"Come, troll, be about your business," he demanded at length, using the human word for her kind as an epithet. Elf and troll were both words of the common tongue which they had learned from humans. Seeming disconcerted, almost irritated by Thule's dull, placid gaze he sneered, "Here I am helpless and dying, why don't you strike me down, you doltish horror?"
Even in anger his voice held beauty, as soft and liquid as the deep-running river that flowed through Thule's cavern home, etching its way persistently through time and stone.
"Why do you hesitate?" the elf cried, when she continued to stand there only looking at him. "Gods of Light deliver me from stone-bound brains! No wonder your kind are all but extinct. Do you not understand? I am dying and no threat to you."
"Dying?" Thule muttered at last, a slow grating sound like rock cracking in the frost. Though her thought process was slow, she was very old and knew the common tongue well enough, even if it was hard for her to speak, but his words made no sense.
To die, this she understood--for both animal and humankind it was to become meat. For Thule's kind it meant to move no more, forever. But the children of starlight could not die. Their magic was too strong; they would live forever. Even the sun, whose light would turn Thule's flesh to empty stone, could not harm them. Yet as she looked into his eyes, she knew that he was dying, and this disturbed her deeply, though she could not say why.
"What are you doing?" he demanded in a startled tone as she bent to gather him carefully into her arms.
"You need warmth, food," Thule replied as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, as she tramped doggedly across the snowfield toward the safety of her cavern.
Bringing the elf to her cavern was a foolhardy thing to do; every instinct she possessed told her this. He was the enemy. It was near certain death for her if any others of his kind were to discover where she laired; yet she could not kill him, nor could she leave him to die.
By the time she laid him on the cavern floor beside her favorite pool, he had fallen into a kind of trance-like silence, though his breath came evenly and his heartbeat was strong. He would need fire, she knew. She, being a creature of the earth and stone, was comfortable in the cold and dark and could see well enough by the dim phosphorescence of the stone, but he was a creature of light and warmth. Thule did not possess fire nor the secret of making it. If he were to be saved, she knew she would need help.
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