change to his aura or mobility: meditation, yoga, aquatics, breathing, sensory isolation, salt water, float tanks; Elke tracked him closely. The canes fascinated Elke, but their health library had no references to the disability. Elke tried to sneak into Father’s office to use the internet, but she never found the opportunity. She was sure though that Leon’s challenges were chronic. He was well adept with the canes and treated them like extensions of his own limbs. She never saw Leon’s caretaker again either. It seemed Leon was there to stay, which made sense if he was to marry Elkeen.
It was a Saturday when Elke woke to the news that a wedding was to take place that night. She found Elkeen in the steam room. White tile walls were slicked with moisture, and almost immediately, Elke’s skin slicked sweaty even in her nightclothes. Her twin was submerged in a deep cast-iron tub. Flower petals floated on the surface of the water that was smeared with the sheen of scented oil. Elkeen smiled when she saw her twin standing there.
“I’m getting married today,” Elkeen said, but Elke felt the heaviness in her twin’s words.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” was all Elke thought to say.
Elkeen’s brow furrowed thoughtfully, and a rivulet of water dripped from her lashes. The steam in the room curled about on the air currents of their conversation. It was like a sacred space had been disturbed by their rhetoric.
“Father says—” she started, but Elke hushed her, kneeling along the tub to whisper. They were enclosed in a fully tiled room with no openings but for steam grates and a sealed door. Still, Elke felt the need to whisper.
“You don’t have to do what he says.”
“How can you say that?! Of course, we must. We do not defy father.”
Elke helped her sister prepare for the ceremony, which was to take place in their gathering hall. The eating tables were moved out and chairs were arranged along the perimeter. The middle was kept empty but for a circle at the center. Elke walked by about an hour before it was to begin. She wore a long blue chiffon dress. Her hair floated freely against her back. Otherwise, she wore no finery or adornment. That was when she realized she wasn’t alone. Beneath an alcove were two men in robes. One was Leon and the other was the caretaker that dropped him off several weeks prior. Their garb looked ceremonial. On the stoles around their necks were triangle symbols that reminded Elke of hourglasses. Curved lines coursed up and down the edges. Were they snakes?
She crept closer to avoid being seen.
“You will marry her, Boy.”
“Fine. Even if I marry her, you can’t make me go through with the rest,” Leon said.
“If you don’t perform your duties, we will have no further use of you.”
“If something happens to me, my family will know. They’ll come for you,” he responded.
The caretaker didn’t seem to be threatened. “They’re the ones that sent you to us. They made the bargain. ‘Bring him back whole or don’t bring him back at all.’”
Leon stormed off as best he could on his wobbly two canes, and Elke rushed away before she was caught. Her mind was whirring as she exploded outside. The terrace was empty. Who was even going to come to this wedding? The villagers? Certainly not, they were never allowed on the grounds. The patients? At night? It was nearly sunset now, and they weren’t allowed out of their rooms after dark, except to be escorted for the most special of treatments.
But it was Leon’s angst that worried Elke the most. He was being coerced into this as much as Elkeen, and Elke was the only one who seemed to be bothered by this!
She traversed the courtyard and hurried through a gate into an old garden. It was overgrown with weeds and vines thickened the walls. Spiders and other crawlies lived there. Nobody ever went in except for her. To her audible surprise, she encountered Leon.
He was sitting on a cinderblock, canes dropped on the ground beside him, his head in his hands.
Elke was frozen, but when he looked up, his red eyes went wide with fright as if ashamed to be caught so vulnerable. It wasn’t the fact that he was there that shocked Elke so strongly, it was the intensity in his gaze that cut straight to her spine. It was like staring into a roaring furnace.
She turned to go, afraid to of what may spill out of her mouth, when he interrupted her.
“Wait please.”
She looked over her shoulder.
“It’s not you, it’s just I’m not comfortable with an arranged marriage,” he said.
He thought she was her twin, the bride. Elke thought frantically. She could use this mixup to her advantage.
“I don’t want to get married either. Let’s tell them no,” she was surprised how easily the words came to her.
He shook his head. “It will be okay Elkeen. I – I won’t let them hurt you.”
Elke had no idea what that meant. Despite what she overheard and despite what how she found him, Leon was still going to go through with it. He was Elke’s last hope to stop this wedding. Unless.. she had an idea.
Back in their room, Elke found her twin dressed in a long white dress of chiffon and pink. Flowers were braided through her hair. She locked herself in.
“Trade places with me,” Elke said.
