Luthiel's Song: Dreams of the Ringed Vale

First Summer's Eve has come and all elves celebrate as the black moon's shadow fades from the world. It is also Luthiel's fifteenth birthday. With it come two extraordinary and dangerous surprises: a Wyrd Stone, its silvery heart a window into a world of dreams and nightmares, and a Blade Dancer, dreaded protector of the Faelands, who bears a dark message. Instead of celebration, Luthiel is given a terrible choice: if she does nothing, someone she loves deeply will die. Or to save a life, she can break the most perilous law of the Faelands, and venture alone to the Vale of Mists. If she chooses the journey, she must race Othalas -- eldest and most feared of all the werewolves -- past great back spiders who weave webs out of nightmares, through glittering mists with the power to reshape flesh, and at last into death by the teeth of dark and ancient Vyrl, who feed on the blood of elves. Either choice will bring death -- unless Luthiel can find the secret in her remarkable Stone, a secret that even the nightmares fear.

To be me is to be different, she thought as she watched them, from her place apart from them, upon the hillside.

And there was much to watch. For everywhere across the Minonowe, and where she lived in Flir Light Hollow, elves were preparing for celebration.

They were festooning trees with glowing flir-bug bulbs, baking delicious almorah cakes and rolling out giant gourds filled with the best summer's wine. Master Alderdalf's pixies were hard at work under the woven canopy of his voluminous fae holme turning out specially prepared fireworks. Loud popping tindersnaps, eek-eeking neekerbeeks, bright flaring fizzleflashes, and the scaly Romas Dragons lay in red, green, orange and silver stacks outside. Lady Lutendrah was busy tying ribbons to her famous pandur's boxes (you never knew what would pop out). Even the otherwise grim-faced elves of the Dark Forest seemed to brighten as they drank toasts to the day - First Summer's Eve.

As she watched them, a lively wind rose up, dancing through the trees, swatting gold and silver ripples across the lake shore, before riding up the hill on which she stood. The breeze played in the branches about her, but the swaying of her arms and the gentle curves of her neck were just as graceful. From her head flowed hair the color of moonlight. It spilled over leaf-shaped ears before falling down shoulders so supple they belied the gentle strength that lay beneath. Clothes of forest green embroidered with silver lay across skin as fair as a cloud. Eyes, which shone like green-blue stars, rested beneath softly sloping brows.

Even elves thought of her as beautiful - if a little strange. And sometimes she would hear them teasing that she'd arisen from the wyrd of sea foam or was born to earth in the cradle of a crescent moon floating down upon the gloaming. For she was an orphan and no one knew her parents.

Though the elves welcomed her, accepting her as one of their own, she could always sense that they held her apart. She bore it with a kind of sad resignation. But she always wondered:

Why do they treat me this way?

Am I not an elf like them? she would think. Why can't they see me as Leowin does?

For her foster sister Leowin was the only one who treated her as though she were no different.

Luthiel smiled at the thought and sniffed the air. She sighed and let all the happy sounds, all the various smells wash over her. It was going to be quite a party. Fitting, because this was the day she turned fifteen, or near enough as her foster parents Glendoras and Winowe could reckon. Some asked her if she cared that her birthday also fell on the night of First Summer's eve. But she only laughed.

"Can you think of a better day?" she would ask them in return. And what better day to be born than on the day that the world shook off the darkness? What happier time to celebrate than when everyone else was celebrating?

She secretly fantasized that the reason for all the hubbub, that the cause for all this happy commotion was her birthday. And she smiled to herself when the first thing they said to her was - "Happy Birthday, Luthiel!" followed by "Happy First Summer's Eve!"