Image by Brigitte Werner from Pixabay

Ian, Sam, and Lex wandered in the forest near their home. They knew they were going to get into trouble if they were caught leaving the carefully tended fields of their families. “Be careful or the elves will get you” was a common warning among the humans of their settlement.

But in two hundred years, no humans had gone missing to the fabled elves. No one had even seen an elf that they knew of. So they felt reasonably safe sneaking away from their chores and poking about in the ruins hidden in the forest.

They wondered who had come before them that left buildings made of material like stone that wasn’t actually stone and something clear like ice that shattered so easily. There were great steel bars, bigger and thicker than anything the smith could make, that supported these structures. It was astonishing what had been left behind.

“Whoa, what’s this?” Lex asked, coming up to a strange metal thing in the middle of the forest. It had curves and looked like it might have had the clear substance in places at one time.

“Do you think this is one of those horseless carriages that ran by itself that my gran used to tell us stories of? The ones her grandmother told her about?” Ian asked.

“Could be,” Sam said.

An arrow thunked into the metal next to them. “You are trespassing in elven terriory,” a musical voice said warningly. “Leave now or suffer the consequences.”

“This is human territory,” Ian said. “It has been for two hundred years.”

Another arrow landed next to the first, narrowly missing Ian’s head. “I said leave,” came the command. The three boys fled in terror.

Their parents were just starting to worry when they came running out of the forest, babbling about the encounter with the elf. “You were told not to enter the forest,” Ian’s father said. “Now you know why.”

“But no one’s seen an elf in forever,” Sam protested.

“As you just saw, it doesn’t mean they aren’t watching,” his father said.

“Get back to the fields,” Lex’s father said. “We have to hope we don’t get into too much trouble with them over this.”

“Why do we listen to them anyway?” Lex demanded.

“No one knows where they came from, or what happened to make it this way,” Sam’s father said. “We don’t even really know anything from before two hundred years ago even though we know humans have existed here longer than that. The elves keep all the history hidden.”

“Why?” Ian asked.

“Only they know that,” Lex’s father said. “Get to work.”

“Yes, Father,” Lex said. The boys headed into the fields, wondering what was so bad about human history that the elves had to hide it all from the small population of humans.