One day – it had been perhaps months since I’d been travelling with the Orcs – I saw Jebediah about to speak up, with the now familiar glint in his eyes as he looked at me, the glint I learned to recognize all too well in my time alongside him, that let me know he was going to make fun of me once more.
I cut him off. “And you - You’re too proud, too conceited to accept that Elves may be good people too! You think you’re better than me, but where has your revolution gotten you? You make grand speeches, sure, and you rally people, but what have you achieved? You speak of a time past, of your people lost, but worry about the present for once! You think I can’t help you, you say you don’t need me in the revolution, but you’ve achieved more with me at your side here in months than you’ve done in years by yourself!” I yelled out, right in front of him and the council.
Jebediah looked at me for a moment, but he showed no emotion. He endured my words. Then he breathed in, and for a moment I thought he might lunge at me for my transgressions. Instead, he calmly turned to one of his friends and motioned for him to bring forward his musket.
“Are you going to pick it up?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you want to prove you have our interests at heart, that this is your fight too, then pick up the musket and join us fully.”
I looked at the weapon. It’s not that I’d never handled a weapon – I’d used a bow plenty of times before to hunt back in my homeland, but… a musket was a whole different thing.
Jebediah challenged my gaze.
“I thought not,” he said. “You claim you want to help us, you say you are on our side, but when it comes down to what matters, you would never die for us. You will go back to your cozy life in the glades, while we sacrifice our own down in the ditches. And that is why I believe you, but I don’t listen to you.”
Do you vibe with the adventures of Jebediah the Orc?
(he was originally named Jebediah because settled populations would use their settlers’ names, and these were originally humans and Jebediah is the quintessential medieval guy name, but I changed it to elves).
I like the writing and the dialogue, don’t love the name though. I understand the reasoning but it just doesn’t feel very “fantasy-ish”, even for a fantasy human. Is Christianity a thing in this universe? Because if it’s not i don’t think that name would exist. Just my opinion.
No I agree, I originally wrote one of the excerpts super quick and had to pick a name for him and I thought what’s the most medievally name I can think of? But it kinda grew on me since then lol
When writing things inspired by the medieval period i always like to ask myself “whose medieval era?”, because there are big cultural differences depending on whether you’re looking at western Europe, eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, etc., they each had their own distinct medieval period. And if you’re going with Europe then you need to remember that it was a period where Christianity and the church were the biggest cultural, ideological and political force by far. In a fantasy world with an entirely different religion though, all of that would be different, so you would not expect to see biblical names. No, Davids or Johns, or Lukes or Marys, etc. etc. Instead i would maybe look to draw names from pre-Christian cultures, or world build in such a way that you think about what kinds of names each race and culture would have based on their characteristics and history, and invent your own.
Soon after I first arrived, Jebediah took me to a human village. I didn’t particularly care to go, and he didn’t force me to, but it’s not like I had anywhere else I could be in this unfamiliar land.
There, we walked through the fields for a while. The local humans didn’t seem to care much about us, and went about their day unbothered. After some time, we left and went back to our horses.
“I don’t understand,” I finally said as we were saddling up the horses.
“What do you not understand?”
“I don’t understand why you brought me here.”
“I wanted to show you how people live here,” Jebediah said, a hint of laughter in his voice.
“Yes, they share four houses between themselves and tend to the fields, so what?”
“This is the village. These people live and work here. This is their life.”
“Well, this is very different from my homeland. Where I come from, we have large houses, light at night, and --”
“And glass window panes, and beer in clean mugs and other luxuries, I know.”
“But you said you’ve never been to an elven town?” I asked quizzically.
“I’ve never been. My kind isn’t allowed there.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Who do you think lights your pillars at night? Who cleans your mugs? Who builds your houses?”
I looked at Jebediah with a raised eyebrow.
“We do, elf. Except you never see us, you never meet us. You wake up in the morning with everything already handled for you – your mugs cleaned, your bedsheets washed – but someone has to do it. And it’s not you. Where do you think all of your wealth comes from? It comes from here, from these people. If you miss your mirrors and your jewelry, we can go to the lord’s manor, if he’ll let us in. But you won’t find it in this village.”
“Magic!” Jebediah chuckled at my words. Again, though he didn’t say it, he let me know he found my remarks amusing, and let me talk only so he could internally laugh at me. “Is that what they call it nowadays? We used to call it life. The essence of the trees that build our homes, the essence of the river fish that feed our people. We used to have ‘magic’ too, until your people forced it out of us. Suddenly we were not allowed to practice our ‘magic’, our way of life. We were not even allowed to practice yours. But you - you could still have your ‘magic’. And you used it, against us.” Neither of us spoke up after this for the remainder of the trip to the village.
“Do you think,” Jebediah let out with his distinct passion – not the kind he reserved for humans, but the kind he let out only in the forbidden speeches he made to the Orcs of the slum-- before he composed himself, “Do you think you will solve our problems for us, after having been here for a month? Do you think we haven’t tried all your ideas already? Who even asked you, human? You won’t save us, we will save us”
“No,” said Jebediah, looking at me with the annoyed look a grandfather might give to an unruly child, “This is the name your kind gave me after they erased my culture. We struggled, and we lost, and we accept that reality. But we also know to bide our time. Will you be so lucky next time, I wonder?”
