Old Maple Hill. That’s what they call it, mostly because that’s what you called it, and even then only because it is centered around... Well, a small hill, with an old maple tree, and you were a child, and you never thought it would be the center of an entire community.

Funny how things change.

Your name is Ezreal Mious Van Houtzmann. ‘Mious’ means ‘wisdom’ in the language of your mother's people, the Sylvan Elves of Dappulyet, whom you may never see or visit again; you can only hope she got your last letter, before you fled your homeland in the pursuit of world peace and personal freedom (it’s a long story). “Van Houztmann” is your human father’s surname... Well, sort of. He was born merely ‘Rudolfo Houtzman’, and seems to have added the ‘van’ and the extra ‘n’ as some form of dramatic flourish. You adopted it much later. It means ‘of the strong men’. Despite all your hereditary strength and wisdom, however, sometimes you feel like a leaf on the wind—a summoned wind, a night-wind, generated by the beating of great wings beating in the unseen dark.

Under your stewardship—and that of Izirina and Costella Fanucci, the women whom you love—Old Maple Hill became first a sort of sanctuary and rehabilitation center for those humans of Hawksong—the world’s preeminent metropolis—who had been afflicted by the chimeric plague better known as ‘the dragon-pox'. As a reward for your good works, your trio was granted the hill itself and the land around it was gifted to you in trust, to preserve and protect in the name of the fairy court upon that eponymous hill. After a year-and-a-half abroad—first in homeland and then upon the sacred moon itself!—you returned with divine knowledge of the holy arcane, to share with those grateful and newly-sorcerous subjects of Hawksong who had decided to remain there. Partly this was out of pride, and out of solidarity with Izzy and Costella, and partly due to a sense of responsibility for what you had wrought.

More and more, though, you wonder if you really had any say at all...

Almost four months ago, you undertook a diplomatic expedition to the Sylvan Realms to rescue the monstrous son of Hawksong’s prince Cosnort—secretly some form of ‘aragonborn antipaladin’ in service to the Gods of Darkness. You hadn’t done this out of any love for those horrid entities, or even the Prince Consort or her majesty Queen Ekaterine, but because you believed it the best way to keep the peace between your peoples.

You’d succeeded, but at a great cost.