(updated as of  10 - 6 - 99)
 

Sun and shadow moved over the damp, soft, emerald grass the day Elina discovered the mercenary knight.  He had settled beneath a tree beside the river .. crossed the ankles of his ruddy boots at the very edge of the mirror pool and bowed his head to sleep.  His mount, the same .. it's long, chestnut head very close to the ground, the rose scented summer breeze moving fair lengths of hair over it's massive hooves.

Elina was immediately fascinated.  A wild elf, a masterful healer, mother of a fine son .. a delicate, sparrowboned face .. her body so slender and frail as to be wraith-like.  A wealth of baby-fine hair fell to her narrow waist, a cornsilk gold.  Shorter coils of it drifted close to her tear shaped face -- eyes the color of new leaves, the delicate points of her ears adorned with tiny hoops of silver.  A woman her creator surely had doted on, she stood .. behind a Tanglewood tree, marvelling at this manboy in his sleep.

The man was clad in tarnished armor.  Fine spatterings of dried gore across his chest plate, heavier on his thighs .. his supple boots nearly worn through.  They were a tarnished red with blood.  His hair was as red -- a rich, dark mane of it that hung to veil his face from view.  Large hands .. calloused, blistered, rough .. lengthly fingers resting against the ground, twitching as he dreamt.  Proud, broad shoulders slumping in rest;  Elina knew he answered to no general.  Regal even in rest.

Slight and small, she stole across the ivory bridge.  The tiny bells ringing her ankles sang .. a melody that wasn't enough to wake him.  He was having a nightmare.  Soft groans from his mouth, tears to find their way down the plates of metal formed to his thighs .. taking filth with them, leaving only the shimmering, clean shine of the armor beneath.  It was this she touched first.  These tiny, clean trails.

The soldier startled awake;  he raised his head and drew a dagger from the bracer surrounding his right wrist .. but it was only she, gazing at him.  Not an enemy, nor a friend.  A stranger with eyes that knew every facet of his despair, his fear, his pain, his lonliness.  He took deep draughts of breath and stared into these eyes.  Weary fingers dropped the dagger.  She cradled his face between her hands and cried with him.

A considerably different Elina stumbled through the forest several months later.  Bright blood now stained her filmy skirts as well, her hands .. in her arms a bundle of coarse cotton.  The child was quiet.

The gore was old.  A few days, perhaps a week.  The healer's delicate face was wasted, old, unrecognizable ..  twisted with grief and a breed of agony she could share only with the towering trees.  She fell to her knees at the edge of a wide wagon trail and whispered soft things to the tiny face hidden within the blanket.  Wetting it's frail cheeks with her resigned tears, passing the pad of her small thumb over it's forhead.  Then setting it into the grass where it stayed as she staggered back into the forest .. disappearing into the same twisting light and shadow that the baby was borne into.

It was then that the baby wailed.

The wagon trail remained vacant and quiet for several hours .. the trees kept the girl child company, sheltered her from a light spring rain.  It's voice nearly hoarse, reduced to half hearted hiccups as a distant vehicle at last sent it's rattle into the forest.  As it neared the child raised it's voice plaintively -- and as though by some force the wagon and it's driver slowed.  It stopped;  a man swung down to the ground from it's seat.

He was tall and thick about the waist, and having not yet had his spring bath he was a sight and a stench, grease from his last meal and all of the other meals before that staining the front of his tunic.  Coming to stand over the child, he rubbed at his beard and bent .. pushing aside the blanket.  Even as he scowed at the discovery of it's gender, he was unsettled by the sensation that it was calling to him with it's mind.  Pleading with him.  Raising a brow, the man Yana would never call her father raised her up into the curve of one meaty arm and strode with her back to the wagon.  Together, they arrived in town.

Yana's first years of life at the Yellow Dog Inn was, at best, unpleasant.  The man had brought the baby back to his home of whores, thieves, and ale.  She swept after these and brought them their meals, tended to the beds they slept in and to the fire that kept them warm.  By the fall of her fourteenth year she was cooking for them as well, pouring them their tepid alcohol .. but it was in that season as well that the half elf came to bloom.  Her slight form of no more than five feet came into it's legacy of fragile beauty.  And suddenly the thick lashes that framed her eyes were bringing stares back to them .. men and women began to ask how much the girl was, just as they asked him how much his other girls were.  Very soon after concocting a price, Yana was no longer merely a maid for such people .. she was one of them.

The man only sold her once the first evening.  She never forgot him, a soldier not a great deal different than her father in occupation;  but in appearance and temperment, he could have never been .. deemed a worthy human being.  The girl's untrained empathic senses were drowned with his pleasure in her pain, the sensation .. the most exquisite of tortures, floundering in the ecstasy of her own rapist.  Again the next night, twice in the next .. and onward, through her ninteenth year.

It was in the winter of this year that the girl saw the snow fall as it had never fallen before.  Blanketing the ground with it's cold, feathery finery .. she watched it from her bedroom window as the latest of her lovers slept in the bed behind her, snoring softly in his sleep.  It snowed through that day and into the next .. the inn was empty that evening.  She wove by the light of the fire, humming a sailor's ballad someone had taught her while she had still dreamed dreams .. A single traveller then, pushed his way into the common room.

Her pale eyes rose at the sound of the wind howling into the room .. snowflakes turned and danced across the floorboards, the fire bowing with the force of the incoming gale.  He shoved the door closed and shook the fine, melting flakes of winter from his hair .. then from his cloak, his robes, knocking his boots against the doorframe.  She found herself staring .. and quickly turned her attention back to her weaving, coils of filthy hair falling to veil her face.

The priest .. perhaps a mage, moved to the bar quietly.  He set his mittened hands against it's scarred surface and murmured for an ale .. The girl's keeper grazed the man from head to toe with his eyes. He drew the liquid from the tap and into the mug.

The muted sound of coin set down on the bar startled Yana's attention from her loom.  The man had set a bag of coin down.  He was pushing it across the way to the barkeep, speaking in even lower tones, glancing to her.  The half-elf's mouth settled into a fine, quiet line and she left of her weaving.  The barkeep's wide eyes gave way to a wider smile -- he gathered up the coin and set the mug of ale down on the bar a little too boisterously .. amber liquid sprung upward, spilling.  At his apologies the traveller just shook his head, gathering up the slightly damp mug .. he turned toward her.

He was near before she realised he was approaching.  His eyes were a muddy brown, hair nearly the same, falling to his shoulders.  His face was ruddy and reddened from the winter wind, though the scarf that he pulled from about the lower half of his face revealed chapped lips that had otherwise been saved from such exposure .. he wore a short beard.  Something tentative and curious about the eyes, the cant of his head .. but there he was, and he was standing over her.

He offered a hand for her hand.