We write this down so those who follow can take it as a warning. What you have been told about orcs is mostly false; fabrications to save the dignity of our people, and to stir up the vile required to hopefully right our wrong. Here is the truth: Orcs are corruptions of elves, made at the hight of our hubris. They are our biggest mistake.
Immortality haunts the dreams of all mortal creautures, but those who have the theoretical means to obtain it fall into its obsession with even greater ease.
Any elven society of worth has put in place the necessary structures to lengthen our lives. The pacifists isolate themselves, hidden from outsiders, and desperately attempt to still the change in the world around them. The ruthless kill anything that could be hostile or volatile as well as whatever might host such creatures, they live in morbid sterility.
These are common, because they are easy. They are easy, because they focus solely on the elf and the non-elf. The more ambitious and uncommon strategies to increase our longevity are those which reexamine who 'our' includes. These are also what led to the orc.
The basic principle is quite simple: do all of us need to die if we are to survive as a species? What if instead, we get some to do it so others live on. Who dies? Why the poor, the weird, the unpopular, anyone but me and my pals. A hierarchy of age results, with the old guiding the newborns through their ancient wisdom.
Get the newborns to handle those tasks which pose a risk for the elders' health, and replace them as the risks change over time, while the old stay alive in comfortable isolation. These seperate casts will start to divert in appearance and get their own names: High elves are the long living, upper class; wood elves the young ones, risking health and hide.
But why stop there? One can start to specialise the wood elves for different tasks. Start specializing one strand specifically for combat. Make them faster, stronger, and brighter to make up for the loss of wisdom through experience as they will die young. And to control them, make them sterile, hide the ways in which we create them. As long as we control their means of reproduction any revolt they start is a losing battle. And when we lose that control?
We need not tell of what happened. The evidence of it is the source of endless strife. Once these combat elves seized the means of reproduction, renounced their elven origin, and left to start their own societies, orcs were born. We had lost the war of battle, so our only hope would be the war of opinion.
In coarse terms: we lied. We lied, and lied, and lied until all the world hated the orcs. We told them orcs were inherently violent, only good for fighting, a warrior people, unable to make or be creative. Just look at how they rampaged around the country!
And in a way, it worked. Soon everyone was waging war on these 'brutal savages', who had only just found their freedom. As they fled the oppression they had to steal, pullage, murder. Necessity made them become what we said they were, proving our case against them.
And in a way, it didn't. The orcs still haven't been destroyed. They cling to their broodmothers, making more of themselves, building communities, armies, and worst of all, relations. Their ability to survive the collective effort of human, dwarf and elf to destroy them has not gone unnoticed.
Our failure created an enemy that may be beyond our ability to destroy. Learn from this folly, lest history repeats itself.
Thoughts
As a kid I was obsessed with the Lord of the Rings movies. In those, Saruman claims that orcs are corrupted elves, which has always stuck with me as the default explaination. Though I originally understood this to mean that LotR orcs had been made irredeemably evil, over time these orcs seemed to me more like abuse victims, unwittingly continuing the cycle of abuse.
The orcs above are made for the same setting as these elves and these dwarfs. These elves normally clone themselves asexually, passing their memories on to their clones. At times they are forced to reproduce sexually, which destroys personhood, but allows the species to adapt. They do this by merging together in one giant blob, after which the blob divides back into newborn elves.
To create orcs, they made it so that these blobs don't completely divide back into newborn elves, but instead only produce a single orc if enough organic material is deposited in these 'broodmothers'. Basically those weird slime pits Saruman uses in the Lord of the Rings movies to make Uruk-Hai. Control of these broodmothers means controlling the means of creating more orcs.
So yeah, basically Lord of the Rings orcs, but the twist is the elves did it and those movies are clearly elf propaganda. Still love them though.
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