Volume 1: Before the Battle
The Elf Queen, who’s eaten nothing for a week but the wadding from benzedrine inhalers, has sex with her dwarf, Cootchie Cootie, in the back seat of his bombed-up 1951 Fleetline Cadillac, while Tolkien and C. S. Lewis look on in passive-aggressive disavowal. It’s a favour for a friend. After that, for the founding volume anyway, we envisage Zap Comic dynamics on a lean-burn version of The Revenger’s Tragedy – the usual tale of poor choices, low ground clearance and self-medication. Emotional palette from A Glastonbury Romance, prose from Destination: Moon and worldbuilding from one of those ads where if you buy the right mobile phone it causes inconvenient buildings to fold themselves away in front of the user so she can get to some other stuff she wants to consume without ever walking round a corner or even, apparently, consulting the phone itself. The world – or perhaps the King – will be called Eldrano, and not as we first proposed Eldranol, which turns out to be already trademarked for a bovine mastitis application.
Volume 2: The Lost Palaces
Eldrano the Elf Lord is wheeled to bed every night on a reinforced composite and titanium gurney. Two or three attendants lift the thick laps of flesh and lovingly clean out the sores down in the creamy, lardy folds where his genitals still nestle. He has lost some of his right foot to diabetes. The Queen left him a hundred years ago, with her dwarf, for the North. But none of this will ever spoil his dream of finishing an ultra-marathon. At night in a secondary world of his secondary world the Elf Lord runs, barefoot and effortless, across the Great Erg Desert (see Map), wearing only the traditional leather kirtle, while his favourite daughter keeps watch over his sleeping body with its faint, calming smells of ketones and antifungal cream. She’s a feisty urban vampire princess but her heart is so in the right place! She can’t help but wonder how things will go with them when the Horde arrives at the Gate next Wednesday. Tomorrow, in a final attempt to reach out to his people, the Elf Lord will feature kingdomwide in the Don’t Do This To Yourself segment of Supersize vs Superskinny; while for the Princess it’s a Kickass Battle Looks Last Chance on QVC.
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Volume 3: Out of Elf Land
Over time the Elf Queen’s underjaw has thickened, while her chin has remained small and pointed, her nose turned up, so that you can see, embedded in fat, the adolescent she was fifteen hundred years ago. In her garden she keeps papery silver poppies and an iris which smells of chocolate; but since the Fall of Llyngitgothgethreal, the rest of her life has been half-warm meals in cold rooms. Though he still carries the single strand of her hair she gave him in the grim days before the battle of Clotsore Moor, the dwarf knows that their relationship is over. So when she says, in a final rather desperate move to regain the initiative, that she has decided to go away for a week, he only shrugs.
“I need to get some space,” she tells him. “Great,” he says vaguely. “Get right away,” she insists. “Everyone needs space,” he says.
She leaves the room but calls back, “I can’t think what’s wrong with you.”
The dwarf can’t bring himself to say. As they fail to get older, elves cling on to peak moments and try to repeat them, squeezing a little less out each time until they are only going through the motions. To an outsider this makes their whole society seem grotesque, caricatured, desperate. He doesn’t want to be a party to it any more. He wants to be back underground, where the real things are happening.
Volume 4: Last Transmission from the Deep Halls
… saying, once those outsiders get in your tortured halls… I’m saying we didn’t have command of the vast fictions of the day… The city wasn’t, in the end, where those of us who lived there thought it was. We had already lost it in all senses of that word… All we knew of this place was the news… the halls are aware that – in the end – they can never know what, exactly, the plot was. It’s only silence after that. Back at the beginning there’s the tapping sound, like metal on stone… then the call signs, several of them, very amplified and confused… cries in the halls… a cruel few words and then, “We no longer know which way to face.” The halls are still aware… What if the city didn’t “fall”? What if nothing “fell”? Nothing was lost but existed just alongside everything else, fifty years later in the rubble by a farm at the flat end of nowhere… who could write this… everyone has a different story to sell… call signatures in rooks, fresh plough, old silence: “We don’t know what to do. Everything is the alongside of something else…” Minor players gesture helplessly… signals hard to make out in the chaos as the big institutions go down… everyone desperate now.
Volume 5: The Royal Estate
The palace turned out to be a stuffy, disappointing warren that just reeked of dogs. The Queen showed us around lots of small low-ceilinged rooms with fitted carpets, not what we were looking for at all. No real Elf Land values or internal architecture left, except for that rather gorgeous river frontage. She kept saying that she and her husband had been going to make this or that improvement, but everything was interrupted when “They came back”. At one point she said, “we were going to sell up, go to the Deep West, but they came back. They came back, you see, and what can you do?” She never said who or what they were. There was an old labrador sleeping outside the back door. They also had a really quite smelly chihuahua, always gazing up at you, and when you petted it, “Oh she’ll go to anyone, that one. When you’re shopping she’ll go straight in your bag.” Meanwhile, honestly, Eldrano just vegetated there in the front room, watching cable TV on satellite and in the end we decided no matter how close it was to the Evening Harbours it just wasn’t for us.