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General Loretta Stibnite’s office was immaculate and professional.
Every surface dusted. Every key on the keyboard spotless. Not one paper out of place, for there were no loose papers.
It made it very frustrating when your eyes were trying to do anything but meet hers.
“The report.”
Dr. Gibbs tried the window. There were usually things outside windows. Like weather, for instance. “Hmm?”
“The report, doctor.”
“Oh. Right.” She cleared her throat. “Well… attempts have been mixed.”
“Which attempts? Define ‘mixed.’ And for the love of god make eye contact, you’re fidgeting worse than a schoolgirl in the principal’s office. I don’t even OWN a ruler.”
You’re wearing a belt though, Dr. Gibbs carefully did not say. Instead she spoke the one thing she wanted even less, which was: “alright then. Project report in full is almost total disaster.”
“Great. Give me the news worst to best.”
“Okay,” said Dr. Gibbs, and the weather outside the window did look nice. Blue sky, little white clouds that looked like smoke slivers. She could see the appeal. “Okay. Okay.”
“Dr. Gibbs.”
“Okay! Well, the cyborg super-soldier program is a bust.”
“That’s certainly descriptive. Go on.”
“It turns out that replacing bones with metal is pretty rough on the human body even if you’re a healthy young adult instead of an senior citizen with an obliterated pelvis.”
“And? I was under the impression your focus was more neurological.”
Dr. Gibbs cursed herself for the misfortune of having a superior who actually read her weekly filings. “Well…yes, after my predecessor’s issues. But well…” She pointed at Stibnite’s computer. “Has that ever crashed?”
“Once or twice.”
“Right, and it’s probably just running basic administration software, nothing too stressful or unproven. It turns out coding meant to interface between the human brain and a computer embedded inside it is sort of new, sort of chancy, and uh…it crashes. A lot. And it tends to crash the brain too.”
“Was this before or after you’d armed them?”
“Before. I mean, after the first time.”
Dr. Gibbs looked out the window some more while the general was busy rubbing her eyes. Yes, that was nice weather. The harbour was a perfect mirror of the sky, the only ripples from the ships making their way about it. An aircraft carrier sat pretty against the horizon; an entire city block transported to sea. Ugly, but dynamically so.
“Alright. Continue, doctor.”
“Okay.”
“Look at me.”
“Okay. Okay. Right. Well, we were making really good progress on the crashing issues –”
“’Were’?”
“-but then right when we were ready to move into early beta tech support for our processing chip was discontinued.”
“Great. Wonderful. So you made me a bunch of seizure-prone heavily-armed glitchy soldiers that can’t be fixed.”
“Well, we could remove the computers, but the surgery to get them in there in the first place was pretty drastic. We already had to remove the module for tech upgrades ten times in the last five years, and each time there’s exponentially greater risks of hemorrhage and so on.”
“You made me a bunch of seizure-prone heavily-armed glitch soldiers that can’t be fixed or they’ll have strokes.”
“Multiple simultaneous strokes each, yes.”
This time the general’s palm covered her entire face.
Count the birds in the sky no no too many seagulls never mind. Count the boats in the bay, one two three four does the aircraft carrier just count as one really it’s awfully big to only count as one.
“What else.”
What else. What else what else what else oh she was looking right at it. “The aircraft carrier.”
“Yes, you’re looking at one of them.”
“No no no I mean OUR aircraft carrier, the one with the integrated command crew.”
“That’s it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s it. That you’re looking at. What’s wrong with it.”
“Well… the surgery was a bit difficult. It seems that the human body rejects foreign elements very readily, even with the most gradual and careful installation. Especially when you’re grafting a ship onto it, followed by the entire rest of the officer compliment. And preventing infection was a MAJOR problem, as was keeping the interface components operational – it turns out human medical needs and hardware maintenance materials aren’t mutually-inclusive.”
“Just tell me what happened to Captain Fairbanks.”
“The captain is nearly fully lucid and his mental recovery seems to be well underway, so perhaps we should wait for a report from–”
“I want to hear it from you.”
“Well. It transpires that the… extensive and gruelling training that the captain and his officers underwent was rendered retroactively useless upon installation. You see, they had all been trained to OPERATE a ship rather than BEING a ship, and it seems that’s a very different situation. They couldn’t get the carrier to move, but they DID almost make its engines explode trying. Oh, and none of them could turn on the lights. Completely impossible. Then we had to pull them all out when they started experiencing temporary psychoses, one after another.”
This time the general didn’t break eye contact, which left Dr. Gibbs to do so on her own. She wondered if the aircraft carrier was getting closer; it was so big that perspective was a bit of a mess on it. She wondered if that were a deliberate part of its design by some fiendish camouflage expert.
“Dr. Gibbs.”
She tried to ignore the voice. Maybe if she focused hard enough on things that weren’t it, it would stop existing.
“Dr. Gibbs. Did your team produce one single, solitary success?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“We had one single solitary success. See, one of the programming teams had some free time after we discontinued the other projects, and they tried to make a safe-use general AI.”
“How can you possibly make general artificial intelligence safe?” demanded Stibnite.
“They built an insatiable monomaniacal drive into it that overrides all other instincts it might develop. Really, it’s more of a quasi-general AI, it’s quite monofocused.”
“So what does it do?”
“It derives para-sexual pleasure from filing. Very efficient, if a bit prone to revision. Trim down the impulse a little and it’ll put a lot of clerks out of business.”
The general sighed. “And this was your big success?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not the replacing-people’s-hands-with-weapons thing?” she asked, wistfully.
“It turns out that’s a lot less flexible than just letting them hold weapons. Harder to swap around, too.”
“Damn. I liked that one.”
“Yes, sir.”
The ship was getting very close and was moving very fast. The sound of its engines would’ve made dust motes jump, if any existed in General Stibnite’s office.
“Gibbs. Continue.”
“General,” said Dr. Gibbs, and wasn’t it funny how her voice sounded like it was underwater now, all garbled and distant, “is there a data center on the property?”
“Just downstairs, why?”
“Oh. Total and unmitigated disaster.”
“Excuse me?”

