teaser: quest for the elf king's sword

[luninosity]

So life has been incredibly busy (even more so than usual! so many academic deadlines!), but here’s some writing news – this year’s JMS Books anniversary story theme is the 1980s, and so I had a ton of fun with a story loosely inspired by some of my of-the-era fantasy influences: Labyrinth, The Never-Ending Story, Mercedes Lackey’s SERRAted Edge & Bedlam’s Bard novels, very early Tanya Huff, Rick Cook’s Mall Purchase Night (slightly too late but the right genre!) (also the title is a Walpurgis Night pun) and so on!

This story is called “Quest for the Elf King’s Sword,” and here’s how it starts…

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Sebastian Barrett met the Elf King, for the second time in twenty years, upon walking into the lobby of the unremarkable beige office building of Knight’s Insurance Services. The Elf King stood out, a vision of spiky shaggy blond hair and high cheekbones and moonlight skin and mismatched green-blue eyes like darting stray iridescences, not to mention the long swooping night-purple brocade coat and tall boots and clinging trousers. He dazzled, against tapioca-bland linoleum and walls and receptionist’s desk; he was the only color, the only real presence, in the world, as everything else faded into the background and receded.

Sebastian said, “No,” and turned, and started to walk right out. He did not have time to deal with this. Nor did he especially want to.

Janine, at the front desk, said, “Mr Barrett…you’ve got a visitor…” though she said it with a sigh, because she had carried on gazing at the Elf King.

Who smiled like hope and expectation and wild primroses opening magically at twilight, all of those at once, and said, “Sebastian—”

Sebastian stopped, hand on the office front door. Outside the sounds of Burbank in the morning, waking up, shouted anchors. Car horns, traffic, bicycles. City noises, downtown metropolitan clamor. The sort of people who had those brand-new enormous portable phones, shouting loudly about the sort of business that people who had portable phones conducted. Southern California, in the sunshine, here in the year nineteen hundred and eighty-four.

Definitely not a wild magic-drenched vaguely medieval fantasy realm. Not even a Renaissance Faire, nor whatever convention this particular fan had crawled out of. Normally the fans—the ones who still remembered Sebastian Barrett’s one and only novel, anyway—did not seek him out at work; this was both mildly worrying and mildly impressive. As was the outfit; the man had plainly gone to some effort. The cloak, the outfit, the boots all looked good: novel-accurate and also well fitted, textured, expensive. The wild hair, the shimmering eyes, that face…

That face had been everything Sebastian had imagined, once upon a time. Everything he’d daydreamed about, when he’d thought of a magical elf-king who’d find him, plain skinny bespectacled Sebastian, special.

When he’d been foolish enough to believe that, yes, as a boy, he’d managed to help save an enchanted world, with the assistance of a young King who needed him.

The man looking at him with aggressive hopefulness had somehow appeared with just that face. So beautiful, so powerful—older now, the way Sebastian himself was older, and obviously this fan had even thought about that detail, twenty years on from the flash-in-the-pan success of Sword of the Elf King. Sebastian tried not to be impressed by the preparation.

He said, hand still on the door, “Do you have an appointment?”

“An appointment…” The Elf King, or the fan dressed up as a once-beloved character, hesitated. His eyes got more sad, betrayed, as if a friendship had gone as wrong as an unexpected blow. “Is that something one needs? To see you? Like a gift?”

“You know what an appointment is,” Sebastian snapped, “and the boots are the wrong color, they’re supposed to have bronze inlay, not silver. Now go away, unless you’re actually here to discuss an insurance claim adjustment.”

“An adjustment of…what?” The Elf King looked at Janine, presumably for assistance. She blinked at him, evidently confused as to why someone might show up at Knight’s Insurance Services without knowing what an insurance claim might be, and offered, “Mr Barrett is one of our top claims adjustors…sorry, Sebastian, he just showed up when I got here, and he said he knew you…”

Sebastian sighed. “He doesn’t.”

“But,” the Elf King protested. “You do.”

“Really, really no.”

“Together we fought the armies of the Relentless Dark—and solved the Riddle of the Winged Dragon, and conquered the Marsh of Foul Despair—”

“I get it,” Sebastian jumped in, “you’ve read the book, you know the book, thank you, I appreciate knowing that some people still remember the one thing I ever published, I’m glad it meant something to you, but I have work to do, because I have an actual job, okay?”

“Sebastian…” The Elf King’s eyes grew darker, wider: shocked by emotion, by comprehension. A tragedy, blossoming right there across his impossibly pretty face. “You don’t believe I’m real.”