Chapter 6
The next morning, I head to the coffee bar inside the Science Center. I select a table squeezed into the back corner and set my laptop up with the screen facing away from the crowd. Then I spread a variety of textbooks and worksheets around the computer, for effect.
I’m supposed to be studying the evolution of language. We have a quiz on the diachronic phoneme analysis next week, and I’ve barely started reviewing language interaction or emergent grammars.
Instead, I’m reading about the elves.
I do this every week: set aside a few hours to comb through Harvard’s various online databases, looking for any piece of literature I can find on the elves.
I take four courses each semester, but privately, I think of this as my fifth.
I took it freshman fall and freshman spring.
I’ll take it sophomore fall and spring. I’ll take it every semester until graduation, if I have to.
And if I don’t find the answers I seek before then, then I’ll apply to graduate school and then do a secret PhD in Elvish Infiltration.
I open LexusNexus and type in my usual keyword: elaerion. I hit enter and scroll straight to the bottom, clicking through the page numbers until I reach page seventeen, where I left off last week.
I love studying. I know that’s an unpopular opinion, but it’s true.
To me, there’s something about opening a book, spreading out my papers, plugging in my headphones, and giving all of my attention to just one task.
It sucks me in. Takes my mind off stress, or anger, or the elves, or my half-broken family, even if just for an hour or two.
The first link is purple, which means I must have looked at it last week. I click the second one and wait as a PDF of a newspaper clipping from 1977 slowly loads onto the screen. The headline reads: KING VARITH REVEALS JUICY NEW DETAIL IN ANNUAL ADDRESS.
I’ve seen enough sensationalist headlines like this one to know that the “juicy new detail” in question is probably something like: the sky on Elaerion is blue.
Elaerion is the elves’ home realm. The place they left and to which they have not returned in over a century.
No human brings up Elaerion to the elves.
It’s an unspoken rule. To do so is to pry into their past, into the reasons why they left to come here.
But when it comes to academia—and to the far more unregulated depths of the internet, like Reddit or ElfWiki, their fandom database—the subject is fair game.
I zoom in on the PDF and start to read.
Thanks to my childhood obsession with the elves, I came to Harvard with the basics of elvish history already committed to memory.
Once upon a time, ten species of elves coexisted on Elaerion: Sun Elves, Air Elves, Fire Elves, Shadow Elves, Snow Elves, Wood Elves, Water Elves, Wild Elves, Nymphs, and Dryads.
For millennia, they lived separately, in tentative peace, but at some point—most sources say around a thousand years ago—a war broke out.
The Elemental War, it was called. It lasted for over a hundred years and was ultimately won by the Sun Elves, under the leadership of Varith Ariar and Adan Melde.
At the close of the Elemental War, the leaders of each species signed the Treaty of Ten, which established the Sun Elves as Elaerion’s leaders, elevating them to the status of High Elves.
Certain individuals or families from other species were also chosen to rule, sitting on the High Council or overseeing certain aspects of governance, as a way to foster lasting peace between the species.
All Sun Elves are High Elves, but not all High Elves are Sun Elves.
The treaty split Elaerion up by species, allotting each tribe their own territory. Though the territories are mostly self-governed, King Ariar technically oversees all.
Though no human has ever seen it, the Treaty of Ten is said to be painstakingly long, laying out, in classic elvish detail, how a new species will be chosen should the Sun Elves ever prove unfit to rule. The Treaty is intended to prevent further warfare.
It’s rumored to be over two thousand pages long.
Much of this I’ve learned from human-authored articles.
Historians, scientists, and other scholars who have made the elves their primary focus.
It’s a tough track of study, given the elves’ secretive nature—as far as I know, no elf has ever agreed to be interviewed by a human, not even for purely academic purposes—but there are those who attempt it anyway.
Academics as infatuated with elvish culture as I once was.
I understand their fixation, and I commend their bravery.
Though, if I had to guess, none of them ever watched their father be murdered by those same elves in broad daylight.
Another point of interest for human scholars is the elves’ magic.
Again, we don’t know much. We know that each species possesses their own brand of elemental magic.
Some of those powers are obvious: Fire Elves can manipulate fire, Water Elves can manipulate water, Sun Elves can manipulate light, and so on.
Others are less clear. What can the Wild Elves manipulate?
What about Nymphs and Dryads? The latter two species are extremely reclusive.
They seem drawn to secluded bodies of water, but for what reason?
Can those granted the status of High Elf perform types of magic that other species cannot?
Scholars, journalists, and over-confident YouTubers have asked these questions time and again, but besides Daerios Ariar’s various drunken displays of magic, they don’t have much information to go on.
That’s part of what makes the elves so terrifying to us humans: that we don’t know the full extent of their magical abilities. How can we protect ourselves from something we don’t understand?
The answer: we can’t. We can only bow and obey.
As expected, the newspaper clipping gives me nothing. I click back to the search results and move on to the next link.
There are two main sources these academics have to draw from: the meager crumbs dropped by the king during his annual address, and the scholarly articles published each year by the elves.
Despite their public caginess, the elves are prolific in academia.
They publish hundreds of papers each year, on matters both human and elven.
The precise biology of the elvish digestive tract.
A study in the efficiency of human vs. elvish sheep farms. Line-by-line analysis of a 600-page epic poem about wheat harvesting, written by a Wood Elf on Elaerion over 2,000 years ago.
So thorough is their scholarship that one might believe they came to Earth just to study abroad, like some sort of interplanetary exchange program.
