“I come from a secret village hidden within the living roots of three ancient trees. My people are forest dwarves — bark-skinned, earth-toned, braided with moss and lichen. We carve our wards into heartwood and coax illusion from living growth. We do not build with stone. We grow with what shelters us. And we do not leave.
I was born different.
Where they bear brown skin and thick braids, I was born furred — black and white like a forest bear. Rounded ears. Dark-ringed eyes. No record in our oral histories speaks of one shaped like me. The elders searched. They found nothing.
They did not call me cursed. But they watched.
As I grew, the forest seemed to notice me in ways it did not notice others. Moss brightened beneath my touch, as though stirred from sleep. Small animals lingered at my feet instead of fleeing. When I felt strong emotion, branches creaked without wind, and once, as a child, a young sapling split cleanly down its trunk after I shouted in anger. I told no one. I learned to keep myself calm.
Months ago, our heartwood altar — the living stump at the center of our village — split down its middle without storm or blade, a thin, patient crack that seemed to appear overnight. Not long after, the boundary wards began to shift. They did not weaken or collapse; they simply rearranged themselves, a sigil carved generations ago growing over its own lines into a spiral no elder recognized. When they asked who had last touched it, I answered truthfully. I had placed my claw against the bark only once, curious about the strange warmth beneath its surface. Nothing dramatic happened beneath my hand, but by morning the pattern had changed. After that, glances lingered too long. Roots seemed to creak when I passed through the lower tunnels, and illusion wards flickered as I walked beneath them — perhaps they always had, yet now others claimed to see it too. Conversations quieted when I entered a chamber. Children were called back indoors. No one accused me outright; they did not need to. Fear gathered in the spaces between words, slowly shaping itself around me. I saw what I might become in their eyes — not a dwarf, but an omen — and I left before suspicion hardened into certainty. I took only my tools and a travel cloak, and before dawn I pressed my claw once more to the cracked altar, not to command it, only to say farewell. It did nothing, and the forest remained silent, and somehow that silence felt heavier than any accusation. if the forest is changing through me, then I must understand why — away from the trees that raised me.”
I hold her gaze, unwavering.
“So if you have been expecting me, then you must know more, tell me plainly — What am I?”