Elkeen’s expression darkened. “Why?”
“Because there’s something strange about all this and I don’t think you should marry him. Don’t go through with it. Please. Let me take your place,” she squeezed her twin’s hands. They were covered with lace gloves.
Elkeen shook her head. “No,” she said softly and left.
The ceremony was attended by the sanatorium workers, her father, and a gathering of some of the more able-bodied clients. Their soft, wrinkly faces watched the procession fondly. Awwing and oowing over the bride and groom. Whispers of young love and long-lost days filled the air. The caretaker officiating the ceremony serenely carrying out the rites. Only Elke was downtrodden.
Hours later, she silently followed the newlyweds as they were escorted to their new chambers. This part of the castle was old and never wired for electricity. Father carried a candelabra to show the way. Leon stopped before going through a door, staring father eye to eye, then looking between Elke and his new wife. Father’s quiet urging was unnerving, “Go on,” then thrust the candelabra in his hands and locked them in the room.
The caretaker stayed in the hallway like a guard posted outside the door, and father dragged Elke back to the main part of the castle. He locked her in her room though that never stopped her escapes before. Alone, she faced an empty bed, tears on her cheeks, when she crawled into her own, pulled the blankets over her head and cried herself to sleep.
An awful dream woke her: nightmares, snakes chasing her though the castle, being trapped in locked rooms, Leon’s intense eyes burning her from the inside out, and Elkeen’s screams. She had to get her sister back.
Still in her dress from earlier, Elke slipped out the window and climbed the exterior ledge to nearby corridor. Heart beating frantically, she ran like a ghost on silent feet. The castle was dark but for the corridors leading to treatment rooms where electric lights flickered ceaselessly in their casings. The ramble of a gurney howled nearby, and she hid herself in a closet, eyeball pressed to the keyhole while an orderly pushed a body covered with a sheet. Another old client must have died, Elke thought, curious as to which one when she remembered her errand. She rattled some tools upon moving and winced, but the noise was muffled by the grinding wheels of the old gurney. So, she grabbed a shovel and continued.
The caretaker was asleep in a chair outside the room. Light leaked from the edges of the door, and Elke tip toed to try the knob, but it was locked. She gasped when a voice cried out.
“What are you doing here?!” The caretaker lunged at her, but Elke swung on instinct. The shovel clattered against his head and he dropped almost instantly, the wound spraying blood.
Elke then hit the door with the shovel over and over again. She hit as hard as she could. Finally, the old door gave way. As soon as it did, smoke fell out. Elkeen! The whole room was filled with it. The candles must have caught a fire! She coughed, eyes wetting, and plunged inside.
“Elkeen?” she yelled. The room was big, and she could see next to nothing.
Finally, she found a bed. Flames danced above it, but they were contained unnaturally on the ceiling. Leon was positioned in the middle of the bed on his knees looking up at the flames. Elkeen’s body laid beside him. Blood was everywhere. Her head had been bashed in with a cane.
Elke swung the shovel at Leon, but with a look, she was thrown aside like a doll. She screamed and slumped to the floor. Leon’s flames funneled from the ceiling toward her, but she scrambled out of the way just as the hem of her dress smoldered. She grabbed the shovel and rushed him a second time. The force of the hit knocked him from the bed and before she knew it, she was pounding him with the shovel, screaming that he had killed Elkeen.
It was her father that pulled her off the corpse. All evidence of the fire and smoke was gone after Leon died as though miraculously extinguished. He’d found the caretaker dead. He found Elkeen’s head smashed in. He caught her beating the groom in seeming cold blood.
She was locked up for real after that, in a tiled room without a window and a drain in the floor. She told the story over and over again, only to be acknowledged that father actually believed her tale. She still wasn’t to be let out anyway. She was their last chance.
“Last chance to what?”
Father turned to her with that look that made her feel like a specimen. She drew up her legs.
“Last chance to make an immortal,” he said flatly.
Elke shivered. “What do you mean, ‘make’?”
Her father quirked his head, one hand on the door as if to leave, the other holding the threshold open for himself, “How else do you make people? You make a baby and let it grow up. We have hypotheses and I must test them. Leon was carefully chosen for your sister. He was from a direct line from the gods and demonstrated all the signs of their return. We simply didn’t take into account the effect of coercion. We need a compliant donor next time.”
Elke stood up, “donor?” Her father nodded.
“Yes, one from the right family is key. Probably more so than the demonstrated power. In fact, now that I think about it...” the quiet that hung on the air prior to father’s departure was far more disturbing than anything said before.
