Adventure
I am lost in a woods. Two paths: cabin, river.
I walk toward the cabin.
Male elf in cabin. "You stink," he says.
"You don't," I counter."
"Nonsense." He walks up and presents his armpit. "Behold."
I sniff. "Not a thing," I say.
The elf made a face. "Strange. Strange, indeed. Human, join me for dinner."
"Only if it is not vegetarian."
I share a meal with the male elf, a soup with his fresh hunt. I learn that his name is Galahad. He notices my gear, and asks: "You also hunt?"**
"I do."
"Where are your spoils?" he asks.
"The animals of these woods elude me."
"Shame," he says, sighing. "I hear stories that meat tastes best when killed at the hands of a human."
"Why?"
"The communion of creatures with short, fleeting lives." He looks at me, pity in his eyes. "You know the suffering of a life that ends too soon. The compassion of a killer tastes sweetest."
"My people have a saying: everyone dies, but few people truly live." I let him think on it for a moment, then continue: "Human sorcerers have achieved the same magic of the elven sages."
"Prodigies of idle tricks and games," he says, waving his hand. "Magic is but a game for children." Demonstrating, he snaps his fingers, and the fire goes out. In the next moment, it burns as if nothing ever happened.
"Have sentiments changed?" I ask. "The humans have oft complained of cleaning up after the elves."
"My people have grown accustomed to waste and excess," the elf says, and pours himself another drink. "I am no different. So I have made myself alone in these woods, away from the ones who taught me to wait for death."
"The creatures of these woods do not elude you," I say, as a question.
"They offer themselves to me." He laughs. "I give them harmony and peace in these woods, away from the harsh nature into which they were born. In exchange, I may have their meat with my daily bread."
"A ranch?"
"If you may call the trees my fences, and the canopy my silos." He looks out a small window. "I created for the animals a paradise. And paradise must have its wall, and its outcasts, and its snake."
I know not what to say, and change direction. "What is so tragic of a short life?"
"Death itself," he says. "Death, the abyss of evil, into which all that is good escapes. Creation, in all its glory, fades into the darkness of a reaper's overtilled domain. Is death not evil to you, an ill that looms over all other?"
"Death looms over evil too," I challenge. "All that is evil also falls into oblivion."
"What good is that?" he exclaims. "Evil deserves to be remembered. Only good has the right to be forgotten. Yet, it is too pure and beautiful to let die."
I know of the wisdom of the elves, and consider the weight of his proclamation. "Those who remember not the past are consigned to live it anew."
He nods. "Yet it is evil we forget, and good we remember. And so we wish for death, and eschew life. Creatures bore of all that the world has to offer, and begin to seek its ultimate destruction."
"Elves too?" I ask.
"Elves most of all." He stands, stretching his legs, and retrieves an old tome from a bare shelf. On its cover you see: Le Mort d'Arthur. "Know you of the prophet Merlin?"
"A race too lowly for his station," he says, then quickly says: "I mean no insult, fellow hunter. Surely you understand my sentiment."
"Do elves think much of humans? Of the writings we create?"
"Elves write many things too," he says, "many which you may know from the histories you see, the texts and treatises of the workshops and the hospitals. Of fact, the elf is master. The world is a windup toy in the palm of a pale, slender hand." He looks at his own hand, and forms a fist. "Yet the human has triumphed. All ages henceforth shall be of the human, of the storyteller."
"Storyteller?"
"Humans think in stories, I was told."
"Hmm," I think aloud. "That never struck me as unique. Do elves not have stories?"
"They know of stories," he says, "but they do not have them. In what sense is a story ours? A story is never ours, no more than a fact. Yet they have predicted the future, and the end times. This, we must all now admit."
Changing subjects: "Would an elven woman find me agreeable?"
"Even better," he says. "Brutish. As they prefer it."
"Fair and lithe beyond imagination," I say, repeating the rumors. "And yet, it is so?"
"The elven maids gossip thus: 'A happy woman's hips are broken twice: by the child, but first from her husband.'"
"A poet who knows not the way of elven grace, who sees in him a savage and a noble." I repeat a story I read as a child. "Know you of Romeo and Juliet?"
"The epic," he says, tearing up. "Wherefore art thou Romeo?"