#lorelyne

She's her mother's daughter, an archer by blood—her family teaches her what very few Farstrider traditions have survived several generations in the human nation of Lordaeron, but most of them relate to shooting a bow and attuning one's heart to the wild. She's a natural by blood too, but that comes at a cost; one Lorelyne is willing to pay, even if her family isn't so sure.

She spends more and more time in the woods, hunting for food—meticulously, of course, because she has her few elven traditions and she knows the difference between a conservationist and a poacher—even if the landowner of the Hearthfire estate doesn't think she does.

Lady Sigrid is not happy to find an elven teenager eating her deer, because she has enough trouble with the wolves that have overstayed their welcome and overgrown their bloodlines. Lorelyne suggests she eats the wolves instead. Lady Sigrid pauses, considers this, and lets her go on the condition she's not noticed again.

She's not. But the thing is, neither is the dog problem. Sigrid spends eight months trying to track the girl down and offer her a job as a gamekeeper.

Lorelyne works here for almost two-hundred years. The types of game problems change—sometimes it's too many dogs, sometimes it's too many deer; sometimes its bears attacking the gardeners, sometimes its real poachers stealing the pheasants. Lorelyne, the high elf with the Capital City accent, handles all of it. The rest of the employees on the land barely know she exists, at least until there's something like bears or poachers, to which someone has to dig her out of the wilderness—assuming they can find her before she finds and solves the problem herself. Hell, they don't know half the shit that happens on this property; it never gets to them before she gets to it.

The Hearthfire family progresses rapidly, as human bloodlines are wont to. It feels like every couple decades or so, Lorelyne is hearing about a new generation of little dark, holy-fire-flinging toddlers running amok. (Apparently this is accurate.) She meets Sigrid's son, and his child, and their daughter and her son and his daughter—

Her name is Anja, and she stops staring when Lorelyne tells her to.

Anja is, in Lorelyne's words, a brilliant toddler. Lorelyne still calls her as much, sometimes, when she's hit her two decades and has her own toddler—Rikke, she names her, who isn't quite as brilliant as Anja, also in Lorelyne's words, but close. (She's Anja's, for Light's sakes—Anja is all the brilliant Lady Sigrid was with half the mean.

Lorelyne scorns how fast humans come and go.)

But Anja is brilliant enough to be quiet, to listen to the wilderness and let its song guide her to Lorelyne—if Lorelyne wants to be found, that is, which is seldom. But less so if it's Anja looking for her, and Lorelyne knows when it is, and lets herself be found just a little more often. Anja loves the Light, and tells Lorelyne about it frequently, like the elf is some sort of big sister Anja strives to impress, and maybe she thinks so, but that's ridiculous, because humans come and go too quickly to forgive almost two-hundred years between them.

Apparently it's less a literal feeling and more a similar one. Lorelyne lets it go, because in a world where they're both elves it makes sense. She likes to talk about her Light, and Lorelyne isn't especially opposed because she talks softly—it's when Anja asks her about her traditions and heritage and long-lost Farstrider customs that Lorelyne rolls her eyes and, not infrequently, ejects herself from the girl's company for that week.

It's not that she doesn't have anything to talk about, it's only that Lorelyne doesn't carry on. But, if Anja is an exception to everything else, she makes herself an exception to this. She's the first human in her bloodline to know more than barely anything about the elven gamekeeper her great-great-et-cetera grandmother hired.

Anja winds up in the city, which is her only deep-cutting offense in Lorelyne's words. But she's an exception, so Lorelyne visits the city sometimes to buy fletchings. Anja walks her, or if she's busy, Rikke and the newest brilliant toddler Bjarke do. It's necessary, and Lorelyne gets mean if the ritual isn't maintained, because Capital City is loud and after almost two-hundred years in the quiet, soft-spoken wilderness, the city can so easily drive her to hysteria.

Rikke is a little more like Lady Sigrid. She's shrewd, and the sharp blade compared to her mother's bludgeoning hammer. She has Sigrid's came-and-gone eyes, and Anja's everything else—except the smile. It takes Lorelyne a while to place the smile, which annoys her furiously because she's known this come-and-go family for almost two-hundred years, but one day she's alone with Anja's wife, who smiles like a shooting star, and she understands.

Bjarke, and eventually their littlest toddler Sidne, are even more like Anja's wife. Sidne even inherits her muddy-blonde hair, and Bjarke her whole face, and Lorelyne won't ever know Dallis' come-and-go family like she knows Anja's—namely because, in Anja's words, Dallis' family is a batch of bastards save for a darling sister—but she learns what little bit she can.

Still. Even Anja, exception that she is, can't keep Lorelyne in the city for long before she's back to the Hearthfire property. Anja will always be the one to visit Lorelyne more than the other way around, but if the wilderness sings of the paladin's arrival, Lorelyne will let herself be found every time.

Every time. Every single time.

Even though Lorelyne knows, immediately, the day something is wrong. The woods' song is shaking, mourning, and Lorelyne's heart is crumbling long before she ever sees her. She waits to be found, wants to be found, wants to be wrong. She wants to see what she knows to be true, that the land is dying, the people, that maddening city—

She sees blue eyes first. Bright, puncturing, like an arctic air cutting through the trees and piercing Lorelyne's own. The rest of the came-and-gone paladin materializes, the dark hair, the battle-beaten body, the deadly air that circles her like a blizzard waiting to form.

This lightless horror is not the brilliant toddler she knows.

But Lorelyne isn't the kind of person to drop her weapons and let a changed friend take her life. They fight, and it's bloody, and Anja leaves the property with red swirling in her wicked blizzard, and Lorelyne doesn't leave at all. She's struck down by a cursed blade, and it looks so wrong in Anja's hammer-wielding hands; it should have blown up her heart but doesn't. Slightly, faintly, barely the tip of the blade veers right, but not far enough right, and it bursts through her left shoulder and rips off everything but the bone and some clinging tendons.

Anja, eerily wordless for the brilliant toddler that softly never shut up, leaves Lorelyne to drown in the blood and frost in her throat. The wilderness lulls her to sleep and sings her to death.