Wake up, boy! It’s 4 AM, time for work. My head thumping with a headache as he keeps shouting. I shouldn’t have stayed up and read all night about tales of magic and miracles. And then you wonder why I’d want to leave this hell. He starts laughing. This is heaven, my boy. You wake up erry mornin’ to work and that’s how it always been for us elves. Be it dark, blood, fairy or human elf, we all work wherever we are. That’s how they respect us. We are immortal beings that can do more than anyone. Unlike dwarves that sit on the top of their mountains smoking pipe and making laws, we have to do what is needed for this world to be the way it is. I sigh as his morning routine as he likes to remind me of our ways for forever. All I hear is that you don’t know better, which makes this hell. As I put my pants on he comes grabs me by the silk shirt and pull me to his eye level. We live forever. We’re old as the dirt we step on. We know everything that ever was and we make everything that will ever be. It is a privilege no one else has. Not the goblins, not the sapiens, or any other race on this face or under it that can do what we do. He gently lets me back down. Be grateful. You could be dying fighting stupid wars or dying of old age and achieving nothing. You’re the smartest elf I met, and I can’t believe you’re also my son. So quit your yappin’ and let’s get working. We got a big one today…

Manorn, Hafhorn, y’all are late. Why do they all love screaming so much? The goblin nobility sent us a letter with a request, he says as hands it to me. Hafhorn, read it. What do they want? I sigh as my eyes gloss over the paper. They want us to make for them farming equipment. 100 plows and 100 cultivators, whatever that means. If we want the job, we need to send back word with however much gold we want for the job. They say here that if we accept, they’ll send half the gold we ask for with some nomad sapiens. Father starts laughing as he yanks the letter from my hands. Botin, what do you think? Two hundred complex machines for the goblin royalty and their settlement. How much work and gold we gonna need for this? Botin scratches his head. We’ll have to check whatever iron ore, coal and rest of the stuff we have. We might need to order some from one of the fairies and their mines. So, I’ll go check on that. Hafhorn, better be prepared to write that letter back, he says as he leaves laughing. I hate you for giving me this name. Father starts laughing. Why couldn’t you give me another name? Like Walkorn, Writhorn, Workorn, why Hafhorn? He continues to laugh. Because you’re no a Fulhorn like your grandpa used to be, and you’re not manly enough to be like your father. You’re Hafhorn, your own wonderful being. Now let’s go… We have work to do. The forges don’t light themselves up on their own.

There’s only a handful of us, fully literate elves and they call us engineers. Which means that the rest are what the dwarves call functionally illiterate. And that makes me wish I was somewhere else doing something else. Whether it would be learning magic of any kind, philosophy with the dwarves on top a mountain or roaming the earth with the sapiens, living as a nomadic species. It all feels so wasteful when you are immortal to do the same thing over and over again without an end in sight. Just as that thought flies through my brain one of the forges explodes. The screams of terrified elves echo through the forests as I rush through the trees from one for to the one that went up in flames. Under molten steel, burnt elves now died after millennia of living. Were lucky enough to escape the steel only to be cut in twain by pieces of metal flung from the furnace. They let the pressure build up too much and I had warned them about this. Botin, what happened? He looks at me. Hafhorn, you are here? Then that means your father… I look across the facility, on a wall pinned by a piece of metal through his head. Father! Botin holds me back. There’s nothing you can do! You can’t bring him back. There’s no potion that heals anything like that. I push him off. No! But there’s magic! Necromancy. I’mma learn it and I’mma bring him and those you can salvage back to life! So, don’t burry ‘em! I hate being right…

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