A golden baby girl wailed among the wreckage of her people's caravan. Newly born with two tiny buds of horns, she could not see the carnage that was strewn about her, nor the body of the merchant female who had used the last of her strength to cover and hide the child in the basket. All she saw was the white cloth above her, spattered with blood and altered by her tear flooded violet eyes. They had been distributing goods among the farming Qunari when the pregnant female in the group gave birth earlier than expected. With only four solider guards they were ambushed by a veritable army of human bandits for their goods, but luckily they had not found the Qunari child or it would have been either her enslavement or her death. It had been quite a few hours and the infant was crying for food and attention but remained unanswered.
A cloaked figure emerged from the forest and came upon the ruinous scene. After a moment of hesitation the figure approached the caravan. The bandits had left little to scavenge but the intruder made due, finding everything the bandits had overlooked. When the person came upon the little girl, she was shivering, her large eyes staring up at the stranger with a wisdom beyond her years. She had found her new caretaker. The figure pulled down it's hood to reveal a slight elven woman with dark brown hair, tan skin, and eyes as green as her forest home. She looked upon the child first with surprise, but then with pity for the poor hungry thing. She was clan-less, wild, and unsure if she could care for a newborn child properly but she couldn't just leave the being to starve. She made a Lenilul, an elven child carrying harness, placed the child within its folds, tying it tight to her chest. She picked up her goods bag and ran off into the woods with a new mouth to feed.
The babe whimpered with hunger but the elf knew not what to feed such a creature for she had never seen anything like it or its dead kin. "Shhh, da'len I will find something you can eat" she said in the ancient elven language. Perhaps it needed milk like elven children but she could not provide it herself. She wondered if her dear friend Halla would take pity on the hungry child and let herself be milked to feed her. When the elf reached her small land ship, she set about to find materials to make a bed for her new ward. A basket and an old cloak would do fine for the moment. The child looked around her and was delighted by the new colors and sounds of the forest, so much so that she felt her face begin to move in strange ways. Her vision shrank as her cheeks rose and the girl experienced her very first smile.
Luckily the elven woman's Halla sensed that their new little companion was in need of her milk and willingly gave it to her friend and protector. The woman did not want to risk punching a hole in her own water-skin so she found an old leather Dalish glove, filled it with milk, tied off the entrance, and pricked a small hole in one of the fingers. She brought the makeshift cradle onto her lap and breathed a sigh of relief when the little one began to drink, and with a healthy vigor. As the golden baby suckled the old glove, her savior couldn't help but smile. She began to sing an old lullaby she remembered from her childhood, an elven song of the old kingdom and what happened when the world weary elders began the eternal sleep. It was not the history of the child in her arms, she was almost certain, but the babe didn't seem to mind. After a while the girl pushed the nearly empty glove away. Her full tummy and the soothing voice of the elven woman soon took its toll on her. The child yawned deeply and snuggled into her new warm bed as her eyelids began to droop. In her sleep she would dream about the new colors she had experienced and sounds she would not know til later were those of her dying kin.
In time, her caretaker, whose name was Frenya, named the Qunari child Enanumin which meant 'emerged from a place of tears' in her native tongue. Often she called her Ena for short. Though she had no children of her own, Frenya raised the girl how she was raised by her mother. Frenya taught her the language and legends of the ancient elves as well as their techniques in hunting, fishing, and gathering, but most importantly, to be grateful to the beings that gave their lives so she could survive. The forest became her home, and the Halla her trusted friend. Her only hindrance was her size. At ten years old she towered over her elven adoptive mother, so much so that Frenya feared that they would be discovered more easily, but she had taught the girl well. Ena stepped almost silently in the forest and they were never once interrupted in their travels.
When she was old enough, Frenya taught Ena the ways of the rouge and how to dual wield swords, which was her own specialization. The girl soon showed exquisite skill and form that rivaled even her mother. They lived a mostly peaceful existence, scavenging the destruction left in the wake of bandits and animal attacks, keeping the old ways, and each other company. On Ena's sixteenth birthday, the age of womanhood for elves, they sat around the fire for their evening meal, like every night, chatting, when a question popped into Ena's mind. She knew that the slight woman was not her birth mother, it didn't take a scholar to figure that out, her reflection was evidence enough. What she didn't know was how Frenya knew her birthday.
"Mother, how is it that you know when I was born? Anyone can see we are not of the same kin. I have horns and you have none, my skin is sun colored and yours is like young bark, my hair the color of snow and yours is of rich soil, and my eyes are lavender while yours are like the leaves of the pines. Not to mention I am only 16 and far larger than you, no disrespect meant mamae."
The older woman sat startled for a moment, then sighed "I thought this day would come. It is true that we are not kin, but that doesn't mean that I don't love you like I would if you were my birth daughter. You know that to be true, right?"
The qunari girl laughed "Yes mamae, of course I do" and she hugged the smaller woman.
Frenya patted her daughter lovingly on the back and smiled "I am glad dear one. Now about your birthday, the day I found you, a group of bandits had ransacked a caravan your people had lead and none survived but you, and you were hidden away beneath the wagon by one of your kin, I can only assume. That day was this day sixteen years ago. I knew not how old you were, but it couldn't have been more than a few days before the attack, so I simply marked the day I discovered you among the wreckage as your birthday. Does that sate your curiosity? Have you more questions?"
Enanumin sat for a moment to absorb the information before responding "Yes, can...can we go to the place you found me?"
The older woman considered her ward's request "Indeed we could, but it was near Par Vallen, which is very far from here. It would take a moon to travel there."
Ena, answer ready, stated "Well, we are travelers, we can go where we please. What do we need around here that we cannot get there?"
"Actually we are here, in the Brecillian Forests of Ferelden to meet with the Dalish elves in a meeting of the tribes called the Arlathvhen that occurs every ten years."
"But I am not an elvhen mamae."
"You are inside, and you were accepted last time. Surely you remember your first, you were but a da'len last time we went but you had fun didn't you?"
"Yeah, if by fun you mean getting stared at and avoided. In fact I remember it as a quite unpleasant experience. No one could understand me and the other children teased me without end."
Frenya scowled at this revelation "Really? Why didn't you come to me for help?"
"Because I would have looked weak to them if I had, just one more thing to tease me about. Do we really have to go back there?"
"We don't have to, but I would like to. I have not seen another elf since the last Arlathvhen. And we know more about the language than many of the tribes, so we have a responsibility to share more knowledge with them to keep our culture alive. It would also do you some good to learn some trade tongue while we are there so you do not get teased for knowing more elven than the others do."
With that both women laughed at the irony and enjoyed the rest of their meal before heading to sleep.