And then the aircraft carrier made contact with the building, delivering one sexually frustrated filing AI and several hundred thousand tonnes of decommissioned cyborg hull directly into the server farms.

On the day of his ascension, the pope-in-waiting watched as his predecessor was thrown from the highest roof of the Cathedral of Utmost Height.
It was very simple. He took the three steps forward, took three steps backwards, hesitated, and was pushed by his cardinals. His arms flailed like a little insect’s for one million years and then he landed on the ground and died only a few feet away from the pope-in-waiting’s feet, splashing them with his blood.
On the roof, the cardinals were bent low, peering at the stones, trying to determine which of them the dead man’s foot had touched last. Trying to find his new spouse.
The pope-in-waiting contented himself with watching the blood seep across the cobbles of the cathedral square. It was hard to tell which was occurring faster: the red staining of the stones or the dust clotting the liquid. This seemed oddly important to him.
At last the search of the men on the roof bore fruit, and they set to work with crowbars, levering free the sacred stone from the peak of the building. It was hoisted in the air, and so was he, and both were carried into the grand hall of the cathedral and many chants were conducted and much incense was burned and so many words of God’s Tongue were spoken that he couldn’t tell his head from his feet and then he was dubbed the new Pope Apex, just like the old one except not as old.
VERY not as old. They must have been running low on pope material, what with the war drawing away all those potential novitiates to bleed and die for the glory of home, and land, and more land to call home. So why not use up one of the few they had left? Thirteen wasn’t old enough to fight properly but it was probably old enough to be holy and bless things. Waste not, want not.

