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But nothing is pretty any longer.
I used to find things beautiful when I was younger. But that ability to see the beauty in things vanished after my first six months in the factories.
The sun might be rising, but it is still dark in the forests of Pyrthos. I struggle through the undergrowth and get snagged on several bushes and low-hanging tree branches as I make my way to the center of the forest.
Skye takes flight, only because she doesn’t want to get snagged on anything herself, but when I get to a small clearing, she settles on the ground next to me.
I forage for whatever vegetables and fruit I can find. We mostly grow our own things, but we have just come through a long winter, and the gardens are still bare.
Skye crows and coos then, and hops up and down on the spot before she starts to root around on the ground. I see what she has spotted quickly. A glimpse of silver shimmers at me from the ground.
I stoop to pick it up and groan slightly as cold pain sparks up my spine from moving heavy boxes yesterday.
The necklace is beautiful, though it is plain. It is silver and thin and looks as though it would fit nicely around my neck.
I have never had jewelry in my life. I can remember very little of my parents, who died when I was five, but I do remember my mother having a beautiful gold ring. I loved that ring. I idolized its beauty, and I idolized my mother’s beauty.
But my parents had to sell it for food just before they both died.
I cough softly as the cold morning air seeps into my lungs and swallow the phlegm that builds in my throat almost every morning.
The faint, pink sunlight has not reached this deep place in the forest. It is dark, gloomy, and I know here the trees become sapient beings.
No other human in Lowtown would believe me if I said that I have heard the trees talking. They’d call me crazy. But we have all seen the dark elves performing magic, and no one questions that.
I don’t pretend to myself that I have any magic abilities, but I am quite sure that the trees do. I listen to them whisper and gossip, though that could just be the wind, as I examine the necklace.
I do not know why I am so enamored by it when it is so plain.
“How did this even get here?” I ask Skye, who is hopping around and picking at the ground.
Skye takes care of herself fairly well – I have never had to provide food for her – and I know she must have spotted a small yillese.
Someone must have walked through the forest, and it must have fallen off. Maybe a dark elf? No human would have kept this when they could have sold it.
A sudden sense of forbidden pleasure overtakes me as I realize that I am probably holding an item belonging to a dark elf.
“I shouldn’t do this,” I mutter to myself, and Skye crows in agreement as she struggles to pull the yillese from its nest.
But then I put the necklace on.
Who could have left this here?Is my first thought when the necklace lightly touches the skin on my neck.
Suddenly, the weak morning sunlight manages to penetrate the thick, tightly intertwined tree branches above my head. The sunlight reaches downwards as if reaching for the necklace, like pale yellow fingers fighting through the branches.
I step away from the sunlight, and shudder with sudden anxiety as I really start to think about how this necklace got here.
“Does this really belong to a dark elf? Won’t I make a target of myself if I continue wearing it?”
My voice sounds almost frantic as I consider taking the necklace off.
I shiver again and again as the sunlight still reaches for the necklace, the light as alive as the trees that whisper more and more loudly.
Wearing the necklace gives me a sense of pleasure. But it also feels very, very wrong.
“I foraged here yesterday morning and last night,” I speak to myself so that I can think this through. “So it must have been dropped here this morning.”
I stiffen as I listen to the forest, sorting through the sounds of the whispering trees and the needy, creaking sunlight to find signs that anyone is in the forest with me.
