"The hell was that all about?" Faith asked, once we were back on the road.

"I had an invention that would significantly advance the state of the art in vehicle manufacturing," I said with a shrug. "I also did not have the time to start my own carriage shop and exploit that invention myself. What I did have was a lot of money, some technical drawings I was confident that a good engineer would be able to follow, and a Merchant who was looking for his next big score."

"So, what, you're just gonna trust some random guy we met in a tiny village to start a business in your name?" Faith asked.

"Of course not," I said. "And he knew that too, which is why we didn't actually sign anything. When we get to Mount Fate, and I have free time again, I'll look him up, look into his track record, and maybe shop around for someone better if he doesn't strike me as suitable to run my carriage business for me." I shrugged. "I can afford to be patient. I already have one of these things, after all."

"That... makes sense," Faith said, before sighing.

I kept driving, and the silence hung in the air for a good minute or two. It was nice. Companionable, even. I was slowly managing to forget that Faith willingly swore herself to the God that killed my grandparents.

"I keep thinking about what he said," Faith said, breaking the silence. "That... When you're handling a lot of money, even if that money isn't really yours, you just... You get used to it, to the point you don't think much of spending a hundred entire Hikaano dollars on just a bottle of wine."

"When you have enough of a certain resource, it stops feeling like a resource," I said. "Or rather... It stops feeling like a limiting factor. Elves live forever, and elven Wizards just keep building up their magicka reserves over time. For elven Wizards, there's no point to using material components, because those cost time and effort, and only save a bit of magicka, which they inevitably end up with huge reserves of. You still notice costs, you just don't feel them as sharply, and you become more willing to eat a larger cost if it means saving more of some other resource you value more, like your time and effort."

"I mean, intellectually it makes sense, I just..." Faith trailed off. "...Despite all that, the image of someone casually spending a hundred dollars on a bottle of wine is... It makes me angry, but it also just feels so absurd, you know? It feels like a lazy joke someone would make about how stupid rich people are, but- but it's not, it's real, it actually happened, and Augustus thought telling me that would make me feel better about all this."

"Did you know that High Elves didn't really have currency?" I asked mildly.

"...What?" Faith asked.

"We didn't trade goods and services for coins, paper bills, or any other common medium of exchange," I said. "If someone had something you wanted? You asked nicely, or traded something you had that they wanted. Something like a barter economy, if you remember that from history class, although of course history class got a lot of shit wrong about the High Elven economy."

"How did anyone who wasn't a farmer feed themselves?" Faith demanded.

"We had a lot of Druids using Primal magic to grow fruits and nuts and vegetables and grains in tremendous quantities," I said with a shrug. "We had more food than we could eat. And, well... I mean, you didn't pay your parents for the food they gave you, did you? Well, that's how it worked for us, too. Just about everyone was related to a Druid, and the Druids made a lot of food to feed their families, so..."

"What about people who didn't have families, though? Orphans? People who disowned their parents?"

"I should back up and clarify," I said. "The Gods of the High Elves are The Mother and The Father. And among the first, most basic of The Mother's teachings is this: no one goes hungry. So, High Elves put a lot of importance on traditions of hospitality- to let someone go hungry when there is so much food to go around is an injustice, and it was the duty of all capable adults to correct injustices, to make things right. Four hundred years ago, if you came to Napoleon Ironheart as a beggar, dressed in rags, belly empty, he would take you into his home and feed you from his own stocks without a second thought. He would bring you to his bathroom, show you how to work the taps, and give you a bar of lavender-scented soap he'd made himself and a clean robe to wear. And once you were warm, and fed, and clean, he would ask someone in his family who liked to sew if they wouldn't mind making some proper clothes for this poor, lost soul, and they would regard it as a blessing, as an opportunity to make the world better by doing something they liked.

"Elves got new things by either making those things themselves, or as a favor from a friend or a neighbor. Elves considered money to be a saddening way to abstract away the delicate, interconnected social fabric of a community, of people helping each other out because it was the right thing to do, they didn't have anything better going on, or even just because the help would take the form of an activity they enjoyed."