Making immortals? Babies? Lines? Chosen? She shivered again, knowing there was a wedding in her future, but it was one she was not going to be going through with no matter what.
The wedding was with far less fanfare than the previous. There were no smiling clients. No flowers in her hair. The dress was still charred from Leon’s fire. Father wore the sash with the hourglasses and snakes again and performed the rites himself. At the end of it, he gently draped a gold chain around her neck. The charm on the necklace was an oval stamped with an hourglass.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
“Memento Mori. It means everyone dies,” he peered into her eyes as though he might dissect their mysteries with a look. His were so different from Elkeen’s, eyes that still haunted her. The twins’ were a light brown, but father’s was a royal blue. His hair was auburn and gray, theirs a husky blonde. Then he added, “for now,” and gently pecked the plump of her lips with his. He tasted like grapes.
Elke let herself be tugged along. But unlike with her sister, no romantic consummation awaited the end of this journey. No candles flickered nor velvet blankets draped. It was just her father’s room, the same one he always slept in. His hand gripped hers impatiently.
Inside, he started to remove her dress. She was nearly shaking, but barely kept her composure. “Let me give you a massage, first,” she uttered.
The offer took him by surprise, but after a moment, he undressed. Her usual table wasn’t there, so she climbed on the bed, straddling his back to reach his shoulders. His tension was palpable, and she had never massaged anyone so young before – younger anyway. Compared to the feeble old bodies she was used to he was practically a youth. Soon, she felt herself fall into the usual motions. The push and pull up and down his back became rhythmic. A trace-like calm settled into her skin, and with it came hope.
“I’m sorry, father,” she said, letting The Trance flow through her. She gripped tighter as he began to struggle to breathe, hanging onto it, willing it with all her desire just as much as she desired her friends not depart. Just as she desired revenge for her sister and everything since. She loved her father or so she thought. She assumed loyalty was the same as love, but now, she wasn’t so sure.
When he managed to twist around, his lips were blue, and his eyes bulged. With tears in hers, Elke repeated his words back at him: “Everyone dies,” and then he did.
Before sunrise, Elke stuffed a wedge of papers and a roll of money from father’s office along with the necklace into her things and left the only place she knew. She hiked alone down the mountains and wandered into the village just as the sun rose to ask the baker how to travel to the nearest city.
Alone and confused, she navigated her way through Europe, heading east to Asia, seeking information about anyone and anything that could explain the secret to immortality.
Elke is a Wilder. She calls the feeling she has while using the power as falling into a trance. She can only use it while massaging someone. She was able to refresh some of her clients, which was part of why they felt so much better when leaving her. Basically, doing the opposite hurt people that she worried would leave her because they were too healthy. She used the same approach but much more forcefully to kill her father in self-defense prior to being impregnated by him.
It is unclear if the director is her father or not. She only knows him as such.
The Director and their family have been members of the Di Inferi for centuries, carrying out many bizarre rituals and experiments at the site of the sanatorium to try to learn the secret to prolonging life. Finally, they figured out the need to manipulate the bloodline of gods into newborns to create new gods that could be immortal. It was thought that Elkeen, who wasn’t a channeler, and Leon, who was, could create a hybrid offspring that would be both immortal without the power. They were going to experiment on Elkeen while she was pregnant to alter the fetus while it was growing. Leon was sent to the Di Inferi by his family in a last-ditch effort to cure him of his malady in exchange for his seed as a power-user. He agreed to the arranged marriage on the condition he would be restored whole, but upon learning that no such future actually existed, he succumbed to the self-destructive allure of saidin and was in the process of being consumed by it when Elkeen discovered them. To save Elkeen from the fate of being burned alive, he killed her.
Elke has never been in the outside world beyond the village. She’s been so sheltered and protected her whole life that the transition will be startling for her. She’s morally ambiguous, not really knowing right from wrong, nor really plagued by guilt.
She has worked her way through Europe as an on-again/ off-again masseuse, learning quickly that massage parlors are not the same as masseurs. Her ability to heal is not a full Restoration, it’s more like a refreshing, so she is quite popular.
She moved to Moscow following the discovery of a clue related to her last name that she hopes will lead to answers about the symbol, their family, and the past.
Appearance:
Her striking, otherworldly appearance is completely disarming. She has those saucer eyes and pneumatic lips that up close exude doll-like features. She’s 20 years old, having been on her own for two years, but is frequently mistaken for pre-pubescent. She remains surprisingly girlish as she ages, but is a mysterious and, at times, disquieting provocateur underneath. Friendly, Elke speaks in high pitched, cut-glass vowels. She is tall for a woman, 5’9” and quite slim as to verge on malnourished.
