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.