Aoife's Story (Prologue to un-named story) Edit

Long ago, before the father of your father roamed the lands, lived a maiden named Aoife. None matched her in beauty, wit or valor. Aoife was a curious girl, and she happened upon a pair of swan wings, white as snow, and strong as her desire to fly. Using the magik of olde, with mutterings of a most ancient and mysterious breed she chanted,
"Come ye stormy wind and rain, use thy powers once again.
Take these wings which now are mine, grant the wish for which I pine.
Bestow unto me avian flight, with thy magik and thy might"
The spirits obliged, and Aoife's head reeled with wonder as she flexed her newly formed tendons, reveling in the newfound weight upon her back. There she stayed for the rest of the day, learning feather by feather how to move her wings.
Spreading her newly found appendages, she took to the air. But her joy was short lived, for upon landing in her village square, she was surrounded with the prying fingers of her own people. But their greed did no damage, for when a feather was plucked from her innocent skin, a new one grew in its place. Make no mistake, Aoife felt the pain. Each feather was a piece of her soul, for she loved her wings to abundance. Each plume plucked was a strike of lightning coursing through her frail frame.  The process continued so for seven days and seven nights, until Aoife's emaciated frame lay shriveled upon the ground.
As she prepared to take her last breath, Aoife gave a last prayer to Ilima, goddess of earth and the northern lands. "Take me Ilima, my goddess," she gasped. "For with my dying breath I shed the bonds which joined me with my people and give my heart to you in their absence." Ilima, answering the maiden's prayer, reached her roots into Aoife's heart and filled it with the essence of immortality. Aoife's desire to end her suffering dulled the pain of the volatile liquid. The avaricious villagers watched in awe as what was once one of their own became one of the gods. With a beam of light, Aoife's deathly metamorphosis brought itself to a thundering crescendo.
There she laid, a beacon of light in the surrounding darkness, some invisible force cradling her body so that her flaxen locks skimmed the ground. A convulsion rippled through her form, blurring her form in a sudden wave. With the voice of a thousand from the lips of one, she roared: "In my time of joy you renounced me in favor of want! In my time of need you regarded me as naught but a resource with which you might fill your bottomless pockets! I scorn you from the land which you currently usurp! You and your children shall live as the scum of the earth, neither wanted nor needed."
A flick of her hand incinerated the village, and a twist of its twin raised a mighty forest through the steaming rubble. A mighty oak occupied the meeting hall; a family of hickories populated the former wheat field and poplars roosted where the school house once stood. The people, in careful veneration of the vengeful goddess shuffled out of the freshly raised woodland, heads bowed with the weight of their sin. Aoife continued "You shall be a tribe of nomads, known as the Elani, until a worthy soul is born by a woman of your band. Judging by the turmoil this very dusk, I would not expect salvation for generations to come."  
With the crackle of lightning, she was gone, leaving behind nothing but one gossamer butterfly wing and a piece of bark with the runes for red river carved upon it.