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“The island,” I say, expecting that it should clarify her confusion. But she still stares up into my eyes, uncertain of how to proceed.
She averts her gaze for a moment, and I feel immediate relief. I don’t like feeling weak in her eyes, but they make me question everything I am.
“You mean why did I come to the island?”
I nod with restraint. “There are many dark elves on the island, and you are not one of them.”
“What gave me away?”
She points her eyes back up at me, and I attempt to look away, longing to find anything more interesting in the room. There is nothing.
“You do not have long ears,” I reply. “Your skin is not gray, and your fangs are dull.”
She looks at me as though I have missed some essential detail but does not elaborate.
She paces around the lair, and I follow her up and down inclines as her mind wanders and she weaves a fascinating tale.
“My mother came to the islands because she wasn’t strong enough to work,” she explains, prodding at a glowing barnacle with a petrified branch.
“To work?”
“Yes,” she explains, her eyebrow raised.
“What is ‘work?’”
She sighs. “This may take a while,” she says before shaking her head. “Usually in society, when you complete a task or a chore for somebody, you’re generally offered currency, so that you can acquire goods and pay other people to work for you.”
“What is ‘currency?’”
She presses her palm to her face before looking out into the lair and walking around the corner into my treasure room. Instinctively, I follow.
“This is currency,” she says. She walks over to a piece of gold and attempts to pick it up.
I snarl in response, prompting her to leap and stand upright, startled.
Sensing her trepidation, I worry that means her story has come to an end. “So your mother brought you here to, what, acquire gold?” I prompt, trying to get back on track.
She shakes her head again. “Dark elves get currency for their work,” she explains. “But as you can tell, I wasn’t born with long ears. I’m not a dark elf.”
“Obviously,” I reply. Her explanations of basic concepts are wearing thin on me.
“Humans generally live in servitude to the dark elves from birth,” she says. “There are some who the dark elves don’t find, who live freely, and there are some who buy their way out. But I hear even they sometimes still get abducted.”
I nod my head.
Though I do partly envy the cruelty of such a system, the intimidation of it is artificial, not reinforced through strength or savagery. These elves have created a system to erect themselves as predators without rightfully earning the title.
Without this artificial system, they are nothing.
“And how does this relate to you?”
Placing her hand up to her chin, she paces away from the treasure hoard. “When my mother came to this realm, she was pregnant with me,” she says. “She was taken in and made to work on the islands before she died giving birth to me.”
I keep waiting for her to elaborate, but she does not.
“Understood,” I say. “That still doesn’t explain how you came to the island.”
She stares at me indifferently now, as though counting the number of barnacles on the wall. Her face is expressionless.
