Author's Note: ...and then they started reviewing it. Wonderful. Now, I have to care.
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"Sometimes you just have to stop caring. That's when the world sits up, takes notice, and starts to poke the Bear."
Sunhawk, acclaimed Fan-fiction writer
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I will not lie, I was bitter for more than a decade.
I had never wanted to be a hunter, and gnomes were, quite frankly, frightening to me. For a long time I had nightmares of being surrounded by a crowd of tiny bearded men, spitting lewd taunts and trapping me with ice.
I don't dream very much, any more.
I can't describe to you my horror upon the first few months in Anvilmar. Hard work I was used to, and strange looks. Neither were in short supply on Teldrassil, where I was the rejected slave-polisher, as the trainees whispered when they thought I was not listening.
My mentor was relentless.
With neither the matter-of-fact cruelty of my Elvish teachers, nor the callus disregard for my feeling that I expected from a Dwarf, she forced me to work in ways I had never done before. I learned to sweat in frigid temperatures, and track leopards by the taste of their tracks.
Despite myself, I learned to respect the ways of the Dwarves.
They were...so different than my people. I saw, and still see, in them an ancient ever-present reverence for nature that permeates every inch of their world. If my birth-people are of the forest, the Dwarves are like the earth we grow from...and I learned to be of the earth as well.
I became a new sort of hunter, following neither the grace-filled nature-patterns of my birth-right, nor the earthy, pragmatic paths of my Dwarf-led training. I was...lonely.
I felt that I was a Dwarf, at heart, and yet...I could never find a Dwarf-male attractive. I never recaptured the feeling and mind-set of a true Night-Elf enough to attract one of my own race. I was a cloud, full of love to rain on another, caught at that age when one is ready for first love and first heartbreak, but unable to continue.
I trained, at first grudgingly, later diligently, to become a Huntress skilled in all the arts of tracking, taming, and killing that were my lot. When first I left Anvilmar, I had not been outside it for more than a hundred years.
...I went to Stormwind, giddy with my new-come adulthood, and the responsibility of my mission; I was to make a delivery there. I know now that it was one of the less crowded days in that mighty fortress, however, it seemed to my untrained mind to be an entire world of unwashed bodies and unkept armor. That was the first day I saw him.
...The most beautiful human I have ever seen.