I’ve been extremely uncommunicative lately — and my apologies if I owe you an e-mail, which is quite a lot of you — but I’m breaking radio silence just before I go home to link you all to the story I got for Yuletide, which is absolutely beautiful.

“The Cautery Wind” combines two of my Elfquest-related suggestions: for my assigned writer to make up their own tribe in the World of Two Moons, and to give backstory for one of the original four tribes from canon (in this case, the Sun Folk). It’s darker than more Elfquest, but in an appropriate way; it picks up on the threads of darkness that are already in the series, and looks at them head-on. The frame is Savah telling a story that Skywise and Timmain need to hear, and it contains more lovely notes than I can list about what it means for the Mother of Memory to want to forget something, what it means for Skywise to have changed the way he did in Kings of the Broken Wheel, what the relationship between Skywise and Timmain is about, and what the differences (and similarities) are between elves and humans. To name just a few of the things I loved about it.

The story probably won’t mean a lot to people who haven’t read the series, but if you know Elfquest, go read this story. It’s a wonderful fan-made addendum to the canon.