I sit at a table, my hands in my lap. My body quivers with nerves and excitement. Five other friends surround me, their own knowing smirks on their faces, ready with their secrets. The scene is set. I take a mouthful of popcorn, fiddle with my new dice. New voices spill from my mouth, and my friends’, and soon after a waterfall of laughter follows. Everything on this night is electric. I’m consumed, enraptured. Slowly, thoroughly, I disappear.
***
There was once a wood elf named Nim. She grew up deep in the forests of Iry, where green brush darkens the sky, in an isolated clan of other wood elves. The branches of the thick trees would curl around the elves and protect them from the outside world, but Nim didn’t mind. She had her family, her mom and her little sister and her little brother, and her best friend Thea, and that was enough for her. She would do anything for the people she loved. Sometimes, as she and Thea spent time falling into misadventures and wandering just a bit too far off the path, Nim wondered about her father, a figure that had been absent her entire life. But really, he was no one that truly mattered.
She also had a secret.
Nim’s clan of wood elves was known for their isolation and their distrust of the other. Some of those strange creatures they looked down upon were the Ents, trees that spoke and lived and maybe loved, but mostly kept to themselves. This wood elf clan, however, hated Ents, for their passivity and aberration of nature. Trees, the clan chief proclaimed, were meant to be trees, not humanoid creatures that breathed.
Nim knew the hatred of Ents well; it was ingratiated into her very skin. It was the only thing her absent father had left behind: her arms were bark, her fingers branches; her legs thick, rough trunks exactly like the trees that surrounded her every day. She covered them up with long, wide-legged pants, long sleeves, and white gloves that she never, ever took off. Her mother reassured Nim and her other half-tree siblings that they were beautiful and unique and had nothing to be ashamed of, even as she pleaded with them, for their own safety, to stay hidden.
But then Nim let her secret out, just a crack. But the crack was enough to let a flood burst forth, and suddenly the whole clan knew of their Ent heritage. Nim and her family stood before the clan chief, who banished them from the forest for being abominations to nature. Nim filled with hatred, mostly at herself for being so trusting. She had known all along that she was hated, would be hated, if she ever shared too much of herself. And she had gone and shared too much of herself anyway. She had learned her lesson. She would never open up like that again; she would bury the bark on her skin deep.
Nim and her family found themselves in a world they’d never known; a city that was a dry, cracked desert wasteland. Nim and her family now lived in a city slum, where people subsisted on close to nothing. Nim watched as her family withered, getting sicker and sicker with every passing day they spent away from the forest. Nim, desperately searching for answers and solutions, found herself at the temple of a nature god, hoping that she could somehow restore her family to health. The god helped her some, and she gained some power from them, but they could only do so much. The only thing Nim ever wanted to do was protect her family, so, in order to save them, she left them. She had only ever known the desert city slums and the isolated forest, so she hired a guard to lead her to new places.
Along the way, though—in a small tavern in a town that was so small as to almost not be a town—some sort of weird black mist attacked, and suddenly Nim found herself travelling with a group of strangers, including the guard she had first hired to help her begin her journey. She told herself it was for protection, that she could make use of their astounding power, even as deep down, she knew she liked the company. Over the next few weeks-turned-months, she found herself becoming fond of this ragtag group of misfits, as much as she kept her walls up, while they teased her about her abrasiveness. Through little moments—the gift of a longbow, conversations on nighttime watches—Nim slowly softened, although her skin was definitely still made of bark.
Slowly, she started to wonder what would happen if she revealed herself fully. Maybe it would be okay. Maybe they would accept her, even love her, just as she was. Sometimes, when she showed a bit of herself, her companions joked that she did have a mushy inside despite her gruff exterior. When the party came across a monstrous tree, a few of her companions noted the similarities between Nim and the tree, eventually drawing the incorrect conclusion that wood elves and trees were one and the same. While Nim corrected the assumption, she couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if they knew how close they were to the truth.
Their adventures continued, and the intrigue got deeper, and soon the things Nim and her friends—they were friends now—were dealing with got bigger. Their problems were as big as the world, and they were somehow supposed to stop the end of it. Nim’s secrets, and her struggle over revealing them, fell to the background. There were plenty of opportunities for Nim to come clean, but she used none of them. It was safer to stay hidden. And then it was time to defeat the evil they had fought for so long to uncover. They spent hours hatching a plan, and, finally, they were ready to defeat their enemy.
And then everything just… stopped.
***
Nim was my Dungeons & Dragons character. Dungeons & Dragons is a collaborative storytelling tabletop role-playing game that I started playing with my brother, some friends, and friends of friends the summer of 2018. Nim was my first character. I created her over the course of six months while we prepared for our first campaign—a long, connected, running story played in multiple “sessions” over the course of months or years. We played that campaign for almost two years, moving online and to weekly once the pandemic of 2020 began. It’s joked about in D&D circles that your first character (if you like to delve deep into backstory and character development like I do) is basically just you under a thin layer of fantasy game mechanics. Nim is me in many ways. Over the course of years of playing her and rationalizing her actions and decisions, I learned a lot about myself too. I learned about my pride and my distrust of others, my judgmental nature, and my uncertainty about taking the reins of leadership even when I was best suited to that role. I also learned about my own tendency to hide things, because it was so much safer to not reveal myself or be vulnerable.
Throughout the campaign, I waited for the moment when Nim would be “found out,” the moment that something would happen that would reveal her true Ent features to the party, whether she wanted to or not. That never happened.
My brother (and our Dungeon Master, the one who runs the game and corrals the party of players) called me out on it, saying I could just bring it up myself if I wanted to. But I didn’t want to have to do that.
So I waited.
And then the campaign ended abruptly, with a promise to end our final fight once we could play safely in person again. As of this writing, that time hasn’t come, and our memories of the intrigue and connective threads of that story dim with every passing day. I realized I should’ve just done it: let Nim reveal her own secrets. How amazing would that moment have been? Nim hadn’t shared because she was stubborn and scared, and now she would never get that beautiful (and probably hilarious) moment of connection from revealing herself.
Just like me.
This book is me, taking off my gloves, rolling up my sleeves, and showing you the rough, rough bark underneath.
Alyssa Sherlock 