The Second Stone

The horse's hoof beats pounded a steady rhythm through The Spine's early morning mist. A lone rider, an elf, rode upon a white steed, urging it forward with obvious desperation. Her long blonde hair flew behind her like a banner, whipping the air. Her shoulders tensed as she kicked the horse's flank again, the need to flee dominating her senses. One of her graceful hands gripped the horse's leather reins. The other was in her lap, clutching a stone of the brightest silver. She was gripping it so hard that her knuckles were screaming in protest.

She threw a wild glance behind her, her heart beating a steady tattoo against her chest, in time with the hoof beats. There was no one in sight behind her, but she felt his presence in her heart. She whispered words to the horse, in the language of the elves. It spurred onward, pushing its piston legs to work harder, flaring it's nostrils with obvious fright. The elf turned her head again, her breath heavy in panic. Again, there was no one in sight, but the presence was there, ominous and powerful. Suddenly the horse reared, neighing, digging its heels into the ground. The woman-elf snapped her head around, and gasped to see that she had ridden onto the edge of a steep cliff. She had been cornered.

She heard him now, his mount's hooves pounding the ground like a battle drum. She had been run into a trap, one that she could not escape. There was no time for magic, no time to even think; just to react. She gripped the stone and threw it with inhuman strength off the cliff into the tangles of the Spine. Time seemed to slow as the beautiful woman watched the stone arc gracefully and speed to the ground. The brambles of the Spine below embraced it, hiding it in the endless green. The elf closed her eyes as her ears filled with the sound of his fury behind her. She smiled. It was finished. A blinding pain erupted in her back as he struck her, shrieking, wailing in anger. The force pushed the slight elf off of her horse and down off the cliff. Following the path of the stone before her, the elf's broken body fell limply into the dark recesses of the wild Spine.

Kairin was sitting on a high tree limb in the heart of The Spine, chewing a long stalk of grass. She leaned her head against the tall tree's trunk, imagining that she felt the ancient plant whisper to her. He was a tree that had stood here forever, and he was revealing the secrets of the forest to her. She smiled and opened her eyes to stare at the blue patch of sky above her, steadily darkening as night fell. The forest was bathed in the orange light of sunset.

Her sharp eyes fixed on a small dark speck in the sky. She sat up and focused on it as it grew steadily larger, a black dot framed by the brilliant blue. It was some kind of object falling through the sky! Kairin grasped the tree limb to regain her balance as she craned her neck to see what was plummeting towards her. With a rustle, it broke through the canopy of trees and went straight for the ground, passing right in front of her eyes. It was a stone, silver and catching the sun's orange rays like a crystal. She screwed up her eyes, expecting to hear the sound of shattering glass as it came in contact with the forest floor, but all she heard was a dull thump. She opened her eyes and stretched to see where it had landed. She saw it sitting on the ground looking completely unharmed.

"There's no way..." she said to herself, and began to swing herself down from her perch. The shining silver stone lay innocently in a pile of brush. It was beautiful, reflecting the trees above on its flawless surface. Kairin walked warily towards it and bent over, getting a closer look. It didn't look dangerous, but it had the feel of magic about it. Kairin couldn't help but pick it up. She weighed it in her hands. It was a good weight, not too heavy or light, and had a smooth surface pleasant to the touch. A smile tugged at Kairin's lips.

"There's no harm in keeping it..." She muttered to herself, tucking it in the crook of her arm like it was a baby.

Kairin lived in The Spine, and to her knowledge, she was the only human who dared to. She had heard rumors about its unnatural, magical powers, and regarded most of them to be just that, rumors. But Kairin knew the forest well. She never underestimated what it did to those who weren't wary of its dark recesses. Kairin respected the ancient magic that was obviously alive in these trees she had grown to love. She knew how to live alongside it. The prided herself on being the only one able to navigate the place she called home. The rumors that flew around Caravahall about the Spine were laughable to her.

