A curious merchant asks Wraithvine and friends as they have joined the merchant caravan to the next town. "I know elves float and meditate instead of actual sleep as we know it, but what of elven infants, do they do the same?" -- Anon Guest
"That is a question I do not often face," said Wraithvine. "Most ask if the world is truly flat for us or whether we can actually drink wine and survive. Ignorant things. So thank you for a question you've clearly been thinking about for some time."
Those around the campfire waited in anticipation, even the Hellkin Bard, Melody, had stopped idly noodling with her lute.
"Elven infants do not meditate. It's not an instinct, it is taught. Parents and guardians guide them from the moment they can understand language, to the age in which it has become automatic to do so. It's a process that tends to finish when an Elf has reached a hundred years of age."
"So then they're Grownups?" asked Kit, one of the train's peripatetic kids. Ze was one of the many free-roaming orphans who had been adopted by the entire train. Hir latest achievement had been learning to read and so was making hir way through anything with print.
"Technically. In that they do not need their guardians to watch over their rest, any more. Elven adulthood is a little more complicated. Like everything Elves do. At one hundred, an Elf is expected to take up a study, something related to a career. Or, for that matter, something to learn to perfect until roughly the age of three hundred. By five hundred, an Elf is expected to have a life's focus. Something to hold their interest for at least a millennium. Eight hundred is a little early for making a family, but not unheard of. Grandparents are generally approaching or over two thousand years of age."
Kit, aged seven and a half, was agog, the hefty book on hir knees and hir fingers still marking where ze had stopped tracing the words. "Two... thousand?" it was probably the biggest number ze had heard so far.
"Not an uncommon number for Elves. The Arch-Elves, those still living in Nanogh, do not know death because they are pure magic made flesh. Here in the mortal realm, there are still some Elves who can live as long as four thousand. Should they take proper care of themselves."
"That's rather like a Human living to one hundred and twenty," clarified Melody. "Achievable, but rare."
"It said in here that there was someone who learned Elf meditation in five years," Kit tapped the pages. "Why's it take Elves one hundred?"
"That was a case of inspired desperation," allowed Wraithvine. "I met the fellow once, long after he needed my hands. Got his story. He was a Hellkin, a very soft-hearted one - for all that the world tried to make him hard. His worries about others plagued him to the point that sleep was... untenable. Punishing. So he had a mountain's worth of motivation to escape dreams."
"And that's what gave him his eerie powers?" asked Kit, returning to enthusiasm.
"What are you reading, child?" demanded Borygam, the merchant who had initially asked. He leaned over to peer at the front cover. "The True Exploits of the Thrice-Sworn King?"
"Not everything that says it's true is actually true, my love," cooed Melody. "And especially don't believe everything that's written down."
"Writers want things read, after all," added Wraithvine, "so of course they want to make it interesting."
[Photo by Joris Voeten on Unsplash]
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