Prologue - Elf in the Orchard

Caedon was just settling down to his morning bowl of porridge when his youngest son, Deiter, came tearing into the cottage, slamming open the door with a loud BANG! Across the room, Edelene, his wife, jumped in surprise at the sound, nearly dropping the clay pitcher of water she was bringing to the table.

Caedon barely had time to rise from his chair before Deiter was upon him, grabbing at his hand and practically dancing in excitement. "Father! Father! Come see! Come see!"

Caedon took his son's hand. The boy's digits clasped around two of his large, callused fingers, roughened from a lifetime of working with the trees. "What is it, son? And you should open the door slowly. You gave your mother a terrible fright."

Deiter looked to his mother, mumbling a quick "sorry, mother," before turning back to Caedon. "You've got to see this, Father! It's incredible! There's an elf out in the apple grove!"

Chuckling a bit at his son's imagination, Caedon shook his head. "An elf? Strange folk, the stories say. No bigger than your hand. Let's have some breakfast, and then we can go out and have a look?"

Deiter's brow wrinkled. "No, Father, it's bigger than a hand! It's bigger than I am! And... I think it's hurt."

Caedon trotted after Deiter's fleeting form down the rows of apple trees, the sun still low in the morning sky. He'd made his son wait as he put on his overcoat, and the delay had only fueled the boy's impatience. This late in the season, mornings were quite chilly. The apple crop had been long harvested, and the trees stood bare, unadorned by neither fruit nor foliage. The first snows would be coming any day now. The earth gave off a rich smell, and he inhaled deeply of the crisp cool air.

The first thing Caedon saw was not the elf. It was the shattered remains of several apple trees, their trunks splintered and broken, a few still connected by strips of bark to their roots, but most simply snapped off like twigs. As his dismayed eyes swept over the damage, calculating the cost of the slain trees, he noticed a furrow plowed into the dirt beyond, and a pale crumpled... something at the end of the furrow. Whatever it was, it had clearly fallen out of the sky, smashed up his trees, and slid along the ground for several feet before finally coming to rest.

He broke into a jog, finally moved to exertion. But as he approached the crumpled shape, his steps faltered as he realized what he was looking at.

There at the end of the furrow, in a red-brown slurry of bloodsoaked mud, lay the filthy body of an unconscious young girl. A decidedly inhuman girl, judging from the huge pair of butterfly wings that sprouted from her back and continued upwards to hood her head in place of hair. The girl's naked body was covered with horrific injuries. Her abdomen was slashed open, gaping a pair of ugly wounds. The upper wound was a straight-edged gash, clearly made with a sword or a knife blade. The lower one was jagged, with burned and blackened edges, the flesh hanging open like some twisted flower. Above her belly, the left side of her torso was simply missing; it looked like someone had taken a saw to her side, slicing away shoulder and arm and a huge slice of her torso. Caedon could see the white nubs of ribs and the remains of her shoulder blade just below the surface of the wound.

Miraculously, almost obscenely, the girl still lived. Her skin was ashen pale, but he could hear the blood bubbling in her chest through the hole in her side with each labored, raspy breath. He was filled with a tide of pity and horror... and strangely, a spike of gut-curdling fear, like nothing he had ever felt before in all of his years, turning his bones to jelly. Fear of the girl?

'There's no way a human could survive injuries like this... what kind of monster must this girl be, to have such resilience?'

Caedon felt a sudden urge to run, and following that, a blast of guilt, smothering the fear. How could he be afraid of a child, hurt so badly, even if she wasn't human? He began to take off his overcoat to wrap around the elf girl's nude form.

"Father? What are we going to do?" Deiter asked worriedly.

Caedon gathered the elf girl's still body into his arms, her surprisingly long wings draping over his arms and dangling to the ground. "Let's take her back to the house."