Kairin had lived in the Spine as long as she could remember, had never imagined that she had come from anywhere else. The busy city of Caravahall nearly repulsed her. She couldn't remember a family, a mother or a father. "My memory can barely remember yesterday," she always told herself. "How should I remember my childhood?" Her memories began sometime around when she was eight years old.

Kairin was now sixteen years old. She had lived alone for eight long years, hunting enough to get by and selling her pelts to the merchants of Caravahall. She lived in a small sort of cottage, another thing she couldn't remember the origin of. To her, it was something that had always been there.

It never bothered Kairin that she didn't know her own beginning. She had never given it the chance to bother her. She convinced herself every day that she preferred living in solitude, without memories, without human ties of any kind. She could slip away at a moments notice, move to a distant city, and change her life on a whim without anyone to hold her back. "I'm the master of my own destiny. That's the way to live," she told herself constantly, chanting it like a mantra. It warded away her loneliness.

But Kairin never had slipped away on a moments notice, never tried to reinvent her life. She carefully overlooked this.

Kairin ran her finger over a tree on her left as she passed. Sure enough, under her fingers she felt the tree gash marks, completely invisible to the naked eye. Kairin took a sharp left around the tree and walked directly into a fern bush, beating and slashing her way through. On the other side was a clearing, cut in half by a shallow creek. Beside the creek was her house, looking run-down but sturdy. It was completely surrounded by bushes and trees all around, totally hidden.

"My hideaway home," said Kairin, as she jumped over the thin creek and swung the wooden door open. The inside was dark, cozy and sweet-smelling. Dried flowers and herbs hung from the ceiling in great bunches. One wall was entirely taken up by a huge fireplace, in which the embers from Kairin's lunch fire were still burning. A small handmade bed was against another wall, and beside it was a large jug of water atop a sanded tree stump. Across from the bed was a wall entirely covered in shelves.

The shelves held a lifetime's worth of forest treasures, from small shiny pebbles to deer antlers and eagle feathers. Kairin set the large silver stone in the center of the middle shelf, arranging a garland of dried flowers around it.

"The rightful place of honor," she said to herself, stepping back to admire the effect. She stood there for a moment, captivated by the reflection of the smoldering embers in the stone's surface. She blinked several times and pulled her gaze away. Next to the shelf, a bow with a quiver and a sword in a sheath leaned against the wall. Kairin picked them up and walked outside into the evening.

The bow was Kairin's first weapon. The one she held in her hands now was another piece of her past, and object without a beginning. She'd had it as long as she could remember. The sword around her waist was another item in her collection; she had found it stuck into a stump deep in the forest. The blade had still been sharp when she found it. Kairin had taught herself everything she knew about fighting. She practiced shooting arrows into trees and exercised her swordplay skills every day. It became her main purpose for waking up in the morning; something to occupy her time and chase the empty days away. Her imagination was her only escape.

Kairin gave up on her training once the sun had sunk down completely, leaving the forest pitch-dark. She trudged back into her cottage and got the fire going, sending flickering light into every corner of the room. After dinner, a small meal of dried venison and boiled wild mushrooms, Kairin went to her bed and pulled a huge roll of parchment from under the mattress. She unfurled it carefully and sat down on the bed, picking up a piece of charcoal that had fallen out of the rolled-up paper. Kairin began to scribble on the parchment, writing furiously.

It was her nighttime ritual. Every night she would pull out a roll of parchment and write. She wrote everything from short stories and epics to poems and songs. She wove several tales of adventure, herself always the main character. She had put herself into love triangles with princes, dungeons with thieves and murderers, and castles with evil kings. She had written more stories than she could count, and used-up pieces of paper were always scattered around the house.

Kairin wrote until the fire died down again, and then tucked herself into bed. With her last conscious thought, Kairin wished fervently for her stories to become real, a wish she repeated every night. She longed for destiny to pick her up out of her lonely life. She wanted her own adventure.

As Kairin fell asleep, she didn't hear the silver stone on the shelf begin to rock back and forth.