Okay, disclaimer: I didn't make up teiflings, elves, or the other DnD races, but my characters are my own. I love them, and they are mine, and kidnapping is bad!

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The Cloudforest is a jungle forever cloaked in fog. The world is green and gray, wet and dim from the mist that surrounds all the world. The trees are tall and the ground is alive with verdant plant growth and every kind of creature imaginable. Dew is a way of life in the mystery-shrouded Cloudforest. The world sparkles like diamonds, and when misty rain falls, life is cool and shadowy.

There are secrets in the shadows of the clouds. Soft, indistinct beasts move like dreams through the riotous growth. The mist muffles all the sounds, and a world full of life becomes as solitary as unrequited love. Each bush, each bough, each leaf hides an intruder in the lonely life of the Cloudforest.

Family does not matter. The Cloudforest is a solitary place, and it harbors a unfrequented life for those born into the rushing stillness of a place time has forgotten. A beast is born, and shortly after the pain is gone, lost.

This is the world I was born into. Despite all of the life, it is hard to eat. To eat, one must disturb another, and that is the most difficult thing in the world to a Cloudforester. Surrounded by life I could have eaten, I nearly starved to death. I am not like others. I look different, and I am willing to kill. Still, the utter solemn lonesomeness of my world seemed to steal things away from my grasp. I would reach toward a fruit to find it was farther away that it had been.

My salvation came in the form of white, pointed men. They had silver hair and eyes, and they wore many cloth leaves on their bodies. They came in a group, unlike even the tribesmen who drove me away from their waterfalls and villages. I was terrified at first.

Figures parted the curtain of concealing mist with hands like moonbeams. They wore metals and gems such as I had never seen. They were strange, so strange, and they had lumps of cloth and food on their backs. They did not carry spears, but I let the mist hide me anyway.

I have seen myself in pools of water. I know I look different from any of the other things in the world. I have a naked, forked tail and bone horns protruding from my skull. My feet are cloven hooves, and my eyes are a dull, glowing red. In other respects I am like a fog-colored man. The silver elves, as I found they were called, told me I am a teifling. They also told me that I am evil and not to be trusted.

I have always been told this. The tribe drove me out for it, and the animals avoid me like a plague when they happen across me in the lonesomeness. I know I am not evil, but I am untrustworthy. I do not always tell myself the truth. I deny reality when it does not suit me. I take what I need, and I am sure my conscience is stunted and ugly inside me. I disturb people. I emit an aura of wrongness more distressing than the eternal secret life of the fog that bore us. I have said all life is forever alone in the Cloudforest. I lied. I am the only one who the Forest takes things away from. I am the only thing in this forest as wrong as the murk, and the clouds themselves make my life harder. They know I am just wrong.

These elves, they were terrified of me. Sometimes I am as well. I remember I once happened upon a pane of metal in the jungle and saw myself for the first time. A skulking, tall and gangly horned and tailed creature hidden by his gray skin in the mist, only his red eyes glowing like ill-luck coals.

Lo and behold this is what the elves saw and took in to care for. One old male, he took me to a fire and fed me raw meat. I would have liked to cook it, but perhaps that would offend him. I now know it was an insult, and in the matter of uneducated, barbarian folk, I fell right into the "stupid" stereotype.

I was kind, shy, and polite, though, and soon he began to call me a name. I had been accepted.

"Mourn," the silver one said one night as we lay in a hotpool so choked with steam only my eyes permeated it. "Do you want to come with me out of this abysmal forest?"

I thought for a moment. Loneliness and the solitary world of clouds was all I had known until I met him. I liked belonging, even though I did not truly belong. The silver one had given me food, a home, pretty copper carvings quickly turning green like the rest of the moist and dripping Cloudforest, and a name. I had to go with him. "Yes, Lord," I replied, for I had never learned his name, and I never would.

"Good," he told me. "We will leave in the morning."