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the door.  With a last glance at the empty walls and
bare floors Cinder reached around and opened the door behind her.  With conscious
effort, she backed out of her home and into the street.
             Cinder already missed her father, Rovair,
who had left an hour earlier, just ahead of the law.  Ostensibly a painter of
signs, Rovair was secretly a forger:  the best, known as ‘The Quill’.  He could
copy any hand or style infallibly.  But this skill eventually drew the
attention of the King, who expended great effort to catch him.  By taunting the
monarchy (actually forging a satirical writ for his own arrest in the King’s
hand and posting it on the door to the headquarters of the city’s secret
police) the Quill had sealed his own fate.  King Alhad placed an immense bounty
on the forger’s head, and soon one of Rovair’s former clients revealed his
location.
             Rovair had many friends in varied circles
and through them learned of his old associate’s treachery.  He sold all of his
possessions, left his daughter a great amount of cash and skipped town, even
selling his house to an unsuspecting merchant.  By Andrelia law, all
possessions of criminals became property of the crown upon the suspect’s
conviction.  So unable to leave Cinder anything of real value, the Quill sold
it all off, knowing most of it would later be confiscated by the authorities,
to the detriment of the purchasers.  He, anyway, had gotten his money for it.
            
             Cinder’s parents met nearly fifty years
earlier on one of her mother’s rare visits to human civilization.  Cinder’s
mother, Shayna Starshine, was an elf of noble blood, known as Faeries by
humans, who as a race dealt only rarely with humanity.  But Shayna and those
she traveled with were adventurous for their kind and did, on occasion, visit
areas populated by the comparatively aggressive humans.  Rovair and Shayna’s
meeting was tempestuous and their love a matter of hours:  a true attraction of
opposites.  In the shame which followed, stooping so low as to let a human love
her, Shayna retreated to her forest domain in the vast Darkwood, carrying in
her womb a half-human, half-elven reminder of her meeting with humanity. 
Rovair, known that year as Valmar, was unaware of their creation.
             Shayna raised her daughter in seclusion. 
The nearby village of Falondell was the only civilization Cinder ever knew, and
the only opportunity she ever had to interact with other people, including
humans.  The mother loved her daughter and raised her as a pure-blooded Faerie,
teaching her the secrets of the planet as only nature’s children—the elves—knew. 
But Cinder longed to know of her father and of other humans, so at the age of
forty-seven, seeming in her early twenties in human years, she set out towards
Andrelia and her beginnings.
             Her search had an absolute air of
futility all about it, and anyone but Cinder would have seen how impossible
success would be.  Perhaps it was her naiveté, or the elven confidence
instilled by her mother, or even her belief that since she aged so slowly a
long search would mean little to her.  Maybe it was a combination of these
reasons, but Cinder was not daunted in the least when the tremendous walls
loomed ahead in the distance still miles away.  “What a great adventure,” she
thought enthusiastically, welcoming a chance to study the strange, wild race
called man.  Cinder was looking for a person named Valmar, who would now be
near 70 years of age, if he still lived.  Shayna had told her daughter the name
of the tavern where she met him, the decades seeming but a few days or weeks to
the immortal Faerie. 
             What Cinder could not possibly realize
was that her father had gained the gratitude of many powerful people by using
his art to their benefit.  One such gift he received from a noted mage was a
magical elixir that