The wind snatched at the loose strands of his long black hair tied in the back in a regulation queue. A storm front was moving in.

With his left hand he absently pushed the hairs out of his eyes and behind his ear. His fingers paused as they traced the shorn ear tip. He’d been marked as a chosen one by the Shadow Monarch, his ear tip frost-blackened in the womb. He was one of the first so marked to remain with the tribe, albeit minus part of an ear. So fearful were the elves of the Hyntaland of the Shadow Monarch’s touch that they chose to abandon babies born with the disfigurement to their deaths in the wild rather than raise them. In this way the Shadow Monarch gained Her children, collecting the babes and raising them as Her own. In time, they grew to be as twisted and dark as the Silver Wolf Oak at the center of Her mountain forest.

Neither their fate nor Konowa’s was one any elf should have to bear, but no one had asked if they accepted the burden. A thin, cold pain gripped his chest where the black acorn, the source of the Iron Elves eternal existence, rested against his chest. It was a reminder that the power of the frost fire and the curse of a hellish life after death had been a burden of his own choosing.

His hand reached up to adjust his shako, the distinctive tall black hat with its winged appendages, and realized it had fallen off. He looked down and spied it a few feet away. He walked over slowly, ignoring the wet sounds beneath his boots, bent down, and picked it up. When he tipped it right side up to place it on his head, a silver locket fell out and landed in the sand. It’s not my shako, he realized.