Kneeling at the first step of the throne, the captain of her rangers made report, and the star set upon the brow of the queen dimmed in the twilight that spilled across the court.

Captain Teguin was old, made of birch and rawhide and grit. As she spoke, she unwound the braid that held her ash-white hair. "Yes," she said, "they move at breakneck speeds across flat land. Our lands are hilly, so this is not why we should fear them." Into the silence, the leather of her quiver creaked.

"Yes, their arrows fly faster even than sound. But they are louder than shouts, and ours are quieter than whispers. When they come to our wood, it is our arrows that shall triumph over theirs."

And now the old captain turned her face to the ground. "No, it is this that we must fear about our human foes: their magics always work."

Confusion played across the faces of the assembled magi, the druids of the Circle, the generals of the Host of War. The queen gazed down at the ranger with a troubled look. "Their art is reliable? This is truly what to fear from them?"

"Yes, my queen, it is." Teguin scraped the dust from her face. "I'll say it more strongly: their magics always work no matter who uses them."

And suddenly, one of the Priests of the Moon understood, and his jaw fell in horror. Teguin turned to him and nodded grimly.

"You see," she said, "this 'math' and these 'guns' are descriptions and tricks of pure dead matter. They portray and manipulate the raw and lifeless stuff of the earth and cause it to act uncharacteristically, but at its essence, it is as simple and natural as a rockslide. That is what their 'guns' are: a tiny wildfire causing a tiny avalanche to fall within a fragment of a fragment of a moment."

"Which means," she continued, sadness weighting her words, "that even the most foolish, most base, most inept or evil or misguided amongst them can uproot forests or crack mountains asunder. They have condensed the knowledge of ancients and put it into the hands of children, of beings who are children until their short lives end. Their 'bombs' can bring down whole castles, yet not one of them will live longer than the time it takes for a single hearth-tree to grow. They commune with no spirits, heed no gods, take favor from no eternal thing. All that they are is contained in their own heads, and thus power is the only hymn they can sing."

The Elf-Queen's face had fallen from sadness to shock, and from shock to despair. "What may we do, in the face of such monstrosity?" she begged.

"This, and this only," said Teguin, and she took up her bow. "We flee. I will lead us beyond the Green Doors and into the wilds of our ancestors, into that land that is not a land but a dream."

The queen looked at her in dismay. "You propose we lose ourselves in a maze of endless mists, filled with the elder magics that once preyed upon mortals."

"I do," said Teguin. "For against this foe there is no victory, They will always be too many, too cunning, and too impetuous to share a world with us for long."

"And what of that world?" asked the Chief Druid. "When we go, the Green Doors will close behind us, and all that renews the earth will fail."

"They will," said Teguin. "And thus this world will begin to wither. The humans will cut down the mother trees, not knowing what they do, and the vast web of life that sustains them will start to fray. I believe that in a mere ten generations of elves, they will destroy the very ground they walk upon, and then their starving ashes will join the rest."

The Chief Druid's eyes fell. "We condemn the earth to save ourselves," he said.

"The earth was condemned once the humans learned that they could make caravans to cross the deserts by promising wealth that did not yet exist," said Teguin. "Their histories are clear: the great engine that drives them is the eternal promise of more and better in the future. They are unwilling to give what they have to one another, and so may only be bribed to share with promises of even greater wealth yet to come. They leverage the future against the past, and so, like ivy on a tree, they will grow until they suck all the air from the world and choke to death the very wood that holds them aloft."

"Come, then," said the queen, and as she rose, the war-host rose with her. "Our time in these woods has ended. We will go through the gates into the wilds of the Dream, together with our spirits and our gods and our eternal friends, and leave these humans to their self-made ends."

And so it happened that Teguin was the last hand upon the Green Doors, once all the host of elven-kind had passed into the dream-lands, where things and their opposites are one. It may have been that, once the doors closed and their sylvan light extinguished, some few humans felt the spark of the untamed wilds finally gutter and die. But, untutored children that they were, they knew not what it meant and simply wandered onward into the garden of their neverending, ever-growing desires.

r/EntelecheianLogbook