Chapter Text
Ríneth’s mother opened the small door in the floor that led to the root cellar and shoved her daughter inside. “You must be very quiet,” she ordered, and the little half elven girl nodded. “Whatever happens you must stay in here until ada or I come to get you.”
Ríneth nodded once more, and the door to the root cellar closed above her head. She knew something horrible was happening outside. There was lots of screaming, and her father had grabbed his sword. It was probably orcs. She had never seen one before, but her parents had taught her that they were very evil creatures.
She slid further and further under her house as the noises got louder. She could hear clashes of metal and shrill cries. Eventually, most of the noises stopped, but then she started to smell something odd. It smelled like burning wood, but why would her mother have lit the stove? She couldn’t be cooking with everything happening outside.
Ríneth began to cough after a while, and then she shrieked as something crashed down above her head. She saw flames begin to eat through the floor above her, and she scrambled back even further under her home and screamed again. A moment later, she heard lots of yelling, and then something was breaking through the floor near where she was. She yelled a third time as an unknown face appeared above her.
“I found her,” the face shouted behind him before reaching into the hole he had made for Ríneth.
Ríneth crawled away from the hole and out of reach. She didn’t know this man. He wasn’t from her village, and her naneth had said to wait for her or ada.
“Come here, child,” the man demanded as he began to widen the hole. “It is very dangerous here. I promise I won’t hurt you. I’m a friend.”
Ríneth scrutinized the man’s face again. He looked nice, and she was scared. She’d been under the house for a long time. Maybe he was a friend of her ada. She moved closer to him and allowed him to help her out from under the floor.
“There we are,” he said gently as he eased her through the broken floorboards. “Now we have to get away from here.”
Ríneth allowed the man to carry her out of her house, except it didn’t look like her house any longer. Everything was broken and blackened, and there still seemed to be a fire burning away inside. “Where are ada and naneth,” she asked the man as he set her down on the ground well away from any of the buildings.
“I do not know,” the man replied as he looked around for his leader. “The others are looking for them.”
Ríneth nodded and looked around her as well. It was then that she began to see all the bodies. There was the baker who made the bread that naneth bought. He was lying on his back in a pool of crimson that had run from his neck. There was the lady that came to talk to naneth about flowers. There was ada’s friend the blacksmith, and beyond him were two people close together, one with long pale hair.
Ríneth took off in the direction of the couple, jumping over the mangled bodies of the people she knew and the other grotesque forms of what could only be orcs. She heard the man call for her from behind, but she did not stop until she had reached the two bodies. It was her parents, and she didn’t need to be told that they were dead and would not be coming back.
“Come, little one,” the man said as he took her small hand in his while she started to sob for her dead parents. He led her over to Halbarad. “She’s the only survivor that we’ve found thus far. Her parents were slain.”
“Bring her with us then. We’ll get her back to one of the settlements for now,” Halbarad said sadly before squatting down next to the child. “What is your name, child?”
“Ríneth,” she replied through her sniffles. “Where are you taking me?”
“We’ll take you somewhere safe,” Halbarad answered with a sad smile before giving orders to those around him regarding the cleanup of the village.
Ríneth was then lifted onto a horse to ride with the man that had found her, and she rode away from the only life she had ever known.