Aatos was late for work. He hurried through the city square of Zalfahan, brushing past passers-by as he made his way to the library. He was used to being bigger than most everyone else, since he had been living among the dwarves for a year, but he made sure not to try to use his size to force people to give way.
He spotted a small street that pointed towards the library and darted down it without looking ahead. He regretted it almost immediately, as he found the way blocked by three steppe-elves. They were a bit shorter and brawnier than Aatos, with sandy blond hair and darker eyes. Oh no, Aatos thought to himself.
"Well, look what we have here?" the brawniest of the trio said.
Aatos slowly backed away from the steppe-elves. It was obvious that they weren't going to let him pass. He slipped out of the alleyway and jogged onto a larger street.
Aatos was very pleased with how the dwarves had treated him after he moved to Ardaroun, but his run-ins with the steppe-elf community rarely ended well. Sometimes, it seemed like it was the little differences that ran the deepest.
"Are you still sure you don't want to go down to the brothel? I'll pay for you."
Oh no. Not this again, Aatos thought to himself. He was working late at the library, and he had a feeling that Rostam was going to bring the brothel up again since there was no one else around.
"I told you, Rostam, I'm not interested."
"Really? Because I thought you wanted to lose your pussyfuck cherry."
Aatos winced. That's astonishingly disgusting. Does he ever talk about anything else? He wondered.
"Not like that, Rostam. Not like that. I want a serious relationship."
"I know that you think dwarven women are too small for you, but there are some nice human girls from Bhativya and the southern islands there, too-"
Aatos narrowed his eyes. "I said that I'm not interested, Rostam."
Cethaz was trying to call it an early night. She never liked the beds in the city guard's barracks- they were designed for average-sized dwarves, not someone as big as her, and she had very little room to toss and turn. The entire barracks were inconvenient for her, in fact- she had to duck to get through the doors and the chairs were awkwardly small for her frame.
And now Nasrin and Parisa were chatting about the guys they were seeing, which was torture for Cethaz, who hated being reminded of how she was single.
"My boyfriend doesn't care enough about what I need."
"Oh, I get what you're saying. I've been with so many men who just wanted to get off and didn't even try to make me feel good."
Cethaz grumbled. They didn't know how lucky they were. It wasn't her fault that her silly (and profane) sense of humor that didn't endear her to the city dwarves of Zalfahan, nor that men were afraid of her because she was so big. She decided that she'd heard enough.
"Hey, you two, knock it off. I'm trying to sleep."
"Sorry."
She tossed and turned for a while before she finally drifted off.
Aatos was walking back to his apartment after finishing a long day of work at the library. He was eager to crash on his bed and get to sleep after he got home. But when he arrived at his building, he was shocked- the stone structure had been covered with offensive graffiti, with words like "forest savage" and "tree sissy" written all over it. The graffiti was in perfect Elvish, which led Aatos to only one conclusion- this was the work of the steppe-elves.
Shaken, he went up to his apartment with heavy trepidation and tried to get to sleep, but he tossed and turned to no avail. He was too scared.
Aatos heard a knock at the door, and he went over to the entrance of his room and opened it. It was a few days after his building had been defaced, and he was still riled up a bit even this long after the fact. He was afraid that some steppe-elves had snuck into the building and had a nasty surprise for him, but he found that he was completely mistaken.
He saw the biggest dwarf he had ever seen in front of him; she nearly came up to his shoulder. A feminine voice said "Hello, I am the bodyguard that the Imperial Library commissioned for you." She was wearing a full suit of armor, with plates over a chainmail shirt and a pointed turban helmet hung with chainmail below that covered her entire face except her green eyes. She held a large battle-axe with its head on the floor.
Aatos felt relieved- he figured that he had gotten some special treatment due to his influential father. "What's your name?"
"I am Cethaz Gumulzadeh of the Zalfahan City Guard."
"Cethaz? That's an interesting name, the 'th' sound doesn't show up often in Dwarvish."
"It- it's a Nishansahri name, our dialect is a little different. You're a translator, right? Your Dwarvish is excellent."
"Yes, I've been studying it ever since I was a kid. My father loved dwarven literature, and he made sure that I learned the language- I also speak centaur and lizardfolk." He looked at Cethaz and asked, "Are you going to be around me all day?"
"All day, every day, wherever you go."
"Even at work?"
"Yes, that's what the Library wants."
"Well, I need to get to the library for work this morning, so that's where we're going."
"Got it."
"Why would they have done something like that? They're elves, too."
Aatos and his bodyguard were making their way through a wide street in Zalfahan. There was a bit of a sunshower, something of a rarity for Ardaroun, which was usually quite arid.
"You have a lot to learn. The rivalry between wood-elves and steppe-elves goes back for more than a millennium. Do you ever get teased for your western accent?"
