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You watch, staying as still as possible through the tremors that shake you, still uncertain on what to do due to the events occurred moments before, and keep your eyes straight to the bottomless eyes of the dark elf before you.
Hadn't your hands been tied together or your mouth covered by rope and cloth you'd have probably dug your nails into skin as a means to steel yourself back to reason, but alas that option eluded you as soon as the tall creature came upon you.
It was nothing but a ruined cumulus of broken, wrecked houses, ruins that won't give back families, lost loved ones, hopes diminished.
Not only did the orcs plague all of your people's dreams and villages, but bandits too in desperate answer to the dark times prolonguing began to raid little communities to gather whatever valuables they could.
Sometimes livestock, sometimes sheep, sometimes coin were stolen.
Children, to use for labour.
Women, to warm a man when ale and adrenaline served little to pacify him.
What would your fate be now, without kin, without belongings, without purpose?
He's at arm's reach now, close enough that you need to crane your neck upwards to look at him in the eye, numbed beyond comprehension of your own emotions, deaf to your heart's rummaging in your chest.
A little creature left for fate to save - or extinguish.
There's something that passes between your eyes and his as he gazes on, presumably looking at your disheveled figure and takes in your crystal clear unwillingness to resume struggling, the fight leaving your body in a smoke evaporating towards the cloudy sky.
Then, as if you'd lost track of a second in the time you exist in, he's knelt down gaze level at you, his pale grey hands effortlessly undoing the knots that bind her hands; if you were less hysterical and a bit more level headed you'd be able to ponder the attention he gives your flesh as he slides off the rope from your reddened, burning palms, but you are not in such state of mind and so you merely take in the action.
One hand goes to your cheek, fingers wrapping around the cloth and bringing it off from within your mouth and down, to dangle by your throat. You barely tuck in a gasp as chance of speech is given back to you, your hands pressed to the curve of your breast as if in prayer to Eru.
And you tremble still, for some reason less than you had before this elf found you, lips moving to form words without uttering a single whisper.
"What is it, firiel?" he speaks instead, and his voice feels like it could have sang the secrets of the earth below them ages before your people came to be, seeking to talk to it, guard it, learn to draw wisdom from the patience of tending to each bit of grass.
There are tears in you, you realize, first secured at the corners of your eyes, then cascading copiously down your face as if a dam had broken at his inquiry.
Help me, help me, I beg you.
I do not know from where you come from, I am so foolish for being like this at such a moment, but please, please-
Your eyes seem to tell him what your lips couldn't, and if her awfully young mind can still function and put thoughts together into a coherent stream, then something flickered in his stormy stare.
You'll never know what propelled this moment to take place, what joke of fate you were made victim of, or if it truly was meant as a passage to put the falling pieces into a semblance of wholeness, but he extended warmth at that moment.
His arms enfold you and you find yourself firmly pressed against him, head below his chin as his palms try to soothe you into a less laboured breathing, whispering words in an elven tongue she'll never get to learn.
"Why?" you manage to whisper at last, as you get air restored into your lungs and settle into this incomprehensible comfort.
"The time for change has come, much will evolve and even more will perish."
His tone is factual, accepting, but there's something that tells you he won't be subjected to what he describes.
The hand previously positioned at her shoulder moves to tilt her chin upwards, to look at you directly.
You drown in that grey as the smallest, tiniest smile upturns his lips.
"And yet what must grow will persist and blossom anew."
You don't know why he was put on your path, nor you his, but you know nothing will have you forget the way his thumb caressed away your tears, his eyes burning lower than the pits of the flaming mountain.
Death will come and fire will burn high.
New seeds will grow, and some of the ache will be mended.
She inhales. To pass now or a few days from today, there's nothing left for her to lose.
Maybe she has lost herself, but it's fine.
She can lay down her weapons.
"Do you know the song of the trees awaiting spring?"