Her room was small and rounded. The walls etched out centuries ago by the first settlers of the caves. Their people were much larger at that time. They had not become the small diminutive figures that the present-day elves became. The rocks and dirt that made up the walls and ceiling of the caves were covered in orange silt, built up over years of the orange dust blowing through the cave’s many tunnels. The dust tinted the lights and colors of the caves orange. When humans used to visit the caves as guests of the elves, they were often disoriented by the coloring. It must have taken them time to get used to the orange tint. Sandra was not bothered by the coloring, having spent most of her life within the dust-colored walls.

She thought back to the few times she was among the humans in the valley. The humans had built many comforts in the valley, much more than the elves enjoyed in their caves. Sandra thought of those comforts that she had experienced. She particularly missed the exceptionally soft beds and chairs that the humans used. The elves favored hard wooden chairs and beds with few feathers that softened the surface. Sandra and her friends did not understand this choice. She had attempted to bring back human pillows. After a few nights of sleep, they had mysteriously disappeared. She never inquired about their fate, knowing that in this the elves were strict. They did not want to be corrupted by the comforts of the humans. It was triviality that concerned the elders and the council the most. They were afraid that important decisions were not made as the humans focused on the unimportant of decisions of what type of chair to sit in or what type of bed to sleep in.

Sandra sat on the hard rock floor in the middle of her small room with her eyes closed and her legs crossed. Tonight was the ceremony. She was no longer a child after the ceremony. She shook her head at the thought. She had not thought of herself as a child for sometime even before the ceremony. It was not what she became but what she could do. Once the ceremony ended, she could go where she wanted. There was much she needed to know about the human population living in the valley. She had learned much about their ancestors, but knew little about the current generation that lived in the valley. When the time came for her to ascend to her role as the prophet, she needed a firm understanding of their affairs to know that her decisions were the right ones.

She wanted to believe as she was taught that the prophet’s and the elves’ decisions were based on something higher, something spiritual. That it was not just their knowledge that enabled them to know the right choice in life. She did not believe that to be the case. For all of her reading, she knew that prophets did make mistakes, and the mistakes usually came about because of lack of full information. That was how she read the histories. Not everyone in her class or all of her instructors agreed with her approach or thoughts on this subject. Some of them thought her thoughts were downright rebellious, she knew. She did not worry about that. She kept certain thoughts to herself. There was much thinking in this area, and one of the truths she found by reading the writing of the other prophets—rarely was much of it autobiographical; most of it done after the fact by researchers interested in their subject matter—was that they kept much of their own thoughts to themselves. There was much disagreement between the elven councils and the prophets. Their goals were not always in tune.

Sandra had been born to be the prophet. They taught her early on what she would eventually grow into. The old prophet always decided on her successor, and when she was born, the old prophet was relieved and entrusted this knowledge to her parents. Her parents had died during her first year of life. Sandra knew that the knowledge that they had given birth to the next prophet gave them much comfort in having a baby so late in their lives. Her parents were twenty five when they had died. They left Sandra many letters about their life and their hopes for her life. They had been wonderful people, her teachers had told her. They cared very much for her, and they spent the last ten years of their lives preparing for her to be born. The last year of their lives, when they knew the future of their child was the most frantic for them. They had so much they wanted to share with Sandra before they died. Sandra had spent days locked in the vaults with those words, finding both comfort and wisdom in those letters. She had cross referenced them with other works in the vault, and added her bit of academic knowledge to the rolls.

“Did they know they would not survive to see me out of diapers?” Sandra had asked any person she met that claimed to have known her parents. Most did not know the answer. Even her teachers stayed away from that question. For all the hours that Sandra spent with the notes and words of her parents, she never found any hint of whether they knew the time of their passing. Most elves did. They knew when it would occur and their life became about planning to that point. Sandra wanted to know that time not only to better understand her own parents, but also to understand herself. She did not know when she would die. For all of her prophetic inclinations, she could not see anything beyond the present moment. One of the first lessons that the young elves learned about this particular gift was how many different forms it took. Humans think of prophecy as glimpsing the future. While that is true in some cases, most of the real prophecy has little to do with the future, and everything to do with the present choices.

