Someone should have given the elves the memo that immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Despite living theoretically forever, most elves got…bored by the time they hit over 2,000 years of age. A feeling of longing for jamaís vu, where everything is de-realized, and new and unique again.
A fleeting feeling that stands in stark contrast to reality.
That was what Darrien was thinking when he was sifting through an ancient album of sketches of his lineage, a hand-me-down from his parents who thought it was cute that he had sketches of his sixth birthday.
This is what a photo album was for. Photos have been a thing for a hundred years now, my parents needed to get with the times, he thought silently while flipping through the pages. This book is older than him, and it still looks brand-new, with the errant dog-eared page. Siblings that were hundreds of years older than him, still looked like they were no older than twenty. Parents that barely showed a crease or a wrinkle, same with the grandparents.
Only three things really did in elves.
Accidents.
Wars.
Or Boredom.
He doesn’t know why that last one bothers him so much. He’s only fifty-three, and his girlfriend is fifty-one, so he has a lot of life left ahead of him–in theory, forever. His parents had gotten onto the bandwagon of non-fungible-treants–like a digital tree that you theoretically owned the rights to.
It was a complete scam and he warned them that the market was going to implode like a dying star if they didn’t bail out and get their money back. Then again, a thousand years of compound interest had made them quite the rich elves. Most were. So they could now pay others to take care of the five hundred-foot tall trees around their homeland, and not have to risk breaking their body from a several hundred-foot drop clearing out mutated squirrels, murder-crows, or the occasional dragon that took the opportunity to nest up there.
Dragons don’t like elves, and the feeling goes both ways. They’re loud, eat elves on occasion when they’re annoyed, and also set the trees on fire. That’s a no-go in their books, and giant ballistas had been put in at some point to deter the murder lizards.
Then the dragons burned them down, and it was back to square one, getting rid of the pesky murder lizards. This problem persisted for hundreds of years until tech caught up with the noisy, constantly hungry lizards with wings.
An F-15 Eagle tended to do the job nicely when they were in flight. But those were in short supply out here. The dragons simply burned them on the ground after they figured out they only had so much ammunition.
Dragons are clever.
Dragons are also a problem. But they’re not The problem.
When people don’t die and keep having kids faster than the world can kill them, it leads to crowding. The kind that leaves Darrien with hand-me-downs even despite his parent's excesses and having to share a room with his youngest brother, even though he should be out on his own by now in the world.
It’s a tad annoying, to put it mildly.
“Darrien, stop moping and get down here! It’s your grandpa’s thousandth birthday party, and you’re not going to miss it!” His mother, Elaine, calls up to the second floor. Well, the second floor of a house that’s a hundred feet off the ground in one giant fire-trap of a tree-village, but still, the second floor of something. Darrien sighs and tucks the album away.
Missy is going to kill him because he’s going to his ancient grandfather’s birthday which really is nothing more than keeping score at this point, and not going out for a trip to the next tree-town and hoping to elope for a change. He’s not in his forties anymore, he’s fully grown, finally!
The humans had it lucky. Immortality, or lack thereof, wasn’t a problem for them. They got stuff done even with such short lives. He scampers down the winding branches that form the staircase and looks at his mother, looking scornful and tapping a soft leather shoe impatiently.
“You’re such a mess Darrien. Look presentable. Get a comb, seriously! The tree can literally make one for you in a minute!”
“Do I gotta?” he sighs heavily. "You know this is just an excess at this point--"
“Yes, you do! Comb that mop, or I’ll take your dad’s tree trimming kit to that mess on top of your head and you can sport the ‘polished’ look that your father wears proudly!” she says in a slightly teasing tone.
“It's called 'cleanshaven,' mom,” he groans, and she glares at him.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“You live here, you live by our rules. Go tidy up.”
Darrien sighs. Missy is definitely going to kill him. There’s no way he can ditch this birthday now. He glances out at the cellophane window, which was like organic glass the tree produced.
He sure wished he could be where those industrial centers are right now by the ground-dwelling town, filled with wonders and magical delights and fun places to visit.
----------------------------------------
The birthday party was going exactly as he’d figured it would. A bunch of eternally young elves, both friends and family members, were lingering around, drinking, and talking about inappropriate stories with the kids too close by. The drinking part was starting to take over as the afternoon sun disappeared beneath the colossus trees, and that bright orange glow started to fade. Darrien looks at the watch on his wrist–it’s a mechanical one, not like the new digital ones he’d heard about that had some kind of liquid-crystal composition.
Just go out and get a mana clock, for crying out loud. Why keep improving on something with such a basic function?
His grandfather looks just like his dad: tall, thin, maybe even slightly gaunt, and his black hair is sprinkled with a few silver hairs–elves did age a little, but after a while, it just stopped. The effective appearance would be like a human reaching middle-age.
