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Elf Maiden Quest IV

!Vjbe4vrS4s ID:4j+QVl6g No.5693395 View ViewReplyOriginalReport
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The year is 6722, by Alfheim reckoning. Two months and two weeks have passed since your departure from your home of Alfheim and the sung marble halls of the Gymnasium in which you were raised. A passing breath and the blink of an eye to a Child of Yggdrasil, for day and night are fleeting things, and a month is a drop in the bucket of a life expected to last ten thousand years at least. Perhaps that is why the Eldest of your kin send the Children upon Travail when they reach their Centum Viginti: to learn for themselves that within the gulf that separates the lifespans of Elf, Hume, and Stout there lies a bottomless abyss called Time that warps perspective and drowns the unwary.

You felt that abyss pull at you quite recently, two weeks - two fleeting heartbeats - past, when you learned that to Humes four centuries was four lifetimes.

The fruit that birthed you ripened a hundred and twenty years ago, twenty years beyond the age most Humes wither and die. The Children of Yggdrasil mature in body within two decades of their harvest - though in truth, you will never stop growing until you die, or sprout into a tree - but the Eldest do not consider a Child to be an adult until a hundred years of learning has grown their mind into something vaguely resembling maturity. The Eldest of Eldest Regius has lived a hundred of your lives, so you must wonder if you can truly call yourself an adult - even if you qualify it with <span class="mu-i">young</span> - or if, to the eldest of your kin, you remain little more than a precocious infant.

Time is a bottomless abyss filled with insanity and wisdom in equal measure. Mortality is the cruel mistress of all life, even if she seems gentler upon you Children of Yggdrasil in how much time she allows you. The lives of Humes are those of fleeting children, and the lives of Stouts are not much longer than that.

But you will not let these morose truths waver your resolve to see through the purpose of your Travail.

If anything, it only steels your certainty that you've found a worthy cause to which you can dedicate your mind, body, and soul.

When a Child leaves their Elfhome upon Travail, they are forbidden return without something worthy for which the Eldest might bid the doors be opened. Some seek wealth to be made in trade and commerce. Others seek relics and priceless treasures for preservation within a museum. Still more bring back the wisdom to be found in the fleeting moments allotted to the Hume and Stout, that it might be added to the Children's body of knowledge. You seek something no less worthy of praise by the Eldest, but something far more abstract.

You seek a renewal of the friendships between Child, Hume, and Stout that Helen Flame-Kissed won in the Age of the Dragon, when she enticed the greatest of the Dragon Kings into her bedroom. A great peace forged through seduction, which lasted for three thousand years.