Arc 1: Chapter 20: The Hunters
I have an old memory that’s never left me. It’s from when I was a boy, back home in the Dales.
I wasn’t born a lord. I earned my knighthood through deed, a touch of luck, and the whim of a certain iron-willed highborn. Half my relatives were woodcutters. I’d even taken my House name from those roots — Hewer. I’d thought it a fine jest at the time, though Rose had rolled her royal eyes.
When I was still a commoner lad, I’d gotten lost in an elfwood near my village. It had been my first experience of just how strange the world could truly be, how frightening. I’d gone from the tedium of hard work and pleasant summer days into a world of whispering shadows and dreaming trees. A world without death. One that didn’t forget.
There’d been wisdom in the roots of those ancient trees. And horror. The priests say the elves mentored humankind when we first came to these shores, took us under their wing and taught us how to wield our souls, the best weapon we have against the Adversary.
I’d once thought of elves as my father talked about them — kind, whimsical, beautiful, and bearing the wisdom of immortals.
He never mentioned how immortality can make you go goring mad.
The hem of my worn red cloak glided over twisting roots and undergrowth. The air was heavy and thick in the shadowed depths of the Irkwood, stinking of rot. My eyes kept wanting to track movement at the edges of my vision, flitting phantom shapes which might have been mist, or my nerves, or the wraiths I knew would haunt the trees.
I could hear whispering too. There was no wind, no singing birds or insect sounds, so the murmuring voices in the near distance provided the only ambience besides my own crunching boots.
I knew better than to try to listen to those voices. Elves don’t die — immortal is immortal — but their flesh can still expire just as a human’s can. Their souls are made of hardier stuff than a man’s. Anywhere I’d find the Old Children, I’d find their shades lingering. Whispering.
Bitter.
So many of them had died during the Fall. Most of them, so far as I knew. The land was infested with fey ghosts, undying, refusing to forget.