The Twins

It was in the later years of the second Nether War that the halfing twins Aelop and Daela were born in the distant, lost realm of Anduir's Rest.  Born under the harvest moon, their arrival was taken as a sign of strange things to come, for few twins had ever been born among the halflings before.

They were presented to the council and town elders, for fear that they might be a bad omen, however, after much discussion, it was finally decided that they carried no threat to the rest of the realm.  Just to be on the safe side, they were blessed with good fortune and long lives, and then left to be raised in their family home.

Saying that they brought good fortune to their kin might be stretching the truth to the point of breaking, for where one halfling causes mischief, two halflings cause it tenfold.  Not content with the quiet lives of their nature-oriented kin, these two halflings pushed the boundaries of what was considered appropriate in Anduir's Rest.

As grown halflings they were little more well behaved than as children, however, they did finally settle into a little home burrowed deep beneath one of the greater trees.  Their kinfolk believed that perhaps they had, at last, built solid roots in their homeland and would stop with their childish antics.  In truth, however, these two halflings dreamed of faraway places and rumors of fantastical things.

Well into their grown-up years, they began to burrow deeper underground and schemed of running away and exploring the dangerous and beautiful world outside this little wooded haven.  For they believed that surely the outside world could not be all as bad as they had been led to believe.  And for what dangers it might hold, surely there was enough good to be worth the risk.

When the halfling twins were young, Aelop once convinced Daela to climb with him to the top of the greatest tree in the realm.  All halfling children would enjoy playing around the roots of the great trees, however, few climbed up more than a little way.  It was not that they feared heights necessarily, but that they were innately a land-dwelling people, burrowing under the earth or living in small homes on the surface.

But these two wild ones were not content with being the same as their friends and family.  The question of what they might see at the top hung over them until finally they succumbed to their curiosity and made that daring climb.  Other halfling children called for them to stop, to come back down.  Several ran away to call for the grown-ups and elders, but by the time anyone arrived who could prevent them from going up, the twins were already well out of reach.

Ignoring the angry and fearful summons from below, they scaled the side of the tree as if they were spiders, from great brough to sheltered knot of wood.  Eventually, after what felt like many hours to their small reckoning, they reached the summit and poked through the canopy.  Faces awash with the golden glow of the setting sun, they blinked and rubbed their eyes, trying to adjust to the sudden brightness.  As the stars left their eyes and started twinkling in the darkening sky above, a gust of wind ran over them, causing them to catch a breath and cling to the tree in a mix of excitement and terror.

Yet it was at this moment that they knew they wanted to leave Anduir's Rest one day.  For almost as far as their eyes could see, there were the rolling hills of the canopy.  Yet in the furthest distance there was a hint of something else.  Was that a mountaintop here, or an ocean there?  The shingles of a city on a hill?  They did not know, yet their thirsty minds were set resolutely to one day seek those places out and stand on top of the world.