I look back on my times, literally under the elves, a secret of the elves. The most secretive people in the world that we knew. I was just a testament to their secrecy, how well they hid their arts for thousands of years, a way to keep their kind away fro any form of ‘staining’ that may harm their precious and prideful lineage. I’ve jumped the gun with that example, but everything about the elves is a secret. Their magic, their ancestry and their beginning.

I was taught under the elves, how to keep myself a secret, forever, because I was a disaster and they could not raise a sword to a child.

Time was spent in the Elf Kings Graveyard, reading books discarded by elf children and talking to Aaron about the surface. He described the sun and the moon. The warmth of the sun was like the kiln, hot, but it never burned, it soothed and made the flowers bloom. He spoke of the moon as a being sometimes when he received mead from the guards. He said it took him a year to seep his way into their hearts. Whatever that meant. He said the moon was his friend and mine, especially mine. He said the moon was the guardian spirit to the wolves and would forever answer their call, especially during a hunt.

“What’s a hunt?” I asked

“I don’t know. The wolves don’t speak of it.Its their secret” he winked and we would laugh at his dry jokes.

He had a lot of those, dry jokes.

Aaron would teach me what he was taught as a boy, reading, writing, secret archery lessons and how to play the harp. He would spend hours teaching me, the flow of a song, the beginning of music and how every song was a tale. A question for every note and an answer with a different note. The harp became my solace and I would play it for him when the guards cut one of his fingers for stealing mead and when he would miss his homeland, Sarrafay.

He talked a lot about that. He said the girls were like fairy wine, enough to get you drunk and enough to keep you coming back. He said he didn’t have a wife but a multitude of lovers. He spoke of Ivy, his would-be bride and the only elf capable of holding him down, keeping him stable and making him a home he would always go back to. Aaron would cry after telling me how big Ivy’s bosom was, it was his happy place. I didn’t know what a bossom was. I thought it was a flower.

From time to time the elf prince would come down to the graveyard to talk to me. He wasn’t kind and he wasn’t cruel but he was handsome. Aaron paled in comparison to the elf prince. He would ask me questions like what I ate and how my day was going. He would then leave me with a gift.

“He wants you to fall in love with him and tell him where the King of the Wolves is sleeping so they can kill him. He doesn’t understand that your heart belongs to the King of the Wolves.” Aaron would whisper to me after he left.

I was 15 at the time. I didn’t know what love was and I still wonder about it to this day, when I look back on those moments.

“The last witch” Aaron would tell me “The fairies would be looking for you right about now. You have the power they like”

“What power is that and how do you know?”

“The power of the wild, witch girl.” Aaron pointed at the trees and flowers around the bird cage, “Before you came here,this place was just stone, now it’s like spring and you’re the sun.”