Past lives:
Elke is in fact connected to another strand in the pattern that is her twin sister. She is always born one of an identical twin, such that it is likely their existence are the result of a splitting of the same thread, like one that frayed in the end but remains entangled and probably should have been woven out of the pattern completely for being flawed. There is something unnatural about their thread, and as such, one of the twins usually dies young. It’s almost as if their life is a mistake in the pattern. She is always a channeler while her twin never is to maintain balance.
Noted past life is of the novice of the White Tower, Elsae and her sister Elseen.
Ninety minutes passed in the blink of an eye and the stroke of Elke’s many thoughts. Her imagination could paint a rainbow, her sister once said. Elkeen loved to hear Elke’s fantastical stories even since they were girls. Long ago, when the north wind howled across the shutters and snow darkened the night blindly, Elke’s stories soothed her scared twin. They huddled close together, Elke stroking Elkeen’s hair, until sleep overcame. It was only then that Elke slipped away. Such moments were the only opportunity to watch That What Must Not Be Seen.
Once, when she was eight years old, a bat flittered from the rafters, startling the young Elke as she squat on her perch. A wide room opened far below like a cavern, though Elke had only seen such places in picture books so she wasn’t completely sure about the comparison. The room was one of several such chambers carved into the bedrock beneath the sanatorium. The commotion was just enough to disturb the silence. People in white coats looked up at her in unison. One pair of eyes burned with an energy that she would never forget. A pad was dropped, shattering on the stone floor. Elke gasped and hurried through the shadows, praying to anything that listened that her face wasn’t seen.
She was back in her room, Elkeen sound asleep, only moments before the door was thrust open. A man in a white doctor’s coat hurried in. For his neatly cut hair and perfectly buttoned shirt, he was disheveled in the face. His eyes were all screwed up, heat and energy incinerating Elke where she stood. For all the horrors that followed, Elkeen never even woke that night. Elke made sure to stay silent to not disturb her sister.
The following four years passed much as it always had. Elke acquired a bicycle along the way that she strangely found abandoned along the path to town. The down-hill village was little more than a collection of shops and an inn, baker and grocer. The residents were usually delighted to see her, as Elke could tell by their smiles and happy waves. She longed to sit and talk with as many as she could. Alas there was never time. She always hurried the winding path home back to her sister. Elkeen had grown sickly over the past few years, frail and thinner even than Elke’s slim silhouette suggested her twin should otherwise be. She couldn’t handle riding a bicycle anymore, nor navigating the treacherous trails up the mountain.
One day, Elke was perched on a stone wall overlooking a paved path when her life was about to be changed. She was raised in a castle hundreds of years old. The original structure was said to have been destroyed by fire in the 1800’s. Despite Elke’s searches, she found little evidence, except for some ancient scorch marks scoured into stone foundations and soot staining attic rafters. Their family’s ancestor at the time was a Baron of some sort whose land the current village now resided and for whom was named. But the riches of the past seemed to go up in the smokes of the fire. Since then, the castle was used as a place of secrets in WWII before transforming into the sanatorium of today.
Such was why Elke liked to sit on the wall high atop the road. She watched cars creep their way up the winding road and spill out old men and women alike onto their courtyard doorstep. A nurse always helped the ambling elderly inside, and Elke would watch with curious interest over what sorts of treatment they chose to submit themselves to. Usually her father chose the regimen, and true to promises, everything about their countenance changed. Stooped, angry people glowed in the fresh air of the steely Alps. Their skin pinked up. Their eyes lost the sting of long-carried stress. Shadows stayed, though, even if they changed their potency.
Elke wandered the grounds one day, searching for one of the elderly women she befriended. She was always outside for her sunshine treatment, but oddly, her chair was found empty. She died, Elke learned after eventually asking one of the orderlies about the missing patient. Elke was disappointed but should be accustomed to death. Many old people stayed for months at a time, only to die in their twilight hours. Her father said the healing process sometimes released the evils of a modern, sick body too stressed for too long to overcome.
Which was why, upon taking up the trade of a masseuse, Elke clung to her elderly, frail friends as long as she could. Sometimes, a woman would leave her room spritely and energetic almost unrecognizable. It took Elke by surprise at first, but eventually she came to replicate the process that kept her friends from the clutches of death.
Until today.
