NOVEL NEXT Chapter 4
The elves are the fairies of the forest blessed by the World Tree,
They can climb trees as swiftly as monkeys,
And communicate with the flora and fauna of the earth,
They are a mysterious race that wields elemental beings born from the World Tree’s enormous branches.
Guardians of the World Tree, those who serve its will,
Eleina recalled a past she wished to forget.
She thought of her father, the Tribe Leader of the Elf Village.
She remembered the words he had spoken to her.
He always told her to engrave deep in her heart the pride and dignity of being born an elf.
Her father said,
“Elves are different from other beings.
In every way, we are superior to them.
We surpass the beastmen, who can’t even control their true natures.
We are greater than the abandoned Half-beast Tribe, who wander the earth forsaken by both good and evil.
We are superior to the hammer-wielding dwarves;
Even the strongest dragons or celestial beings,
And of course, superior to the humans, who merely swarm around.
No race is greater than us elves.
Every day, the Tribe Leader father drilled these words into her, as if brainwashing his daughter, holding her shoulders firmly.
He tried to instill his firm beliefs,
No, the pathetic beliefs that all elves possess.
Any being contrary to this is not an elf.
If you’ve been born an elf, especially as the daughter of the Tribe Leader, one destined to be the queen of the elves, you must naturally hold these values.
Yet, the young elf Eleina could not understand her father’s words.
She had no idea what he was talking about.
He told her that playing outside with her friends was wrong because elves are great.
Eleina tilted her head in confusion.
Of the words her father spoke, the only thing the young Eleina could comprehend was
the word human.
And that was just because she had overheard her parents conversing mockingly about humans while sipping tea in the palace.
She couldn’t grasp her father’s teachings.
Eleina could not understand her father.
And, in turn, her father could not understand her.
So, she was abandoned…
*
Father periodically came to see Eleina.
He tried hard to instill the ugly beliefs that they possessed into her head.
Yet, a year passed, then ten years, and still, Eleina couldn’t understand her father’s ideologies.
She didn’t want to understand.
Eleina was always filled with questions.
Why is it said that only elves are the smartest? Why do we have to be the pinnacle of all?
Eleina knew. For decades, while she hadn’t seen much, she had still seen and heard things.
Her friends in the forest taught her about the outside world, what freedom truly is.
Eleina listened attentively to the stories of the flowers.
Whenever the trees swayed, she approached and reached out.
When it rained, she didn’t avoid it but instead welcomed the raindrops.
Eleina could hear.
And she could understand.
She realized that the place she was in was no different from a cage,
And the stories that all the beings of the world tried to tell her only painted her existence as pitiful.
Thus, another year passed, and then another ten.
Eleina, in her middle age by human standards, but by elf standards, her time was but a fleeting moment.
The curious and cheerful child was slowly entering adolescence.
To a human perspective, she looked like a child who still needed parental care,
But regardless of her appearance, what mattered was that as the Tribe Leader’s daughter, Eleina was ready to come of age.
She had become an adult.
With this, she decided to finally voice the questions she had buried in her heart to her father.
Eleina cheerfully shared with her father the stories the world had tried to teach her, those that had filled her with hope.
She desperately averted her gaze from her father’s disdainful eyes, knowing he would look at her with disgust.
As a small elf, she knew very well that her father would look down upon her.
But still, Eleina started to illustrate the constellations, the people, and various plants and animals that didn’t exist in the elves’ forest,
Like a horse with two humps, a donkey with pure white fur and mud-colored hair, or a huge cat with a golden mane,
The entire forest covered in sandy deserts, with a massive pond of clean water providing solace to the thirsty inhabitants,
A lake filled with salt water, home to tadpoles with fins…uh…what were they called again?
Oh yes, tadpoles!
And those tadpoles were sometimes eaten by gigantic blue tadpoles, some even said they were cannibals…
Young Eleina did not wish to achieve her dreams.
She knew that if she disappeared, chaos would surely ensue. She understood that much.
She hadn’t chosen her parents, but what could she do? She was born as the Tribe Leader’s daughter.
She could pretend.
She could pretend to be a good daughter, a perfect daughter, a daughter who didn’t bring trouble to her father.
She could do and act as if she believed in his undesirable ideologies like a compliant toy.
Why? Because she was born that way. She came from parents who wanted just that.
Eleina knew. The latent malice in her father’s gaze, the depths of his contempt for the outside world,
Thus, for once, she wanted to indulge herself.
She did not want to hear about being told to leave and chase her dreams.
She didn’t need the assurance that she didn’t have to believe.
She simply wanted her father to acknowledge her dreams, just once.
To the Tribe Leader, the elf leader, her father, she wished that he would recognize her dreams,
Dreams that were far less realistic than the tales of heroes saving the world since the moment she was born as an elf.
Even just a grimace, even if he looked at her as if she were filth, or if he simply sighed and ruffled her hair,
Or perhaps even just a single word of encouragement, that would have been enough for her.
She wished to become the doll her father desired,
And so, Eleina’s dream
crack!
Crumpled down in an instant.
Her father, who usually showed indifference towards her,
Would brush her off when she asked questions,
And he didn’t even spare a glance at the playful antics of a smiling daughter.
Only when she tried to become the puppet that he wanted, following his commands dutifully, did his indifference shine through.
He was a perfect daughter’s genius, but he was by no means a father who would unleash violence upon his own flesh and blood.
No, to be more precise, he was no less than a bottom-tier scum, an elf scum at that.
He slapped the cheek of the child who had wished, even for a fleeting moment, to be seen by him.
Because she wasn’t becoming the image he wanted.
What she had said flowed contrary to what the Tribe Leader desired.
The Tribe Leader struck his daughter. After hitting her across the face, he brutally beat her down, crushing her underfoot.
Her beautiful face, with skin as white and soft as a princess, turned bruised and red.
It was as if he was trying to release all the malice he had built up over a lifetime on his own daughter.
Had other elves who happened upon the scene not intervened, Eleina would have lost everything, both body and spirit, that day.
Though she had already crumbled, that Eleina, at the time, might have been denying it.
Hugging her father while he beat down the very filth she had created, when she felt the wicked, loathsome evil radiating from the Tribe Leader,
Eleina doubted whether this being truly was her father. Usually frightening and harsh, but now he appeared as a monster with a cold, mechanical heart, or perhaps even closer to a grotesque abomination.
If her father saw her as filth, then from that moment on, she saw him as a heap of trash.
For both of them, they were family bound by a thread of blood, yet failed products at the same time.
When, somewhere along the line, Eleina’s vision of her father and the other elves faded,
The fallen Eleina shook off the dirt from her body and stood up.
With her legs crumpled beneath her, Eleina
For some reason, her body seemed to tilt constantly.
She burst into tears. She even held her breath, frightened that her father might hear her distant cries.
Covering her mouth with her hands, she wept.
Her tattered and scraped legs buried into her face as she cried endlessly.
Yet, fearing that the keen-eared elves, especially her father, the Tribe Leader, would hear her,
She only made whimpers, the sound of scraping metal.
She wished that no one would hear her, yearning for the salvation of the constellations she sought.
And so, she silently wept for a long time.