Sylvan Starweaver's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Sylvan stood at the edge of the clearing where three hundred years of silence might finally break. The message had arrived at dawn, carried by a rider who wouldn't dismount or speak. Just a folded letter pressed into his hand, sealed with green wax. The meeting place sat at the boundary itself, marked by an old cobblestone fence thick with moss. On the far side, a carved wooden staff had been planted in the earth, green silk ribbons stirring in the wind. Someone had come. Someone had actually come. The elf stepped out from the treeline, alone. She was tall, dressed in traveling clothes that had seen weeks of use. She stopped three paces from the fence and held up her right hand. A bracelet circled her wrist, silver and green threads woven in a pattern Sylvan recognized from his grandfather's journals. She spoke in the old merchant tongue. "I will commit the Greenhollow Guild. But only if you swear an oath to the first anchor, before the humans arrive." Her eyes held his. The bracelet marked her as a keeper of old agreements, ones that existed before the separation. She was asking him to bind himself to something the humans couldn't know, not yet. Sylvan felt the weight of three centuries pressing against this single choice. He nodded once. The first side had moved.