Ash floats through the wilderness like great dry snowflakes, the only sound the crackling of many fires, beneath the ruined, charred husks that were once homes. Like a beast's feral eyes, the embers of the long burning fires glow with a wild intensity.
From amidst the wreckage and still falling, burning debris, walks a lone figure. A maiden. Her hair is white and braided over many times into thick waist length cords, it falls over her shoulders and down her back, her eyes command at once a deep sorrow and a rage of such intensity as to consume all around her. Another fire burns unseen.
Her powerful, graceful limbs move surely, with a liquid precision and killers confidence. Her mouth is a small, lopsided grin, amusement at a private joke. Your chance of facing her and living is the punch line. In one slender hand she wields a long sword, the Flyssa style blade of her tribe dual curved to its deadly point moves with a life all its own as she sidesteps around you, one hand rising, her fingers semi curled, her index finger raised slightly. A tattoo, a silver saber-tooth tiger ripples across one muscular shoulder blade.
You thought that the whole tribe had been eradicated, that your Orc horde had smothered everything in flames before approaching the camp. So perfect was your plan. You never once thought that the small female captive would escape, running loose and wreaking so much havoc. Her throat bears the scars of the coarse hemp rope that suspended her while she was beaten unconscious. Red, irritated tissue that looked so much like flames licking up her wrists and throat.
She is now close enough that you catch a faint breeze of flowers amidst all the charred flesh and young, burning trees. You can see the beads woven into some of her braids, all bound with a feather tip. Her right ear is pierced, a thin silver chain running from a simple earring to another small loop in her right nostril. The feathers flitter about her body as she twirls, entering a dance you have seen before, as she dispatched your honor guard.
Her voice is a low, raspy hum, the words just barely inaudible. She takes a little of your blood at first, just to make sure you know that this is no dream. She follows by crippling you, your legs useless meat you fall upon. Then your arms are severed, her steps do not falter nor do they slow as she moves about your shuddering body. You watch in morbid fascination the feathers bound to the flat of her blade, seven feathers, the smallest at the tip, a mere three inches, the longest below the hilt of the weapon, a good fifteen inches long. Her blade is clean as she finishes with you, and your dead eyes watch her walk away as your dead, deaf ears hear the last of her song. You will never know where she goes, and you will never know her song.
She goes now, vowing that no other elf shall suffer; the words to her blade song are the names of those lost in her village.
Her own tribe's self-alienation is her own greatest enemy now. Her ignorance of the world an obstacle she can solve through patience and sheer will. Her tribe is not, and never will be forgotten, her identity is her own, and she goes now to share that with the others of her kind. Her village will live on with the Elven kind even if those in it will not. Hers is the task of ensuring they are not forgotten. And that no other feels this pain that weighs her heart.