Your character has just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As they look around, their gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. They duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? She begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”
I’m Aetheama Levyn. The name means “strange flower,” though I’ve rarely heard it said kindly. My mother was Mali’ker. Cold. Brilliant. She used to trace the stars on my skin when I was little and whisper their names to me like they were secrets. She said I carried old blood, cursed blood, but that I was hers, and she’d burn the world before she let it take me. My father was Farfolk, softer in every way. He was a healer, a gardener, a man who could coax life out of anything, even in the middle of nowhere. He hummed songs I never learned the words to, and spoke about the desert as if it were a dream he barely remembered. They lived quietly in the woods, tucked between borders where no patrols ever came. That’s where they raised me in peace, or something close to it. I never saw a city. Never touched cobblestone. My world was moss and moonlight, stories in two tongues, and hands stained green from crushed herbs.
But even peace molds you into something fragile. They taught me to stay unseen. Hide the ears. Speak Common, not Elven. Don’t draw attention. “The world doesn’t know what to do with people like us,” my father once said.
He wasn’t wrong.
When I was sixteen, the raiders came. Not soldiers, not knights, just men with greed in their eyes. They thought our home hid gold, magic, something worth killing for. They were wrong, but it didn’t matter. My father was dead before sunrise. My mother vanished into the dark like a wraith. I buried what I could and walked away. I don’t know how many seasons it’s been since. I’ve lost count. I’ve crossed rivers and highlands, deserts and frost-covered roads. Slept under trees and rooftops, traded salves for scraps, lied about who I was more times than I can count. Some towns took me in for the night, while others chased me out before I even said a word.
I’ve met kindness and I’ve met cruelty that wears its face. There was a boy once in a coastal village who taught me to fish, and a woman who gave me a place to sleep during a storm. There was also a man who tried to cut my hair while I slept to see if I was “really an elf.” I stabbed his hand. He got the message. So yes, I’m tired. I’m tired of drifting. Of surviving instead of living. Of watching people build homes and lives and not knowing what that feels like. I don’t know where my purpose lies. I don’t know what I’m meant to do or be.
But I want to find it. I want something that’s mine. A home that isn’t borrowed or temporary. People who don’t look at me like I’m something to figure out or fear. I want to wake up one morning and know I’m where I’m supposed to be. I don’t need a crown or a title. I don’t need revenge.
I want to belong, and if I have to wander every edge of this world to find that place, I will.
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