Elf

As others tell it¶

There is an elf alive today who was already ancient when the first human sail was sighted off this coast. He has since watched a colony rise in a valley he gardens, and burn, and be rebuilt under a different flag, and he has not thought any of the three events worth recording.

Elves do not conquer. They arrive, and after some centuries the place is theirs, and nobody can name the day it changed hands. It is not a strategy that anyone chose. It is what happens when a people who are never in a hurry share a continent with peoples who are.

The courtesy that is the insult¶

An elven claim is not announced. A glade is tidier than it was. A river runs where it ought. A boundary exists that nobody was told about and everybody now respects.

No garrison marches out. No treaty is broken, because no treaty was ever signed. A forest becomes a garden over the length of a governor's entire career, and the garden does not include him. There is no moment at which to lodge a protest, and that is the design. By the time one human generation has grasped the shape of it, the elves who began the work are still there, still gardening, perfectly willing to explain the history to you at whatever length you can stand.

The Eldrin have taken this further than anyone and are the reason the practice has a name in four languages. They are not, however, the elves. Perhaps half the elves alive have nothing to do with Ithelanne: houses on the eastern rivers that predate the Eldrin claim and decline it politely every century, wandering scholars, isolated groves deep in the southern forest where no human has ever been invited, and a few coastal houses that woke one morning inside somebody's colonial grant and have treated the governor as weather ever since. All of them regard the Eldrin as a foreign power with an irritating manner.

What nine thousand years does to a mind¶

Every elven habit that infuriates the rest of Valdrin descends from the length of an elven life.

They do not hurry, because hurrying is something the dying do. They do not forget, because they were present: an elf does not consult a history, he corrects it. They prize knowledge above strength without a flicker of modesty, having observed that strength expires while knowledge accrues, and having had longer than anyone alive in which to accrue.

Children come rarely, and an elven child is an event. A people who lose a warrior once in a century and replace one once in a century do not acquire a taste for battle. They acquire a taste for being right eventually.

The wound they do not discuss¶

Halflings exist. Elven blood is half the reason.

The elven position has been, for generations, an elegant and total silence. Not denial, which could be argued with. Not shame, which could be forgiven. Silence, held by people who will still be holding it nine centuries from now, offered to a cousin standing in the road asking only to be named.

It is not an Eldrin policy, though Ithelanne has made it a formal one. It is a habit of the whole people, held as firmly in a river house that has never sworn to the Eldrin as in a curated glade, and the few elves who have broken it have found that the silence closes over the gap without anyone appearing to enforce it.

That silence built the Sintari more thoroughly than any human court ever managed, and the elves have said nothing about that either.

In your settlement¶

Sharp of hand and sharper of mind, elves excel wherever precision compounds and are squandered wherever the work is merely heavy. They tolerate humans and Goetern readily, orcs barely, and giants not at all.

The cost is replacement. An elf lost to a raid is a gap that will not close in your lifetime, nor your successor's, and their people will not be sending more in any hurry. You are not hiring a worker. You are borrowing a piece of somebody's very long memory, and it will remember how you treated it.