Elke finished cleaning up just as her patient, a silver-haired rich woman from England, revealed that she planned on departing their wellness center in a few days. A pain struck Elke straight in the stomach.
“Leave? But you can’t leave,” she said, crossing to her and taking up the wrinkled hands in her own.
The old woman shook her head softly, patting the young Elke on the cheek.
“I’ll miss you dearie, but I am greatly improved. I look forward to returning home.”
This was worse than if the old woman died. She was choosing to leave.
Elke frowned, and a heat gripped her heart in a way that she never felt before.
After a moment, the old woman groaned and coughed. She put a hand to her head and laid back on the table dizzy.
Elke gasped, and helped her into her wheelchair, steering her quickly back to her room.
The woman ended up staying another three months before finally passing in her sleep.
One day when Elke was sitting on her wall-top perch dully watching the road, a strange sort of car meandered the winding passage, rumbling over the bridge and made its way to the gatehouse. One of the workers at the gate came out and tapped on the window. Elke couldn’t see who was inside, but something was odd about this arrival. She hurried across the balustrade, long hair floating on the mountain breeze, to get a closer look.
Out emerged a middle-aged man, maybe more on the upper end of that range, wearing a nice suit and fedora hat, but what struck Elke most was the second person. It was a boy. A young boy. Or so much younger than all their other clients as to practically be a child by comparison, yet Elke guessed him to be close to her age. She’d only seen other teenagers in the village on her rare excursions down the mountain.
It was almost like he sensed someone watching, and when he looked up to find her, he was startled. He had a nice face that lacked any manly facial hair. He was dressed well but he was pale and leaned on two canes, one in each hand. Elke thought him in need of their health treatments and assumed she would be massaging him within a week.
She never got the chance.
The first person she relayed the news to was Elkeen. Her ephemerus twin was eager to see the newcomer. She even managed to get his name from father’s office: Leon Finnegren (20).
Elke finally dredged up the nerve to ask her father about Leon. Everyone had seen him stumbling through the grounds. With their castle’s many stairs and centuries-old rocky paths, his canes struggled. Yet he spoke so rarely, Elke was curious if he was a mute.
She took a breath and knocked on the door to father’s office. The glass was frosted over for privacy and the word DIRECTOR was stamped in the middle. She found him holding a vial of liquid up to the light, peering into its depths as though waiting for something to emerge. He wore his white coat like always, with a button-down shirt and tight tie beneath. His hair was neatly cropped with many flecks of gray. He also kept his face clean shaven, though Elke remembered him with a mustache when they were children.
He looked up, studying her like one of his samples, probably unable to tell which of the twins was there. Though Elke was startled when he spoke, “What is it, Elke?” Guess he did know after all.
“Leon Finne-“ she started, but her father cut her short. He rounded the desk and was in front of her, gripping her shoulders tight.
“You didn’t speak with him have you?” He demanded with that wildness in his eyes that frightened Elke as a child.
“No I just .. why?” she stammered.
“Because he is to marry your sister and I don’t want you filling his head with confusion,” he said, but the explanation left Elke more shocked than ever.
“Marry her?” Elke gasped.
Her father dismissed the shocked response and continued almost immediately. “Yes, I’d have done it a year ago but the Finnegrens insisted she be 18. I don’t know why,” he shrugged.
Elke couldn’t imagine her innocent twin married. And to a boy they’d never even spoken to?
“Father?” she began, but he’d returned to his specimens by then. Elke’s shoulders ached from the gripping.
“Stay away from him, Elke. And I don’t want you filling Elkeen’s head with any of your dissent. Now go do your work, I am busy.” He was head down by then, and Elke left with a furrow to her brow.
She didn’t tell Elkeen the news, but she continued to watch Leon with greater interest than ever before.
The next few days were uneventful. Leon drifted from one of their health treatments to another with little change to his aura or mobility: meditation, yoga, aquatics, breathing, sensory isolation, salt water, float tanks; Elke tracked him closely. The canes fascinated Elke, but their health library had no references to the disability. Elke tried to sneak into Father’s office to use the internet, but she never found the opportunity. She was sure though that Leon’s challenges were chronic. He was well adept with the canes and treated them like extensions of his own limbs. She never saw Leon’s caretaker again either. It seemed Leon was there to stay, which made sense if he was to marry Elkeen.
It was a Saturday when Elke woke to the news that a wedding was to take place that night. She found Elkeen in the steam room. White tile walls were slicked with moisture, and almost immediately, Elke’s skin slicked sweaty even in her nightclothes. Her twin was submerged in a deep cast-iron tub. Flower petals floated on the surface of the water that was smeared with the sheen of scented oil. Elkeen smiled when she saw her twin standing there.