But we know that isn’t the case. The King said so during his first address: We are looking for something. As soon as we find it, we shall leave your realm in peace.
Unfortunately, the papers published by the elves gives no clue as to why they came to Earth.
Never have they given an in-depth analysis of how their magic works.
Never have they revealed more than small snippets about their homeland.
Instead, they publish pages and pages of scholarly analysis on the most boring, minute facets of science, history, literature, and so on.
No different than human academia, really.
They say quite a lot without ever really saying anything at all.
Not altogether different from human academia, now that I think about it.
After an hour of reading, I’ve gotten through all the results on page seventeen. I open a new tab and am about to type in the URL for JSTOR when movement in my peripheral vision catches my eye.
I look up from the screen. Two tables over, a group of elvish women are pulling back chairs and setting down paper cups of tea. Shaking out their long, silken hair. Posture perfect as they lower themselves into their seats.
Elvish women are goddesses. They come in every variety of skin tone and hair color, and they are all, every one, perfect. Ethereal. Tall. Thin. Eyes like jewels, limbs like waving willow branches. Their figures seem molded from divine clay.
Me, on the other hand… I’m not ugly, but I’m about as far from an elf as one can get. I’m short. I have curly red hair. My body is that of a woman who has devoted herself to intellectual pursuits, not physical: soft and curvy, with generous hips and breasts. The exact opposite of an elvish woman.
Which is another reason it’s so unfathomable that Daerios would ask me to be his date instead of one of his own kind. He would have had his pick of dates, being a Prince of the Sun. He could have had a preternatural supermodel on his arm. But no, he’d asked me. Incomprehensible.
No, not incomprehensible. I know exactly why Daerios asked me to be his date: to piss off the king. I may not know much about their relationship, but his lifetime of distinctly un-elvish troublemaking suggest that he loves being a thorn in his all-too-proper father’s side.
This fact should make me more afraid. If going to this date event with Daerios truly does make waves in the royal family, I’ll be implicated by association.
But I can’t remember a single time in the last seven years when I felt an emotion at its appropriate instance.
It’s rare that I feel anything other than numb.
Down on the table, my phone lights up, buzzing across the stack of papers on which it’s lying. The screen shows my mom, grinning with her cheek pressed to the floppy ears of our dog Buster.
I smile and pick up the phone, answering.
“Mom,” I say. “Hi!”
“There you are,” comes my mother’s familiar voice. “Hi, sweetheart. I’m so glad I finally caught you.”
My stomach twists with guilt. It’s not that I’m avoiding my mother’s calls, but…
“I know,” I say. “The semester has been crazy so far. You should see the size of the book they assigned for my literature class this week.”
True, but not the real reason I let most of her calls go to voicemail.
“Well, I hope they’re not running you too ragged. I know you go to a fancy Ivy League school, but it’s still college. You have to make time for fun.”
“I do, don’t worry.” Another half-truth. Spying on the elves is my main extracurricular, but, to me, that is fun.
“Good. And your linguistics courses? Are you still loving them?”
I smile. This one I can answer honestly. “Always.”
“Wonderful.” She sighs. “Oh, I’m so proud of you, Quinn. I always knew you were too smart to stay in our small town forever, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss you.”
My heart squeezes. “I miss you, too, Mom.”
“And you’re eating?”
“Yes, Mom,” I say, sighing. “I’m eating. I promise. You know I haven’t been in active recovery in years.”
“Yes, yes, of course. But I also know that old coping mechanisms can flare up in times of stress and uncertainty. Remember senior year, the day college admissions results were being released, when you didn’t eat all day and got so dizzy that I had to pick you up from school early?”
Oh, I remember. Of course I do. I had been stable for years by then, eating on a meal plan that kept me accountable and consistent.
But that Thursday in March, I was due to hear back from Harvard, Yale, and the seven other backup schools to which I’d applied.
All my backup schools had sizable elvish enrollment, but they didn’t have any of the elvish princes.
I’d already received rejections from both Peking and Oxford, so Harvard and Yale were my only hopes.
All week leading up to the admissions being released, I felt sick to my stomach.
By Wednesday night, it had gotten so bad that I couldn’t touch my dinner.
Or my breakfast the next day. Or lunch in the cafeteria.
By eighth period, I felt like I was going to pass out.
I went to the nurse, who called my mom. I was back home, tucked in on the couch with a high-calorie protein shake before ninth period even started.
For a moment, I let my gaze drift over to the elvish women seated a stone’s throw from my table. To one of the many reasons I once set such unhealthy standards for my own body in the first place.
“I’m eating,” I say honestly, looking away. “I promise.”
“Good. And I trust you’re still keeping your distance from…” Her voice lowers. “Them?”
There it is. The knife in the chest. The real reason I don’t pick up my mother’s calls: because every time I do, I have to tell a bald-faced lie to the person I love most in this world. The only family I have left.
“Yep,” I say, staring at the article on Elaerion still open on my computer screen. “I keep my nose as far out of from their business as humanly possible.”
“Good. Excellent. I know things are different there, Quinn. That humans and elves are far more integrated than they are back here. But that doesn’t change the truth: the elves cannot be trusted. Not now. Not ever.” Her voice shrinks. “I can’t lose you, too.”
I swallow. Daerios’s face flashes through my head. The surprise in his eyes when I agreed to be his date.
“I know, Mom,” I say. “You don’t need to worry about me. I promise.”
The words are acid on my tongue.