"It sounds... It sounds like a fairy tale," Faith murmured.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"Yeah, humans wrote a lot of fairy tales about elves," I said quietly. "A lot of stories about the elves stealing humans away are... Not completely fictitious. Elves didn't have a social practice of kidnapping humans, of course- that's a stupid thing to do- but we did have a social practice of taking in lost strangers and treating them like our own. Plenty of humans found themselves without a place in the society that raised them, and decided... Fuck it, I've heard about the elves and their excess and plenty. Let's go see if they'll take me. And they did! Consistently, without fail, the High Elves would accept humans into their midst, accept them into their families. Half-elves were always pretty common." I hummed. "The stories portraying us as tricksters are also grounded in fact. The biggest problem we faced was boredom, and so we developed a sense of humor. When we learned about the human practice of intentionally aging wine, someone suggested using that as the basis of a child-rearing tradition."

"Wait, what?" Faith asked. "How does aging wine relate to raising a child?"

"Oh, it's simple," I said breezily. "You tell the kid that, when they were born, you brewed a bottle of good wine, and that you were aging it, so that when they'd come of age, and had a matured palate, they could properly appreciate it, and experience the sublime joys of a wine that's as old as you are."

"...Wait, you said this was a prank?" Faith asked.

"Uncle Frederick pulled it on me last week," I said dryly. "The punchline of the prank is that, twenty-odd years later, the wine has gone bad, and become vinegar. Badly-made vinegar, at that. And this is meant to teach an important life lesson: don't wait for luxuries for no reason. If it's ready, and you can enjoy it now, then just do it. Don't put it off, thinking you're gonna get to it one of these years- do it. Because, while a lot of what humans think about how High Elves think is wrong, it is true that we have tend to have bigger problems with procrastination than humans do. Of course, with immortality, it's not as consequential as it is with humans, but it can still ruin your week."

"Huh," Faith said. "...Did Talia's parents do that to her, too?"

"I asked her that exact question earlier today," I said. "And she said, 'No, my parents love me.'"

"Ouch, burn," Faith said, smirking.

"Yeah, Tim's not really much of a traditionalist," I said, shrugging. "He's only in his forties, y'know? If your dad wasn't in his early 20s when you were born, he might actually be older than Tim. No, Tim grew up in the Hikaano Empire, surrounded by humans. For all that he's a father with a stable, respectable job, he's more a peer to me than he is to Napoleon. You can tell, because Tim actually charges people money for things."

"Your dad doesn't?" Faith asked.

"Nah, he's an old-school Druid," I said. "The way he sees it, his job is to keep his people alive and healthy- feed them when they're hungry, heal them when they're sick, help them give birth, et cetera. And he gets paid for this service by being a well-loved pillar of the community. People are happy to do favors for him- he's helped them so much, it's only fair they do what they can for him, isn't it? He does still sometimes have to pay for things, of course, so he does take some paying work outside the community- mostly one-off contract work for the Ranger's Guild- but for something like healing Amelie and removing her liver cancer? Nope. He did that for free, because that's just how the world works, to him- he helps people when they need it, and later, they help him when he needs it. I know he doesn't look old, but... He's five hundred years old. That's not ancient, the way my two-and-a-half-millennia-old mother is, but he is old. Old enough to remember the way we used to be, and to keep that spark alive, one day at a time."

"...Do you think it would've still been that way today, if the war hadn't happened?"

"On the one hand, that social order lasted for millennia. The idea that it'd continue for another three centuries isn't exactly hard to swallow," I said. "However... There were other things changing, too. Industrialization, the Scientific Revolution, the Dragon Wars... In the end? I don't know. We'll never know. The Rosewood Kingdom is gone. King Lysander Rosewood is dead, his legacy reduced to blood in the gutter and dust on the wind. But..." I sighed. "...Maybe we can make it that way, someday. Maybe we can build a better tomorrow, a world without hunger, where all want for naught. But we don't live there yet. And the path is long, winding, and poorly lit."

Faith sighed.

"...I'm sorry," Faith said quietly.

"It's not your fault," I said.

"I swore myself to the God who killed your grandparents," Faith said. "Who ordered the destruction of your homeland and your people. I... I mean, I knew that elves lived forever, that the War of the Roses destroyed their homeland, and I even knew that there were some elves still around who were old enough to remember it, but... I just... I never connected those dots, and fully realized what the Paladins had done. What Hano had done."

Thunder rumbled, loud enough to be heard over the (admittedly, magically-muffled) noise of the van.

I sighed, ignoring the impotent little godling's pitiful little temper tantrum.

"It's not too late to change your mind," I said. "Apostasy is always an option."

"What the hell else is there for me?" Faith asked. "Being a Paladin is all I have, Joseph. That's... That's why I'm sorry. I... I have to stick with this."

I had a lot I could say to that...

...but. Well.

I let it drop, and just kept driving.