Chapter Text
On the day Blaer found out that humans are real, the sunrise was exquisite.
It was eleven in the morning. He was enjoying the view from near the top of a beautiful cliff that a more superstitious elf would call a “human church”. He could see, he supposed, why the legends were so persistent. The higher part of the cliff, shaped by some mysterious volcanic processes to look like a stack of organ pipes, could definitely resemble a church tower from afar. The caves inside had rock formations similar to pews and staircases. There was even a sort of chiming as water dripped in some unseen place or rocks pinged as they cooled and heated — Blaer wasn't sure what was causing the sound, but someone with an active imagination could certainly fancy themselves hearing a clock.
He could see the whole group of supposedly haunted, story-wreathed cliffs through the clear volcanic glass in the walls of the cave. The tops of the lower cliffs were a soft snowy twilight blue, interspersed with fluffy black hints of trees and some spooky lights like mysterious eyes peering out of the haze. The mountains near the horizon looked almost violet.
Blaer watched the sky bloom as he munched his early lunch of dark rye bread and plain yogurt. The sun, still hidden, blessed one end of a dusky mauve cloud with a touch of glorious gold. And, like a slow revelation, the whole world became outlined in a halo of gold, pink clouds wafting above.
The light stayed mild, muted, but even so, Blær basked in it. Even this literal cave had more light than the dark, stuffy room at home under the turf roof — the single room where the whole family and the farm hands slept and ate. This so-called human church could be described as comfortable, if it weren't for all the creepy echoes that made him feel like he wasn't alone.
They would know by now, at home, that he wasn't coming back from his holiday hiking trip any sooner than he could help it. New Year's Eve, the traditional day for leaving and arriving and settling down, had been almost a week ago, and his father had visited three times in Blaer's dreams that night, and Blaer had woken up every time out of spite rather than talk to him. Today was the thirteenth day of Christmas, and Blaer had watched a stagecoach leave for Skuggahlíðarbjarg and had turned on his heel and walked deeper into the haunted cliffs instead. Here, among the whispers of the “hidden people”—the humans who didn't exist—, he felt like he, too, could pretend he didn't exist for a little bit while he figured things out.
He would go home eventually, he supposed. What else was there to do? He'd go and keep helping out on the farm, with some occasional fishing as his most exciting adventure, for the rest of his years. Or, if he somehow got on dad's good side, if the farm was doing well, he might be able to study to become a priest or a lawyer or a doctor. Pity all three of those options made him queasy for various reasons.
Sometimes Blaer wished humans were real. Surely their schools would offer all sorts of interesting careers. If human skyships were real and not just an old wives' tale to explain funny clouds, he could row one across the sky to faraway lands, where he would see... he knew not what, but he wished to know.
No use dwelling on it. He put away his yogurt jar and made his way down the stairwell-shaped cave and out of the church-shaped cliff, and looked for a place to set up camp. It was a warm day—the temperature was above freezing. He tried not to slip in the thin layer of water above the ice. The wool inside his sheepskin shoes would warm his feet even if a little water seeped in, but he would need to dry his socks eventually. And, while he still had a little money, it would run out soon if he kept staying at the taverns over in Hafnarfjörður.
Sounds surrounded him as he went - a roaring as if of distant waterfalls, but growing stronger and fainter as if something was moving; he swore he heard laughter and voices sometimes. But he was used to tuning the voices out. He wasn't a weirdo.
He found an open space near a lake. He liked being further away from the creepy cliffs - for all that the church rock had been exciting to visit, a place like that wasn't somewhere he'd want to sleep - but there were too many moving sounds and voices, and the shores of the lake were unpleasantly rocky and smooth and had that nasty walked-on ice-water combo, and what cliffs there were next to the lake had one peak that looked too eerily like a church. So he wandered along the side of the lake and a little way off to another, smaller lake. It was quieter there. There was some coarse dry grass and reeds and some short scraggly bushes, poking out red through the partially melted snow. The lake was really something between a very big puddle and a very wet meadow and a very small lake. In his search, he found a wooden picnic table. What brave soul must have built that so far in the haunted wilderness? At last, he found several mossy rocks on one end of the lake where a stream started from it through something like a beaver dam.
He went inside one of the rocks. It was a simple camping hut, as he had hoped - and unoccupied, though there were some fish bones and a simple fireplace, and a bit of heather by the wall that looked slept-in. It would do. He got out his tinderbox and lit a fire. The small room warmed quickly, the thick stone walls keeping the warm air in even though they still felt cold to the touch.
