In Dungeons with Dragons | Prologue: Illyria
A Mind for All Time
The conversations from the previous night rang in Illyria’s waking mind as she rejoined the normal time of things. Though she didn’t actually sleep as the others did, the trance she entered offered many of the salubrious benefits and, yet, permitted her to remain aware of her surroundings. The long-haired human had shook her from her trance the night before, not realizing she had entered her race’s form of sleep.
He had asked if she was well. Perhaps he assumed that her unblinking eyes and focused stare signified symptoms of distress. She explained the restful trance her people entered, and, based on his widening eyes, it must have seemed to him some unnatural phenomenon. He smiled upon comprehension and referred to it as “sleeping with one eye open.” The expression didn’t make sense to Illyria as she “slept” with both eyes open, but she appreciated his smile, which made her feel far less unnatural than she surely must seem to these men and women of the natural world.
Now daybreak, (which was yet another normalcy that required adaptation, for Illyria was used to the perpetual twilight of her home in the forests of Sildëyuir), she noticed the others had either woken or abandoned the pretense of sleep. Illyria looked at the dragonborn who claimed to be a captain in an army that was defunct according to all records and conversations to which Illyria had been privy. Recalling the fight from the previous night, he surely could have been a military leader.
And, with two fey knights and a Bralani of Autumn Winds in her family, there was no shortage of military prowess. However, it was her mother’s sister to whom she most connected and the one she missed the most right now. Her mother’s sister, Sehanierianna, was a Twilight Enchanter and the one from whom she received the book in her bag with so many blank pages. Illyria enjoyed recalling to mind the smile on Sehanierianna’s face when she saw what must have been a visage of consternation at the realization that the powerful book that she had wanted to peek at for so long was completely empty! Illyria could smile now that a couple pages had revealed themselves.
She thought back on the indelicate way Sehanierianna would tug at her auburn tresses (rare against the silver and gold locks of her kith and kin), and urge her to “stay in the present with a mind for the future and a memory for the past” when recitation of a complicated spell twisted her tongue and her thoughts. The enchantments were difficult enough without being held to the impossible eladrin standard of “a mind for all time”.
But, when her brain refused to hold the page-long incantation, Sehanierianna would encourage a respite, and they would lean against the silver-boled trees of the cool, emerald forest, bare feet nested in lush jade blades of grass, and tell stories of the “evil-eyed” fomorians who ruled the Underdark of the Feywild, known locally as the Feydark. And, they would not quit their story-telling until one had told a story so outlandish that they fell on their backs quaking from laughter, eyes toward the star-filled purple velvet of the heavens that peeked through the canopy of the forest’s towering trees. Stars were the ever-present companions of her childhood. She had names for her favorites and told stories to herself as she rested in the highest boughs. From this height, she could even see the dusky adamantine sky that ringed the heavens and lightened as it approached the horizon, terminating in the pearl gray of twilight.
Illyria had spent much of her childhood alone, typically enjoying the solitude, but inevitably lapsing into loneliness. She hadn’t been friendless, only desperately unique; she was rarely disliked, but often misunderstood. She didn’t lack grace at all times, but catastrophe hit when she did. She exuded elegance, which was to an eladrin what honor was to a dragonborn—according to the books she had read on the subject (she read voraciously). Well, she exuded elegance usually, except when she didn’t. Elegance was breathed by the other members of her race, she simply wore it like a beautiful but itchy cloak.
Illyria was separate and longed for kindred spirits, those that put their energy to those things that were more important than an impossible devotion to beauty in all aspects of life. She had no qualms with whether or not it was a laudable goal. She knew in theory it was. A world that was beautiful in all ways: the environment, the peoples, the interactions between peoples and the environment, would all culminate in something wonderful and desirable. Illyria just simply wanted a life in which messy was acceptable from time to time.
It had been almost a year before when she had first stumbled through The Veil into the forest of brown-trunked trees called the Yuirwood. She knew immediately she was no longer in the Feywild. The sticky air, an immediate contrast to the almost breeze-less cool of Sildëyuir, invigorated senses of which she hadn’t previously been aware. The stubby trees brought a smile.
Nearby voices sent her up into the branches of one of those stunted trees. She gazed down on the unsuspecting humans (soldiers she guessed based on the matching tunics they wore with sleeves rolled to the elbow in these humid woods), as they stumbled twenty feet below between the trees, tripping over roots, and crunching fallen leaves with their heavy boots. She lost her grip on the unfamiliar and piercing bark of these alien trees and almost fell. She caught herself quickly enough, but not without eliciting a searching glance from the soldier at the rear, a very handsome human, if she was not mistaken, one with a sweat-strewn brow, cropped hair, a kind face, lean yet muscled arms, and a solid black tattoo encircling his wrist. Tattoos almost always meant something, she knew. Was it in remembrance of a loved one? Was is a mark of bondage? Did he draw arcane power from it? Illyria knew one thing: she wanted to know more about this human and his tattoo. And, his rounded ears didn’t look nearly as silly as her childhood friends had joked.
Dismissing the movement as the scurrying of some forest animal no doubt, the human returned to his trek. Once he and his friends had disappeared from her sight, Illyria dropped from the tree, sporting a couple scratches, but landing inaudibly, toes between the scattered dry leaves.
Finding her way back through The Veil to the Feywild, she marked the tree almost invisibly next to where she had slipped through, and hoped she would be able to return, and hoped even harder she would see the handsome soldier again.
The soldiers at The Lucky Gnome claimed no such handsomeness except perhaps to those that birthed them. Demonic eyes set into devilish skulls perched atop hellish bodies.
Illyria watched as the fight began, saw the small one (not quite like or unlike the gnomes of the Feywild) confront so many so much bigger than her, saw the dragonborn with whom she had spoken charge in like an owlbear, and witnessed an elf with less grace than she (likely owing to a misplaced sense of alcoholic tolerance). Illyria felt the smile spread across her lips, balling her cheeks. She was enjoying herself.