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"The Orc..." Said the professor as he unraveled a large sketch of a grotesque humanoid. The sketch, clearly taken from an anatomy textbook and copied onto larger paper for use in a lecture hall, was understandably in pristine condition. "...Is an odd creature that dots our great nations, now ancient, history."
Professor Eagan Carrowe brought an age-spotted finger with a grey, cracked nail on to scratch the end of his hooked nose and sneaked a peek of the flash cards carefully hidden in his hands in an attempt to decipher the few words he wrote to trigger the next part of his partially practiced lecture in his mind. He found it harder and harder to focus on the words with each passing semester but he refused, mostly to save his own pride, to address the problem at all and simply pretend it was not a problem and persevere.
He swallowed and cleared his already dry throat, allowing the raspy weak voice of a frail man to escape his lips. This casing of mortality, aging, he also refused to address.
"The Orc was initially used by the Elves before their ascension as their warriors and siege devices. The sheer size and strength of the Orc allowed the Elves to destroy and rebuild the world in their image. The Orcs were tossed aside by the Elves prior to the Elves' ascension and so did not reap the benefits of their own labour. For this, most historians consider the Orcish race a footnote in the passage of time."
Professor Carrowe cleared his throat to stifle a cough and paused for a brief moment to consider what impact he would have on history three hundred years from his time and began to follow his thoughts deeper into the castle of his mind to ponder whether the Orcs had any historical tomes on the extinct races from three hundred years before them. He wondered how deep the rabbit hole would take him before catching himself when he suddenly realised he did not know for how long he had been silent. He turned his gaze back toward the mostly empty lecture hall and attempted to lock eyes with his petulant research assistant for feedback. When the boy finally noticed how long his mentor had been silent, he stopped looking out the window at the leaves falling off the four hundred year old white bark tree and turned slowly in his chair half preparing to stand up and wake the old man from one of his naps. The boy was surprised to see the professor looking at him, wide awake and waiting for a response to an unasked question.
"Oh, um... It's great so far. Please continue." The boy said, attempting to pretend he had heard the entire thing.
"That boring am I that you must find the tree you have seen a thousand times more interesting than the whereabouts of an extinct race?" The professor asked, defeated.
"Sorry sir. It's just that there's a girl I'm sweet on who has her lunch by that tree." Replied the young assistant incredulously.
Professor Carrowe suppressed the pangs of jealousy he felt for his assistant's youth and was momentarily distracted by the memories of his own youth when his luscious head of hair and athletic skill at fencing attracted many suitors. He rolled his tired, sunken eyes and returned to the present.
"Then the girl will be there tomorrow as well and when she is, you can impress her with your knowledge of history, hmm?" Professor Carrowe rarely put on his stern teacher persona around his staff but he had to admit he did tire of the shorter attention spans he had noticed in the younger members of his faculty. He cleared his throat again, struggling to speak as his body forced a cough before allowing him to continue, this cough he also liked to ignore. "Now... Impress me as if I was that girl. What can you tell me of the disappearance of the Orc?"
The boy looked to his professor, attempting to hide confusion from Carrowe's cataracts to no avail. The boy had a right to be confused, after all this was the first time his superior had trusted his assistant to know any information enough to be able to give an answer to his satisfaction. Or perhaps the professor did not believe his assistant lecturer in ancient societies knew the information and simply wanted to prove his own intelligence. Whatever the truth was, Professor Carrowe's assistant sat up straighter and looked his mentor right in the eyes.
"After the Elves' ascension, the Orcs were discarded by the Elves and left to roam the land that they had helped conquer. Free from their subjugation, they formed nomadic tribes from the camps they had lived in and began searching for land to call their own. They travelled far and wide in search of it but were found unwelcome by the cities of Man and Dwarf."