“I’m getting married today,” Elkeen said, but Elke felt the heaviness in her twin’s words.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” was all Elke thought to say.
Elkeen’s brow furrowed thoughtfully, and a rivulet of water dripped from her lashes. The steam in the room curled about on the air currents of their conversation. It was like a sacred space had been disturbed by their rhetoric.
“Father says—” she started, but Elke hushed her, kneeling along the tub to whisper. They were enclosed in a fully tiled room with no openings but for steam grates and a sealed door. Still, Elke felt the need to whisper.
“You don’t have to do what he says.”
“How can you say that?! Of course, we must. We do not defy father.”
Elke helped her sister prepare for the ceremony, which was to take place in their gathering hall. The eating tables were moved out and chairs were arranged along the perimeter. The middle was kept empty but for a circle at the center. Elke walked by about an hour before it was to begin. She wore a long blue chiffon dress. Her hair floated freely against her back. Otherwise, she wore no finery or adornment. That was when she realized she wasn’t alone. Beneath an alcove were two men in robes. One was Leon and the other was the caretaker that dropped him off several weeks prior. Their garb looked ceremonial. On the stoles around their necks were triangle symbols that reminded Elke of hourglasses. Curved lines coursed up and down the edges. Were they snakes?
She crept closer to avoid being seen.
“You will marry her, Boy.”
“Fine. Even if I marry her, you can’t make me go through with the rest,” Leon said.
“If you don’t perform your duties, we will have no further use of you.”
“If something happens to me, my family will know. They’ll come for you,” he responded.
The caretaker didn’t seem to be threatened. “They’re the ones that sent you to us. They made the bargain. ‘Bring him back whole or don’t bring him back at all.’”
Leon stormed off as best he could on his wobbly two canes, and Elke rushed away before she was caught. Her mind was whirring as she exploded outside. The terrace was empty. Who was even going to come to this wedding? The villagers? Certainly not, they were never allowed on the grounds. The patients? At night? It was nearly sunset now, and they weren’t allowed out of their rooms after dark, except to be escorted for the most special of treatments.
But it was Leon’s angst that worried Elke the most. He was being coerced into this as much as Elkeen, and Elke was the only one who seemed to be bothered by this!
She traversed the courtyard and hurried through a gate into an old garden. It was overgrown with weeds and vines thickened the walls. Spiders and other crawlies lived there. Nobody ever went in except for her. To her audible surprise, she encountered Leon.
He was sitting on a cinderblock, canes dropped on the ground beside him, his head in his hands.
Elke was frozen, but when he looked up, his red eyes went wide with fright as if ashamed to be caught so vulnerable. It wasn’t the fact that he was there that shocked Elke so strongly, it was the intensity in his gaze that cut straight to her spine. It was like staring into a roaring furnace.
She turned to go, afraid to of what may spill out of her mouth, when he interrupted her.
“Wait please.”
She looked over her shoulder.
“It’s not you, it’s just I’m not comfortable with an arranged marriage,” he said.
He thought she was her twin, the bride. Elke thought frantically. She could use this mixup to her advantage.
“I don’t want to get married either. Let’s tell them no,” she was surprised how easily the words came to her.
He shook his head. “It will be okay Elkeen. I – I won’t let them hurt you.”
Elke had no idea what that meant. Despite what she overheard and despite what how she found him, Leon was still going to go through with it. He was Elke’s last hope to stop this wedding. Unless.. she had an idea.
Back in their room, Elke found her twin dressed in a long white dress of chiffon and pink. Flowers were braided through her hair. She locked herself in.
“Trade places with me,” Elke said.
Elkeen’s expression darkened. “Why?”
“Because there’s something strange about all this and I don’t think you should marry him. Don’t go through with it. Please. Let me take your place,” she squeezed her twin’s hands. They were covered with lace gloves.
Elkeen shook her head. “No,” she said softly and left.
The ceremony was attended by the sanatorium workers, her father, and a gathering of some of the more able-bodied clients. Their soft, wrinkly faces watched the procession fondly. Awwing and oowing over the bride and groom. Whispers of young love and long-lost days filled the air. The caretaker officiating the ceremony serenely carrying out the rites. Only Elke was downtrodden.
