The Martial Unity

“Tell me,” he began with a nonchalant tone. “This vessel of yours, is it fertile?”

She turned towards him with an uncharacteristic blank expression. “…Eh?”

“Your main body is a tree, is it not?” he continued with a composed tone. “But your vessel, from what I understand, is able to retain elven biological function, including reproductive abilities; is that not the case?”

“…That is indeed the case, Your Majesty,” Mother Alicia replied knowingly. “While our true bodies are essentially able to recreate any and everything that our original elven bodies could do, we Mothers of Nature find that it is useful to ’return’ to our elven forms frequently so that we don’t lose touch with elvenity. While more adept elves can communicate and connect with us even in our tree forms through their Hymn of Mind and Soul, most elves are not masters of nature manipulation like the most adept among us are. In order to connect with the common woman, we adopt our elven forms to partake in the daily lives of our fellow elves and everything that comes with it, including reproduction during mating season.”

“Mating season, is it? That’s quite fascinating,” Emperor Rael remarked with an interesting tone.

“Over eons, we elves evolved a seasonal reproduction strategy for birth to coincide with spring for a surplus of food,” Mother Alicia explained. “Because our pregnancies last an entire year, we mate during spring to give birth during spring to maximize the chances of survival of our offspring. Of course, this is irrelevant in the modern era where we have gained nigh absolute mastery of our environment and our continent with as much food as we could ever need.”

“Fascinating,” Emperor Rael remarked. “And I believe elves are polyamorous in your sexual relationships, according to the recent information exchanges that we have conducted.”

“Indeed.” Mother Alicia nodded. “We have multiple partners over our long lifetimes of nearly a thousand years. We also view love differently from how humans do. We often conclude our romantic relationships with a partner after birth and seek out new mates for the next mating season. In our civilization, love is not eternal, but something that we cultivate to eventually manifest and culminate as a baby, who is collectively raised in our community. We then move on to other mates and once more cultivate love to eventually manifest as a new elf in this world, and so on and so forth. We view love and reproduction as communal rather than as a relationship between merely two individuals.”

Emperor Rael nodded with an intrigued expression. “The differences in our conceptualizations of love and our reproductive norms are, well, more than a little substantial, which makes what I have in mind a little bit more complex and challenging.”

Mother Alicia raised a knowing eyebrow. “And what do you have in mind, Emperor Rael?”

He gazed at her with a serious expression.

“A monogamous marriage, of course. One between you and me.”

A proposal of marriage was one that was supposed to be quite romantic, ordinarily, but Emperor Rael’s impassive seriousness didn’t leave any room for heart-fluttering, even if he was extremely attractive by both human and elven standards.

“…You wish to seal the alliance between human and elven civilizations with ’marriage?’” She spoke the word as if the very concept of it was very alien to her. “We are not unaccustomed to the concept of a political relationship to reinforce an alliance or a friendship. However, we have discovered that incompatibility in our sociocultural and even sociogenetic conceptualizations of sexual relations can often impede such political relationships.”

“I have no doubt about that, considering everything that we have learned about elven sexuality and love,” Emperor Rael remarked. “However, there is merit in attempting to pursue a marriage between leaders of our civilizations. Historically, alliances reinforced with marriages that yield progeny are about forty-three percent less likely to crumble. The more marriages and the more children, the better. In such circumstances, both sides are more committed to solving disputes and conflicts and compromising to maintain the alliance than they would be otherwise.”

Mother Alicia raised an eyebrow.

“Are you afraid that our alliance will be severed in the future?”

“I would be foolish not to take measures to ensure that it doesn’t happen, if nothing else,” Emperor Rael replied calmly. “Dark elven and light elven civilizations were sister civilizations until very recently, and eons of history were unable to prevent the fissuring of your two civilizations. I suspect that part of it is because, despite your close proximity and massive cultural overlap, your two civilizations are reproductively isolated from each other, hence the two broader racial strains of light and dark elf.”

“…I suppose you are correct,” Mother Alicia heaved a small sigh of exhaustion. “Perhaps if we interbred more and made for a racial spectrum among elves, then we could have had a united, greater elven civilization. But the differences in temperament between light and dark elves are not small, and that is what has exacerbated the problem to the degree that it has.”

“It requires concerted compromise from both sides,” Emperor Rael remarked with a knowing tone. “I am willing to compromise when it comes to a political marriage between myself and you, or perhaps some other Mother of Nature if you are not personally inclined. I can adjust my mentality to suit your conceptualizations of love if you do not wish to reproduce without love and emotional intimacy. But in turn, you will need to compromise on pursuing a polyamorous relationship.”

She tilted her head as she gazed at him with a complicated expression. “Is that unacceptable to you as a human?”

“Not as a human,” Emperor Rael remarked. “But as an Emperor among humans. I cannot allow my wife to engage in other sexual relationships. It would, for better or worse, ravage my prestige and lose me tremendous face. Monogamy is by far the norm in human civilization, and that is a reality that constrains the kind of relationships that I can have. I can have many wives as Emperor, but my wives can only have one husband.”