“Whoo… I roughly understand it now.”
Estel, who had been staying up for days with bloodshot eyes while devouring books, muttered as she massaged her tired eyes, rubbing her eyelids like she was easing the tension.
“Humans, elves, magic… they’re truly full of strange things.”
The more she read, the more she learned about the elves, the more Estel felt like a sense of helplessness was creeping into her heart.
Basically, elves are a long-lived species.
Among the majority of intelligent life forms, almost no species can match the elves in terms of lifespan.
While a few years from an elf’s perspective might feel like only a decade or two to other species, time passes incredibly slowly for them, and they are quite indifferent to the flow of years.
With such long lifespans, they don’t feel the need to live with urgency.
Since time is abundant, they live leisurely, doing whatever they wish, without worrying about whether they succeed or not, as long as they are at peace.
In a good sense, they can calmly handle any situation (unless, of course, an unexpected nuclear missile-level catastrophe strikes the elf capital), but in a bad sense, they often lack passion for life.
No matter what they do, they believe they’ll reach the end eventually, so they lack enthusiasm for learning and don’t risk their lives for progress.
They can survive on fruits that grow in the forest, and external threats have little effect on them.
For elves who have lived in the forest for at least a hundred years from birth, the Great Forest is simply a comfortable home, but to outsiders, the Great Forest is a natural fortress with thick trees and dense underbrush.
Most can’t even penetrate the shallowest of defenses.
And even if someone were to break through and invade, arrows suddenly flying from places hidden by dense trees and piercing the heads of their companions would be a horror to anyone unfamiliar with the land.
The biggest drawback, however, is that their deeply ingrained conservative views, built over centuries, are like the roots of an ancient tree, firmly embedded in their hearts and resistant to change.
According to history, elves cut off contact with other forces after the Thousand-Year War thousands of years ago and have lived in seclusion in the Great Forest ever since.
And since this perspective is still alive and well, they have no complaints about living their entire lives in the same Great Forest where they were born, except for the few unusual elves.
After much thought and reflection, Estel’s conclusion was this:
A stagnant puddle of water, where the flow has been cut off.
But, it was a puddle that never rots.
This was her assessment.
And Estel couldn’t bear to watch such a situation.
In her first life, she had always lived with intensity, and competition had been a part of her everyday life. She closed the book she had been reading.
“That was a good read. It was exactly the information I needed.”
“Are you leaving already? You haven’t even read that much yet…”
“While sitting here and reading leisurely might be nice, it’s not my style.”
She stood up from her seat and walked toward the center of the library, where the librarian, who had greeted her with the same gesture from a few days ago, received her with a smile.
“Please organize the books. I have somewhere to be.”
“Understood.”
“First, I need to check what my authority allows.”
Having reached some conclusion, she began to carefully organize the plan she had in her mind, with the first thing she needed to do coming to her thoughts.
Estel is a princess
She’s a third princess, to be exact, and she has two older brothers.
The eldest, Prince 1, is not particularly interested in kingship, and has built a hut far away from the palace, where he lives a relaxed life.
The second, Princess 2, wanted to expand her horizons, so she announced that she was going to explore the human world and set out for the Great Forest.
She was completely unusual and strange to the elves, but Estel understood.
And Estel, the remaining third princess.
Somehow, she was the only heir left to the throne.
In some ways, she was the most powerful person in the palace, just below the king.
In order to carry out her plans, Estel needed to speak with her father, the Elven King, to gauge the extent of her authority.
Whether he was too conservative, or had power over his heir, etc. If she could talk to him about her plans and get his approval.
and get him to agree with her plans.
Estel went straight to the king’s quarters, but–
“Three years ago, the king died in his sleep.”
“…What?”
Estel was immediately confronted by the guards guarding the king’s residence with the news.
Sleep for those elves who live so long, some have come to regard it as a curse or a shackle.
The thought of years, decades, centuries, millennia, and millennia of the same day repeating itself with little or no change was enough to drive some to extreme depression.
And as more and more of them made extreme choices and did things that caused chaos in the kingdom, the ancestors came up with a solution.
They would rather go to sleep.
Once they devised a way to sleep as long as they wanted without dying, the suicide rate and incidents among the elves dropped dramatically.
Depressed? Want to die, but scared of dying?
Now you can just sleep like you’re dead.
It was a great way for them to go to sleep, because every time they fell asleep, a few hundred years just flashed by.
“When will you wake up?”
“He said not to wake him until at least 400 years have passed, so he’ll be sleeping for a while.”
“My God…what an irresponsible being…”
But… at least the idea of a king of a country sleeping for hundreds of years without a proper successor in place was not a positive one.
