Role

Chapter 2

I think far too often about what my name is or was or should be. I'm borrowing
a name and I think far too often about what happened to the little girl whose
real name is mine. Are names powerful? Do they really hold anything of value?
What is a family really? There's where names come from, family. At least I
think so. You look to your family to meet yourself and then you look to
yourself to know yourself. But you must start somewhere, I must start somewhere
and being twice-orphaned and wing-clipped, I don't know where to begin to look.

Since leaving Evermoon Hollow after my false father died, I spent a time
tending to the orchards again. The mothers now free of their tyrannical husband
made their way safely back to their families and encouraged me to find mine.
Only one knew of the orchards where I spent a brief time before the merciful
abduction, as they called it. One of the apple pickers, a woman, did remember
me and told me the story, though even she knew not my name.

One night nearly a hundred years before, a small group of pixies came to the
apple trees with an infant nearly their size. A poem was left beside the child:

She was one of us and will always be
Tend to her mercifully
hEr spirit is strong
Zhe is grounded now, like you
And so with you, she must now be

The 'E' and the 'Z' confused them and so she remembered that specifically. They
told her they went off to hunt the one responsible and they would return for me
once they were successful. What's more is they did return, but I was gone. She
suggested I find them in the Ancient Emerald Forest.