That was a place to sleep taken care of, then. He walked back to Hafnarfjörður—the town south of the haunted cliffs—and bought food for a couple more days. Money was running out—he only had a few rigsdalers left. Walking back, he wondered if foraging would work at all this time of year. Maybe there were some of last year's crowberries or half-frozen sorrel or something around. He could make lichen soup if he found enough of those.
He had no luck finding any edible plants. The snow did get in the way, and the ground here was strange and hard. He was turning around to go back to the camping hut when he saw some seagulls fighting over something. At this point, he wouldn't rule out snagging a fish if one of them dropped it. He walked up to them.
The seagulls were flocking around what looked like a broad, shoulder-height container of some sort, square green lid not fully closed over a jumble of boxes and things. He lifted the lid the rest of the way.
(In the background, a voice seemed to say, "Windy tonight, huh. Blew that lid right off the dumpster." There was nobody there, of course. Just another iffy cliff, this one with bright yellow bits - must be lichen -, and someone had somehow written BÓNUS on the cliff face and drawn a pig.)
Under the lid, the container was like the dirtiest, messiest banquet table Blaer had ever seen: among torn cardboard boxes and some crinkly black bags, there was neatly sliced bread in shiny wrappings, raw potatoes and carrots and string beans and other vegetables he didn't recognize, a whole stack of small boxes of red berries that looked like half-ripe brambleberries... and were those bananas? He'd read about those once.
("That's interesting. There's no wind, Marysia," said another incorporeal voice. Some people got ringing in their ears, Blaer got voices. We all have our own cross to bear.)
Was this container of vegetables someone's strange, poorly insulated root cellar? But out here in the wilderness?
It had small wheels. Was it really someone's cart? Maybe someone was taking stuff to the market? But there didn't seem to be anyone around.
("Well, then it must be the seagulls," the first voice went on, with a bit of a foreign accent.
"Clever bastards," the other answered. "Any day now, they're going to discover fire, and then we'll be screwed.")
Blaer was usually better at tuning the voices out, but something about this place was getting to him. Despite himself, he remembered the legends about humans again. Today was still Christmas season, if only barely. The stories said that if you found a human house during Christmas, there would be a feast waiting. Human food was supposed to be rich and exotic. What was less possible, he mused. That this square green thing was a human house, or any of the other guesses he'd been able to come up with?
There has to be a less stupid explanation, he thought as he fished out one of the berry boxes to take a closer look. When he shook the box a little, the berries moved as though they were very soft, which was odd, since brambleberries should not behave that way if they were still red.
"There has to be an explanation," one of the voices said again, as if someone was standing only a step or two from him. "Spooky floating raspberries... someone must be pranking us with wires or stuff. Or maybe it's elves." There was laughter. The green container... cart... thing jostled of its own accord, and the lid went back on as if pushed by a ghost.
Blaer decided to give up on figuring anything out, take some of the food as rightfully foraged in the wilderness, and get out of here. He opened the lid again. There was a gasp almost right in his ear.
The other voice, further away, by the "BÓNUS" rock, was saying something about how she was pretty sure it was a prank with wires or something, but just in case, she didn't want any trouble with any spirits that might happen to be around. If they could just leave her alone and ignore her completely, that'd be fine with her.
Would the voices ever cut it out? Blaer threw a good amount of potatoes into his rucksack and hesitated between taking some probably-bananas or some of the weird berries.
The closer voice, sounding like it was all a big joke, started up again. "No way. If elves were dumpster diving here, I would want to say hi and shake their hand for boycotting consumerism. Do you think we'd be invisible to them just like they are to us? Because that would suck. I would want the dumpster elves to see me."
Blaer dropped his bag as someone appeared right in front of his eyes. It was a young man around his age, a little scruffy (the way humans supposedly looked, an unwelcome thought reminded him).
It had been many years since Blaer had believed in humans, and he'd done his best to forget all about it. But he remembered this face; the soft dreamy eyes, now hidden behind glasses. And, most of all, the spark of whimsy, the random tangents. I would want the dumpster elves to see me. Who came up with stuff like that?
Jón did, that's who. It was him—the imaginary friend Blaer used to have as a child, back on the previous farm, before his family moved east. The little boy who lived in the human house and came out to play with Blaer each day all summer. The one the grown-ups couldn't see—well, grandma had said she could, but Blaer had always thought she'd just been humoring him.
What if she hadn't? What if Jón had never been imaginary?