Sandra spent the last five years building up to her graduation. After the first few years of study, there was little doubt that she would be the worthy successor that the old prophet had foresaw at her birth at the end of her study. She had spent much of her time sequestered with the current prophet. There was much she needed to teach her about the times. The humans and the elves approached the world they shared differently. Their histories were intertwined more than the humans knew, but they were not always willing to believe in the elves.

“Each of us prophets has a single purpose,” the old prophet had told her. “Most humans and even elves think that purpose is in choosing the next king or queen to rule over the human population, and of course to choose the next prophet.” The old prophet looked at Sandra in that way Sandra knew her parents would have looked at her if they were still alive. “That is an important part of our role. At the end, what each prophet tells us to remember is that it is not the choice at the end that makes the prophet. It is not even the reasoning that led up to that choice.”

That is where the old prophet left off in her lessons. Sandra had waited for three hours as both her and the old prophet sat on the floor of the school room in silent meditation. At first Sandra thought the prophet was waiting for her to answer the question. She had thought long and hard about it but although she came up with a few ideas of what the old prophet could have meant, none of them seemed right. The old prophet had put her through many exercises in patience, where they would sit in quiet contemplation until the answer was revealed, either through the meditation, or through a carefully cryptic but revealing hint. This was not one of those situations.

For all of their quick ways, the elves took a great deal of pleasure in finding ways to elongate their lives. This elongation was through finding peace through internalizing their thoughts and beliefs over long periods of time. This internal battle was difficult with so many images and words playing through their mind. The greatest prophet was said to have spent a week in entirely silent and unmoving meditation. This was a feat even for elves since they did not need water or food as often as humans. What that prophet had thought had been lost. But Sandra had her suspicions that the entire elves way of life was incorporated or prophesized during that week. She believed that if she could find the calm for an entire day, she could bring about a substantial change for the better for both societies. She did not believe she could ever achieve that, never having made it past five hours of silence. Most of her instructors could not spend more than fifteen minutes in silence, so she did not feel defeated by this. It would be a goal for her entire life.

At the end of the three hours, the old prophet rose and nodded her head toward Sandra. “You will know the answer, but more importantly the questions, when you assume take over my mantle,” the old prophet said mysteriously, with no discussions of noodles. It was another of those questions where Sandra wanted to believe the old prophet knew but had decided that she could not handle the answer instead of the alternative.

That had been the first time anyone in the caves had acknowledged that Sandra would be chosen. There was little question within the school or the society that she would be the next prophet. Her ability to choose the right approach in every situation was unparalleled even when compared to the old prophet. What she did not have was the true prophetic sense.

“Prophet,” Sandra said a few weeks after her conversation with the old prophet. “I do not understand something. I know the proper answers but I don’t know the why’s behind those answers. I do not see the future as you describe it. I never have. I only choose an approach and that approach in the end is the correct one. But I do not know why it will be the correct one, nor do I know what I chose it in the first place. Is this the way it is supposed to work? You taught me that prophecy was the ability to know the future.”

The old prophet smiled cryptically at the question. She did not answer Sandra’s question that day. Sandra returned to it often as they spent more time together. The prophet only smiled whenever she asked.

Like all elves, Sandra spent the first five years of her schooling learning the histories of those that came before her. The history started a hundred years after the elves settled the caves. What happened before then was either not known or not shared with the students. The elves soaked up knowledge, able to spend hours reading through old histories, or questioning the elders about facts that had been passed down. The written histories were important, but equally important were the oral traditions. More of them were written down with each generation, as some elves spent their energy on recording these truths.

