Panech's Answer

[A dark-headed sun elf not yet fully grown out of boyhood (ELIDYR) sits at a desk, across from an older elf (PANECH). The latter has white, ghostly hair threatening the edges of a prominent widow's peak; otherwise his hair's cropped neatly, coloured in a fading sandy blond.]

[They are seated in a tower high above the ground, and are bathed in the warm glow of an afternoon sun from an open air window nearby. Below stretches the Green Isle of Evermeet.]

ELIDYR: Vexing as it would be, master, can they not be taught and told of truth, the law of the land?

PANECH: Have you heard none of my voice, child? There is no more law of the land. That law was broken into pieces, a long time ago; the shards were scattered into the sky, lost and beyond my reach or yours. Only the Creator can touch them now, and do you think He still watches you or the sky?

ELIDYR: And can you call yourself a wise elf when you condemn every soul that is yet born to this ugly fate? Must all things of that kind be wrought of poisoned clay?

PANECH: Every bird that sings, joyful and unknowing, could be called depraved, for we do not know the contents of their song. It may be they sing of horrors beyond our imagining; can truly anything not of the You and the We be trusted? Is it better to stick my hand in clay that could kill me, if only for the chance it shan't?

ELIDYR: Rarely are such things so easily broken and boiled, wise one. We both know well that life is a thing more faceted than to stick my hand in a jar.

PANECH: Among the young there is the common folly that the world is difficult, and unknowable; that there are things truly beyond one elf's reach. This you conceive of only for your folly, your ignorance, the strange incongruency that comes in the young only that the world is both altogether conquerable, but also altogether larger than any one soul.

ELIDYR: Unless I am wrong, my master, is this not a fault in both young and old? I see how close you are to the incorporeal parts of your existence in the pallor of your hair, the wax of your skin, and the soft of your voice. Can ever a boy become a man?

PANECH: No. Some might, but they are more cursed than blessed.

[The sun sets in the west, as both elves look on.]

Authored by magus Elidyr Hithlain, twenty-sixth of Ches, AR 160.