"Hang tight, elves…" he thought, though the words rang more like a prayer than a taunt. He wasn't sure whether he prayed for them, or for himself. Perhaps both.
The thought clung to his chest like armor, but armor made of paper—thin, fragile, one touch away from tearing.
His breath fogged in the night air, carrying with it a metallic tang he could not name.
The Weight of History
The elves.
Long-eared folk who had carved their dominion not in stone, nor in steel, but in the forest's marrow itself.
A people who did not build monuments outward, but inward, sinking into the green, binding themselves to root and leaf, to the pulse beneath soil.
A species obsessed not with what lay beyond the horizon, but with the silence inside the trees.
And in that silence, they had found their goddess. Not by questioning, not by wrestling with doubt, but by surrender. Sheer, unrelenting subservience.
