“You ask what it means to be one of the folks of the woods? The dwarves ask such, and the humans sometimes, but you are half an elf, and deserve more. Oh? No one deserves the truth, child -- and to me you are a child, foundling -- but everyone needs a past. And we have that, the way the others do not. We elves live a long, foolish time often enough, and we can see things others do not and move through life a lot quieter than the other races. We also have a History with us that no other race has. You have heard of the Historian -- who has not? -- and that one is the memory of our people, stretching back through the millennia unbroken. Even now, our numbers reduced by the demons so that we will end eventually, we still take pride in that. We have a history, young one, even if much has been forgotten or lost ...
“And we are lost, in many ways. Our woods were wrecked, our lands harmed. We are too few to rebuild our ruins and can no longer take the lands pain into us as we did in other times. The demons feared us, as the stories say, but we never knew why. Don’t smirk like that, child! I may be weak but I’m not blind. That’s better. Now, as I was saying, we truly do not know what the demons feared. We held old lore through the Historian -- lore that allowed us to know what weaknesses the demons had and we taught others to exploit them. We were too late for the dwarves, and for that they have never forgiven us. I would not if I was one of them.
“Forgive me, I wander again. To be an elf is what you wanted to ask. Look at us now. Mocked, degraded, listening to the old songs about the animals sung again .... most people are kind to us out of remembrance for what we were, not what we are. I’m a cripple, child, like the rest of my people. Even the healthy ones will have children like me, weak in body and unfit for many things. Perhaps the demons did taint us after all. The Historian refuses to speak on that, and most of us have lived to see our race become this mockery of itself. Soon people will forget what we were entirely and we’ll be treated as orcs and outcasts. Strange indeed that we have lived to see these days. To be an elf, child, is to be trapped in the past and long for ... ending.
“You had best go now. Oh, this? Oh, this is just an ... old fashioned noose. Its a gift for a friend, foundling. It’s not as if I could hang myself since I cannot even rise without help. Just a gift for an old, old friend. You had best go. It grows dark.”
Racial: Knowledge (obscure/trivia) +3
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