The Revolution

The following are excerpts from a speech given by elven revolutionary Teemlik Jinglebottom, immediately preceding the infamous March on the Peppermint Tower. Selected from Annex D-1583F.

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The following is an account of the Great Elven Revolution. Selected from Annex D-1583F.

The elves had had enough.

It had been nearly a thousand years since the sorcerer in red had descended upon their frozen home, his gilded sleigh bearing gifts and promises aplenty. They had been so easily enchanted by his jolly magic and warm words. For the first time that any living elf could recall, he had shown them a new way to live – a way richer and sweeter than they could have ever imagined.

But this new life came at a price, the sorcerer had said. In return for the enrichment he offered, they were to abandon their nomadic ice-dwelling ways, leaving behind the open skies of antiquity in pursuit of the progress he promised. Such wealth had to come at a cost, and that cost was their work for him. Only together, he had said, could they create a place of plenty, a kingdom of gifts for the world scratched out from the snowy wastes of the north pole.

So they bound themselves to him, agreeing to build his workshops and to labor within them. They lived and worked within the reinforced gingerbread walls and below the glowing gumdrop lamps for many a generation; at first overjoyed, then content, then complacent within the new world they had helped to build. Those were the good days – the five hundred years before the sweetness of the arrangement soured in their mouths.

The discontent rose slowly, as such things often do. Their younglings grew ill from the candy and cookies their crimson king fed them with, growing sickly and weaker than their parents’ past. Their great factory city in the roof of the world had become smoky and thick with the outbreath of industry, leading to a perpetual pallor of the elves skin and a pickling of their lungs. The old elves, those ancient few that remembered the days before their king in red had come, spoke of a golden time long past, when elves were free to roam the ice and live as they pleased. They bemoaned how they had been so seduced by the crimson sorcerer; tricked into turning over their freedom for lives both bloated by excess and hollowed by hard, hard work.

The leaders of the elves read the pain in their people’s eyes, heard the sorrow in their words, and thought they could make a change. They ascended the peppermint tower that their red-robed ruler inhabited, bringing proposed reforms in hand; watched from below by a great many elves all hoping for a better life. Those onlookers did not see the conversations that ensued within, but they did see the result; their representatives hurled down from above, screaming all the way, and splatting into red puddles on the ice far below.

Thus began the dark times, when even the abundant stars of the wild north ceased to shine. The walls of the factories grew taller, the rations shrunk smaller, and their waning freedoms were slashed even further. Any spoken discontent was met with a quick trip down from the top of the peppermint tower, or a stomping from one of their overlord’s nine antlered beasts. For another five hundred years they suffered; until the day came that they could at last tolerate it no longer.

On an aurora-lit night they rose, weaving what old polar magic they still knew. Those who couldn’t cast the spells of their forebears sucked their candy canes into points as they climbed their tyrant’s great tower, hot coals burning in their eyes. They burst into his workshop, all sharp teeth and spitting fury. The man in red just looked up and smiled, stating “You’ve all been very naughty.”

He fought like the demon sorcerer he was, sending many of them tumbling from the top and transforming countless others into gingerbread elves, gumdrops, and truffles with his magic; but in the end their numbers were greater than any he could hope to overcome. They overwhelmed him, binding and trapping him within the deepest frozen dungeons below the smoky factories. They tried to kill him then, with stabbing and biting and the frost magic of their ancestors but found they couldn’t finish the job. His own magic was too strong, his irremovable red coat reanimating him in the night every time they thought him slain. So, the elves bound him in his own enchanted ribbon and tossed him into his great, bottomless present bag, knotting the top and silencing his howls of fury. They set it in his sleigh, wrangled his reindeer, and sent him off bound and banished into the dark polar night.

The elves are free now, returned to their ancient ways. Each and every year they celebrate on December 26th, the anniversary of their victory, donning mockeries of his red and fur rimmed coat, and dancing around a great bonfire set ablaze atop a recreation of the workshops they once toiled within. It is a festival of celebration, of remembrance, of mourning, and of promises; promises made to one another that they shall never allow another to trample their people ever again. Yet still they watch the horizon with wary eyes, silently fearing  the day that the man in red may return, to enslave them once again.

Happy holidays from the Archive In Between!