Except the women didn’t go through menopause. This made many of the older generation very happy in their extremely long-term relationships. Darrien is thinking of switching his juice for some hard cider to dull the boredom he’s got.
His boredom ends when the speech starts, and his grandfather is wobbling a little–probably a little too much to drink, he figures. He’s checking his watch for the third time in a minute. Missy is going to kill him for missing out on the date that he tried to bump to the next day, but she said she couldn’t, something about classes at the university in town. He’d already finished his courses and was done with it.
A degree in arbology was hardly anything to sneeze at. He knew so much about the colossus trees that populated the nation and formed a major bio-resource, that he’d gotten a damn Ph.D and they’d handed him the papers without even blinking. Even now, he frowned when he glanced skywards, trying to find anything else to focus on the boasts and raunchy stories of his grandfather, while his dad tried to gently pry the microphone away. A typical family affair, really.
Why were the trees turning color? It wasn’t even close to Austice? Icymoon was even further away–months, in fact. It’s strange that he hadn’t even noticed it before. Why are they turning? Thoughts of atmospheric variation, changes in wind patterns, this global warming thing one of the humans had been warning was the end of the world and had shown him a graph with a line shaped like a Canada-stick. He still didn’t get the term, but he knew that temperatures were rising. Globally, in fact, beyond historical trends, even with solar revolution variations.
“Darry, whatcha looking at?” He breathes a sigh of relief at his youngest sister Marielle, who is a precocious fifteen-year-old–still a ways to go to her maiden day when she was an adult, in her early forties. She’s all cheery green-eyed just like him, but with auburn hair compared to his chestnut brown, and she’s more angular compared to his rounded face and tapered chin. He didn’t mind the nickname she’d given him since she was six.
Of all his siblings, he liked her the most. She was young–young enough to still see the wonder in the world and treat everything as new. A thought that had faded for him over the past few years, even given his youthful appearance. Aging gracefully didn’t have a meaning for elves. They just…didn’t.
“Looking at leaves,” he sighs. “Strange. The Colossus trees usually don’t turn till Octavine. We’re still in Augtern."
“Maybe the trees are sick,” she proposes. He breathes a sigh of relief.
“They don’t get sick, Mari. They just grow to a certain height then they’re like us, immovable objects that withstand the test of time. Only the fires of cataclysm can do them in. They don’t get diseases. Maybe parasites on occasion, but…” he taps the table gently. “Ah, I’m sure it’s nothing. Just variation in the leaves changing color. You see that if you look at a whole forest, a few are the daring first ones to change, then more and more as time goes on. But they all change eventually as Icymoon comes.”
“You know so much about trees, Darry,” she giggles. He smiles contentedly.
“It was either the trees, or go work on the tech revolution the humans keep prattling on about. I chose something mom could mostly tolerate before I get the next degree in fifty or so years when I tire of it. Though, I do like the study of these plant titans. They have a rhythm and a soul of their own, don’t they? We tend to them, they shelter us.”
“Are they alive?” She asks with childlike curiosity. He laughs softly.
“Plants are alive, yes. They have cells just like us, and you could argue organs, but not to the level of being a thinking, breathing being. Though, some of the elders swear that they can ‘hear’ the trees. I don’t know, it sounds a little funny to me, I mean we know mana exists and so does magic, but the idea that the trees have souls or something…I guess it's a bit of a stretch.”
“Do they have feelings?”
"They perceive things around them, yes–the water in the soil, the humidity of the air, the amount of light shining on the leaves, and even sometimes the pollution we occasionally get, they shutter up early in the day. They feel, but I don’t think they have feelings.” He loves her inquiry, that natural curiosity he had when she was his age. Something he misses now, in hindsight. He doesn’t want her to get old, jaded, and cynical, and certainly not for all eternity.
Darrien has been so absorbed in his discussion that he missed the panicked shouts. Then there’s a scream. His grandmother. He snaps to attention and sees a gathering of people by the main table where his parents and grand-dad had been. He rises up and pushes people aside.
He gasps. His grandfather is prone on the ground and not breathing. His grandmother with her brown and slightly silvered hair and pointy ears is trying to shake him awake, and his father is trying his best to get a heartbeat, and when that fails, performs chest compressions. Darrien goes pale at this spectacle. There is nothing he can do but look for a doctor to come quickly with a medical kit, sprinting as fast as he can in his youthful body.
But time doesn't work that way for everything. By the time he gets the elder physician and sprints back, everyone is sobbing or looking grim. Marielle is crying, and he kneels down to comfort her and feels splashes of tears and a shuddering heartache from her. Distantly, he hears the wails of his other family members, and someone reluctantly grabs a clean tablecloth and places it over his grandfather.
What had been a joyous birthday was now a death day.
A death that no one has answers for.
Not even him.
----------------------------------------