An exposition tale

Silence fell again upon us in a dark, solemn mood. Even Lily, whom I suspected to take Elä'Ahrûna’s tale with a fair amount of skepticism, didn't make a single comment.

To me her story sounded unfortunately all too familiar. How often did something similar happen on earth, when a technologically superior culture met a technologically inferior one? Think about Cortez and the Aztecs, or Pizarro and the Inkas! Think about the slave trades between Africa and America, or the treatment of the Aborigines in Australia, the genocides of the native people in North America, or the exploitation and humiliation of old China! Everywhere and anywhere in history on Earth it has happened in similar ways and shades over and over again.

But there was a decisive difference between Liyúra and Earth: The attacked daimons and ælves had magic at their disposal! And from what I’ve heard so far, presently all sentient species were sharing their natural habitats here more or less in harmony and balance.

Therefore the outcome of the great war is clear, but I was quite curious to hear how peace and balance between all six races was established and maintained. Imagine six different intelligent species, capable of communicating on the same level, sharing all of the existing available space on Earth! I couldn’t imagine how that would (or could) work!

Meanwhile Elä’Ahrûna continued her tale.

“I don’t want to drag this sad part of the story out too long. You can imagine that the great war between ælves and daimons on the one side, and humans on the other was absolutely terrifying, if not apocalyptic! It destroyed practically all of our culture and history. Nobody was aware how destructive the weapons of the humans could be, and how twisted and cunning their ingenuity in inventing and building new, even more effective and devastating weapons was. Over a century we fought and battled, often coming to a standstill, a fragile truce that never held long before giving way to new battles and warfare. We were truly in despair and many of us deeply regretted that we let the newcomers ever settle into this world. Of course that sparked tension among our own ranks too, with some battles fought even between daimons and ælves. Indeed: The whole world was coming apart!

But in the end we prevailed. We beat the human forces, destroyed their weapons, dismantled their technology and freed their slaves. But the price was high, as you can tell. Most of us were dead and the humans didn’t fare any better. Our history was lost, the people who traded and preserved it were killed, with the same happening on the human side too. In the end most sentients didn’t know anymore why they were even fighting against each other. And that is where the long, brutal war was slowly dwindling and coming to an end. There simply were not enough individuals left to continue fighting. And the remaining few were just too tired to kill each other anymore. Reason finally prevailed.”

The daimon fell silent again.

“But the hardest, most arduous part was still ahead of us.” she continued, when none of us made any sign to drop a comment.

“It was the task to build a mutual understanding between our races and establish a lasting, sustainable peace.”

She smirked.

“Can you imagine how hard it is to trust someone you were battling for more than a hundred years? But without understanding and trust there can be no peace, and so I founded the first multiracial empire at the Midland Sea with the intention to achieve just that. Though hardened in countless battles and scarred by multiple losses, I was still young and idealistic, but also the sole survivor of the elder daimons and the only greater daimon to transcend the boundaries of its own species in a long time. That gave me a tremendously long lifespan beyond everything ever deemed possible and the opportunity to plan ahead for many centuries.”

Now we finally came to the part that interested me the most!

“You see, I tried to turn the heavy losses in our numbers, knowledge and history into an opportunity.” she went on.

“I did my best to create a new history with a new background for all sentients. And I tried my best to avoid any mention that humans came from a different celestial body or that they were the source of the near apocalypse that almost wiped us all off the face of Liyúra. I also tried to hide that oruc, dwarves and giants were created by the humans as their minions and slaves. Instead I laid the ground for the legends and stories you still foster and share to this day, the start of a new history, free from the bloody ballast accumulated over more than a century of bloodshed and war.”

“Does this mean, our history, our traded stories and legends are all …lies?” Yára now interjected, disbelief an shock in her voice.

Elä’Ahrûna firmly shook her head.

