She was lost. Again.

Not lost in dream or memory, not just a metaphorical lost wherein one might contemplate life’s paths, nor a philosophical lost in a moral dilemma.  No, she was well and truly lost, in the very real and present sense of having no idea how to tell one stubbornly identical tree apart from another.

The petite elf stands surrounded by the towering sentinels of the Idyllwild, trying to remember if moss grew on the east or the west side of trees, and how that particular bit of knowledge (once correctly determined) would get her home.

She is searching for a way, and searching for a word, one single word that is the distillation of her very essence. The likely choices came and went: cheerful, bemused, quaint, floriferous, even peculiar. All those things were part of her, honestly and without guile or pretense, but they were not, in the end, who she was.

Lost. Her word was lost.

She was content, she was happy. She enjoyed wherever she happened to find herself, in whatever company she happened to find herself. Her way had always been made, one way or another, to somewhere or another, and she’d blossomed wherever she found herself planted.

Once, just the once, she had been Found.

In the still of the winter’s dusk, as the sinking sun casts off the last of its light, her heart’s desire is not for such things as vast treasure or devoted love. Her heart wishes nothing more, and nothing less than an easy to read signpost, with a specific number of choices, clearly delineated with arrows, and markers neatly displaying the lengths she would need to go in any given direction to find her way.