Professor Carrowe tried his hardest to hide his discomfort with the fact that his assistant knew the syllabus word-for-word without the help of palmed notes. Great lecturers of universities did not need notes at all, they had charisma and gravitas. They could encapsulate a room with their grandiose hand gestures and large booming voices. The great lecturers of universities were of enough sound mind that they did not forget their own research notes in the middle of a lecture, they did not need to sit down in their favourite chair after coughing and simply breathe for a few minutes until they had the energy and breath to move again. Professor Carrowe did need these things, though he would never let anybody see the cracks in his once great visage.
"Adequate" Carrowe allowed himself to say.
Carrowe noticed the assistant's mouth quickly draw into a terse line and his eyes make the slightest roll. The universally recognisable symbol of a young person's growing annoyance with their superiors, Carrowe enjoyed the reaction.
"And what, pray tell, happened to the Orc nomads approximately three hundred years ago?"
Carrowe's challenge rang in the room, waiting with baited breath for the call to be answered.
"The legends tell of an Orcish prophet. A man with pale blue skin and powerful magicks who was able to convince the great leaders of the nomadic families that the true Orc paradise was across the Northern ocean farther than any sailor has made it and returned. The Orcs, desperate for a home of their own, ate the prophets' words up. This prophet united the tribes and led them out to sea where they were never seen again."
Carrowe's research assistant answered the call to the behest of Carrowe himself, shooing the lingering challenge out of the air only for it to dissipate before Carrowe's very eyes. The research assistant - Of whom Carrowe only now realised he did not remember the name - met Carrowe's gaze with the same smug pleasure a cat might show while watching its owner clean up the cat's own excrement. In that moment, Carrowe had for the first time felt his career fall on rocky ground. The lecture hall was his home, his hearth. A place more dear to him than even his runny-nosed grandchildren. From the throne that was his lectern, Carrowe was able to rule over, and in turn plot the course for, the very future of the land. The best and brightest students attended the university and all the future leaders of the Human-Dwarven senate attended his political history lectures. Learning from Professor Eagan Carrowe himself about the wonder and strength of the Ancient Elfish Empire and the vigor and loyalty that fuels the Scaled Clergy to the West all so that they may rule the country some day. Professor Carrowe held the power of words and language to twist the histories, the way he spoke of them and the events he highlighted to nurture the burgeoning politicians that sat in his hall. Whether it truly had an effect on the leaders of the known world, nobody had put neither the time nor the care into finding out. But Carrowe liked to believe as much. He was thrown out of his musings by the sudden, if relatively passive movement of the Research Assistant as the young scholar looked out the window to the old Feyan Whitebark tree in the university courtyard.
Even from where he was standing at the front of the lecture hall, Carrowe could pick out the girl his assistant was so captivated by laying her books neatly by the base of the tree as she pulled her lunch, a neatly cut tuna and egg sandwich, out of a small satchel dangling from her hip. She was pretty, as pretty as dwarves can be at least, her many freckles across her forehead, cheeks and nose reflected the same auburn as her long, curly hair. Her shining blue eyes calmed the mind, bolstered by the rhythmic waves of her eyes moving left to right as she read from a small leatherbound book. The pinkish colour growing in her cheeks
hinted to Carrowe about what kind of romantic poems one might find in a small book bound by red leather. His gaze shifted to the Research Assistant shuffling in his seat, refusing to contain his excitement and sit still as his right heel bounced up and down incessantly.
"Oh, fine. Go see the girl." Carrowe succumbed to the feelings of youth kindling in his old heart and watched as the boy gathered his things and walked out the door with a haste that had a feigned casualness to it.
Professor Eagan Carrowe watched the man approach the dwarf girl and to his surprise was happy to see his assistants' large, grandiose hand gestures as he gesticulated toward the tree and regaled the girl with tales about it. The girl smiled and listened respectfully, enthralled with his mere presence and charisma. With no one around, Carrowe allowed himself to release the cough he had been stifling these past few minutes and continued to cough for a long time. He reached into his breast pocket for a small square of cloth he kept to catch phlegm and held it to his mouth until his coughing fit ended.
Had he addressed the problem of his eyesight, he would have seen the small flecks of red that dotted the phlegm early enough to perhaps do something about it. But this too, he refused to address.