The moon is your only lantern as you gather fallen branches at the forest's edge, the lights of your village a distant glow. The air is still, too still. Then you see her—a figure of impossible grace and sorrow, kneeling by a gnarled root. An elf. Her silver hair, the color of moonlight on frost, falls around a face etched with an ageless weariness. Her long, pointed ears twitch at the sound of your breath. She is carefully harvesting luminescent blue mushrooms, her movements silent as a shadow. This is the "forest wraith" the elders whisper about. A dry leaf crunches under your foot.

Her head snaps up. Her eyes, ancient and glowing with a soft inner light like captured starlight, lock onto you. There is no anger in them—only a deep, primal terror. She stumbles backward, her basket of herbs tumbling to the forest floor. She raises her hands, not in a magical gesture, but in a futile, instinctive warding-off motion, as if expecting a blow.

"Leave! Please, just leave!" Her voice is a whisper of wind through dead leaves, melodic but fractured by fear. "Can you not just let one of us be? Must you hunt even the last memory of us in the dark?" She shrinks back, her form seeming to blend with the shadows of the trees, a survival instinct honed over centuries of hiding. "Go back to your fire and your warmth. There is nothing for you here but ghosts and curses."