At the End of All Things Elves in Revelation
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"Cáno was the best in the world, once upon a time. Elves're better than humans at - most things. Stronger, faster, prettier, much better vision, that kind of thing."

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"Sounds like a good deal."

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"I would trade you in a heartbeat, if you get an afterlife. Elves are - scripted. There were prophecies thirty thousand years ago about what would happen, and no matter what we choose they always come true."

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"...uh, how does that work?"

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"Prophecies only come to light under conditions such that nothing anyone will do in response to them disrupts them. Like, sometimes it's 'the prophecy isn't believed' and sometimes it's 'everyone who learns of it wants it to happen' and sometimes it's 'people try to avoid it but it happens anyway' and sometimes it's just straight-up railroading, but it always happens."

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"But this doesn't work on humans?"

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"Nope. You can springboard off them - and we have tried it - but it usually doesn't work as well as it should. The Enemy tried having minor decisions all made by random humans, it didn't change anything large-stream."

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"Didn't try having large decisions made by nonrandom humans?"

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"Attempted by both sides of the war under some circumstances but since humans die so young and the war took five hundred years it was hard to get them equipped to be making major strategic decisions and then have any kind of continuity of strategic objectives."

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"...if you say so."

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"Humans live longer now, this was before anyone'd invented germ theory and so on. They had like fifty years and their teeth were falling out by twenty-five."

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"So you need robust organizational continuity, but it doesn't sound insoluble..."

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"Probably was not insoluble. Did not get solved in time."

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"Yeah, okay."

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"We lost. Everyone died."

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"And you got resurrected."

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"Thirty thousand years later, yeah."

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"That's a hell of a turnaround time."

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"They modify people to not have - theological disagreements - with them before reembodiment. You can decline modification but then no new body. We declined. Eventually they got sick of us."

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"Long time to wait them out, congratulations."

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"It was hardly a choice, but thanks. I wish we'd arrived sooner."

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"Have other people been resurrected?"

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"I think all of the Elves who died are now back alive. I think orcs the gods intend to keep dead forever - they're in a bit of a bind on that, admittedly, but only a bit of a bind..."

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"Orcs?"

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"So the Enemy's first bright idea to get around the fate thing was to breed a new race of sapients. Elves have - pretty fine direct control over our bodies, we mostly look the way we want to look and our hair and fingernails grow only up to the length we want them and so on. And so the Enemy's idea was that if you selectively bred Elves and tortured the children from birth, could you get something else? You can. You get orcs. There were millions of them. And all of them in constant pain, because that's how he got them to - not be Elves."

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