***

After his induction he was spirited away through a maze of little tunnels under the cathedral, all alike, and after that a ceremonial meal of bread and water was fed to him personally by his highest cardinal, Lofty, and after THAT he was introduced properly to his spouse, who was a large and somewhat careworn slab of unidentifiable stone.
“Do you know what this is?” asked the cardinal.
“No,” replied Pope Apex, truthfully. He had not been raised to understand masonry or geology.
Cardinal Lofty sighed and smacked him on the side of the head. “This is the material manifestation of the church, and you are wedded to it. Preserve its wellbeing at all costs. Now go to bed.”
Pope Apex went to bed, and his spouse followed him with the aid of several large and muscular escorts, who dropped it in the middle of his mattress and left.
The pope had spent much of his youth sharing quarters with others. He knew what to do in this sort of situation. Softly and slowly, with the care of one trying not to alarm another, he wrapped the careworn stone in most of his blankets. Then he took his pillow and spent the night in a peculiar (if cold) sort of peace.

The next day it was removed from his bed and placed on a little dais in the center of his chambers, to remind him of his vows, and he was a little grateful for this because his back hurt from where it had bumped him. This shamed him, and he spent some time apologizing to his spouse for his insensitivity.

***

Being a pope was much easier than being a novitiate had been. He got more sleep, scrubbed fewer pots, and the cardinals only hit him when he did something wrong, which was much less often than the underpriests had.
And there was his spouse, who he spoke to as much as possible. It never talked back, but that just made it a good listener, which was very precious to Pope Apex because almost nobody else ever seemed to listen to anything he said.
Maybe there weren’t as many differences from being a novitiate as he’d thought.

***

Victory had come!
Well, not final victory. Just a victory. But it was a good one! An entire city burned down.
Not a perfect victory, Cardinal Plummet told him. They hadn’t managed to burn down its inhabitants too.
But the victors had earned themselves some sort of spoils, and so Pope Apex was taken to the new frontlines to walk through the charred buildings and the toppled towers and the seared timbers to have a great banquet-feast on this very new and very holy day.
It had been a big city. The entire Holy Army fit inside it, even the more mobile casualties with their stumps and splints and crutches and bandages.
“-got it?” Cardinal Lofty was saying to him.
Pope Apex shook a little, and knew he’d be getting lectured about that later. Shaking was for the tremulous and uncertain and those things weren’t permitted. “Yes,” he said, which was true. He’d very much memorized the very short speech he’d been given very many days ago.
He looked down at his feet, and saw stones smeared with ash and charcoal. Then he thought about stones red with blood, and about a particular stone, and its smoothed, calm surface.
His back ached.
“Do it,” said Cardinal Lofty.
Pope Apex stepped to his seat, waited for the noise to die down, chanted out the speech in God’s Tongue, and then spoke for the many rather than the educated.
“May this feast strengthen our limbs and make hearty our hearts, may it fill our stomachs and our souls, and may this terrible war end soon.”
There was a little pause around the table at those last words, as if everyone’s ears were checking themselves, but then the escorts took Pope Apex by his shoulders and gently steered him away, and it was decided that everything was alright again.
That night he was lectured with both words and fists, and to a degree he’d never imagined even as a novitiate. This war was not terrible, it was noble. It was just and correct.
He tried to explain what the stone had suggested to him, but every time he opened his mouth he was screamed at until his small words were drowned in a vast din, and so in the end he wasn’t able to tell anyone at all.

***

There were no more public appearances after that, just public public appearances, the kind where he was placed on top of a high structure and waved at people while they cheered. It made the cardinals happy because it prevented issues, and it made Pope Apex happy because it made him think on what it would be like to throw himself off a high surface and if the next pope would have to marry whatever he was standing on at the time and if they would be as kind and helpful as his own spouse was.
If he slipped on his bathmat, would someone have to marry it? He almost got the giggles.

***

The campaign continued, but no more cities were burned. This was a clear problem, and so Pope Apex was recruited to correct it personally. Clearly their blessed and holy armies weren’t the problem, so it must be their tools.
The weapons were laid out before him to be blessed, a shining field of dead-bodies-to-be, and Pope Apex felt as if he couldn’t lay eyes anywhere without them being sliced right out his skull. Every surface was edged for a very particular purpose.
“Begin,” whispered Cardinal Lofty in his ear, and so he walked up and down the long long rows of steel and thought of the rows of the dead and he chanted as he walked.
“Please don’t hurt anyone,” he murmured, mangling it through as many layers of half-forgotten, half-mangled God’s Tongue as he could manage, “please don’t hurt anyone, please don’t get anyone else killed, please please please.”
Though he didn’t get the thrashing the banquet had gifted him, he was berated for some time on his awful pronunciation. But the stone softly shone at him whenever he glanced at it, and so he endured it with as much earnestness as he was able.

