Well, I think my husband, Darvin, was the start of it all. We were both quite young when we met, relatively speaking, of course. It had been maybe twenty years since I had left home? I don't remember what I was doing at the time or why I decided to join his caravan in the first place. I wish I could remember our first words to one another. But wherever it started, one thing led to another, and we traveled up and down the coast together for years, even after the kids were born. We were good merchants, but the roads were dangerous and times were hard. By the time things settled down, the kids were nearly grown anyway, so we carried on traveling a while longer.

Gradually, they peeled off from us and started lives of their own. My daughter joined another caravan, figured she would have an easier time getting established there and did quite well for herself. My two sons settled down in a city that fell long before you were born; one became a carpenter and the other took what little I could teach him, found a wizard who'd take him, and became a mage. Gods how proud we were. We joined them a few years after. One day, Darvin turned to me and said all our rambling was starting to tire him. I must admit, I was quite confused at first. I was perfectly willing to settle down for him, but I hadn't the faintest clue why he wanted to then, after we'd become so used to traveling, so I asked him. He just laughed and said he was getting old.

I hadn't really even known what that meant before then! Sure, there were old elves in my village growing up, but it's a long time before we start showing our age. It always seemed so distant and abstract. So I looked at him and, sure enough, his skin was sagging on his bones, his back was hunched over, and he had all these wrinkles and creases all over him. He was nearly always smiling and, by this time, he'd smiled so much that even when he wasn't, the marks were still there where they'd been etched into his face. And I had seen it all before then; every year brought little changes, but they were just more lines in a long tale. That was the first time I realized tales come to an end.

When I was young, my parents always told me not to go getting tangled up with shorter-lived folks. Said it would break my heart: nothing but jealousy, bitterness, and sorrow. They said there's no greater pain than watching the ones you love most wither and die. They stopped speaking to me for a while when I married Darvin, but my sister visited me at his grave and, somehow, she convinced us all to make amends not long after. They were right, of course. Darvin was not my first partner, but he will be my last. He took a part of my soul with him when he went and, when I'm dead, I'm going chase it down until I find him again. If I must, I'll take a bit of him with me in the next life, and every one after. And I'll keep finding my way back to him until the stars go out.

But that's a long time away from now, and I haven't really been alone for one moment since he died. Even as I was scattering seed over his grave, I had my children and, by then, my grandchildren. Somewhere between when the grandkids grew up and the great grandkids were born, the city fell. The years helping them all resettle after were quite chaotic and, by the end of it, there was quite a bit of distance between us. My eldest son didn't make it through at all. They were all getting on in their years by then and the move was too much for him. I helped bury the other two soon enough outside our refuge in the hills. The land there's all broken up now by rivers that were little streams when we got there. The little stones we used to mark their places are long gone, but I like to think the polished pebbles in the beds serve as their markers now.

The years have flown by like arrows since then. Now it's my great grandkids who are old and their children starting families, and my sister has a little one, too! They're scattered all across the coast and I find more and more that I'm making the same journey on different roads through different lands. My children welcome me in much the same way Darvin and I's old friends did. They love me, but they do not know me. How could they? Every few months I dash off like a mad rabbit! It's only very recently I took a break and all the rest happened. When my parents' health started to fail, too, I hurried home, and when all was said and done, my sister was the one who talked me into going back to those old ruins where Darvin and I first settled. It took a couple years to find the exact spot. It's where the Great Forest is now. I got pretty comfortable living out there. I never did find our actual home- just a few of the city's larger structures that hadn't been fully consumed by the forest yet.

That was the day I set out to become a druid. It sounds a bit mad, but I realized I had quite a bit in common with those mossy old bricks. We both stood hardly changed in a forest that didn't exist when we first settled there. The Great Forest used to be a great plain. I can still remember when the wind came howling over the hills, leaving waves of gold and red in the tall grass, and the sound of the running river that flows hundreds of leagues away now as it lapped against the city's walls during the rainy season. I had to tear up the newborn soil just to assure myself that the stone beneath, at least, was still the same. It was, and it will probably still be there when the old bricks and I crumble into fresh soil ourselves. Maybe one day my own bones will settle into the stone, and someone will come build a city or three on top of me. The wilderness is an odd place where order and chaos come to meet. Everything happens in cycles; the earth transforms over and over while remaining fundamentally the same. I find comfort in the inevitability of it, and I realized, then, that it was something I wished to become more intimately familiar with.

So, I sought out an archdruid and I learned as much as I could from him before it was time to start making the rounds again. I missed my family, so I took the lessons he taught me and I grew more familiar with the ways of the wild as I traveled. My sister and nephew have fallen on hard times, you see. I'd like to earn some coin to help them out, and it does me good to pick up some work every now and then. Oh, I'm sorry! You probably could have done without all that, couldn't you? I get a little carried away sometimes! It's the ale. Now, I believe goblins were mentioned?