Branches whipped his cheeks as he ran, stinging far less than the pain in his chest. Smoke and tears had made his vision a blur, but in the dark of night deep in the southern woods there was very little even for his keen wood elven eyes to see.

It didn't mater, ultimately - Browai wasn't running anywhere in particular, other than away.

Away from the burning shack that had once been the quiet refuge of a band of Nymauti demons he'd befriended. Befriended, and caused to be found and slaughtered.

Away from a thousand other mistakes and misfortunes his brazen nature had brought on others.
Away from his failures, to himself, others, his family.

Away.

He just wanted to run away.

When Browai's blind running through the thick woods finally caught up to him, it took him a long moment before he finally shifted from where he'd so abruptly and violently fallen. The wood elf gasped in pain, before letting out another weak, exhausted sob. He knew he'd fallen onto his lute when his foot had caught the vine maple, and he didn't need light to know he'd broken it. After all, he was certain there was a piece of wood now lodged into his side. His long brown hair was tangled and filled with branches and leaves, and his tanned skin marred with cuts and debris. He'd lost his hat somewhere early in his run, and his cape had followed sometime after.

Browai shifted enough to roll onto his side and off the destroyed instrument, unable to hold down another pathetic wail of physical and emotional pain. 

There had been children in there - a already rare and fleeting thing for the poor Nymaut. The demons had been nothing but kind - immigrants, looking for a new life on the surface. Oh, how much he had learned about them. Not at all the beasts he'd been told about in books, and not at all the monsters they could become when bound to a cruel summoner's whims.

He just wanted everyone else to see that. See the truth. They weren't monsters. They were people, too.

All it had done was get them killed. They had trusted him.

He turned and wretched, gasping in pain as nothing came up and the injury in his side twitched with his stomach.

Solis, the Digger, was a young mother that could not have been much older than him. Sweet and soft-spoken, with beautiful long white hair and a pair of characteristically asymmetrical horns that complimented the curvature of her face. She'd already had one of her two offspring, Taken, but oh how she'd clung to her remaining son. Bin, she had called him - son, in Nymauti, as he was too young to have taken a true Name yet - but the woman had such deep hopes for him. To survive to his Name day, to live a life on the surface under the sun and in the grace of the wind.

She'd been the only one he'd seen alive when he arrived to the smoldering building, clutching Bin to her chest a she made a break for the tree line. A soldier had caught her by her tail, dragging her back before another grabbed her by the horns.

Browai had tried. Gods, had he tried. Tried to tell them to stop, begged them to let her and her son go. Solis had fought the best she could - but even the natural magics of her people was nothing when she was not a born fighter. The soldiers had given up trying to wrestle the screaming child from her arms when one decided to just kill the both of them with one blow, Bin held so close to his mother's chest. A single well-placed stab through Solis's back killed the both of them, and like the rest of them the two had been thrown back into the blazing shack to burn.

It was all his fault.

If you'd just stayed home and been a good son.

If you'd just picked something better to do with your life.

If you'd just stuck to what ever other bard ever bard wrote about.

If you'd just left them alone.

He hugged himself weakly, each sob that wracked his body making the pain of the wood shard wedged in his side worse.

It was far from a fatal injury, but too much of Browai wish it had been. He deserved to die out there, alone. Lost somewhere in the woods, who knew how far from the nearest... anything. The shack the Nymauti had taken dwelling in was already well off the beaten path, and he had no idea what direction or for how long he'd been running.

Maybe he'd die anyways.

He had not heard its approach, but when the golden glow of the lamp cut into his blurry field of vision his sobbing slowed as a chill ran up his spine. It came to stop some feet from him, and only then did Browai notice that the woods around him had gone eerily still and quiet.

His crying didn't quite stop, but he quieted, eyes fixated on the shape of his broken lute and the gold glow that was cast over it.

"Bróbh Boíg."

Wood Singer.

The voice was inhumanly smooth, a soft whisper in the cold night air. There was a inflection to the two spoken words, characteristic of the ancient language it stemmed from.

Even the deepest grief Browai swam in dried in the presence of complete and utter fear. His gaze lifted just a few inches towards the direction of the lamp light, sniffling pitifully as his gaze came to rest on the sharpened hooves of the Fae King's mount. Browai inhaled shakily, then exhaled. Slowly, his forehead came to rest against the leaves, eyes screwing shut.

So he was going to die.

"Lord Ort."

Them.

The Wandering One. King of the Fae. Lord of the Woods, Lord of the Lost. The fickle Nuríian god who was as much of a guide to some as a cruel doom to others. 

Which would he be to Browai, on this night?

There was the clink of the lantern as the fae god plucked it from the twisted horn of his undead elk, raising it to better shine its damning light upon Browai's crumpled form. The wood elf's long ears pinned back, fully unable to hide the fear that washed over him.

