It's her birthday. Sort of. At the very least it's the anniversary of her being found by the Arlathvhen's ranging border-guards near the gathering place of the Dalish thirty years ago, a carefully swaddled infant left nestled and sheltered among the roots of an old tree, nearly missed, being weak and quiet with hunger.
One of them had been a young hunter with a charming spread of freckles, brilliant copper hair, and four children already, one of them quite recently. Being both a fierce mother and insistent that she had enough milk for two she'd adopted the babe instantly, a lone dark spot amidst the pale and eminently ginger brood. She had been loved as ardently as the others, praised and scolded and embraced the same, but all the same it had been impossible for even a young Nari to not understand that she had come from somewhere else.
As soon as she'd asked she'd been told, of course. Reassured that they were her family, and they were. But there was always the ghost of some other. Some dark haired woman with dark skinned hands that had held her once, and then let her go for some reason she would never know.
Every ten years, when the clans gathered, she asked. Every ten years, there was nothing. No one had seen anything, had heard anything, but she asked all the same. The older men and women who came every Arlathvhen remembered her, their answers a little more gentle, a little sadder every time, and every time she would smile and thank them, and then in the evening sit and look into the fire for an hour or so and then disappear to find a tree to climb, a branches close enough to lie in and to stare up at the stars through the canopy until she slept.
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One of them had been a young hunter with a charming spread of freckles, brilliant copper hair, and four children already, one of them quite recently. Being both a fierce mother and insistent that she had enough milk for two she'd adopted the babe instantly, a lone dark spot amidst the pale and eminently ginger brood. She had been loved as ardently as the others, praised and scolded and embraced the same, but all the same it had been impossible for even a young Nari to not understand that she had come from somewhere else.
As soon as she'd asked she'd been told, of course. Reassured that they were her family, and they were. But there was always the ghost of some other. Some dark haired woman with dark skinned hands that had held her once, and then let her go for some reason she would never know.
Every ten years, when the clans gathered, she asked. Every ten years, there was nothing. No one had seen anything, had heard anything, but she asked all the same. The older men and women who came every Arlathvhen remembered her, their answers a little more gentle, a little sadder every time, and every time she would smile and thank them, and then in the evening sit and look into the fire for an hour or so and then disappear to find a tree to climb, a branches close enough to lie in and to stare up at the stars through the canopy until she slept.
She's at the fire now.