The Worst Kobold Chapter 19: Storyweaver Interlude #5 - The Disappearance of the Elves

Read chapter 19 of The Worst Kobold by Thalaas on NovelPedia.

Before we get to the jailbreak scene? I think we need to learn a bit about the elves. No groaning! I mean, why would you want to hear about exciting prison escapes, magical catastrophes, heroic sacrifices and climatic battles, when we could have a history lesson? We briefly mentioned the enigmatic elves during this story. You may know them by different names, depending on where you’re from. Some called them the Fay, others called them Will o’ the Wisps. Records on them are spotty at best, even about what exactly the elves were. There’s some evidence the elves were human in appearance, taller, slimmer, with slightly pointed ears. Others say they were far more lanky, with pale blue skin and hair as white as ivory. Another theory states they weren’t even material, and existed as living balls of mana. I believe the last one is the most far-fetched. Mana energy constructs wouldn’t need things like buildings and vehicles, and the lands are peppered with the remnants of the elvish civilization. No one knows what happened to the elves, except that no one had seen one in thousands of years. They were never as numerous as the other races, but they seemed to have spread their influence to every bit of land and sea. One would always stumble on some long lost artifact buried deep in the desert sands, or located in a glacier on the tallest peak. One thing we do know, is the elves were far more advanced than any other society, even before the great decline of magic. They had towers that reached hundreds of feet into the sky. They built their homes in the most hostile of places, from volcanoes to the ocean floor. There is even some evidence the elves had floating sky palaces that moved on wind currents. This made archaeology one of the most lucrative trades in the world. The elves had superior building materials, so even their simple tools fetched a high price. But the real gold was in their magical devices. Our kingdoms did learn how to make some impressive machines with mana gems, such as flying skyships to semi-sentient golems. But the elves seemed to be on another level compared to us when it came to magical creations. There are tales of the elves having skyships that could travel the world in under a day. Or even having a network of portals connecting far and wide. They had golems so powerful, they could move mountains, yet were as smart and aware as you and me. Most of their creations had faded and crumbled due to time, but every now and then, a new one is found. The northern kingdom of Khanahda unearthed a machine that controlled the very weather. They had almost a century of mild winters and storm free summers, until the device powered down for ever. The Ashen Kingdom itself had found a sentient plant golem over a century ago that seemed to be as smart as you or me. Sadly, it appeared to have been stolen one day. If you do find the creature? There is still a huge reward for it, though I doubt you’d get a reward for the thief as, most likely, they are long dead. The problem of finding elven artifacts is two-fold. The first reason is that the magical technology of the elves is still so far beyond us. We can barely understand it, let alone fix or duplicate it. It wasn’t always clear what some devices did, even if they were fully powered. Maybe that fancy orb of lights was just a children’s toy, or maybe it was a controller for some golem death machine. Who could say? A new find could increase a kingdom’s power tenfold, or just be a particularly pretty paperweight. More importantly though, as we will find out shortly, is that many of the elvish artifacts were extremely dangerous. Not deliberately so, we believe. The elves didn’t seem to have much in the way of weaponry, but even simple trinkets could be deadly. In more ways than one. One complicated elvish device was found to be able to control an ocean’s worth of water. You could see how this used to do anything from water farmlands, to stopping floods. One queen used it to wipe her neig