Grandpa Becomes an Elf (3)
"Hoo… I think I've got the general idea."
After several sleepless nights spent devouring every book she could get her hands on, Estel rubbed at her dry, aching eyelids and muttered to herself.
"Humans, elves, magic… this place is crawling with the strangest things."
The more she read, the more she learned about the elven race, the more a hollow weight settled in one corner of her chest.
Elves were, at their core, a long-lived people.
Among most intelligent lifeforms, virtually none could match an elf's lifespan. From an elf's perspective, a handful of years might pass — and for every other race, that same stretch would easily cover ten or twenty. They were profoundly numb to the flow of time.
With so many years ahead of them, there was no need to live fiercely.
Time was the one thing they had in abundance, so whatever they did, they did it slowly, at ease, without fretting over whether it worked out or not.
Put generously, they could face anything with composure — short of a nuclear-missile-grade catastrophe dropping out of nowhere on the elven capital, which was vanishingly unlikely. Put less generously, most of them simply had no passion for living.
Whatever they set out to learn, they would get there eventually, so they felt no hunger for study and staked nothing on progress. Food was as simple as the fruit growing on the mountainsides, and outside threats barely registered.
To elves who had spent at least a hundred years in these woods from the day they were born, the Great Forest was nothing more than a comfortable home. To outsiders, it was a fortress of nature — dense trees and thick undergrowth so impenetrable that most could not even breach its shallowest perimeter.
And even if someone did manage to slip through the border, arrows would come whistling out of places the invaders could not see at all, punching clean through their comrades' skulls one by one. It was pure horror.
Then there was the greatest flaw of all.
That carefully cultivated conservatism had sunk roots into their hearts like an ancient tree centuries old — and it did not change easily.
According to the histories, the elves had cut off all contact with other powers after the Thousand-Year War millennia ago, and had since burrowed into this vast Great Forest to stay. That outlook was still very much alive. Aside from a few eccentric individuals, most elves felt no dissatisfaction whatsoever about living out their entire lives in the forest of their birth.
After turning it over in her mind again and again, Estel arrived at her verdict.
A pool of water, cut off from every current, sitting still and stagnant forever.
And yet — a pool that never, ever rotted.
That was her assessment.
And Estel could not bear to simply watch it happen.
In her first life she had always lived fiercely; competition had been her daily bread. She closed the book she had been reading.
"Good reading. Exactly the material I needed."
"Are you leaving already? You've barely started…"
"Sitting here with my backside planted, reading at a leisurely pace wouldn't be so bad — but it doesn't suit my temperament."
She rose from her seat and walked to the center of the archive, where she offered her thanks to the librarian who greeted her with the same practiced motion as a few days before.
"Would you mind putting the books away? I've got somewhere I need to be."
"Of course."
"First things first — I need to figure out just how much authority I actually have."
Having reached some kind of conclusion, she sorted through the plan taking shape in her head and fixed on the very first thing she needed to do.
Estel was a princess.
More precisely, the third princess — and she had two older siblings above her.
The first, the crown prince, had declared he had no interest in the throne whatsoever and built himself a cabin some distance from the palace, where he was living a thoroughly unhurried life.
The second, the second princess, had announced she wanted to broaden her horizons and set off to explore the human world — then walked straight out of the Great Forest.
To the elves she was a complete oddity, a genuine weirdo, but Estel understood her perfectly.
Which left the third princess: Estel.
One way or another, she was now the sole remaining heir in the palace.
In a sense, she stood just beneath the king himself — the second-most powerful person in the entire royal court.
To put her carefully laid plans into motion, she first needed a conversation with her father, the Elf King — someone who could help her gauge the true extent of her authority. If the king turned out to be too conservative, or if there were complications around succession and power… well, if she could sit down with him, lay out her plans, and win his consent, everything would go a great deal more smoothly.
So Estel went straight to the king's chambers — only to be met with this:
"His Majesty entered hibernation three years ago."
"…What did you just say?"
The guard stationed outside the royal chambers delivered the news like a bolt from a clear sky.
Hibernation.
For elves who lived such impossibly long lives, some came to regard that lifespan as a kind of curse — a shackle. When the same uneventful days stretched on for years, decades, centuries, millennia, it was only natural that some fell into crushing depression.
As their numbers grew, more and more of them made extreme choices or caused chaos within the kingdom. The ancestors eventually devised a solution.
Simply go to sleep.
They invented a method that let an elf sleep for as long as they wished without dying — and the suicide rate and related incidents plummeted overnight.
Depressed? Want to die? But death itself is frightening?
Fine. Just sleep as if you were dead.
Every time they closed their eyes, a few hundred years would whip by in a blink. For them, it was an excellent arrangement.
"When does he wake?"
"He ordered that he not be disturbed for at least four hundred years, so he will remain in hibernation for the foreseeable future."