“No, at least not all, as most of them are grounded in real events. Some originated centuries later though, without any influence from me, but it is true for instance, that there was a group of ascended sentients tipping the war in our favor. It is true that I was part of it and that I was their sole survivor. It is also true that we had an internal struggle, as some of my fellow comrades were against peace before not every single human was wiped off this plane of existence. It is true that we fought and that I killed some of my former comrades. But it is not true that I killed all of them! Some died in battle, and one even from grief over the loss of all her family and clan members. Yes, it is true, I reigned for about three hundred years over a big empire, trying to heal all the gravely injured sentient societies. I can’t tell if I was ‘cruel’ or despotic, as some tales convey, in my view I always tried to be liberal, open minded and forgiving, but of course, leadership sometimes requires tough, if not even brutal decisions.”

She shrugged apologetically.

“I foresaw that my empire was not a lasting establishment. Humans often think their nations and kingdoms will exist forever, but in reality they are far from stable institutions. Like everything on this plane of existence they are fluid structures, in need to be adaptable to changing conditions of their environment. So after three centuries I had no problem releasing the different sentients to their self-governed freedom, as an ever growing number felt my reign more and more as oppressive, overbearing and patronizing.”

“So there was no revolution that dethroned you?” Yára asked again.

“Oh, there was!” answered Elä’Ahrûna with a subtle smirk. “I allowed some ‘patriotic revolutionaries’ to stage an assassination attempt and let them believe it was successful. Of course I made preparations to guarantee a break up of the empire without a years long raging civil war - almost successfully… In any case, I vanished from the open stage, faded into obscurity and devoted myself to life long studies that in the end led to your summoning, Vilém.”

I was caught by surprise to find my person so suddenly at the end of her tale, but in hindsight it was obvious it had to come to this. There was one question though that had come to my mind during all of that exposition.

“To what do I owe the honor of being selected as a subject for such a challenging and difficult task that needs hundreds, if not thousands of years of study and preparation? Isn’t that kind of …a waste?”

The girls nodded in agreement and Elä’Ahrûna smiled again.

“Obviously it looks that way, so why did I do it, you ask? Well, it started as an attempt to understand the essence of reality and the purpose of fate and destiny. When you fight for more than one hundred years and rule afterwards for nearly three centuries to just be overthrown and nearly killed (again), at some point you start to question the meaning of all this. So I set out to find some answers, to find out what holds it all together, what are the elemental components of the universe, the fabric of reality and destiny, so to speak.”

“Don’t tell me you found the answer.” said Lily in her unique snark.

The daimon lady answered with an amused grin.

“There is no ultimate answer, as far as I have come. Every answer is limited to just a certain aspect or part of a greater system. And I for my part have not found any non exceedable limit. We live in an open, unbounded, infinite system, that we never can explore in every detail to its last. There is always something beyond the horizon of our perception, no matter how much we learn or how far we develop our mental or physical abilities. There is just no end.”

“And then what was the purpose of summoning me of all people to this world?” I tried to bring the tale back on track.

“Well, you see, during my studies and explorations of the spiritual realm I found another world entangled with ours where similar sentient beings came into existence: Your homeworld that you call Earth.” she answered.

“I studied it, your history and the different paths of your development, and I learned many useful things, about your world as much as about mine. And above all I studied the difficult and problematic paths your societies took since certain points of industrialization, where your technology started developing at an exponential rate, continued by an equally exponential growth of your populations. Because that is what happened on Liýranda too. And that is also, what started to happen here again during the last millennium. History has this tendency to repeat similar patterns over and over again in seemingly endless variations. And the development of human societies here on Liyúra are starting to fall into the all too familiar pattern of destruction again. A new cataclysmic war is looming, only now some humans also wield the power of magic. If they learn to combine it with a similarly advanced technology as three thousand years ago, all other sentient races and most other species on Liyúra are almost certain to die. To prevent that I have summoned you here, Vilém, in the hope that a new element, unfamiliar to this world, but capable in many ways and also aware of the more deranged aspects of its own world, could potentially derail this perilous development.”

We all stood in stunned silence. Of course it had to come down to save the whole f***ing world! Can't think of any other reason for a good ol’ summoning! 

Similar patterns, oh YEAH!

But there was another thing bugging me.