Hours later, she silently followed the newlyweds as they were escorted to their new chambers. This part of the castle was old and never wired for electricity. Father carried a candelabra to show the way. Leon stopped before going through a door, staring father eye to eye, then looking between Elke and his new wife. Father’s quiet urging was unnerving, “Go on,” then thrust the candelabra in his hands and locked them in the room.
The caretaker stayed in the hallway like a guard posted outside the door, and father dragged Elke back to the main part of the castle. He locked her in her room though that never stopped her escapes before. Alone, she faced an empty bed, tears on her cheeks, when she crawled into her own, pulled the blankets over her head and cried herself to sleep.
An awful dream woke her: nightmares, snakes chasing her though the castle, being trapped in locked rooms, Leon’s intense eyes burning her from the inside out, and Elkeen’s screams. She had to get her sister back.
Still in her dress from earlier, Elke slipped out the window and climbed the exterior ledge to nearby corridor. Heart beating frantically, she ran like a ghost on silent feet. The castle was dark but for the corridors leading to treatment rooms where electric lights flickered ceaselessly in their casings. The ramble of a gurney howled nearby, and she hid herself in a closet, eyeball pressed to the keyhole while an orderly pushed a body covered with a sheet. Another old client must have died, Elke thought, curious as to which one when she remembered her errand. She rattled some tools upon moving and winced, but the noise was muffled by the grinding wheels of the old gurney. So, she grabbed a shovel and continued.
The caretaker was asleep in a chair outside the room. Light leaked from the edges of the door, and Elke tip toed to try the knob, but it was locked. She gasped when a voice cried out.
“What are you doing here?!” The caretaker lunged at her, but Elke swung on instinct. The shovel clattered against his head and he dropped almost instantly, the wound spraying blood.
Elke then hit the door with the shovel over and over again. She hit as hard as she could. Finally, the old door gave way. As soon as it did, smoke fell out. Elkeen! The whole room was filled with it. The candles must have caught a fire! She coughed, eyes wetting, and plunged inside.
“Elkeen?” she yelled. The room was big, and she could see next to nothing.
Finally, she found a bed. Flames danced above it, but they were contained unnaturally on the ceiling. Leon was positioned in the middle of the bed on his knees looking up at the flames. Elkeen’s body laid beside him. Blood was everywhere. Her head had been bashed in with a cane.
Elke swung the shovel at Leon, but with a look, she was thrown aside like a doll. She screamed and slumped to the floor. Leon’s flames funneled from the ceiling toward her, but she scrambled out of the way just as the hem of her dress smoldered. She grabbed the shovel and rushed him a second time. The force of the hit knocked him from the bed and before she knew it, she was pounding him with the shovel, screaming that he had killed Elkeen.
It was her father that pulled her off the corpse. All evidence of the fire and smoke was gone after Leon died as though miraculously extinguished. He’d found the caretaker dead. He found Elkeen’s head smashed in. He caught her beating the groom in seeming cold blood.
She was locked up for real after that, in a tiled room without a window and a drain in the floor. She told the story over and over again, only to be acknowledged that father actually believed her tale. She still wasn’t to be let out anyway. She was their last chance.
“Last chance to what?”
Father turned to her with that look that made her feel like a specimen. She drew up her legs.
“Last chance to make an immortal,” he said flatly.
Elke shivered. “What do you mean, ‘make’?”
Her father quirked his head, one hand on the door as if to leave, the other holding the threshold open for himself, “How else do you make people? You make a baby and let it grow up. We have hypotheses and I must test them. Leon was carefully chosen for your sister. He was from a direct line from the gods and demonstrated all the signs of their return. We simply didn’t take into account the effect of coercion. We need a compliant donor next time.”
Elke stood up, “donor?” Her father nodded.
“Yes, one from the right family is key. Probably more so than the demonstrated power. In fact, now that I think about it...” the quiet that hung on the air prior to father’s departure was far more disturbing than anything said before.
Making immortals? Babies? Lines? Chosen? She shivered again, knowing there was a wedding in her future, but it was one she was not going to be going through with no matter what.
The wedding was with far less fanfare than the previous. There were no smiling clients. No flowers in her hair. The dress was still charred from Leon’s fire. Father wore the sash with the hourglasses and snakes again and performed the rites himself. At the end of it, he gently draped a gold chain around her neck. The charm on the necklace was an oval stamped with an hourglass.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
“Memento Mori. It means everyone dies,” he peered into her eyes as though he might dissect their mysteries with a look. His were so different from Elkeen’s, eyes that still haunted her. The twins’ were a light brown, but father’s was a royal blue. His hair was auburn and gray, theirs a husky blonde. Then he added, “for now,” and gently pecked the plump of her lips with his. He tasted like grapes.
