Fiction - Xmas POW

She'd been with him since the last year of the Elf War, when he found her half dead in the shadow of a smoldering pine tree. Nicholas slung her over his shoulder, her blood staining his white beard, and carried her to his fortified cabin.

By the time she recovered, the war had been won. The small contingent of prisoners he kept penned outside jeered at her when she emerged, blinking, onto the snow covered porch.
She showed them kindness, as was her way. She tried to convince Nicholas to register the prisoners with the War Authority, which was a tenet of the peace treaty.

"You can't just keep them chained! They have rights." They fought that night, their only fight. But he looked at the scars on her face and wanted to kill the elves, one by one.

In the end, she won. The elves were registered and put to work. Nicholas had been an artisan before he was a soldier so the elves took up his work. As repatriation the toys they made were shipped out, once a year, to the children of the world the elves had tried to ravage.

That they were immortal was not the fault of Nicholas, or his wife, who were not. One day in the far future, they would die and some other, younger of their kind would move into the cabin to keep watch. For eternity the elves would toil day and night, applying make shift salves to their bleeding hands and singing ancient songs to skies embroidered by Northern Lights.

In the meantime, Nicholas fed his reindeer better fare than he afforded the prisoners. When he wasn’t looking, Mrs. Clause brought cookies to the elves and wrote letters to the government, arguing for their freedom.