1: Winter Forever

There's nothing here. The bitter cold and blinding white stretch out for miles upon miles and into the gray horizon. The wind moans endlessly, woebegone and forbidding. 

I've been cast into this desolate wasteland to suffer and die as punishment for my crime. A fitting punishment I suppose, considering the horror and bloodshed I instigated. Yet, not once will I ever question the justness of my cause. What I did may have been terribly wrong, but I was not wrong for doing it. My actions were perfectly justified. I only corrected their grave mistake. 

Lives were lost. Yes. Innocents suffered. Yes. Elven society was brought to the bring of collapse. Yes. Even so, the things I did, the rebellion I engineered was nothing compared to their crime. There is no greater evil than enslaving one's own kind. None. They were in the gravest wrong, not me. I will insist on this one thing to my last breath, and I will die on this hill if that is what it will take to make them see the light.

The freezing cold at my back tells me the veil has been closed. That the ones who've banished me to this wasteland have turned their backs on me for good. They've passed judgement on me and returned to the warmth and comfort of the elven kingdom without so much as a second thought. 

I'm not sad about this. I'm not bitter.

My fur-lined layers of clothing can only protect me to some degree. If I don't do something drastic about my predicament now, within mere hours, I will be dead. Of course, that's what they're hoping for. That's the reason they banished me here. Such is the fate of a traitor. But I've never been a fan of bowing to fate.

My grip tightens as I raise my knobby staff to the skies in defiance.

"You will not get the better of me, you spineless fools!"

They will not make me beg or cry. They will not make me bend.

I will not resent the predicament of my people either. My dark elves, my pitiful and self-effacing people. Hated, cursed and abused by all elf-kind for millennia. Nor will I ever bow to the demand that I curse the black of my obsidian skin. 

I will have nothing but love inside me for my self and my kin. The dark ones. The pale ones. The tragic ones. The foolish ones. I will love. I will love. I will love, I will love. But first, I must live.

My mind is a mess, a discombobulated muddle. But i know what I must do here. I know what I need to do first. I need to survive. 

The banshee wind picks up, sinking sharp, greedy teeth into my skin. Merciless, the freezing cold bores deeper down into my marrow reminding me how little time I have left. My entire body, wracked with violent shivers, slowly begins to go numb.

I reach for the leathery pouch tied to my tightly belted waist. My treasure of treasures and the source of all my meager magics. A witchery bag of bones passed and to me from my mother and to her from hers and so on and so forth through countless generations. 

I bend low to the ground. I shake the bag. I scatter the bones. My eyes scan the seemingly random arrangement of pieces. My lips tremble as I whisper, reading aloud the arcane message telegraphed by the bones.

I can't see it in the pristine whiteness ahead but they say there is a mountain in the distance and at the foot of that mountain nestles a cave that will offer shelter from the howling, murderous wind.