For the first time I am actually feeling like a child. Not because I want to do childish things, but because I want to grow up as soon as possible. Here I am, studying in the library while there are brand new discoveries in the archipelago that I wish I can see it with my own eyes. Sadly or thankfully, depending on how you look at it, there is no known magic that can make you older so I am stuck like this for now. I won't pretend like I have a solution for this problem, especially due to a surprising nature of this world.
Despite all the description that Tolkien made of us, the elves in this world have a life expectancy of only 105 years while humans have 150. How the hell did this happen? It's already bad that we prefer traditional and magic medicine over modern ones, now we have shortening life expectancy to worry about too. Whatever the Great Awakening did to us must have been horrible because the reports say that elves used to live for 300 years a millennia ago. Unfortunately, the cause for this won't be discovered until medical research is advanced enough and, to be honest, if I had access to such technology I wouldn't research this. I would rather research every race's genome to find out how do they actually work in the first place.
You see I was making a delivery to a family in the lower city. I started doing odd jobs around the guild, but that's not the point. The family I have delivered to consisted of Tigran husband and human wife as well as their 2 kids. I already knew the truth about this, but it's still shocking to see that there are no half breeds in this world. Despite this world consisting of humans, elves, orcs, goblins, halflings, dwarves and Tigrans, and I am not including any monster races like fey and merfolk into this, there is no being that has external features of two different races.
Those are reserved for the internal stuff like the higher strength for children with orcish parent and better immune system for children with goblin parent. What's even more stranger is the fact that mother can give birth to child of any race. Yes. It doesn't matter if she is an elf of human. She can give birth to an orc or a goblin child. I am shocked to hear that this is considered normal in this world and that very few people question this. Yes, I did also came from a society with multiple alien races. But the difference is that, since we evolved separately, our biology wasn't compatible for this kind of "mixing", to put it mildly.
I didn't care about this back in my previous life. so I don't know if technology had evolved to such an extent to allow this. Oh, what about the experiments in this world? There could have been… Yeah, before I actually write about this disturbing image I have on my mind I should move on. It's enough to remember the early days when they started flooding the online.
So what else is new? Well, the war against Frostlings had finally started. Last month a full artillery brigade left the city on airships to join the front. Yeah, we have airships now too. Eh, I prefer those remote controlled UAVs. Anyway, the first target was liberated recently. A ghost elven town by the name of Byrneth. There are contradicting reports on why the town is abandoned.
Initial reports from the independent elven city of Rithile say majority of the elves left the city after Frostlings took it over. But according to the army reports there used to live around 8000 elves there while only several hundred elves went to Rithile. So where are the missing elves? There are also the disturbing facts that there was no mass grave like the one in Fryghid and the elves that were in the city ignored all pleas from the army to surrender and fought until death for the Frostlings. Nobody likes the implications that these facts carry.
At least without any civilian population left it was easy to get it annexed to the state. Right now the council is deciding what will they do with the town. One decision I was surprised to hear was that they appointed Cass as the new mayor of the town. It took me more thinking than I would like to admit to realize the reason behind this. Even if she is still young, she is one of the biggest merchants in Metzaca who specialized into colonial trade, even if that's only because she couldn't conduct proper trade with the continent without getting into trouble. With the limited freedom she will get after taking over as well as the financial backing she can bring to the town it could accelerate the restoration process. Wonder if she will go so far as to move her headquarters up north. We shall see.
Oh, speaking of Cass. There were several interesting discoveries in this archipelago. People in Sidyu got surprised when a herd of water horses joined the town garrison there. Nobody can confirm if they are magical horses or unknown type of creature that decided to take form of a horse. Even the professional horsebreeders who were sent there aren't sure. They did discover one bad thing about them. All of the horses are mares so unless we discover where they came from we won't get any more of them.
The public quickly lost interest in this. Mainly because they have something much bigger to talk about. A discovered fey city on Longsong Island. Now the colonial army has encountered several small fey communities before and none of them were friendly. But this is something different. A proper city weaven into a forest where mythical creatures live. And these ones are friendly. Or should I say desperate enough to be friendly? With a huge horde of undead on their island they are in bad condition so they are desperate enough to even gladly get annexed by Metzaca. So now everyone is discussing how to handle this since this is an unprecedented situation.
I am just glad the colonial army missed that horde the first time when they landed on Longsong. From what the UAV operators reported this horde might be more dangerous than the undead dragons that besieged Kusahne. Since the army is now up north it will be months before we can launch the expedition to destroy the horde. At least we can plan out so that we don't suffer the same casualties as with the fight against the undead dragons. Though, whatever the necromancers used there, might be reused again.
As I am finishing this, I am thinking about what this diary means to me. Now I have Rigurd to talk about my previous life so no reason to continue writing this. In fact, as I read my previous entries, I realize I still think someone will read this someday so I keep writing my thoughts as if I was speaking to someone. I was thinking about if I should continue doing this and then I realized that, if there is one thing I can trust, it's my own diary. It's hard to have trust in others about your thoughts so I might as well continue doing this. I do hope this isn't me just being tired because I didn't exactly have lots of sleep recently. It's so bad I thought a bird has been following me for days now. I hope that this will be over soon and that this will be just another idiot tale of mine.