***

Neither the blessing intended nor the blessing assumed appeared to work all that well; maybe they’d cancelled each other out. The war was still going and the bodies were still piling and from out his window the pope could just barely see the edge of the cemetery where the most esteemed and important people actually got their own private graves. It had expanded itself very quickly since his installment.
The cardinals weren’t happy either, which was why Cardinal Plummet had come up with the most ingenious plan of poisoning the city’s river, seeing as the besieging army downstream needed it. That they wouldn’t be able to tell the rest of the city’s populace for the sake of secrecy until half of them had already drank from it and died as well seemed to be something Cardinal Lofty considered a marked downside, but endurable.
One thing hadn’t changed since Pope Apex’s novitiate days: people didn’t much care what they said in front of him.
That night, he stayed up very late talking with his spouse. The stone told him it wasn’t his fault, and he tried to believe it. Looking on the stone also told him something else, something he could do, and the more he thought about it the more impossible it was NOT to believe that.
So he did it.

***

It wasn’t very difficult for him to find the besieging army’s encampment, but it WAS very difficult for him to get to its commander, both because he didn’t know the woman’s name beyond Cardinal Plummet calling her ‘that little shithead’ and because it took a full hour for anyone to confirm he was Pope Apex.
After that, though, all he had to do was tell them about the passages under the Cathedral of Utmost Height, and they were happy to listen to anything he said. They were so happy that they listened to his requests, which were really quite simple.

***

The cathedral square cobbles were buried in the cemetery, with the cardinals. But there needed to be something there in the plaza for people to stand on, and so the cathedral itself was taken apart, brick by brick, stone by stone, and it filled in the gaps and gave everyone a firm foundation to brace themselves on, softened by air and water and a hundred desperate sets of feet.
The former pope kept his spouse, though. It was a little selfish, but he appreciated its advice.

The glass of wine, half-full, struck the carpet. Unfortunately the pile was so thick and luxurious that it refused to shatter, and so Josh Wellick had to finish the job himself with his heel.
It was nothing, just another of the trifling little inconveniences he had to deal with, being so insanely wealthy and accomplished. Like his chief concern right now.
“I’m BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORed,” he enunciated clearly and distinctly. “Hey! Shill! What haven’t I done yet?”
“Shillings, sir,” said his butler, a ground-down and generally eroded little human being.
“I will call you what I please, Shill. What haven’t I done yet?”
Shillings consulted the giant and unwieldy tablet his master had shackled to his chest. “Uh…. You haven’t climbed the Great Pyramid of Giza riding a bear…”
“That’s because I did it last year riding a hippo, you incompetent.”
“Err…you haven’t climbed the CN Tower backwards….”
“Why would I bother climbing it at all? Hasn’t been that tall for decades now.”
“Uuuuuhhhhh….. you haven’t climbed out of a construction site’s foundations….”
“Disgusting. Suggest that one more time and I’ll have your knees hobbled.”
“You haven’t gone to the deepest point in the Antarctic Ocean.”
“I told you, not until they let me kill and eat whatever I find there.”
“…..You haven’t climbed any waterfalls.”
Josh stopped mid-berating. “Haven’t I? Hm. Hmm. Hmmmmmmm.”
“Sir?”
“Shill, what’s the tallest waterfall in the world? We need to start this off impressive.”
“Angel Falls, in Venezuela.”
“Didn’t even need to look that up?”
“My granddaughter likes world records, sir.”
“Well tell her to put all the old ones out of her empty little head, because we’re going to make some very spectacular stunts today. Now clean up this mess. No hands, mind you. They’re a crutch.”
“You took away my crutch yesterday, sir. You said it was a weakness.”
“And I was right! No more backtalk, and a lot more tonguework. This glass won’t lick itself up.”