"What brings you out so far into my woods, my little Wood Singer?" Ort questioned, his Náian unsettling with his accent. "Not to sing your pretty songs to me, I see, unless you have learned a new instrument."

Browai swallowed dryly, before he dare lifted his head a bit more - up the monstrous god Mun's thin, spindly legs, to the twisted yellow-gold mane that cascaded down its unnaturally long neck, to the Lord of Decay and Rot's severed jaws and at last its empty elk-skull face. And from just behind its mighty head, seated upon its bare back, the Fae King himself.

As unostentatious as the stories told him, Ort's traveling garb was a drab brown, utterly devoid of other patterns or the accompaniment of jewelry. Plain brown leather gloves covered his hands, and his mask was as unadorned as the rest of him. In truth, he was the least ornate or even particularly interesting looking Nuríian Browai had ever encountered - besides the unsettlingly intense yellow pinpoints of light that peered from inside the mask's unnatural darkness. 

Browai had seen the forest god's lamp in the distance before, a warning light to those who knew better and a siren's call to those who didn't. Of all the times to meet the Greater God though, it had to be now, when he was laying crying on the forest floor with a wedge of his lute stuck in his side.
Or maybe that was why he was meeting the god now.

"I was running, my lord," Browai answered honestly after a long moment of utter silence. 

"From?" Ort questioned. His voice did not imply enough inflection for Browai to guess if that question was asked in irritation, expectation, or something else.

Browai dared to glance over his shoulder, in the direction he'd come from. The cabin was long gone, and in the darkness and density of the forest he couldn't even make out a plume of smoke that might indicate where it was. "A cabin, that the soldiers set on fire."

Ort chuckled, a sound that made Browai's hair stand up on the back of his neck. The elk Mun started to trot in a circle around Browai, like the patient predator the bard knew it was.

"Oh, come now my dear Wood Singer, I know you're running from more than that," he said, arm stretched out to keep the lamp's light over Browai's crumpled form. "Let's not play games."

Browai winced. "I'm running from my mistakes then," he said, casting his gaze down to the leaves.

"And where do you expect you will end up, at the end of this run?"

Dead, I hope.

The elf sunk in on himself, exhaling in pain as he did so. "Away from here, I hope," he whispered in reply.

Mun completed its circle, coming to stand where it had been before.

A long, uneasy silence stretched out between the two, and Browai awaited the judgement he assumed would come from the god's hand. His eyes closed, and he took in a deep breath of the earthy air in front of him.

"Wood Singer."

Browai's ears twitched, and he lifted his head.

Ort's gloved hand was stretched out to him, having returned the lamp to Mun's antler. Browai felt his heart still and his throat tighten at the sight.

"Let us go then, my Wood Singer. Away from here. Far, far away from here, from your mistakes, from your woes and pain."

The words spoken awakened a new degree of fear that Browai did not know was possible. He knew what that offer was. A offer one did not come back from. A invitation to ride on Mun's back with the King of the Fae to Nurí, never to return. As much of a suicide as any of the other thoughts that had passed through his head that night. 

Browai looked over his shoulder, back towards his mistakes and his follies, then at the broken lute at his side.

What did it matter. He wouldn't make it to dawn anyways. His ears drooped and his eyes grew heavy. Slowly, inhaling in pain, he stood. There was a moment of hesitation, before he slid his satchel off his shoulder. Several years of letters still were bundled in there, never sent back to his family - words too afraid and ashamed to say, thoughts he'd carried with him that weighed more than the paper they were written on.

Maybe someone would find it, and whatever closure his family needed - if any - could be brought. 

Browai reached out and took the worn glove in his hand, and with inhuman strength Ort pulled the smaller wood elf up onto the back of the monster to sit in front of him. Browai gasped in pain, one hand gripping his wounded side once he'd settled.

Ort's hand met his, before the leather slipped under his fingers. He bit his lip in pain as the wood was tugged from his side, before he felt the pain... soothe, then subside. Browai let out a exhale of relief, turning to glance up at the masked man behind him, but Ort did not look down at him.

"There will be no more pain where we are going," the fae whispered, one hand tucking around Browai's side while the other dug into Mun's mane.

The words terrified him, and yet...

Mun began to trot, turning away from the direction Browai had come from. Before long, the monster had broken into a sprint. The dark forest flew by in the brief light of the lamp as the elf and the beast's rider stayed low to the monster's neck, though the movement was smoother than anything Browai had ever been on. 

As dawn began to approach the horizon, he knew he was not on Aanrah anymore. Even at a sprint on the back of a monster, Browai found himself drifting to sleep.

Away from everything else. No more pain. No more worries.

The sweet smell of a foreign perfume. The roll of strings beneath his fingers. Carefree songs and laughter. Comfortable warmth. No more pain. No more worries.

Fifteen years later, Bróbh Boíg woke up with a gasp in the middle of the sunny woods.