Lyn's smile grew at his obvious eagerness to hear her tales and she cast a quick glance to his sister, giving a small and silent 'thank you' for making the room feel that much warmer. It's not that Galen had been overbearingly cold to Lyn, but the tension that had been in the air was now gone. Setting her spoon down in her bowl, Lyn sat back in her seat, running a hand through her blonde hair. "Let's see... what's a fun story I could tell..." she mused, mentally running through all the adventures she'd had with her Dalish friends. She laughed to herself as her memory caught onto a story that was particularly funny to her.
"Remember how I said I went to my father's clan when I was ten, yes?" she started, before going into her tale. "Well the next year the Fifth Blight started. This isn't going to be some depressing tale of darkspawn or anything, I promise. Every few centuries or so, the clans get together for one giant clan meeting. It's kind of like a family reunion since elven children are often times arranged marriages outside their clan to keep the bonds between clans strong. Well, the Keepers decided that, because of the Blight and the Grey Wardens coming to us for help, now would be a good time to call one of those meetings. So we packed up our aravels and moved camp to the meeting location. There were thousands of elves there by the time everyone had arrived. They all wouldn't even fit in the alienage," she said, trying to describe the mass number of elves that were present. She'd remembered arriving there and being in complete awe that there could be that many elves in one location. She'd never seen anything like it.
"I was the new elf in town, city born and living in the forest, so needless to say I turned out to be the scapegoat. Usually, the children are allowed to roam wherever. The Dalish trust the forest to watch over their young, but with the darkspawn hordes popping up all over the place, they didn't want us leaving camp just in case. That, of course, didn't stop us. I remember sitting by one of the fires and one of the boys from another clan -- Jaden was his name I believe -- suggested we go on our own 'hunting trip'," she retold, mentally going through the story in her head. She knew Jaden was the one who had suggested the hunting trip. He was younger than her but already outspoken and sure of himself. Æolyn had liked him the moment she met him.
"I had been apprehensive at first, remember Zathrian's warning to me about going off by myself. The other children convinced me that I wasn't going off by myself, I was going off with them, so I went along. Of course I later learned that Zathrian meant for me to not go off without an adult, but I was a child then. I wanted to be accepted. We broke into two groups and whoever brought back the most game would be the winner. In my group there was Jaden: the one who had suggested the venture, Seda: a girl from my clan, Faer: Jaden's best friend, Morwen: an older girl very skilled with a bow, Aodhen: one of the boy's from my clan, and twins Keigal and Vanya. So we head into the forest to hunt. We were there for hours before we ran into anything. We didn't quite understand the concept of hunting and keeping quiet so we were making entirely too much noise to be very successful. The first animal we came across was a bear," she said, pausing for dramatic affect.