***

Obtaining permission for these sorts of things was always haphazard. In the end Josh simply had Shilling stand in the center of the capitol and bribe everyone walking by for twenty-four hours. It had worked when he needed to climb the Washington Monument naked, and in the meantime he had important things to do, like airlifting in six hundred thousand tons of cutting-edge machinery plundered from private ski resorts and hockey rinks.
“I want it all installed in the next six hours,” he told the man seated next to him. “And for every hour longer than that it takes, your paychecks are all cut ten percent.”
“I’m not the head of the project, sir,” said the man. “I’m a laborer.”
“Gross! Someone throw him out of the plane or none of you get paid.”
Josh sighed and leaned back in his chair, wiping his brow. “Gosh that was close. Almost got some poor on me. Now, what was all this you said about this taking way too long?”
“There’s going to need to be safety tethers-” began the actual project head.
“Boring,” said Josh, tossing his phone to the ground and grinding it underfoot. “Safety is our third priority. Number one is making me look good, number two is nothing at all. Remember that, you goober.”
“Attempting this unsecured will cause dozens if not hundreds of deaths.”
“They’re still throwing out the last guy, you know. I’ve got room for more.”
The project head’s shoulders slumped and she sighed.
“That’s the kind of attitude I like,” said Josh. “Now clean this mess up without using your hands.”

***

In the end it took over six thousand deaths to install the machinery before sunset, but install it they did. For the first time in history Angel Falls was frozen solid, and at the base of the mammoth icicle stood that incomparable daredevil, explorer, maverick capitalist, entrepreneur of science, Josh Wellick, accompanied by a mere hundred assistants flunkies piton-affixers and dogsbodies.
“To the top!” he said heroically, pointing skywards.
They cheered.
“I wanted awed silence,” he told them. “You’re all fired. If you don’t get us up there by morning, you don’t get severance pay and I’ll buy wherever your families work and fire them too.”
And so began their ascent.

***

The first successful climb of Angel Falls took almost ten days to complete, but they were doing boring things like climbing up the cliff face instead of the waterfall itself and also being safe. Josh Wellick demanded more, and what Josh Wellick demanded, he always got, because that’s the kind of guy he was.
Which is why when he ascended the last step to the rim of the falls, treading on the numbed knuckles of his one hundredth (and final remaining) guide to get there, he was greeted by Shilling and a breakfast buffet.
“One more recorded shattered for all time by the very best of humanity,” he declared, then sniffed the air. “Did you put any blueberries in those pancakes?”
“As you requested, sir.”
“I changed my mind. Throw it all out and start over. Throw the cooks off the falls too.” He threw his ice axe to the ground and stomped on it in exaltation. “By GOD I never feel more alive than at a moment like thi-” and then a small frog, released from its icy tomb by the impact of his foot, erupted from the ground and startled him a very important six inches backwards.

***

Angel Falls is very tall. He had almost fifteen seconds to think of a lot of swears on the way down.

DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING
In all his many years working here, he thought the bell was the worst part. It wasn’t enough to merely announce that the workday was beginning, oh no. It had to be PROTRACTED.
DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG
He breathed in, he breathed out. He wished he’d looked himself in the mirror before coming here, told himself ‘you can do this,’ but he’d been unable to stomach the idea of seeing the bags under his eyes and so had brushed his teeth at a gum-blistering pace, darting out the door before his sanity could catch up to him and ask him ‘why ARE you doing this, anyways?’
The roar and rabble were approaching. It was too late for more thoughts, too late for anything. His doom awaited.
A pleasant smile appeared on his face as he confronted the throng. “Welcome to the Museum of War and Antiquities of the Old Days. I’m Feilloveit, former Elflord of Tor Messoveit, Primus of the First Peoples, and your tour guide for the day. Shall we get started?”
“Err,” said a round, portly little creature. “Can it wait a moment? Little Beedo’s wet himself.”
He had lived seven ages of man, dwarf, elf and monster. But the idea of this day ahead of him…it ached.

