The night had been dark, but not excessively so; a fat, full moon glittered down on the rolling fields between quaint, semi-country lanes. Silvered tips of grasses and leaves flickered in the faint breeze, lending a glittering brilliance to the world outside of the main city. The streets here were still dirt, but clearly smoothed out; the manor houses, when one encountered them, exultant and beautiful, with arching lines and vividly bright columns to hold up the rooves over tiled porticoes. The wealth alone was enough to take her breath away, though as a creature of nature, she had never had any need for such obvious trappings of wealth.
The slender girl traveled down one such road, the thin dust of cobbles and dirt clinging to her feet as dirt and dust always had. Her dress hung in successively ragged tatters around her body, the hems falling unevenly, the silk stained with her previous attempts to wash it with her ability to control the water that swam in streams and lakes around her, the former lace edging only present in certain spots. Where it had once shimmered mother-of-pearl in the light of the moon, it was now a flat silver shade, no longer magical, no longer mystical.
The faerie girl wasn't sure where she was headed, knowing only that she was looking for somewhere to stay the night, or find something to eat. Hunger had carved delicate lines under her cheekbones and the hollows of her eyes, etching shadows along the edges of her slender arms, throwing a dark relief along the southernmost edges of her ribcage, though that was unseen to the world around. She carried the image of hunger and poverty around her, though she had once possessed the curves of regular feeding, the self-assured grace of a princess in her own kingdom. Now, all she had were the rags on her back and the glittering beads of the headdress she wore on her brow and the necklace that circled her throat and glittered in deep blue shades against her breast.
Her feet carried her on the silent path, blue eyes flicking from tree to tree, searching out anything promising in the shadows along the oak-lined path. Her pearly hair fell in waves around her waist, sometimes tangled, sometimes straight, and always somehow in her eyes. With another aggravated sweep of her hand across her forehead, she found it. Something.
Someone.
The figure was propped against the trunk of a tree, thickly shadowed despite the brilliant moon that tossed glittering waves of light to the ground. The posture alone made Ilayda stop; it wasn't the strong-shouldered look of someone in the height of their power, it was the image of someone who was hurting. Ilayda was a faerie, obvious in the graceful way she moved and the ethereal vulnerability of her face, but despite her species' penchant for mischief and mayhem, she held none of those tendencies. When she saw someone who seemed injured, her heart begged her to stop, and so she did.
The girl turned off of the roadway, stepped cautiously through the thickening grass along the verge. She moved slowly, as one does when approaching an injured animal, with both hands extended. Her voice when she spoke was full of the sound of water, a chattering brook designed to soothe angry souls.
"Hello." She spoke carefully, each step placed delicately on the grass, hands still outgstretched. "Are you hurt? I can help you." She offered a soft smile, the edges of her face lit with the gentle wash of moonlight, flickering in the depths of her eyes and glittering along the edges of her cheekbones. "I won't hurt you." She paused a few feet from the figure, studying the lines that looked human-like in nature, then sank to her knees, dropping one arm but leaving the other extended as though approaching a nervous animal. "Let me help you." She saw the darkening of the shirt across the front, caught the faint whiff of copper and pennies that heralded blood, and bit her lip. She wanted to help the figure - but only if the man would let himself be helped.
