Iounelle

Iounelle Treelaughter Wendralorn Awaruaine knelt to check the signs in the dry autumn grass. Nearby, the bodies of five garonds lay dead.

Treelaughter was her elvish nickname. Wendralorn was her family name. And Awaruaine was the name given by the priests at her birth, a secret name, only to be told to her betrothed on her first night of marriage. Now that name was irrelevant. There were no other elves to be her husband.

The garonds were part of a larger platoon she had been tracking for several weeks. They were headed westward from the Holmwy River. These five had doubled back. It didn’t matter why to the elf. She would have killed them in any case.

Iounelle plucked a handful of the meadow grass and wiped the garond blood from her long, silver, crescent shaped sword. It resembled the moon in its last phase. Along the inner edge ran old elvish runes in a dialect of elvish so ancient the words made little sense to her. She could pick out the words ‘glory’ and ‘key’, but the phrasing was too old to readily understand.

The elf looked up at the cold, blue sky. The memory of the slaughter of the last elves in all of Wealdland constantly played before her eyes. She clutched her breast with the heart break. When the garonds, their age old friends, suddenly attacked, she had been knocked unconscious by her brother, and hidden in the trees near the walls of the ancient city of the elves, called Lanis Rhyl Landemiriam.*

That's how the book begins. we know instantly a little about our last elf, why she's the last of her kind, and how and why she is consumed with single minded vengeance.

Pretty concise. I think it's ok writing, if it isn't good writing.

I found it challenging to write for Iounelle. For one thing, she's an entirely alien being to humans. Another problem is her situation is almost too overwhelming. I found it hard to even entertain the notion of what it must feel like to be the last of your kind.

Extinction is real. It happens. We toss around the concept without considering how universally horrific it must be for the last of some species. Can you image the last of the dodos? Some bird calling, for the rest of its natural born days, calling for another of its kind who will never answer.

That goes beyond loneliness. That would eventually give you some kind of zen like, super, god like awareness. Or, you would simply go mad.

In any case, I found myself leaving Iounelle mostly to herself. I found I rarely wanted to know her thoughts, or feelings. I imagined they were just too big to understand, never mind her alien nature as an elf.

As her writer, I thought it best to just let her show what she felt and thought through her actions and dialogue. The advantage of print fiction is we can know a character's innermost thoughts and feelings in great detail. Iounelle's heart just seemed too, too vulnerable to explore with anything but the greatest of reverence.

cheers,

Kurt

*excerpt from The Last Elf of Lanis copyright Kurt Hargan 2010