***

Two changings one polite deferment from sharing his opinions on orcs and six givings-of-directions later they left the entry hall of the museum, fifteen minutes behind schedule. Surprisingly quickly, truth be told.
“This is the hall of the First Eon. Technically the concept of conflict didn’t exist yet at this time, but its seeds were planted before it was complete – if you’ll examine the giant shining wall of solid mathril to your left, you’ll see it’s composed entirely of a broken fragment of the plough of Githmatug.”
“What’s a Githmatug?”
Feilloveit’s eyes were beginning to water from the sheer force of the oncoming headache. “Githmatug was the primordial lord of all soil and earth before succumbing to wrath and breaking his plough over the head of his lazy children and tricking the other ancient gods into gathering all the pieces and forging them into the first sword and bringing conflict and strife to the world.”
“Excuse me?” asked a thin young half-height with bright and empty eyes.
“Go ahead,” said Feilloveit, hoping that they wouldn’t, or better yet, would suffer from catastrophic and immediate muteness.
“The First Eon doesn’t exist and neither do the primordial gods. They were just evil ghosts who lied to people; the world is only six hundred years old.”
“IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIrespectyouropinionsandbeliefs HOWEVER this establishment is devoted to the mainstream lessons of history as obtained from the records of time.”
“Oh yeah? How’d you know that? Were you there?”
“YES!” snapped Feilloveit. “A falling shard of Githmatug’s sword almost flattened my house.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, are you SURE?”
“Let’s move on, shall we?”
“Answer my questions, minion of falsity!” shouted the half-height, but he was drowned in the endless murmurs of shuffling feet, sighing mouths, and creaking backs, and so Feilloveit soothed his blood pressure and restrained himself from gutting him like the trout he had caught on the banks of the Mallleomtum, when he was young and the world still had that new-made smell.

***

“This is the hall of the Second Eon, when the first wars descended from the realms of the ancients and made their way across the land. Githmatug had begun to see the value in many hands making light work, and so he ordered his many lazy children to create him an unstoppable army by sowing his specially-prepared seeds of destruction. Luckily for all of us, they lost many of the seeds, grew tired and threw them away without watering them, or simply forgot about them, leaving them to arm themselves with the crude weaponry you see here. As it is, the orcs and trolls and ogres combined were nearly enough to yes what is it?”
“Isn’t there substantial archaeological evidence that the orcs, trolls and ogres formed a mutual defensive pact after they were attacked out of nowhere by expansionistic forces of elves who wanted more land and believed their enemies were nothing more than evil vermin created by a malevolent god?” asked a teenaged dwarf.
“Ah. Ahahaha. Aha. No.”
“Hasn’t this museum been fined six times in the past sixteen years for presenting racist propaganda has fact?”
“The Museum of War and Antiquities of the Old Days has never settled the lawsuits arising from those accusations and has in fact counter-sued for slander, which-”
“This is bullshit.”
Feilloveit snapped his fingers and a mystical hush descended upon the room, and all grew quiet and starry-eyed at the wondrous and soft light surrounding them. Thoughts and ideas stopped at the sight, mouths hung open, minds shut themselves tight.
“Security,” he murmured mellifluously, and two elves in armour of the Old Days descended upon the tour group and hauled away the teenager.
“Let no words of foulness be spoken in this home,” said Feilloveit. Particularly because he was out of glamour. “Now, let’s get moving.”

***

“This is the hall of the Third, or Middle Eon. By now Githmatug had been sealed away in the Endless Place, so most strife was caused by his former lieutenant and least-lazy child, Irvon. Though less powerful than his father, Irvon’s foe was a world much reduced by war and calamity, and so it took a desperate mission to the heart of his domain to destroy the Black Pump by which he powered his endless forges and sustained the weight of his grand tower. There’s a small replica of the Black Pump over there in the corner.”
“My great-great-grandfather told me that there never was a pump and you just sent a hitsquad to merk Irvon when he tried to take the trollish homelands back from elven occupation,” said a graying elf. “Said he spent half his life as a puppet for elven business interests and got his legs hacked off by a broadsword so’s some stuck-up so-and-so from the First Eon could have a bigger estate and hire fancier poets to write longer songs about the tragedy of the passing of the world.”
“If you press that button on the display, it makes the Black Pump fall apart,” said Feilloveit desperately. “Who wants to push it?”
The resulting brawl between the children of the group took up the next ten minutes.

