Legends of Belariath
Nienna Kinslayer
At times, the forest made more sense to Nienna than the people did. The word and the Lore had so much meaning to her people but in the end? It was the whisper of the trees that told her what she needed to know. Born beneath the half-moon and made to balance her lunar anger with the dark wisdom of that well considered orb, Nienna's birthing cries had been silenced not by the touch of her mother or the soft crooning of her father but by the song of a lark in a tree. This is what the Leafwalker clan knew of her from her earliest days: Nienna was not born to walk among those of her species. She was not born for the quill or the lute, but the call of the magpie and the howl of the wolf. These were her ways, and they held her ways during her training.
Education as a druidess came naturally to none more easily than to the Leafwalker's most recent scion. The trees whispered their hidden song and the maddening call of the whipporwhil was the greatest of teachers for her. Deep in the forests, she learned all that she needed to know and a whiff of something more. In the deepest and darkest places, Nienna found a place that had been lost to the history of her people and fell into a mouldering crypt. Nothing dead stirred within but instead, the place was perfectly serene. Quiet, and a sign. The young druidess learned then that nature would eventually reclaim all things. Even the holiest and most secret of places were not hidden from Gaea, and that Her fingertips would reach down into the most hidden places to return them to nothingness.
That night, Nienna returned to her people and sat around the story-fire to listen to the tales. Oft repeated cautionary stories about travelling too far, about seeing too much and about how the secrets of the world could drive a person mad. The druidess listened and knew that she had found the simple and insidious truth about the world: All things returned to Gaea, including the secrets of the world. Anything that she learned, anything that she did, would all return to the Mother in the end. All that she could ever find in the world and claim for her own would eventually come back to that darkened crypt in the forest, and from there? To nothingness. What was she then, but simple flesh? Simple blood, and a simple soul? What challenge could she face and not overcome knowing that in the end, it would all be for Her.
Her Rite of Passage, to go forth into the forest and return to the Elders something that had been lost, was too easy. She brought back a fragment of a pillar from the crypt and left it in their care, and smiled at how their eyes widened so intensely for the glyph that had been carved upon it. An ancient sect of Gaean worshippers, and here they had thought the lore lost entirely. The blessing was given for a boon, anything of Nienna's choosing and when it came time for the choice to be made? She chose it by stating the name of the land, Belariath, in its own tongue. A sign that she wished to leave and to find the world as she saw it. And they did grant this, with deep reluctance for the departure of such a druidess as this.
But she departed, all the same.