Elerrina

Meeting

She pulled a loose strand of her golden hair back from her behind her ear. The afternoon sun was already hiding far in the horizon and the gentle wind whispered softly in her ears in tis won secret language, singing, muttering. She had been waiting for the sunset to come. Every sunset she would allow herself to wonder in the endless woods, drifting away from her home, from her troubles, form everything.

A few fallen branches cracked underneath her feet, the grass rustling against the hem of her long worn dress. Nobody ever understood why she walked in the forest every sunset, but she had long ago stop trying to explain herself. For them it was just to walk among tall trees, with nothing to see, nothing to hear, alone. But she was not like them. She had never been like them. It had been hard to be the different one, the one who would never blend in, the one who could never fully belong.  She was an elf...and they were human. She remembered not knowing the difference, not understanding the looks and pointing fingers that every stranger who stopped in their village gave in her direction: why did they think her different from the other children? What was wrong with her? But it had become clearer as she grew older. 

After all, she had been raised the same way a human child would be raised, performed the same chores, played their same games. She was one of them now. And her mother would yell and glare at anyone who dared tell her she was different, that she did not belong there. She had often told her whenever she would return him crying that the only difference between her and any other child  was her pointed ears. But she knew it was not.

The warm breeze toyed with her long strands of her, making the skirts of her dress press against her legs, the smell of fresh bark and green leaves swirling in the calm air. Here she could enjoy the gifts of being an elf, the reason why she would forever remain different. Here she could hear the trees whispering and singing things they would never hear, she could talk to them, laugh with them, never understanding their language and yet understanding what they said. They would call to her, whisper her name in the soft dancing wind in an eerily beautiful collection of voices.Here, alone, she could hear the melancholic song of the river as its waters were drawn away with the current, prancing, twirling, splashing. She could see life in what they thought lifeless. 

But something felt different this evening.

Everything was unnaturally quiet and still, even the breeze was devoid of the usual warm whispers, as if the trees around her had suddenly grown mute. But then even the wind stopped, and a different kind of whisper brushed agains her ears, making her stop in her walks, listening. It was a warning, urgent...danger. 

Her deep green eyes scanned her surroundings, stopping in every tree, in every bush, her heart suddenly drumming inside her chest. She had never heard this call before, she did not know that to expect, what to do. Danger was near, and coming nearer and nearer. And then her instinct kicked in, her feet moving before she could even command them, and without thinking it twice she started to run, run as far as she could. Her light footsteps barely left a track line behind her, and the crackling and ruffling of fallen leaves underneath her running feet felt suddenly too loud, quickly turning left and right and rounding the thick trunks and-

"MOVE!" A voice suddenly exclaimed, something large and black flying in front of eyes, and she fell backwards, a scream leaving her lips.

 A dark horse stood on its rear legs, furiously waving the front ones in the air just above her head. She closed her eyes shut, throwing her hands over her head, and attempting to crawl back and away but only managed to ungracefully wriggle on the dirt. And it was for the first time that she noticed that a man had jumped down from the horse, whispering something in a language that she could not understand, frantically attempting to calm the frightening animal. It seemed as if he  had been forced to stop abruptly so he wouldn't kill her by running over her.