***

“The Fourth Eon was an age of rebuilding, of great glories and many victories. Elippces, the newly-crowned king of the short-lived-people, defeated many of the remaining vassals of Irvon and made the world safe and very very prosperous for all – see the cabinet, on the right? That’s a display case of weapons seized from rebellious provinces that had once toiled for Irvon. Note the cruel and barbed serrations, so very different from the elegant and clean blades you know. But once the peacemaking was complete the wine flowed like water and the water tasted as fine as wine and the crops were bountiful and that was the way things should be, with everyone happy and content in their place. Specifically for the short-lived-people, that place was as the middlemen of the world, managing each other’s affairs and the land while offering up a purely voluntary and ceremonial tribute every harvest season to the peoples of the Old Days, who had in their gracious wisdom begun to remove themselves from the world to make space for their chosen successors.”
“My great-great gran died because she tried to stop the Elflord of our province from seizing our fields,” said an old, old human.
“Hey, mine too.”
“My grandpappy toiled in the mines for King Elippces’s crown jewels.”
“MY crops didn’t flourish,” said a dwarf. “The field went barren from overuse, but it was either that or break the tribute, and between losing the farm or my head I chose my head.”
“One might say you were attached to it,” said Feilloveit, and quickly led the group to the next room in the aftermath of the dad joke.

***

“And now we come, alas, alack, to the Fifth Eon – though it barely merits counting as such, lasting as it did but a short, violent decade. An ungrateful and greedy host of short-lived-people, combined with dark elves and the greediest dwarfs – and yea, even some of the most dissolute and reckless of the half-heights, bless their cherubically lazy little souls – formed alliance with the relics of Irvon’s armies and laid foul and merciless siege to the lands. The days of yore were finally washed away, and the last of the Elflords left overseas for-”
“Tax havens.”
“Their own safety.”
“Scarpered with the loot, little bastards did!”
“-FOR THE RELICS OF THE LOST AGES and then after the wars were done the peace treaty was signed there is a copy of it here under glass please take a look and remember that one’s word means nothing if one is forced into it so let’s move on now-”
“Hey, look at this bit at the bottom here, where the land repatriation kicked in!”
“NOW.”

***

“The Sixth Eon is not yet finished, but we can rest assured that conflict has not left us by, no matter what the sordid little document in the last room says. Trouble brews in the heroic West, the orcs, trolls and ogres grow complacent and fat and vulnerable in the vile East. Yes, we shall rise up again, I vow you this, as the last remaining of the Elflords, I say that our time has not yet fully passed, and I say to you that you SHALL see the return of justice and truth to our world and the crushing of the orc! Just place your donations into this model shaped like the hypothetical triumph of our alliance.”
There was a tiny pop as Beedo unsheathed his thumb from his mouth. “Issa’ boat,” he mumbled.
“A ship,” corrected Feilloveit.
“Why do you want our money to build a ship to reignite a race war?” inquired the graying elf.
“We’ll launch a naval assault.”
“You’re trying to scam us and head overseas like the rest of them, aren’t you?” asked Beedo’s mother. “What an asshole.”
“Right.”
“Absolutely.”
“Too true.”
“I didn’t charge you admission!” yelled Feilloveit, his tempering roiling over in an incandescent rage that made his eyes shine as they hadn’t since the world was young.
“Yeah, because if you did you’d be subject to lawsuits,” said the old, old human. “Let’s get out of this dump.”

They did.
And Feilloveit, former Elflord of Tor Messoveit, Primus of the First Peoples, and sole tour guide, curator, owner, director, and founder of the Museum of War and Antiquities of the Old Days, locked up for the day early, his mind abrew with dark portents and despair.
The weight of all time was on his shoulders. The mockery of the ignorant and the deluded was in his ears.
But surely, surely, surely he was right. And soon the goodness of the Old Days would come again, just like he’d known they would.
Surely.
And that thought would get him through tomorrow, and THEN, ah, THEN, THEN it would all be worth it.
Surely.