Yunhua arrived at the elven outpost near the borderlands when she was thirteen. Spring had barely arrived; the snow still clung to the mountain passes like stubborn mold, and her boots, secondhand and stiff at the soles, were caked with frost and dirt. She wore a woolen cloak that smelled of damp earth and smoke, and she looked less like a child and more like a bundled package someone had forgotten to deliver on time.
No one offered to take her hand as she dismounted from the cart.
The man who had brought her — a villager of no particular note, possibly a blacksmith's cousin or just someone sufficiently motivated by coin — gave a grunt of acknowledgment, passed along a sealed letter, and muttered, "Her father's problem now." He did not wait for a response. He did not check to see if the girl followed.
She did.
The elves who received her were no more expressive. They scanned the letter, exchanged glances, and said nothing. No welcoming arms. No curious questions. They did not seem surprised. Nor did they seem pleased.
Yunhua did not cry. She hadn't cried when they found her beside her mother's cold body that winter either — sitting with her back straight, legs tucked beneath her, as if guarding the sleeping form like some dutiful temple dog. The frost had long claimed the inside of the cabin by then. Her mother had looked peaceful. Yunhua, less so.
The healer who came later had said something about how illness took the weak in the mountains, and how grief often rendered children mute. The local priestess said it was a blessing the girl had not gone mad. But Yunhua was neither mad nor grieving. She had simply concluded there was no further use in noise. At least, that's what made the most sense in her young mind at the time.
Her mother had died. Her father, if the letter was to be believed, lived (at some point) somewhere beyond these gates. The rest was none of her concern.
At the outpost, they gave her a room. Or more accurately, a cot in a stone-walled dormitory shared with other fosterlings and low-ranking apprentices. The walls were drafty. The mattress smelled of straw and soap root. There was one window that barely opened, and one shelf to place her things on — though she had nothing to place beside her mother's most prized possession: a silver hair ornament with blood red beads.
She was given clothing, all of it plain, clearly once worn by someone taller. She rolled up the sleeves and ignored the uneven hem. Meals were delivered to the long communal table: porridge in the morning, broth in the evening, always the same, always without comment. Her bowl was simply placed at the edge where no one else sat.
No one asked her name. No one asked if she understood the language. Someone simply wrote her name in chalk on a slate tablet, placed it at the foot of her cot, and directed her to sit in the back row of the lecture hall.
No one spat at her. No one struck her. But no one smiled either.
It was not cruelty. Merely administration.
Half-elves were not unheard of in the outposts. They appeared now and again — mostly from minor scandals, border town affairs, and the occasional lapse in discretion from someone noble enough to have servants but not enough to keep secrets. They were never celebrated. But they were tolerated, if only because ignoring them completely might invite political inconvenience.
Yunhua, as it turned out, made toleration quite easy.
She did not protest. She did not make demands. She did not speak.
Not in the first week. Nor the second.
When the dormitory matron explained the communal washroom, Yunhua listened. When the stone-faced tutor gestured to the empty seat in the back, she sat. When one of the older apprentices sneered and asked, "Do you understand what he's saying, ghost girl?" she blinked once, tilted her head slightly, and then turned away — not out of shame, but out of sheer disinterest.
She wasn't frightened. She simply didn't care.
Words were valuable when used sparingly.
That much, her mother had taught her.
The teasing faded quickly. Yunhua was not reactive enough to be amusing. She did not flinch or cry or lash out. She did not offer satisfaction. She merely regarded them the same way one regarded mold growing under a damp floorboard: unpleasant, but unworthy of fuss.
It was around that time they began calling her the ghost girl.
But not with cruelty. Just indifference. As if they assumed she wouldn't stay long enough to warrant remembering.
Yunhua's days became routine.
She rose before dawn. She folded her blanket into a perfect square. She washed with cold water that made her teeth ache. She ate without speaking. Morning lectures were followed by scroll-copying in the scriptorium, where the air smelled of old ink, damp stone, and the faint metallic tang of worn quills. In the afternoons, she was sent to the herb garden to assist the aging herbalist — a silent elf with a limp and no patience for idle chatter who found Yunhua's character to be quite likeable.