Elke let herself be tugged along. But unlike with her sister, no romantic consummation awaited the end of this journey. No candles flickered nor velvet blankets draped. It was just her father’s room, the same one he always slept in. His hand gripped hers impatiently.
Inside, he started to remove her dress. She was nearly shaking, but barely kept her composure. “Let me give you a massage, first,” she uttered.
The offer took him by surprise, but after a moment, he undressed. Her usual table wasn’t there, so she climbed on the bed, straddling his back to reach his shoulders. His tension was palpable, and she had never massaged anyone so young before – younger anyway. Compared to the feeble old bodies she was used to he was practically a youth. Soon, she felt herself fall into the usual motions. The push and pull up and down his back became rhythmic. A trace-like calm settled into her skin, and with it came hope.
“I’m sorry, father,” she said, letting The Trance flow through her. She gripped tighter as he began to struggle to breathe, hanging onto it, willing it with all her desire just as much as she desired her friends not depart. Just as she desired revenge for her sister and everything since. She loved her father or so she thought. She assumed loyalty was the same as love, but now, she wasn’t so sure.
When he managed to twist around, his lips were blue, and his eyes bulged. With tears in hers, Elke repeated his words back at him: “Everyone dies,” and then he did.
Before sunrise, Elke stuffed a wedge of papers and a roll of money from father’s office along with the necklace into her things and left the only place she knew. She hiked alone down the mountains and wandered into the village just as the sun rose to ask the baker how to travel to the nearest city.
Alone and confused, she navigated her way through Europe, heading east to Asia, seeking information about anyone and anything that could explain the secret to immortality.
Elke is a Wilder. She calls the feeling she has while using the power as falling into a trance. She can only use it while massaging someone. She was able to refresh some of her clients, which was part of why they felt so much better when leaving her. Basically, doing the opposite hurt people that she worried would leave her because they were too healthy. She used the same approach but much more forcefully to kill her father in self-defense prior to being impregnated by him.
It is unclear if the director is her father or not. She only knows him as such.
The Director and their family have been members of the Di Inferi for centuries, carrying out many bizarre rituals and experiments at the site of the sanatorium to try to learn the secret to prolonging life. Finally, they figured out the need to manipulate the bloodline of gods into newborns to create new gods that could be immortal. It was thought that Elkeen, who wasn’t a channeler, and Leon, who was, could create a hybrid offspring that would be both immortal without the power. They were going to experiment on Elkeen while she was pregnant to alter the fetus while it was growing. Leon was sent to the Di Inferi by his family in a last-ditch effort to cure him of his malady in exchange for his seed as a power-user. He agreed to the arranged marriage on the condition he would be restored whole, but upon learning that no such future actually existed, he succumbed to the self-destructive allure of saidin and was in the process of being consumed by it when Elkeen discovered them. To save Elkeen from the fate of being burned alive, he killed her.
Elke has never been in the outside world beyond the village. She’s been so sheltered and protected her whole life that the transition will be startling for her. She’s morally ambiguous, not really knowing right from wrong, nor really plagued by guilt.
She has worked her way through Europe as an on-again/ off-again masseuse, learning quickly that massage parlors are not the same as masseurs. Her ability to heal is not a full Restoration, it’s more like a refreshing, so she is quite popular.
She moved to Moscow following the discovery of a clue related to her last name that she hopes will lead to answers about the symbol, their family, and the past.
Appearance:
Her striking, otherworldly appearance is completely disarming. She has those saucer eyes and pneumatic lips that up close exude doll-like features. She’s 20 years old, having been on her own for two years, but is frequently mistaken for pre-pubescent. She remains surprisingly girlish as she ages, but is a mysterious and, at times, disquieting provocateur underneath. Friendly, Elke speaks in high pitched, cut-glass vowels. She is tall for a woman, 5’9” and quite slim as to verge on malnourished.
Past lives:
Elke is in fact connected to another strand in the pattern that is her twin sister. She is always born one of an identical twin, such that it is likely their existence are the result of a splitting of the same thread, like one that frayed in the end but remains entangled and probably should have been woven out of the pattern completely for being flawed. There is something unnatural about their thread, and as such, one of the twins usually dies young. It’s almost as if their life is a mistake in the pattern. She is always a channeler while her twin never is to maintain balance.
Noted past life is of the novice of the White Tower, Elsae and her sister Elseen.
Elke von Metternich