(Pronunciation: Nimlo: The first, stressed, syllable resembles the first syllable of "nimble;" the second syllable is pronounced like the English word, "low." Theril: The "Th" is pronounced as in "thank" or Scottish "thane;" the name in full rhymes with the precious stone, "beryl.")
Theril doesn't remember her mother at all, and isn't sure that the man she knew as her father was any relation to hers. Dark of skin, with long, black hair, perfectly straight, brown eyes near to black, and sharply defined features, he shared nothing of Theril's appearance but the bright intensity of his gaze. Even in her earliest memories, Theril recalls him not as "father," but as "Dein," a diminutive of what she learned was an elven word for "teacher."
She remembers the woodland elves who were her earliest peers, and the breathtakingly beautiful elven lady who called her Dein "Alcronast," and whom he called "Elhuvin." She remembers the day when her Dein sent her to Elhuvin with an urgent message in a language Theril could not read, and told to stay with Elhuvin a while and obey her as though she herself had been Theril's Dein. She remembers the thunder in the distance not many days thereafter, sharp and clear, and Elhuvin keeping her close and the feeling in the air of great preparations being made, and power, and silence, and fear -- of speaking of these things, and Elhuvin hushing her.
The fear and tension slowly waned in the days that followed among the elves, but they weren't many before Theril started asking about her Dein. Again Elhuvin hushed her, perhaps more urgently than before, and Theril soon came to know that she would never see him again.
There was little time to mourn -- perhaps a single season -- before the rainy night when Elhuvin woke Theril from her bed, and put a newborn baby boy into her arms. The child squalled in silence, his sounds lost in a spell woven about him, and Elhuvin said that he was Nimlo, a name whose meaning Theril did not know. Elhuvin whispered, "Yu must go, and carry Nimlo with you. This forest will be safe for you no more. I will send a fox to guide you to the far edge of the woods, and then you must follow your wisdom and the high points of the land, and make your way to the city named on this map." She put a paper into Theril's hand.
She held it awkwardly with her arms around the baby, but read it and listened to Elhuvin's instructions, and understood the words that were written there, and the name to whom she was to give a second paper, sealed with wax and magic. She stood still while Elhuvin strapped a knapsack over her shoulders with all the supplies Theril would need for the first stage of her journey, and took the papers from her again and put them in the knapsack, and held tight to Nimlo the whole time. By the time Elhuvin began to lead her down by little-watched ways to the forest floor, the baby was silent without need of the spell around him.
In a night-shadowed thicket, Elhuvim bade both children a tearful goodbye, and embraced them, and kissed Nimlo on his baby brow. Her last word to Theril was, "Hurry!" before she disappeared on her way back to the home they had shared for so long. Theril watched her go, and looked to the fox with shining eyes that Elhuvin had left behind, and followed it only a little way, into a deeper and lower, more shadowy part of the thicket, before she told it to wait without knowing if it would listen, and sat down beneath the sheltering leaves of a giant fern, and set Nimlo down in her lap. She shrugged off her knapsack and carefully went through it, examining its contents and cataloging them in her mind. She didn't wonder at the time that she could see everything so clearly and know what it was, and hadn't wondered since until the Fall of Isiyes, many years later, when she saw and knew at once, with the vision of her childhood restored. At the time, she only made sure of her supplies, and asked the fox, which stood waiting, aloud but in a whisper, "How does the baby get milk?" The fox only stood and waited with its bright eyes, and Theril sighed and closed her eyes, and with her knapsack packed once more and on her back, gathered up Nimlo from her lap and followed.
Theril soon had her answer; the first time Nimlo started bawling with hunger, the spell of silence long since fallen away, and Theril sat with him in her lap once more to try to find some way to make use of what she had in her knapsack for him, the fox approached, and proved to be a vixen, and nursed the little baby patiently. Theril still remembers frowning at that. There were spells enough on the fox, certainly, but it didn't change the fact that in Nimlo's first days, he was being raised on fox's milk. For her part, Theril husbanded her food carefully, and stopped to refill her water flasks at every stream. She didn't know where the fox was leading, nor how long the journey would be.
It led her to the forest's edge, far from any habitation, and looked out from under the eaves at the wind-weathered brush that covered the hills beyond. Theril followed its eyes and frowned and sat at the edge of the woodland with Nimlo in her lap, looking over her map carefully. Towns and villages, inns and houses, were marked, and Theril chose the nearest, searched for landmarks, found two, and hesitantly placed herself and the direction she would need to travel. The fox kept looking out at the hills, and the path she had chosen appeared to be in the direction of its gaze, but the village she had chosen was still far off if she understood the map properly, and she remembered that the fox was to lead her only as far as the forest's edge. "You'd better come over and feed Nimlo," she told it. "I don't want him to get hungry."
