Between the stink and the racket there was enough to make him despise the forest, but fate, it seemed, wasn't satisfied with that. On top of everything else, Konowa was certain the trees were watching him. Worse, he had the growing suspicion that they were trying to tell him something. He walked up to one, even reaching out a hand to pat it, but it looked and acted just like a tree, being absolutely inscrutable as it stood there.

It's just the heat, he decided, wiping the sweat from his brow. Elfkyna was suffocatingly hot in the summer, humid in the snowless winter, and miserable the rest of the year.

He was, as he had been for the past year, alone in a forest.

It brought to mind the angry words he'd shouted all those years ago as he clutched his broken arm and kicked the trunk of the tree that had let him fall: " I hate the forest and I don't want to be an elf anymore! "

Decades later, that sentiment remained.

Sighing, Konowa dropped the canteen to his side and held his hands out before him, palms up, wondering if he would ever hold his own fate again. He looked closer at his hands. His natural tanned color was deepening to a hue close to the reddish-brown bark of the trees around him. Great, he thought, I'm turning into a bloody tree. He ran his hands through the tangled thatch of long black hair on his head, half expecting to feel leaves sprouting there. Instead, his fingers brushed against the tops of his ears, feeling the point on the right, and ragged scar tissue on the left where the point used to be. The mutilation hadn't been by choice, but he wasn't overly upset with the results. He had never been comfortable with his heritage.