Sandra and her classmates did not want to spend their days huddled over books with fountain pens to record the histories told to them by the older elves. They wanted to make their own impact on the elven society, which would be recorded by subsequent generations. The young people always thought that way, their teachers had told them. Even they, the teachers, had thought that way before growing into academia in their later years, spending their time teaching the younger generations and recording old histories that had past with the last generation of elves.

The teachers were never exasperated by the choices of the young elves. They knew why they made the decision they did. What they worried about, and they told the young elves about these worries almost constantly, interrupting the flow of conversations as the conversation ebbed and flowed across many topics, as was the want of elven discussions, was that there would be nobody around to record the conversations that they knew. They only had so much time and energy to record their own knowledge, which with unused became fainter and less reliable. There was also the not as well known fact that the elven population was not growing. It was shrinking at an alarming rate. There were not enough young elves around to listen to all that their elders had to teach. There were many rooms within the caves that were no longer occupied by elves. They were left open, a museum to the ways of the elves many years before.

There was much that needed to improve in this situation. Sandra did not have the answers at that time. It would be many years before these problems would affect her. She listened as she did with most things by remembering all the details that were told to her. It would take her mind many years to synthesize those details into plans that felt right.

But those years were a long time off for the young elf. Sandra tried to keep her mind clear, to silence the runaway thoughts that stampeded through her. It was difficult now as it always was. She envied the humans this. Their thoughts were simple and guided. They could follow a single path, perhaps branching off at times, but returning to the main path after a brief staunch. Their ability to do many things at once was almost trivial when compared to what the elves could do. She did not believe this out of any egocentric thoughts of how much better the elves were than humans. This comparison did not make sense to elves. They did not spend time worrying about what others thoughts, be they elves or humans. Their time was too short, and with so many paths to think through, why would they waste it on worrying about such trivial things when their very existence and the existence of all the memories of their kind was at risk each day.

Sandra opened her eyes, giving up on her meditation. On the day of her graduation, she knew that she should not accept such failure. She thought of Mrs. Sallimander who say. She taught her meditation and would be greatly disappointed to know what she called her greatest student of this generation was on the day of her entrance into polite society, giving up on the most basic task of calming her thoughts before the ceremony.

The thoughts racing through her mind allowed her to move beyond her failure to this acceptance. She sighed and gave up. She opened her footlocker that contained her clothing for the evening. She pulled out the long white robe that the students wear during the candlelit proceedings. She held it out in front of her and looked at it for some time. It was not truly white, as nothing in the caves was truly white. It had long before been dyed by the orange dust that permeated the rooms of the caves. It was only in the valley where an elf or person could find relief from the constant taste of look of orange dust everywhere. It was not a relief she could understand. She knew the orange dust was what made the elves who they were. To give up even a moment of the powers of that dust seemed ludicrous to her. Why the humans would sacrifice that to live within the comforts of valley. But then she thought again about the pillows and the beds and she understood it if only briefly. There was much she needed to understand about the humans. Stuff she could only learn not through the dusty old history books but by being with them for a long period of time. To live in their world and to understand their thoughts and wishes.

The caves were dark. Except for small candles that were replenished in the bedrooms each night, little light shown throughout the rooms. Most elves preferred the darkness. It allowed their silence to go unchallenged, and allowed them to walk throughout the halls without being bothered by extraneous thoughts. Sandra would go to graduation and learn about her future and those of her people.

Word count: 2,787 (14,728)

Words remaining: 35,272

It was more difficult to find the time to write today. I took a big step backwards in the telling. I decided that some of my back story for certain characters made more sense as the actual story. It took a bit of jiggering, but at least I have something of a plot with a conclusion in mind. That I did this with lots of telling again (are you noticing a theme?) instead of showing, I’ll try not to worry except to complain here.

Doolies convinced me to restart my Warhammer account this weekend. She needed amazingly little convincing. So far it has not hurt my output, as I’ve tried to finish before late evening. We’ll see if this remains true in the coming days and weeks.