"Good heavens… to think such an irresponsible creature exists…"
Still — a king of an entire nation dropping into a multi-century sleep without even designating a proper successor was hardly a positive development. Estel simply could not keep pace with the elves' characteristic leisure and optimism.
And yet the elves themselves saw nothing strange about it at all, which only left her more bewildered.
"Hoo… all right. So that's how it is. Listen here."
"Yes, Your Highness."
"If I'm currently the sole blood of the royal line, does that mean I can exercise the king's authority as well?"
"That is correct."
"I see. That might actually work out rather well."
Looked at from the other side, this was a stroke of luck. She wouldn't have to bother with a tedious audience with the king — she could simply step in as his proxy.
Incidentally, even a common soldier could answer her questions without missing a beat. She kept being startled by the average elf's breadth of knowledge, then forced herself to accept it. Ask that young man in front of her his age and he would casually reply that he was a few hundred years old; after living that long, of course he would know most of what there was to know about elves and their kingdom.
Every single elf here was a walking library. A truly peculiar — and remarkable — race.
"Then what if I, as the king's proxy, declared an end to the elves' isolationist policy and announced full-scale exchange with the powers beyond the Great Forest? What would happen?"
While she was at it, Estel put the question that had been nagging at her to the guard standing right there.
"I imagine the Council of Elders would fly into a rage and give Your Highness a thorough scolding."
"…The Council of Elders?"
That answer was unexpected — though she had some idea what the Council was. The term had appeared often enough in the materials she had been reading in the archive.
"Is the Council's power greater than the crown's?"
"Well… they have lived a very long time, after all. We trust and rely on them because they are wiser than the rest of us."
"Hmm… I see."
At first she had taken the king for a hopelessly irresponsible dark lord for vanishing into hibernation without a plan. The soldier's explanation made him somewhat more understandable.
In short, whether one was king or princess, the titles were little more than labels. The Council of Elders handled the actual responsibility of governing the elves — so a king was hardly necessary.
"What do they usually do?"
"Er… they don't particularly do anything. They simply offer solutions drawn from the experience and wisdom they've accumulated whenever the elves face a problem."
"So they don't actually do much of anything?"
"Yes. At this hour, the elders are probably gathered for their tea time."
"And how would you know that?"
"Well… they've spent nearly a thousand years doing the exact same thing every single day."
"……Could you show me where that is?"
Every conversation with an elf left her dizzy from their cozy, elastic sense of time. Estel decided that asking more questions was less efficient than simply going to see for herself.
"Fine tea, this. Is it already the season for jasmine-leaf brew?"
"Indeed. Before you know it, this time of year has come around again."
"Now then, where were we…?"
"Ah, right. That young fellow Graham from the lower village — word is he just had his second child."
"Nonsense. That boy had his second child a good twenty years ago. This old fool's spouting rubbish again."
"…Was he?"
Around a table set out in the sunny yard of a cottage, steam curling up from their teacups, the conversation was exactly what one would expect from a pack of doddering old-timers chattering without a care in the world.
Estel was certain that the fourth-ranking elder — currently blinking in confusion — would be repeating that same story tomorrow, and the day after that.
"All right, all right, settle down. We have a special guest today, after all. Hmm?"
"…Pleasure. Third Princess."
"Special guest, my foot. An old man making a fuss…"
"She's the princess, you old coot. Have you dunked every last scrap of manners in your soup?"
"I've seen fifty-four princesses in my lifetime!"
"How old is the princess this year, anyway?"
"Feels like only yesterday she was a newborn, and look how she's grown."
"Bah, at that age she's still a child. A child."
"Is that so…"
"Hoo…"
What in the world… it's like someone rounded up every doddering old-timer on the brink of tomorrow and dumped them in one place.
That was Estel's first impression of the Council of Elders, once her introduction had been casually steamrolled into oblivion.
Only a few days ago she herself had been one foot in the grave — but these people were the real article.
Nearly every elf she had met so far looked to be in their early-to-mid twenties. By elven nature, the journey from childhood to young adulthood took roughly a hundred and fifty to two hundred years, and after that they aged at something like one year per century. Even at several hundred or a thousand years old, they still looked remarkably young.
The Council sitting before her, however, was composed of genuine wrinkled elders. She could not even begin to guess how many years they had lived.
"First, allow me to apologize for attending a Council gathering so abruptly, without any prior notice."
"Apology? What for~ This is just a place where old fossils who refuse to die while away the hours. No need for formalities. If you're bored, come keep us company — don't feel any pressure, Princess."
"Is that so?"
"Damn it! You, boy! Is 'is that so' and 'was he' all you can say? Are you finally on your way out?"
"…Was I?"
"Ugh. Not worth the breath."
"…Ahem! In any case — the reason I have come before the assembled members of the Council today is that I have something I wish to tell them."
Before the conversation could derail her again, Estel cleared her throat, drew every eye back to herself, and went straight to the point.
"I intend to make this Great Forest great once more."