"Are you all right?" The heavy Imperial accent was the first thing the young Bosmer would ever remember hearing. A strong hand cradled the girl's head, helping her to sit up as she coughed the water from her lungs. A second hand, belonging to the same man, firmly patted her on the back in an effort to help her expel the fluid from her chest.

The girl could feel the sand clinging to her cool skin, held there by the rough, dry blanket that had been wrapped around her wet clothing.

"All right there, easy now," the voice said in an attempt to soothe her as she gulped in greedy lungfuls of air. "Can you open your eyes?" It was not until he asked this question that the child realized her eyes were still closed.

What she saw when she opened them was a land she had never seen before. She was on a beach, on a... southwestern coast, judging by the position of the moons in the sky. Up the hill from the beach, fields of grass stretched on endlessly, lit only by the light from the night sky. In the distance to what she decided was the west, she could see a town by the water. Though she was young – just a few years old – the girl had been taught to navigate by the positions of the bodies in the sky, so that she could find her way home if she ever got lost.

The man who she had heard when she first awoke was clearly an Imperial. He had greying hair, but no wrinkles at all on his face. He was dressed as a commoner; he wore a dirty, well-used cotton shirt paired with a pair of rough breeches. The man had no shoes. Instead, he had tied scraps taken from a grain sack around his feet to protect them.

"Good," the man said as she looked around, relief evident in his voice. He had been worried that the young Wood elf child had been dead like the others he had found, still floating in the water.

"Child, can you tell me where you're from?" came his next question. The girl opened her mouth to reply, but found that she had no answer for him. She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes.

"Shh," he said, hoping to prevent her from crying, "that's all right. I expect you don't know what happened, either." It wasn't a question. He actually had a fair idea of what had caused the small craft to take a sudden turn for the rocks just off the coastline, but the child on the ground in front of him had no need to know about that.

"Well, let's get you somewhere warm before you get much colder," he told her as he stood. Gently, he picked up the child, still wrapped in his only blanket, then started walking toward a small house just beyond the first hill. He was careful to make sure that she didn't get a clear view of the bodies still floating in the water behind them.

That the girl had yet to speak was starting to concern him. She was still in shock, he suspected. "My name is Lucan," he told her as they reached the door to the shack he kept as a home. The door was in reality a bit of driftwood that he had lashed together and hung from the doorway using some rope. It barely even kept the wind out, but it was the best he had been able to come up with.

He set her down on the edge of the straw pallet he used for a bed. She could use it for tonight; he would take the floor. "Well, child, if you're going to stay here, you'll need a name," he told her, sitting down on the floor with her and offering her a piece of bread. It was meager, but it was the only food he had.

The young Bosmer frowned as she tried to recall her own name. She shook her head as nothing came to her – and she looked as though she was about to cry again.

Lucan started speaking again before the girl had the chance to get too upset. "Well then, if you can't remember, I'll just have to give you a name!" he told her with a cheesy, forced grin. He made a show of thinking over it for a moment. "I think I will call you Una," he told her after a moment.

Lucan had no idea what the name meant, or where he had even heard it. It just seemed to fit the pathetic little elf huddling in a blanket on his floor. The girl took a bite of the bread he had given her, chewing carefully before swallowing it. Dark eyes studied him carefully, as though she expected him to suddenly change his mind and kick her out.

Her reaction drew a weak laugh from him. "You're safe here, child," he reassured her. She relaxed somewhat at that statement, but still said nothing. Maybe he would have better luck with that in the morning – if she even could speak. She understood him well enough, it seemed, but perhaps Bosmer children didn't learn to speak until they were older. He really had no idea.

"Get some sleep, Una," he suggested, using the name he had chosen for her. "By morning you should feel better, and we can get you into town and see if anyone there knows what family you have left."

Una wordlessly studied his expression for a moment before she curled up on the pallet – bread still clutched in one hand – and slowly drifted off to sleep.

Lucan watched over the girl for a few minutes before deciding that he needed to get some sleep himself. He stood just long enough to walk over to the other side of the tiny, one room shack. He sat down, leaning his head and back against the wall of the structure. It was an uncomfortable way to sleep, but it would do for the night.

Sleep well, little one, he thought before he closed his eyes sleep came to him as well.