A/N: Werecat99: Thank you for the review! Moroderl is said moh-roh-DAYRL, with the last syllable rhyming with "barrel." He probably will come back into the story at some point.

Warning: This one goes beyond dark and enters twisted.

He leaned against the wall, and waited for his mother to come home.

As he did, he thought of the story she always told him.

*******

Even when he reached fifteen, as tall as he would ever grow, as old as he would ever look, his mother still loved to tell the story of his father to him. But by that time, Sailagh had learned to translate.

"He was so beautiful," she would say, with a little sigh as though she could touch the beauty still. "Eyes blue like the shadows of the sun on the snow, and hair as silver as the frost on the leaves." She used the same descriptions again and again. She had made them up, once, and was reluctant to forsake them.

Sailagh would nod, and translate in his mind. He was so beautiful I hated and envied him. I’m never going to look like that. Why can’t I look like that?

His mother always shifted position then, hand plucking at her skirt as if she still remembered the night she had pulled it up for her Elwen lover. "He suddenly noticed me one day, and smiled. It was like the sun coming from behind a cloud."

I made him notice me. Why didn’t he notice me before then? He should have noticed me.

"I became his lover that night." A note of pride in her voice, still glinting like a coin after all these years, though like a coin it had grown polished and tarnished through too many handlings. "No one had ever wanted me the way he did, so fast and so suddenly."

I mistook the passion of a land Elwen for love.

"He lay with me that night, and it was the most wonderful experience of my life."

I had beauty. I had notice. Surely in a little time I would have a marriage and a comfortable house. After all, no one who was human would lie with a woman but one he intended to marry and have raise his children. Why would an Elwen be any different, even though I knew he was different?

"But when I woke in the morning, he was gone from me." Flowing tears. "He must have realized that he could not love me as I deserved, and departed from me."

He woke up, came to his senses, and ran out the door as soon as he could.

"In a few months, I realized that I carried the gift of a child he had given me." A bright smile. "I had not asked for such a gift, but there it was, nevertheless, growing in my belly, and bigger all the time."

All those mornings of swollen ankles and sickness! I thought I would die.

"And then I bore you, Sailagh, and I have been happy ever since."

Happy when I don’t look at you with eyes envious of the beauty you inherited. Happy when I don’t think that I’ll die in just a few decades, even if I’m lucky, and you may see five thousand years. Happy when I don’t flinch and shriek in fear as your magic rises all around you, not trained enough to stay under control, too strong to subdue.

Oh, yes, Sailagh knew how to translate very well.

*******

He had once thought it would be different than it was. After all, many of his fellow humans believed that his father, whatever his name had been, had raped his mother. She had the sympathy of everyone in their village. They were in the middle of a war with the land Elwens, a war that must see them destroy or be destroyed. Surely the sympathy for the mother would extend to the son.

It didn’t. They stared at him in the same way that they stared at the Elwens who occasionally rode by at a distance. They whispered about "beauty beyond heart’s holding" and "lives as long as a god’s" and "magic that could make the winds cower," but they didn’t treat him with awe, or even try to forget his Elwen blood and treat him like a human. They turned on him with bitterness mixed with fear.

And envy.

Always envy, eating like a canker at every happiness that Sailagh thought he had found. He believed he had human friends, and then found all they could think about was him living in years they would never see. He believed he was in love with a human girl, and he wanted to marry her and have human children and never leave the village, just as everyone was always proclaiming was best. And he found that she curled up and sobbed when he asked her to marry him, at the thought of wedding with something- thing, always, and not human or person or even Elwen- who was heir to the Rune knew what evil.

Sailagh wanted to be human. He told himself that, again and again. He tried to accept that this was just fear. He knew its sources, since he could see them in the villagers’ eyes, and he had inherited some of the land Elwen emotional magic that let him feel what they were feeling. Surely, since he knew it was just jealousy and terror, and both of them well-founded, he could accept it.

He could not.

He didn’t sing to the stars. He didn’t speak any Elwen language. He never let out his magic in front of people, once he learned to control it a little. He even kept his gaze down much of the time, or wore a hood, so that his diamond-shaped eyes wouldn’t disconcert anyone. He thought he was lucky, since his hair was yellow and his eyes dark, both of then normal, human.

None if it worked.

And when he found that people stared at him oddly and whispered because of the way he walked, more quickly and gracefully than anyone else in the village, then he snapped.

*******

Sailagh looked up as his mother entered their little house, and smiled at her. There came the usual heart-freezing moment when she stared at him, and Sailagh knew what she was seeking. Some sign of his father in his face, or some sign that she could have what he had, all the gifts that she was so convinced she wanted.

He picked up the bottle of wine he had already prepared. He had taken it from a girl at the inn while she stood trembling and frozen at the silvery sound of his voice, but no need to tell his mother that. "I thought we could celebrate," he said. "The victory over the Elwens in the south."

His mother relaxed and nodded. Sailagh thought she had never looked more beautiful than she did right now, when she was contemplating drinking to the deaths of a people whose blood her son had half a share in.

Sailagh wanted to tell her so badly; the words foamed on the tip of his tongue. Long years mean nothing when you have no one to spend them with. I’m deadened at the thought of how long I will live, and trying to contemplate it with no one by my side.

He kept them back. He had never said them, and he would never say them now.

"I am pleased, Sailagh," said his mother, as she came to the table and picked up the wine, "that you thought of such an important occasion."

Sailagh smiled.

"Did I ever tell you about the time I met your father?" his mother sighed, after a few sips of the wine. "He was so beautiful." The sigh. "Eyes blue like the shadows of the sun on the snow, and hair as silver as the frost on the leaves."

He was so beautiful I hated and envied him. I’m never going to look like that. Why can’t I look like that?

*******

Sailagh moved carefully. He hadn’t done this before, which was the reason he had stolen the wine. He didn’t think that he could have done it while his mother was awake.

But when she was lying still and dead drunk, it was quite easy to take a knife and slit her throat, easier than he had ever expected it to be.

********

Sailagh stood on a hill above the sleeping village and looked down on it. He had the feeling he was supposed to say something dramatic and final, something that would sever the ties between himself and his birthplace forever.

But he couldn’t think of anything.

No doubt, he thought, if I was really Elwen, I could come up with something.

He shrugged, and lifted a hand. "May the bastards burn," he said.

His rage boiled and churned. He couldn’t call on it in the same way a full land Elwen could do, lighting fires every time he was slightly irritated, but this time he was quite angry enough.

Lightning came to his call, leaping down from a clear sky to strike at the roofs. Sailagh closed his eyes and listened to the crackle of flames, straining those sensitive Elwen ears they were all convinced he had until he could hear the first faint screams over the flames.

And the rattling of the doors, of course. Sailagh had very carefully blocked them all before he called the lightning. He was good at that, attentive to details like that. It was probably the Elwen in him.

He opened his eyes and watched the houses burn down. He supposed he should be filled with something else now, some kind of horror and loathing at himself, or some kind of wild exhilaration.

He felt nothing save a faint appreciation for the beauty of the flames.

Why were they always staring at me, when there’s beauty beyond heart’s holding in the sky all the time?

Sailagh waited until the houses burned to embers, and then turned to the north. That was where the greatest land Elwen commander, Lady Eleriad, was said to be. The sight of her Running Stag banner had cleared many a field before the battle began.

Sailagh knew nothing about her other than the tales he had heard of her from humans, doubtless distorted. Some of his mother’s people couldn’t get past the fact that the Elwens let a woman lead their battles, never mind anything else.

I am going to find her, and ask her if she will let me kill humans. That’s all I know.

He walked down the hill without looking back, because, really, what was the point?