New and Old

Silvus entered his apartment and dropped his case files on the in the main room.

He paused.  Looked around.  Tugged on the collar of the fashionable human tunic he wore to the office every day.  His office.

No.

Their office.

The Prosecutor was a human position, created by humans to enforce human laws.

He pulled the tunic off, held it up, studied it.

When did he become this?  When did he decide to split himself in two?  Of what use was this behavior?  He imagined his Eladrin brethren looking at his actions, and Eladrin pride welled up in him.  What kind of Eladrin would skulk around in secret to accomplish what should be done?  Yes, should.  Should more than must.  The Hood was moral, a dispensation of the spirit of justice, but not a human spirit with human laws and human restraints and impersonal human systems.

The Hood was pure.  The Hood was Eladrin.

Silvus realized what he had become in that long moment, and he threw the tunic down in disgust.  He had become human.  There were good humans in the world, to be sure, but it was not what he was.  Warmth flooded his face, and he took a deep breath.  Eladrin blood, hot, searing, roiled through his veins at the command of his heart- the heart of a warrior.  The heart of an Eladrin.

The Hood's gear was all that was left of his old Eladrin life, his old Eladrin home, his village, his family, his line.  He gathered it up and changed into it, latching his bracers tight. pulling the strap of his sword sheaths in close.

Do you remember?

In his mind's eye, he was a boy again.  So long ago.  His grandfather stood beside him on a beach near the woods of his people, somewhere deep in the Fey.  A stag stood atop a formation of massive rocks, looking down at them.  They looked up and met its gaze.

"Feel it," his grandfather said.

He slid his feet along the sand.

The stag scraped the rocks with his hooves.

"I do," said Silvus, and he did.  He felt another heartbeat falling into rhythm with his own.  The stag's.  The beast turned and leapt and bolted off.

Silvus felt the raw power race through him, and his feet carried him off, his arms pumping wildly, cold, crisp air bursting in his lungs with every breath.

Oneness.  With the world.

Eladrin.

The night blurred around him as he made his way across the rooftops.  The apartment trashed, the Prosecutor left for dead.  Silvus Highblade would hide no more.  He was one with the wild Eladrin blood of his fathers and their fathers and generations of his race back to the very dawn of everything.