The fox didn't respond, so Theril took Nimlo up in her arms again, approached it, and sat down right beside it, positioning Nimlo in such a way that the fox had to move at last, and did, and nursed the baby one last time. Then Theril gathered everything up once more, and holding Nimlo tight in her arms, started away from the woods. Before long, the fox slipped away into the underbrush, and was gone.
Theril carried Nimlo far over the hills, checking her course against her landmarks and her map each time she came to a crest. When Nimlo grew cranky, she bounced him about and sang to him, or rocked him to sleep, and tried with little hope to figure out what to do if he grew too hungry to be calmed by anything but milk. It was a great relief to her when she finally reached a hilltop that needed no landmarks to show where she was, as she looked down across the plains below and saw the tiny, distant rooftops of a village.
Nimlo was crying continously before she came near the village, and she approached an outlying farmhouse just to avoid drawing too much attention. The woman of the house appeared at the door while Theril was still approaching, to see what was causing all the noise. It didn't take Theril long to explain that the baby was hungry, and that was all she would say or explain until the woman agreed to feed him, stubbornly refusing to answer questions about where she had come from, or whether Nimlo -- his elven blood clearly visible in his features -- might be a changeling. "He's hungry," she kept insisting, plaintively, and the woman from the farmhouse at last let her motherly instincts overcome her fear and uncertainty.
While Nimlo was quietly nursing, the farmer's wife repeated some of her questions, and Theril answered with modestly-spoken, completely invented stories. She couldn't speak of Elhuvim or the terrible fear and urgent secrecy in which she had sent the children away, or risk leaving a clear trail to be followed by the nameless object of Elhuvim's fear. She therefore decided that Nimlo had been left on the doorstep of her imaginary parents' house, and when they saw he seemed to have elven blood, had sent Theril to return him to the people from whom he came, whom they thought would hear a child's entreaties before that of a grown man or woman. The story wasn't perfect, and Theril would have preferred one that would be more ordinary, but it was the best she could do, and simple and backward enough, she hoped, to at least hope to keep the matter to occasional gossip, and as best she could, to conceal her destination and identity.
Perhaps the farmer's wife, and her husband when he returned from the fields, felt it was irresponsible to send a child off on such a mission as Theril had invented, or perhaps they simply wanted more young children in the house than their own, and decided Theril's imaginary parents wouldn't be expecting her back for some time, and might blame the elves if she disappeared along with Nimlo. They might have supposed a child with elven blood would bring good luck enough for them to scoff at any consequences. At all events, they decided to keep the children for their own. Theril accepted this, and after carefully concealing the papers she had been given by Elhuvin, did her best to help around the house, glad to see that Nimlo was being nursed properly. Many days passed, and Theril was so cheerful in her captivity that farmer and wife relaxed their guard ... and as soon as she saw an opening, Theril took up her map and letter again, and what supplies she could gather quickly and silently, lifted Nimlo from his cradle, and hurried away into the night, not toward the nearest village, but toward another that, by her map, she hoped she could reach not too long after daybreak.
For months, she crossed the countryside, now welcoming the hospitality of a family that didn't try to hinder her departure with more than promises of welcome in their home, now spending the night with a strong, single woman who asked no questions at all and expected no explanations, now traveling for as much as a month at a time with nomads or a merchant caravan, made much of for Theril's helpfulness and childish beauty, and for the obvious signs of Nimlo's elven blood, until their paths diverged or Theril worried that she'd been among them too long, and slipped away again with Nimlo in the night. She crossed the breadth of a great Human kingdom of the Fire Coast with a helpless child to care for, and nothing but her map, her wits, her duty, her bright eyes, and her will. So at long, long last, she came to Venighas, her destination, and made her way to the place named on her map, its largest orphanage. And so she showed up on the doorstep, with Nimlo in her arms, and gave the sealed letter that Elhuvim had prepared to the man who was named above its seal, and she and Nimlo were welcomed there, and more than welcomed. Children and adults alike were awed by her appearance, her boots and cloak muddied with the soil of half the kindom, and the baby alive and healthy because of her care, though she was only seven years old, and had been traveling for the better part of a year. She was beautiful and graceful and self-possessed, seeming to many or most like a higher order of being. So she arrived, so she met Dargon and Quix.
