No one asked for her to be born.
And yet, she was.
Beneath the spiral branches of the sacred tree of Thêkariel, when the sky was still red from within and the rivers had yet to learn silence, a small figure, still wrapped in light, descended into the world with the slowness of something that did not wish to intrude. Her cry was not a cry. It was a hollow echo, as if her soul, already tired, refused to scream.
The council of elders did not name her.
They only looked.
And they looked too long.
It was the Tree Chief, the oldest among the ancients, who bent toward her without emotion. Not out of reverence, but caution. In his gaze—soft as damp bark—a crack appeared. Not of fear, but of recognition.
"You've returned, haven't you?" he whispered.
But no one answered.
Her eyes were not open. Only firmly shut eyelids, as if her birth had forced her to hide. On her forehead, where the symbol of the pureborn should have glowed, shimmered a mark that belonged to no record of gods or ages.
An incomplete spiral.
A symbol that did not turn.
The Tree Chief spoke no more. He raised his staff. The sentence was simple, without hatred.
"Exiled. Let her not cross the forest. Let her not touch the language."
The words fell like stones upon leaves.
They left her at the edge, where mist no longer respected names and the ferns whispered without mouths. She, still nameless, wordless, was laid down like a thing the world had tried to reject... but could not.
The nursemaid who carried her did not cry. But her fingers trembled.
"It's not her fault," she said, before laying her on a moss-covered rock.
Ae'lyra did not know she was Ae'lyra.
She had no name, no age, no sense of time.
But she had... everything else.
Her ears heard the stars.
Her fingers felt the rot beneath the earth.
And though she had no words, her mind slowly fractured beneath visions that could not be hers.
She walked. Not out of will. Out of instinct.
Small, fragile, barefoot. Her eyes yet unbandaged.
Darkness did not frighten her.
What frightened her was knowing that even with closed eyes... she would still see.
Days passed. Or centuries.
She did not know.
She lived among twisted branches, drinking from water that did not reject her, speaking without voice to creatures that only existed in the folds of time. Sometimes she laughed. Sometimes she screamed. Often, she simply curled between roots, trembling as if the universe spoke too fast.
Ae'lyra's childhood was not one.
It was thousands.
All at once.
And none enough to prepare her.
One night—if night could exist in Thêkariel—a figure approached her. It bore no weapons. Only eyes. Many. On its back, on its neck, beneath its skin.
"You shouldn't have been born," it said.
"But you were.
Why?"
Ae'lyra did not reply.
She only lifted her hands to her face.
And for the first time... the band appeared.
We don't know if she placed it herself.
Or if the world, at last, showed her mercy.
Since then, she walks.
She does not speak.
She does not beg.
She only listens.
And with every step, the universe adjusts—not out of obedience, but out of confusion.
The blood of the symbol slid once over the rock where she had been left. It remains there, gleaming, as if it had just fallen.
No one dares touch it.
Because though her body resembled a child's,
the world soon learned there was something within her
that even the oldest fangs dared not taste.
Time was not mercy.
It was trial.
And Ae'lyra crossed it with no guide, no tribe,
no voice to call her by name.
She grew in the crack between days,
where insects stood like pillars
and the night roars made the trees bend in fear.
There she learned she could never sleep too long,
for each dream dragged her through eras yet to be.
She fed on roots that wept when torn.
On fruits her skin didn't burn to touch.
She read the tremble of the ground
as if it were sacred text.
Each day, a test.
Each night, a revelation.
And with every creature that sniffed her and stepped away,
she came closer to what she couldn't yet understand:
she was no prey.
But she was no predator either.
She was... untouchable.
The skies changed.
Ash would fall instead of rain.
The sun spun backward sometimes.
And still, Ae'lyra walked—
always with the band over her eyes,
because opening them was too much.
She had seen the sea born from a tear.
She had seen the skeleton of a god atop a mountain not yet formed.
She had seen herself die...
in worlds that would never be born.
Yet her bare feet found paths,
as if the Earth, trembling,
relented to her presence.
She survived without language.
But not without awareness.
She knew which plants would sing before blooming.
Which nests must never be touched,
because their guardians still remembered gods older than time.
Animals smelled her.
Some stalked her.
But when they saw her—
they stopped.
They watched.
And they backed away.
Not in fear.
But because she did not belong to the logic of hunger.
Ae'lyra grew between the violence of the world
and the violence within her mind.
She did not cry when wounded.
She cried when she saw a creature die—
and remembered its descendants centuries before they lived.
She cried when trees shed their leaves,
not from cold,
but because she could feel the exact moment the tree knew it was dying.
She walked.
And the world watched from afar.
Not as a goddess.
Not as a threat.
But as a wound that would not heal.
An elf that could not die,
because no one knew how to define her.
And while the dried blood of the symbol still shines on the stone...
the world remains silent.
Not out of reverence.
But because no one wants it to happen again.
And still...
she keeps walking.