Big fat caravans decorated with flamboyant colors and intricately carved swirls trundled down a long forgotten road. They were any normal band of traveling gypsies. The men were rugged, hairy, and jovially joking back and forth, up and down the procession about who's wife had better cooking and who would pay with a cold lonely night for some insult or other about the women. And like wise the women carried on their own jokes hopping into the men's conversation when it was prudent to stick up for themselves. For they were large women who carried poniards and daggers in their belts, most likely for beheading a chicken, but the effect was the same.
Even the children were more able bodied than the city kids. They dashed up and down the traveling caravan shooting each other with tiny bows and dull arrows, but some.....some danced behind one of the middle wagons. The tiny group of five or seven children bounced and laughed, skipped and whistled in tune with the music floating to their ears from the foreign Kalimba. No one in the gypsy family had ever seen such a thing as the metal tonged instrument, and while the novelty had worn off with the adults, it still drew sparkling eyes of the younger generations. For the Kalimba was fascinating but equally so, maybe even more fascinating was the musician.
The gypsy men had their fair share of tattoo's but none so decorative and plentiful as this man's. Every time they looked at him it seemed more inked writing and symbols had risen to the top of his skin, and then would fade away even as they looked at them, blending into the changing color of his flesh. The man also had hair longer than most of the women, though his had been put to the test by putting the man and the woman with the longest hair back to back, just to measure and provide an opportunity to wager money on it. But it was obvious that the musicians hair was a good deal fairer, and colorful than any gypsy. The man also had an enchanting smile that drew people in, and an almost regal presence. The gypsies referred to him as a marsh fire, a magical thing. The man...was an elf.
But not an elf the likes of which anyone in the camp had ever seen. This elf was a taller middling height, only a few inches taller than the average human. His frame was thin but muscles stocky, and he moved fluidly. It was also noticed that no matter how dirty he got, or clean for that matter, the elf always smelled of the ocean. The gypsies had taken to him immediately, seeing him like themselves, a being on the fringes of human society. They had picked him up......actually if they put all their heads together they weren't sure where he'd started to tag along. One day...he just was. Usually smiling, always happy to lend a hand when needed, aid with the cooking, even watch the kids; Though after a few minutes of alone time with them he'd have them all rallied together and they would launch attacks on the candy boxes and more often then not cause enough of a ruckus that the gypsies had to have someone watch him watch the children.
For all of his good naturedness the gypsies knew he wasn't content to stay. One day they knew he'd up and leave, just like a stray dog. It was never more apparent than when he'd slip into staring in one direction or the other. Only two ways, never deviating, either ahead of the caravan, or behind, longing for something lost. And today was that day, as they trundled down the long forgotten road under magical lands floating above them. The song the elf was playing on the Kalimba ended, he hopped off the back of the wagon, stole a hug from several of the grandmother gypsies who had treated him well, and trotted off through the forest.
Cresent Seaspear had felt a pulling some time ago, when he was a figure of some import in distant land, a land of dragons. He'd felt the pulling as if his ancestors themselves were reeling in his heart strings. He obeyed the pulling and started running one day. He ran and ran and ran, forgetting his station and relations during his journey. But as soon as he got to the place of pulling he felt the urge to go back to where he'd come from, that land of dragons. And so after several nights of having his tattoo's redone, Cresent up and ran some more. Now he was back. Back and he didn't feel anymore pulling. He was back, where he should have stayed to begin with. But how would they receive him? Those people he'd left behind. The elven cousins, the men he'd served with, royalty he knew, the lands, his old ship, and how would the people he'd held closest react? He knew one thing...it was all going to seem to happen fast for him....as Cresent silently brushed past the last fern and equally as silent, made his way through the elves on the streets to the epicenter of the lands he'd once, and unwittingly, been deemed a Ruler of.