Cethaz stopped in her tracks, and Aatos suspected that she was blushing under her aventail.
"I... I've been trying to hide it..."
"You get teased a lot because you're different. Now imagine that, but with centuries of bloody warfare involved."
"I guess I didn't know enough about elves, I kind of thought that they were all the same..." Cethaz looked down, a little ashamed.
"A lot of elves make that mistake about dwarves, too. I know that the marsh-dwarves aren't too happy about being part of the empire."
"A lot of my colleagues don't consider them dwarves, to be honest. They call them marsh-gnomes."
"That reminds me of how wood-elves pretend that steppe-elves speak a different language, even though they're mutually intelligible for the most part." Aatos rolled his eyes at the absurdity.
"What other elven races are there?"
"There are the snow-elves, who live to the north of the wood-elves' kingdom of Suoveli. They're nomads and they don't like us, either. They sometimes raid the northern parts of the kingdom."
"Do the steppe-elves raid Suoveli, too?"
"There hasn't been any actual bloodshed between Suoveli and the steppe-elf principalities since before I was born, but we have long lifespans and long memories. That's why I was always dreading that something like this would happen- there's a reason that Little Suoveli and the steppe-elf neighborhood are on opposite sides of the city." Aatos stopped and pointed at a large building with a bright red dome on its roof. "That's the Imperial Library, it's where I work. Let me show you around."
The scriptorium was filled with desks, with scribes hard at work at most of them. The roof was quite high, and there were many windows on the upper walls that let light through. Aatos led Cethaz to an empty desk, and he said "This is the first thing I do when I get here." He took out two scrolls from a drawer in the first desk. One was covered with Dwarvish script, and the other was blank. He placed them onto the desk, which was large enough to fit them both with some room to spare. He put something very tiny in between them- Cethaz thought that it might be a grain of sand.
Then he stepped back, chanted some words that Cethaz recognized as Elvish, and waved his arms around in circles. Cethaz noticed the air above the desk start to shimmer a bit, and Aatos spoke a bit more before the shimmering void before it moved on top of a quill at the side of the desk, raised it up, dipped it into the inkwell, and began to copy the contents of the first scroll onto the second one.
Cethaz gasped.
"That- that's amazing!"
"Oh, it's a pretty simple spell- summoning up an invisible servant is quite easy. To be honest, I think it's the biggest reason why they keep me around." Aatos began to repeat the process at the next desk over.
Cethaz waited until Aatos had completed summoning another servant before she asked,
"Are you one of those wizards who can turn people into toads and crazy stuff like that?"
Aatos chuckled. "Oh, I just know a little bit of magic, I can't do anything that dramatic. Most elves know a few simple tricks like that."
"Is learning the spells hard?"
"Learning them isn't that tough, but casting them takes a bit of energy out of me. I can only summon three servants before I start to feel a bit tired, and I need a lot of energy to do my main job."
Cethaz said "What was that thing that you put between the scrolls?"
"That was a grain of sand, which is the payment for the job. They're quite valuable on some of the other planes."
He repeated his spell a third time in front of the third desk, and then he led Cethaz down a narrow pathway that led out of the scriptorium. Cethaz looked at Aatos. She had seen elves before in Zalfahan, when she had been patrolling in the elven neighborhoods, but she had never worked closely with any of them before. She noticed that Aatos had darker hair than most elves- it was a deep reddish-brown that reminded her a little of the robes that dwarven priests wore. He was so much taller and thinner than the dwarven men that she had grown up around but she couldn't say that he wasn't attractive, even if his clean-shaven face made him look awfully boyish. She also appreciated that he spoke Dwarvish like a native.
Cethaz followed Aatos through a door and another passageway and found herself in a small room that was filled with bookshelves on every wall. A desk sat in the middle, and Aatos took his place behind it.. "This is my main job here. I translate Dwarvish texts into Elvish, and they get sent back to Suoveli. My father is the duke of Kuhviisa and he sends the Imperial Library a chest full of treasure every year to get permission to do this."
"Your father is a duke? Does that mean you're going to be one yourself someday?"
"No, I have two older brothers so I'm not going to inherit the title, barring disaster. I don't really want to be duke anyway."
"You don't? Why not?"
"I don't want the responsibility of holding a title. I would rather spend time with my books, translating Dwarvish literature. That's where I feel comfortable."
Aatos began to peruse a Dwarvish scroll that was on the desk as he opened a book with blank pages. "Can you read?"
"I'm okay, my parents were some of the only literate people in the village where we lived so they made sure that I learned."
"You might be interested in some of the military histories I have, they're on the bottom shelf on the left wall."
"I'm more interested in what you're translating right now."
"Oh, this?" He motioned towards his scroll. "I'm working on a biography of Emperor Soroush. I find him quite the interesting figure, although the parts about him fighting in battles directly seem a bit self-serving."
