You = a Silvan elf from Mirkwood.
“Daro!” a female voice cries from behind you. The outburst is followed by a frustrated growl and a carefully enunciated phrase in Westron, the common tongue: “Hold, stranger.”
You raise your eyebrows with skeptical surprise as you turn, for the female voice spoke first in the Silvan tongue, and the Westron seemed unfamiliar to it.
“Le suilon, mellon,” you tentatively greet the darkness between the trees, repeating in Westron in case you misheard, “I greet you.”
A dark-haired elf-woman melts away from the side of a tree trunk as she moves. She slowly lowers her bow.
“You are of Eryn Galen?” she asks, a hint of eagerness in her voice.
You nod the affirmative and tell her from whence you come.
“Mae govanthen!” she grins and moves to walks past you in the direction you were moving before, beckoning welcomingly for you to follow. There is a happy spring in her step, and you walk only a few meters before she stops and crouches down to uncover the expertly concealed embers of a small fire. The acrid scent of smoldering pine reaches you as she stirs them, gently blowing air across them to bring them back to life.
“Please, sit!” she says enthusiastically, indicating a fallen log nearby and, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, she produces a small leather flagon from within the folds of her clothing. She hands it to you almost reverently.
You begin to unstopper the bottle. “What is— Oh!” you interrupt yourself as you catch the sharply sweet fragrance of a wine whose grapes could only have been grown along the Celduin, the swift-running river east of Eryn Galen. You begin to cradle the bottle as protectively as did the other elf, content to savor the scent of the liquor without drinking.
“Wait… What is you name?” you ask, realizing that you don’t know.
She tells you that her name is Saelindril and that she comes from the south of Eryn Galen, near where dwells Aiwendil in Rhosgobel, though not so near the edges of the wood as live the Woodsmen. In Eryn Galen, she is a hunter of both game and orc. Out here, she says solemnly, she is seeking her wayward brother.
“Wayward?” you ask.
“He has left the warmth of the wood,” she says, her expression unreadable for the first time since you recognized one another as kin.
“I see,” you say, slowly.
"I aim to find him," she says. She does not elaborate.
You nod, leaving the topic in the past, and she opens up again, nodding sympathetically as you explain what inspires your travels. You speak together of the foods and smells and people and places of home that you miss. She tells you that she hungers for Beorn the bear-man’s honey cakes, which she could not help but gobble up in her first month away from home; a lack of will she now regrets. It feels good to speak your native tongue with another of your own kin.
“Come, let us drink,” you say, and you carefully tip a tiny sip of the precious homeland wine between your lips. You return her flagon and savor the delicate flavors and intense nostalgia as she tips back a tiny sip of her own.
“A small piece of home,” she murmurs, quietly, and you nod, gazing wistfully toward the stars. At least they are the same stars as at home.
As the fire burns down, your companion pulls out an old flute and plays a familiar tune. Then another, and another. You clap along, and she begins to dance to her own music, weaving between the trees with a brilliant smile in her oak-green eyes.
It is a good night.
