Elladan

Elladan Narmolanya is an elven bard from Kai-Arborus, the tree city in the great forest of Ruanaiaith, and he joins the companions during Ruins on Stone Hill. Glolindir's first impression is of a decidedly handsome young elf, perhaps a hundred to a hundred and ten years old, with thick black hair, dark soulful eyes, high cheekbones, and a prominent chin. He dresses almost completely in white — white tabard, coat with spangled trim, shirt, and trousers — with brown boots and gloves, a green cloak, and a short sword at his side. Even after a night of disaster, the bright outfit gives him away as a performer.

Book 1 meets him at his lowest point. Elladan was travelling toward Lukescros, where he took runner-up in last year's bard competition and intends to win at next month's fair, when orcs attacked his caravan in the Bendenwoods at night. Thrown from an overturned wagon into bramble that saved his life, he was the caravan's sole survivor, and he kept his instrument through the wreck. Lost in woods he knew mainly on paper — he is a student of geography, not a tracker — he fell in with the tracker Brundon, who led him to the cave where Aksel, Seth, Lloyd, and Glolindir were hunting the same orc bandits. Over a breakfast he insists on cooking himself, humming as he works, he tells them what happened and argues, in a rousing little speech, that unusual circumstances force strangers to band together against a common foe.

That argument becomes an invitation. Elladan asks to come along, and he is not offering entertainment only: bard songs are laced with magic and can bolster comrades or distract and enchant enemies. He goes with the party down the well into the orc caves under the Vogels, helps rout the bandits who destroyed his caravan, and, after the return to Ravenford and its celebration, is invited into the group. He earns that place as an observer as well as a singer. It is Elladan who theorises that someone may be putting pressure on the Ravenford area — orcs, then a hill giant troubling farms near Bardon's Gap — a theory Book 1 later gives sharper shape when the Black Adders appear, without yet proving the whole chain.

For all his flamboyance on approach, Elladan shares Seth's working motto: trust no one. The policy sits oddly, and revealingly, beside how quickly he commits once he has chosen his people. Book 1 leaves him exactly there — a charmer with a voice, a geography student's head full of maps and roads, and a new company he has decided, against his own rule, to trust. This page stops at that invitation. His later travels, performances, and attachments belong to later books and are not summarised here.