Yunhua liked the garden. Plants did not ask questions. And they didn't care whether her ears were slightly casted downward.
At night, she practiced her writing with charcoal on the back of torn parchment scraps. She copied entire lectures by memory and corrected the grammar in her textbooks. She wasn't trying to impress anyone. She simply had little else to do, and nothing drew attention like failure.
Some of the younger fosterlings eventually took to leaving her small kindnesses. A roll of bread here. A freshly cleaned inkwell there. They never expected thanks. Which was convenient, because Yunhua never liked offering it.
One girl braided her hair once, unprompted. Yunhua allowed it, mostly out of curiosity. She unbraided it the moment the girl left. She didn't like the feeling of having her hair and head touched by others, but for some reason this time she didn't want to refuse the other girl outwardly.
There was no camaraderie in the dormitory.
Only an understanding that attachments were luxuries few could afford. The political winds changed often. Apprentices disappeared overnight — some recalled to their noble houses, others sent elsewhere without warning. A few simply failed and were quietly reassigned or dismissed.
Yunhua did not ask what happened to them.
If they lived, it was not her business.
If they didn't, even less so.
She spent most of her free time in the older wing of the library. Not the main building, which buzzed with students discussing theory and law, but the forgotten annex — a place where forgotten tomes gathered dust and the air carried the scent of mildew and wildflowers from the garden beyond.
She liked the quiet there. It was easy to think.
She perched on window ledges, curled around thick books on herbology or healing incantations, and copied passages into her notebooks until her fingers cramped and her spine protested. Occasionally, she found marginalia left by other students — messy notes, diagrams, the occasional doodle of a bored apprentice stabbing a mushroom.
She ignored those too.
On her sixteenth winter, Yunhua developed a fever. It started with a dull ache in her limbs, then crept into her chest like a sleeping animal curling in too tight.
She ignored it for as long as she could.
Drawing attention to illness was a poor use of energy, and she didn't trust the outpost healers to do anything useful. Besides, fevers passed. Usually.
This one didn't.
She collapsed in the library behind a shelf of neglected treatises on magical botany. She might have been there for hours. By the time someone found her, her lips were cracked, her hands ice-cold, and her breathing shallow.
The healer who came was efficient and gruff.
Yunhua didn't bother to remember their name.
She drifted in and out of fevered sleep for days. Voices came and went. She heard someone say she was "malnourished."
Another said, "How did no one notice?"
She did not respond, not that she was in the state to.
If they were that surprised, they clearly hadn't been paying attention.
When she awoke properly, she was back in her cot. The sheets were clean. A bowl of stew sat on the small table beside her, covered with a linen cloth. It had been seasoned properly — with garlic and wild fennel, not just salt.
She ate it slowly. No one came to reclaim it.
After that, people treated her a little differently.
The matron brought an extra blanket. A senior apprentice placed a worn scarf beside her books one morning and made no comment when she wore it. The herbalist gave her first pick of the late-autumn roots.
They still did not speak much. Nor did Yunhua.
But there was a quiet recognition. Not friendship. Not warmth.
Just... acknowledgement.
And back then that was enough.
By her fortieth year — still young by elven standards, nearing adulthood by human ones — Yunhua had become something of a fixture.
She was tall, pale, and too still for comfort.
Her hair, long and dark, was always tied back neatly. She wore her robes with the same practicality as a tradesman wears gloves. Her brow was often furrowed, not in worry but calculation.
She spoke when necessary. She corrected mistakes when she found them. She kept to her routines — library, garden, dinner, sleep.
If others thought her strange, she didn't mind.
Strange things were less likely to be interrupted.
She was not afraid of others.
She just preferred not to be involved.
She lived like that for a long time.
Quiet. Observant. Meticulous. The kind of person you might forget until you realized something had been repaired, sorted, or solved behind your back.
A ghost, some still called her.
But she was no wraith.
Only a young woman who had learned that survival was easiest when no one noticed you were still alive.