Elenya remembers fire.

Not clearly, not fully. Just shards of memory: heat, ash, a baby’s cry swallowed by chaos. The forest of Letharien, once a hidden haven of ancient elven nobility, was reduced to ruin before she could speak her name. Its groves burned, its protectors slaughtered, and its secrets lost to time.

But someone saved her.

Hidden in a cradle of moss and root beneath the weeping trees, she was found days later by a wandering human couple. They were poor, childless woodcutters who had no business taking in a child wrapped in royal silks and marked by otherworldly grace. But they did. They named her Elenya, after the morning star, and raised her as their own.

The village whispered, of course. About the pale-haired girl with eyes like frozen silver, who moved like moonlight and healed too fast. But Elenya paid them no mind. Her foster parents taught her to work hard, to wield axe and blade, and to walk with quiet strength. From a young age, she could hunt as well as any grown man. And when bandits came, she fought them off better than most.

Still, she never quite fit.

There was a pull in her bones. A hum in her blood. And an amulet she’d always worn, found with her the day she was rescued, engraved with an ancient elvish sigil even scholars couldn't decipher. It called to her.

But she stayed.

She stayed for them, for the only family she had ever known. She watched over them as they aged, cared for them when they grew frail, and wept quietly when the forest finally took them both. Only after she buried them beneath the same oak where she had first been found did she allow herself to leave. Not out of grief, but out of duty fulfilled.

At first, it was just wandering. Then fighting. She became a mercenary, not for gold, but for proximity to danger, to secrets, to whispers of the old world. She sought ruins, interrogated survivors, followed myths. Every job she took brought her closer to shadows of her past. A name. A crest. A survivor. A soldier who remembered the day the forest burned.

She knows now that she was no common orphan. She was someone. A child of power, of legacy, perhaps of royalty. But until she knows what that truly means, she walks a blood-stained path, blade drawn, eyes sharp.

She is Elenya. The last of Letharien.

And one day, those who burned her home will answer for it.