At this point, the Librarian dropped on her head.

Winkin the glove stitcher and Coster the apple seller discussed the play on the way home.

'The bit with the queen and the man with the asses ears was good,' said Winkin.

'Aye, it was.'

And the wall bit, too. When the man said "he is no crescent, and his horns are invisible within the circumference", I nearly widdled my breeches. I like a good joke, me.'

'Aye.'

'But I didn't understand why all those people in the fur and feathers and stuff were chased across the stage by the man in the hairy red costume, and why the fat men in the expensive seats all got up and on to the stage and why the idiot in the red dress was running around screaming about potatoes, whatever they are. While Puck was speaking at the end I definitely thought I could hear a fight going on.'

'Experimental theatre,' said Winkin.

'Good dialogue,' said Coster.

'And you've got to hand it to those actors, the way they kept going,' said Winkin.

Yeah, and I could have sworn there was another Quene up on stage,' said Coster, 'and she looked like a woman. You know, the one who was trying to strangle that man babbling about potatoes.'

'A woman on stage? Don't be daft,' said Winkin. 'Good play, though.' 'Yeah. I think they could cut out the chase sequence, though,' said Coster. 'And frankly I don't think you could get a girdle that big.' 'Yes, it would be dreadful if special effects took over,' said Winkin.

Wizards, like many large men, can be quite light on their feet. Rincewind was impressed. By the sound of it, they were right behind him as he sped along the path by the river.

'Best not to wait for a curtain call, I thought,' Ridcully panted.

'Did you see me ... wallop the Queen with a horseshoe?' wheezed the Dean.

'Yes ... pity it was an actor,' said Ridcully. 'The other one was the elf. Still, not a complete waste of a horseshoe.'

'But we certainly showed them, eh?' said the Dean.

'The history is completed,' said the voice of Hex, from Ponder's bouncing pocket. 'Elves will be viewed as fairies and such they will become. Over the course of several centuries belief in them will dwindle as they are moved into the realm of art and literature, which is where the remnant of them will subsequently exist. They will become a subject suitable for the amusement of children.

Their influence will be severely curtailed but will never die away completely.'

'Never?' panted Ponder, who was getting winded.

'There will always be some influence. Minds on this world are extremely susceptible.'

'Yes, but we've pushed imagination to the next stage,' puffed Ponder. 'People can imagine that the things they imagine are imaginary. Elves are little fairies. Monsters get pushed off the map.

You can't fear the unseen when you can see it.'

'There will be new kinds of monsters,' said Hex, from Ponder's pocket. 'Humans are very inventive in that respect.'

'Heads ... on ... spikes,' said Rincewind, who liked to save his breath for running.

'Many heads,' said Hex.

'There's always heads on spikes somewhere,' said Ridcully.

'The Shell Midden People didn't have heads on spikes,' said Rincewind.

'Yes, but they didn't even have spikes,' said Ridcully.

'You know,' wheezed Ponder, 'we could have just told Hex to move us directly to the opening into L-space ...

They landed on the wooden floor, still running.

'Can we teach him to do that on Discworld?' said Rincewind, after they'd picked themselves up from the heap by the wall.

'No! Otherwise what use would you be?' said Ridcully. 'Come on, let's go ...'

Ponder hesitated by the L-space portal. It was filled with dull, greyish light, and a distant view of mountains and plains of books.

'There's still elves here,' he said. 'They're persistent. They might find some way to—'

'Will you come on?' snapped Ridcully. 'We can't fight every battle.'

'Something could still go wrong, though.'

'Whose fault will that be now? No, come on.'

Ponder looked around, gave a little shrug, and stepped into the hole.

After a moment a hairy red arm came through and pulled more books through the hole, piling them up until it was a wall of books.

Brilliant light, so strong that it lanced out between the pages, flashed for a while somewhere in the heap.

Then it went dark. After a moment, a book slipped out of the pile, and it collapsed, the books tumbling to the floor, and there was nothing left but a bare wall.

And, of course, a banana.

MAY CONTAIN NUTS

We are the storytelling ape, and we are incredibly good at it.

As soon as we are old enough to want to understand what is happening around us, we begin to live in a world of stories. We think in narrative. We do it so automatically that we don't think we do it. And we have told ourselves stories vast enough to live in.

In the sky above us, patterns older than our planet and unimaginably far away have been fashioned in gods and monsters. But there are bigger stories down below. We live in a network of stories that range from 'how we got here' to 'natural justice' to 'real life'.

Ah, yes ... 'real life'. Death, who acts as a kind of Greek chorus in the Discworld books, is impressed by some aspects of humanity. One is that we have evolved to tell ourselves interesting and useful little lies about monsters and gods and tooth fairies, as a kind of prelude to creating really big lies, like 'Truth' and Justice'.

There is no justice. As Death remarks in Hogfather, you could grind the universe into powder and not find one atom of justice. We created it, and while we acknowledge this fact, nevertheless there is a sense in which we feel it's 'out there', big and white and shining. It's another story.

Because we rely so much on them, we love stories. We require them on a daily basis. So a huge service industry has grown up over several thousand years.

The basic narrative forms of drama -the archetypal stories -can all be found in the works of the ancient Greek playwrights: Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles ... Most of the dramatic tricks go back to ancient Greece, especially Athens. No doubt they are older than that, for no tradition starts in fully developed form. The 'chorus', a gaggle of bit-players who form a backdrop for the main action and in various ways reinforce it and comment on it, is of Greek or earlier origin. So is the main division of the form of a play, though not necessarily its substance, into comedy and tragedy. So, possibly, is the invention of the huge stuffed joke willy, always good for a laugh from the cheap seats.

The Greek concept of tragedy was an extreme form of narrative imperative: the nature of the impending disaster had to be evident to the audience and to virtually all of the players; but it also had to be evident that it was going to happen anyway, despite that. You were Doomed, as you should be -but we'll watch anyway, to see how interestingly you'll be Doomed. And if it sounds silly to watch a drama when you know the ending in advance, consider this: how likely is it, when you settle down to watch the next James Bond movie, that he won't defuse the bomb? In fact you'll be watching a narrative as rigid as any Greek drama, but you'll watch anyway to see how the trick is done this time.

In our story, Hex is the chorus. In form, our tale is comedy; in substance, it is closer to tragedy.

The elves are a Discworld reification of human cruelty and wickedness, they are evil incarnate because -traditionally -they have no souls. Yet in their various aspects they fascinate us, as do vampires and monsters and werewolves. It'd be a terrible event if the last jungle yields up its tiger, and so it would be, too, when the last forest yields up its werewolf (yes, all right, technically they don't exist, but we hope you know what we mean: it'd be a bad day for humanity when we stop telling stories).