The situation was not a positive one.
She couldn’t help but think of the Elves as laid-back and optimistic.
Still, the elves didn’t think anything was wrong, which only confused Estel even more.
“Huh…yeah. That’s what I’m saying, my dear.”
“Yes, Princess.”
“So, since I’m the only royal blood currently in existence, does that mean I can use the king’s powers?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see, that might not be a bad thing.”
But when she thought about it, it was actually a good thing for her.
She could easily claim to be the king’s representative without having to go to the trouble of interviewing him.
She was surprised at the average knowledge of the elves, but then she realized that even the soldiers could answer her questions.
Acknowledged even the young man in front of you, if asked his age, would casually say a few hundred years, so if he had lived that long, he would know most things about the Elves and the Elven Lands.
Each and every elf here is a walking library, a strange and extraordinary race indeed.
“So what happens if I, acting as the king’s representative, declare that the elves have abandoned their policy of reclamation, and that we will begin to engage with the powers outside the Great Forest?”
Estel turns to the guard in front of her and asks the question she had been dreading.
“I’m afraid that the Senate would probably go on a rampage and scold the princess.”
“…The Senate?”
Estel asks, and the question gets an unexpected answer.
It was a word that had come up often enough in her many readings in the library that she had some idea of what it was.
“Is the power of the Senate greater than the power of the Crown?”
“Well…they’ve lived longer, after all, and they’re wiser than we are, so we rely on them.”
“Hmph… I see.”
At first, I thought that the king was an irresponsible dark lord who had irresponsibly gone into sleep, but the soldier’s explanation made me understand him somewhat.
I could understand the king.
Literally, the king, princess, or whatever, was just a play on words, and there was no need for a king since the Senate was in charge of the elves.
in charge of the elves.
“What do they usually do?”
“Well, they don’t really do anything. They just use their years of experience and wisdom to come up with solutions to the problems the elves face.
when the elves are faced with a problem.”
“So you mean they don’t really do anything?”
“Yes, they probably have a council of elders meeting and drinking tea by now.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Well…..because they’ve been doing that every day for almost a thousand years.”
“……..Can you show me where that place is?”
Estel’s head was spinning from the cozy sense of time that seemed to come with every conversation she had with the elves, so rather than ask any more questions, she opted for something a little easier.
“The scent of tea is nice. Has it already come time to brew jasmine petals?”
“Indeed. Once again, this season has arrived.”
“By the way, where did we leave off in our conversation…?”
“Oh, right. That young man named Graham who lives in the lower village, they say he just had his second child.”
“But that guy had his second child over 20 years ago. Are you saying this old man is talking nonsense again?”
“…Did he?”
The conversation, shared over steaming cups of tea in the sunny backyard of a small cottage, was just like the rambling chatter of elderly folk, as if they were endlessly repeating stories for tomorrow or the next day.
Estel, observing the elder council’s fourth finger blink in confusion, was certain they would repeat the same tales tomorrow as well.
“Alright, everyone, quiet down. Today, we have a special guest, you know. Hmm?”
“Ah… it’s a pleasure. The third princess.”
“Old man, you’ve lost your mind… what’s so special about this guest?”
“Isn’t it the princess? You’ve completely forgotten your manners, you old fool.”
“The princess I’ve seen in my life? I’ve seen forty-four of them already!”
“So, how old is she this year?”
“It feels like just yesterday she was a baby, but has she really grown up this much?”
“Eh, she’s still a child, just a child.”
“Is that so…”
“Ha…”
Estel’s reflection, observing the gathering of elderly folk, was that they seemed to be a group of people who would continue rambling on endlessly, repeating the same things.
Until a few days ago, she had been close to meeting the Grim Reaper, but these beings were different, they were the real deal.
Most of the elves she’d seen before had looked in their twenties, as elves grow from childhood to youth over 150 to 200 years, and then age only about one year per century.
They appeared extremely young. But the elder council before her was made up of wrinkled, elderly figures, making it impossible to guess how many years they had lived.
“Well, first, I apologize for attending the council meeting without prior notice.”
“Apologize? What’s there to apologize for? This is just where old folks like us waste time because we can’t die yet. There’s no need to be formal; if you’re bored, just keep us company. Don’t feel pressured, Princess.”
“Is that so?”
“Ugh! Hey, kid! Are you just going to keep saying ‘is that so’ and ‘really’? What’s wrong with you?”
“…Really?”
“Goodness, just stop talking.”
“Ahem! Anyway, the reason I’m here today, among the council members, is that I have something important to say to them.”
With that, Estel cleared her throat and, before losing her focus, turned straight to the point.
“I intend to make the Great Forest great once again.”