All the Elves are Dead

        He was just finishing the tenth lecture of the month and it was the last talk he had committed to give in return for the publisher taking a chance on an unknown writer.

With his bushy beard and eyebrows he looked the exact opposite of the beings he was talking about. Elves they all knew were supposed to be slender, graceful, nearly hairless magical creatures. He on the other hand was stocky, and had such poor posture that he always seemed to be crouching over the podium as he spoke.

This audience, like most of the groups he spoke before after the first few lectures, was composed of those who believed in magical creatures and were here to see how wrong he was, and good religious folks who supported his position as they knew that there was no such thing as magic and he was their leader. The later, in a previous time, would have been stacking up the kindling to burn all the witches.

He started out by questioning the supposed qualities these beings called elves were supposed to have. Elves, he said, were supposed to be extremely long lived. There were no tales of elves getting a cold or sniffles. No mention, he reminded his audience, of a plague of measles striking down the pointy eared folks of legend. No he had researched all of the books, both new and ancient and there was no mention of a sickness among the elves. Not even a hint of hiccups.

So if these almost eternal beings were supposed to be so healthy where the heck were they. Why after supposed centuries of living among mankind did they suddenly disappear as if some black plague had wiped hem off the face of the earth.

Which brought him to his next observation. The elves, according to the fancies propagated among the believers, were supposed to be among the wisest of the peoples of the olden world. Thus, he questioned, even if there had been some sort of deadly disease raging through the ranks of magical creatures, wouldn’t the all-knowing elves have been able to devise some sort of cure. This he maintained was further proof of the non-existence of elves.

He spoke eloquently for over an hour and took questions from his listeners for nearly that long after he close his formal remarks. As mentioned there were quite a few believers among those who heard him that night who threw story after story at him as proof of the existence of elves and indeed all manner of magical creatures. For each claim he had a defense, and with each refutation the believers weakened in their resolve and the non-believers cheered him on.

It was late in the evening when the last of the audience left the auditorium. Each of those who attended that night had bought a copy of his book, which had the same title as his talk, “All the Elves are Dead”. The cover had an image of an elf lying on the ground with what appeared to be an arrow, or perhaps a magical wand, sticking out of his chest. The image was a clear reflection of the intention of the book, elves are gone and probably never were here in the first place.

He thought that those who believed in magic and magical creatures were buying the books to burn in their back yards, or at the next meeting of the Middle of the Earth society. They might even be buying the books with the hope of getting them off of the streets. The others, who were fully committed to the position of “no-such-thing-as-magic,” were buying the books to bring home and throw at their children and neighbors who persisted in holding on to magic as a solution for the world’s ills. They realized that it was seemingly impossible to prove that creatures that never existed in the first place were gone, but his book was proving to be the very best defense against the fools who believed.

So powerful were both positions that his book had risen to one of the top really non-fiction books on the shelves of the world’s book stores. Not that actual brick-and-mortar bookstores weren’t becoming almost as hard to find as the supposed creatures he wrote about. Still he believed that the book was serving it purpose. There were fewer persons who believed in elves today than there were last year. In fact it was being postulated that his book alone was acting as the driving force for the collapse of the whole magical world construct.

The fact that he was also managing to make a nice little pile of money at the same time was a benefit he had not foreseen. His wife, who had warned him that he was a fool to take on this mission, was going to be pleasantly surprised.  Now he could buy things in the marketplace that she had wanted but had no money to use. When the council had approached him with the idea for the book he had resisted. While he enjoyed writing poetry, he had never been a great fan of the works of non-fiction he had been able to read.

To write the book he had to do a lot of research into the myth’s of elves. He had laughed for weeks at a time over how some stories had developed from the simplest truths about elves. After he had finished he book he faced the next major challenge, getting it published. He had no agent, and thus had to promote the book on his own. While actually getting the first several hundred copies printed hadn’t been a problem, he faced a rather monumental problem of getting them distributed and read.

Luckily today the almost magical world of the Internet existed and he had been able to send copies of the book to groups and societies who manifested a presence of role playing and fantasy which indicated a base belief in the creatures he was writing about. He had been advised to send copies to those who hated the idea of magic. They would be the logical recipients of his credo, but he had resisted. To challenge those who believed would fan greater opposition than to provide yet another ember to the warm glow that non-believers had to warm themselves by.

He had been right. The more that the believers had objected and raved against his book. The more that the non-believers took to it as a realistic thorn to stick in the sides of the believers. Even he had been surprised at how quickly the brush fire he had started had spread. In less than six months he had publishers in Europe and the US who signed book deals with him. It was the US publisher who had demanded that he agree to a book signing/lecture tour to promote the book. Up until that time he had been happy to continue his writing career from a distance.

The numbers of books that the US publisher had promised were too large to pass up and so he found himself touring the US speaking before ever larger groups with each passing week. To be honest he rather enjoyed talking with them, and he felt just a wee bit guilty crushing the hope of the believers. Still he had agreed with the council that the surge of fictional books about magic and the creature of the magical world were becoming a threat to the anonymity they had enjoyed for centuries. 

It was still highly unlikely that mankind would find a way to breach the walls that had been set to keep them out. However, with each passing year more and more people began to think that here might be something to the legends. If that trend continued who knew if they might someday find a way. After all there was magic in a small number of them as well, but fortunately they had never tried to use it.

He left the hall with his traveling assistant and caught a taxi to the train station. There he passed through the main hall and went to the lockers where he had previously stored his true baggage. He put a tag on the suitcase he had used these past several months stating it was to be sent to New York. He knew that once it arrived there it could remain uncalled for during several lifetimes before anyone would think to open it. He didn’t plan to return to this world, but if it became necessary he would have those clothes to use. 

His traveling assistant, Orego, had created his persona and developed an Internet page for him to use along with an E-mail address he was able to access from home. Strangely, neither of the publishers had thought that his bank account in Malta was unusual. He knew that Orego had chosen that bank because it was built entirely on a site that was solid rock. They both hated the temporariness of dirt. What was dirt after all, just broken rock. Stick with the original Orego had said.

With their baggage on their shoulders and everything else taken care of they slipped away through the back door of the station which opened out to a small park. There they brought out crystals that they scattered around in a circle. When they were sure that they were alone in the park, they stepped inside the circle of crystal, said a few words, and disappeared from the world of man.