Astrid was always a quiet girl.
Not because she wanted to be… but because the orphanage made her that way. The caretakers there didn’t yell. They didn’t scream. They didn’t need to. Their punishment was in the silence: cold meals, colder eyes, and long hours locked in dark closets that made sound feel like a sin.
The orphanage never had a name, just a gate that locked from the outside, and a sign that used to say something, long since rotted off.
Astrid was left there before she could remember. Raised among whispers, strict rules, and cold hands. Elves age slowly, and that meant she didn’t grow the way the others did. She was always the youngest, always the weakest. They said she was soft. Naive. A burden. She learned to keep her head down. To nod. To smile. To sing when they told her to, and be quiet when they didn’t.
She wasn’t allowed to make friends. Or cry. Or ask where her parents went.
And if she did, there were consequences.
But she did learn music. Her one escape. Her only “magic”.
And one day somehow, she got out. Her feet bloody, her lute cracked, and her heart so small it barely beat.
She didn’t know where she was going. All that mattered was she would soon be free—be happy.
And then, she found that faithful little egg.
She almost tripped over it, it was half-buried under rags in the alley behind the orphanage’s outer wall. She had passed it a hundred times without seeing it. But tonight, something pulled her toward it. Maybe the way it was curled into itself. Maybe the way it looked like it had been forgotten. Maybe because it was the first thing she saw that felt more alone than she did.
She didn’t know what it was, or what it would hatch into. She just held it. She sang to it. She warmed it close to her chest and whispered, “I won’t leave you.”
When Felyor was born, he looked up at her with wide golden eyes and curled into her arms like he’d always been there.
She was just a child herself. But she became a mother that day.
Felyor is bold, fiery, loud. Everything she was never allowed to be. He believes he’s going to become a dragon, and sometimes Astrid wonders if maybe he already has—because he’s powerful, impossible to ignore, and burns bright enough for both of them.
She laughs about it now, it seems ridiculous, a child raising a child. But in some ways, he saved her. He’s loud. He’s bold. He sets things on fire and dares the world to look away. He gets them in trouble, and she plays her flute to smooth it over, to keep the peace, to keep them moving.
Sometimes he gets them into trouble. Sometimes he nearly burns the world around him. But he never flinches from it. He never hides. He fights for her.
They don’t have much, but they have songs. They have stories. They have each other.
For the first time in her life… she is not alone.
And her little flame—her fierce, wild, wonderful flame—reminds her every day what freedom really means.
Felyor’s POV:
