The Last Book of the Elves: Prologue

I should warn you, this is not the Last Book of the Elves. It will be, however, my story of how I came into possession of said book, what happened afterwards, and ultimately, what became of it.

This story, as most of the good ones do, starts with a birth. You might guess —correctly— that the child being born was me, an unremarkable baby so sickly she was abandoned at a crossroads in the hope someone would take her and thus relieve her parents of their guilt. Luckily for me, it didn’t take long for a kind, scholarly man to find me. Alvim took pity on the wailing child and carried her to his hut. It was a small, warm, and homely place I grew to love. There were no leaks or drafts, which would seem odd to you unless you knew more about our neighbours. But before I get ahead of myself, you should know some of what I’ll recount comes from Alvim’s own memories as he relayed them to me, and though he was wise, he was also very old and prone to confusion by the time I was old enough to understand what he was trying to teach me.

The hut we lived in was on the northern edge of the Eldwood, near the aforementioned crossroads where I was found. It may not ring a bell to you, but you might know it as the Wildwood, if it’s even remembered at all these days and in these parts. The forest was very old, and Alvim said it was the last remnant of the unending woods that had once covered all of the Realm from hill to shore. It had become no more than a small islet by the time I took my first steps inside of it, an isolated patch of green in a vast sea of golden barley fields, farms, and roads. Alvim had chosen to live near it so he could study it, and he had spent a decade attempting to map it and understand it before my arrival upended his plans and delayed his work.

What? Oh, my name? We’ll get to that later since it’s weaved into the story. For now, you should know Alvim gave me no name. He reckoned I must have been given one by my parents, and even if they had abandoned me, it wasn’t his place to rename me. So he called me ‘child’ until I was given my proper name, and even afterwards, he still called me ‘child’, but mostly to chide me or make it clear he was upset with me. In those moments, he also made a point to mention how I had disturbed his work and how many times he had needed to rush to the nearest town in the middle of the night to find a doctor because I had trouble breathing. He said that mostly in jest, but I had grown from a sickly child to a difficult one, always running away and getting into trouble. Alvim would sigh constantly but rarely yelled at me. He had sired no children —at least he claimed he didn’t— but I had arrived at a point in his life when it would take more than one willful creature to try his patience.

I never learned exactly what Alvim had done before dedicating the last stretch of his life to studying the Eldwood. He was always evading questions about his past, so at one point I had almost convinced myself he had been a criminal. A robber or some other type of villain, I had guessed —though my knowledge of the world was rather incomplete, stemming mostly from the few books Alvim kept, which dealt mostly with nature and its creatures— until I outgrew that specific fantasy. But whatever Alvim had done in his previous life, it was clear he had wanted to leave it behind. There was no oral mention or written trace of who he had been, so I had to content myself with the fact he was, for all intents and purposes, a good man who carried no past with him. I was a child with no past either, so we both lived in the present, too fearful of what the future implied.

Then it all changed when I turned six and the Elves took me.