Ankili mac Aevyrn (Pronounced: ahn-KEE-lee mac ĀEY-vern)

Ankili mac Aevyrn stands 5’10 with hair the hue of the sun. Together with a face as pale as the new moon and eyes of piecing green, his features will cause those who do not know him to do a double take, look once more, and surmise that the slender hips and build (which contrast with his broad shoulders) point toward a hidden ancestry, an arresting combination of elf and man.
For his mother was Akana Alcestes (pronounced ah-KAH-nah al-CESS-teez), a druidess of a hidden grove in Sinann. She herself was three-quarters elf. (Her mother before her had been pure elf, and her father a half-elven druid.) Her grove lay in the place where the forest becomes rocky and mountainous as the temperate woods run upslope and begin to mix with fir and pine at the base of the lower heights of the far northern Gallectica Range. The grove’s sacred circle was a deep, hidden bowl surrounded by mountain ash. Ankili had learned much from Akana of woodlore and druidic knowledge. Yet often he traveled to his father’s people, who lived in the vale which ran along the great, looping river to the west. There his father, Aevyrn, labored long days as the village blacksmith, and was known for his skills as an armorer. He taught Ankili much about the making of weapons, and gave Ankili his broad shoulders, his surname, and basic skill with wielding a blade. He made the scimitar that Ankili used after his mother initiated him onto the Path of the Druid, after the oath prohibited him from practicing with a straight sword anymore. And Ivryn forged the leaf-shaped blade of the spear that Ankili had been carrying on the day he returned to find his mother’s grove in ruin.
Ankili had climbed to the bough-flet among the tree tops where Akana, his mother had made her home, and found her there, spread eagle, cruelly pinned to a tree by two curved, sharp-toothed daggers that had been pierced between her slender wrist bones. Their points had been lodged in the trunk, holding her there. They were large daggers, crudely forged, made of black iron, the kind used by ogres, so that only the points were wedged between her slender, elvish wrist bones. How long she’d been there, tortured and screaming, Ankili did not wish to know; for the thought (which he constantly sought to put out of mind) reminded him of the two days he had stayed overlong with his father, perfecting the folding technique by which alloyed-iron becomes steel. Had he come sooner and not delayed (he was young enough and still hot enough of blood so to believe), he might have saved her. In his more sober moments, he was not so sure.
There had been not just ogres. Those he recognized from the large, extra knuckle-like indentation at the edge of their footprints. (His skill at tracking beasts and humanoids was a skill he had also learned from his mother.) The ogre prints, as he inspected them, ran alongside other strange prints he could not accurately read. Who else had been here? There were some boot prints too, human or human. One? Or more than one? Was this person, or persons, the leader of this raid? And among the crisscrossing boot tracks and ogre prints was something larger. The strut of something huge. A giant? Ankili had never seen a giant, so he did not know. Or was it something as large than a giant, and yet more dire?
And then, from the hidden place beneath the suspended bough-flet where Akana slept, he found his worst suspicion confirmed: the lute had gone missing. The lute that made the leaves of the sacred trees in the bowl of the hidden grove shimmer and tremble and sing along with her when his mother played it. The lute that could sooth hurts, and yet, it was said, could also make the earth shake. This item was (it was not hard to guess) why they had tortured her. How long had she held out until she had revealed its secret place? A day? Two? A week?
The tale his mother told him (a tale handed down druid to druid of those who guarded this grove) went something like this: For one strong enough, for one with secret knowledge and an iron confidence, the lute would not just heal; it would also bring fire from the earth. It could make the mountaintops explode, belch lava, rain ash. Though an ordinary looking instrument, in the druidic tongue it was called Tar Eneemena: Earth Shaker. For this reason, several centuries ago, it had been sent here for protection, sequestered in a minor grove, ringed by a bowl of mountain ash. The ancient druids, his mother told him, had believed those trees – the mountain ash – would sooth the fiery spirit inside the lute, so that its music would not overthrow the balance. Better to keep its healing powers from the world than to risk unleashing fire unbidden from the earth, when the earth herself had not called it forth. Better that beings remain ill or die without the lute’s caring song than for its music to be mastered by one who wished to conscript and wield the fury of the earth. Better that it lay hidden in the woods and forgotten, and it was now forgotten by all but the most learned among the druids.
For according to the tale, it had been five centuries or more ago since a luthier-bard of great skill had carved it. Aided by a dark, fiercely ambitious sorcerer and a beatific, saintly priestess, the luthier-bard had trapped inside it a spirit of fire, whose powerful voice contained an eerie magic. The Three Crafters had created the lute, it was said, as perhaps the only means of defeating a menace from another plane. What was that menace? His mother knew, but had never told him. It may have been that only the guardian of this grove had been permitted to know the whole tale. With the threat gone, the Three Crafters fought over its possession, and a great destruction had ensued. Of what had happened to the Three Crafters or how they had been defeated, that was also something that no one alive, perhaps, knew now that Akana was dead. Or maybe others also knew. Again, Ankili was not sure.
For this reason, at any rate, only a single woman, one with the most beautiful voice among the Celtic druids of Sinann or Galletica, was selected to guard this grove when its guardianship became vacant, and then was sent north to protect the grove. In the right hands, the lute, accompanied by one who had as beautiful a voice as Akana’s, would bring healing to earth and cause the land to flourish. In the wrong hands, accompanied by one whose voice was discord, lands would be thrown asunder as mountains burst into fury; waterways fouled, their courses changed; the fate of kingdoms altered. Even cities would be buried in fire, ash, and ruin.