Silver Thorne

(summary) winter, as was her name when translated from the ancient night elven tongue, was the young and only daughter of a high-ranking night elf household. she ends up meeting a boy from a poor family and sees him in secret to enjoy his company, having no interest in a life of nobility and deeply valuing who she comes to consider her best friend. this quickly escalates into the two of them falling in love and winter becoming pregnant; she wants to keep the child and attempts to hide her pregnancy from her family until she can find a way to escape them entirely to live with her lover. her family unfortunately discovers her secrets, locks her in her room and lies to her lover that she abandoned him. she watches through the sealed window of her room as he runs sobbing from her family's property and cries bitterly for what she was robbed of.

this was only the first thing winter's family would do to their daughter; though winter wanted the child she was carrying, her parents found the idea of their heir sired by a commoner repulsive and damaging to their family's status. winter's pregnancy was early enough to not be easily noticed so they brought her on what they told others was a "vacation" into the northern mountains of kalimdor, where they could have their daughter's pregnancy terminated with much more secrecy. Unbeknownst to them winter started formulating a plan the moment she heard her parents planned to take her away and kill her child, and she managed to escape unseen deep into the snowy wildnerness.

while winter was dressed for the season she was named after she did not account for the harshness of the mountains she now found herself in alone and unsheltered, and quickly became desperate not to freeze to death. she was found close to dangerous hypothermia by a group of tauren hunters and immediately taken back to their tribe. she explained herself and her situation to the tribe's chieftain and elders, who after some small amount of deliberation declared she was allowed to stay with them so long as she lived as they did and accepted their culture as her own. Winter eagerly and gratefully accepted and was brought into the full protection of the tribe. though she was privately afraid of her parents coming to look for her and possibly even finding her, she was unaware they quickly gave up looking for her and simply told everyone when they arrived back at their estate their troublesome and ungrateful daughter ran away and died in the mountains.

winter, small for a night elf, struggled with the birth of her child, her labor beginning right as the frost crept back into the mountains which her tribe considered a bad omen. Despite the care of the tribe's best midwives and shamans she died of persistent bleeding and complications and was buried with the rest of the tribe's deceased women. the tribe raises infant silver briefly before silver is forcibly taken by a night elf couple offended to see tauren raising an elf infant and became determined to "save" the baby from being raised by "beasts."

the couple ends up resenting silver as they grow older and are noticeably an odd, sensitive child; the mistreatment only grows worse as the couple has several biological children, and escalates even further when silver's younger siblings are killed in a storm leaving them as the sole survivor. the resentment and hatred peaks in silver's adoptive father beating them unconscious and leaving their body deep in the wildnerness for them to die of exposure. silver awakens hours later, alive but very badly injured.

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(summary) silver by chance comes across the young shen-zin su while living in the ocean in aquatic form. they manage to barely approach the turtle, which despite being thousands of years from reaching his current massive size is still curiously large, large enough for a few pandaren families to live on — if cramped — and large enough to pique silver's inquisitive nature. they barely manage to approach and cling to shen-zin su's shell in their aquatic form, and are pulled up onto land by the shocked and curious pandaren living there who have never seen a hippocampus before. they are only more shocked when the hippocampus becomes an elf once on land, but are generous to the stranger as they seem friendly or at least non-hostile. though the pandaren and silver do not share a language they eventually work out a crude way of communicating simple concepts and ideas.

silver stays long enough to gain a rough, basic understanding of what will eventually be considered a very ancient version of the dialect of pandaren spoken on the wandering isle, and in turn they teach the pandaren as much as they can of their own native elven tongue. the pandaren and silver teach each other everything they can manage to learn despite the language barrier of each other's cultures and ways of living. silver becomes familiar enough with their pandaren friends to make attempts using their knowledge of druidic magic to assume the form of a pandaren, mostly out of curiosity to see if they can as well as to exercise practice in shapeshifting. their attempts are eventually successful much to the excitement and joy of the pandaren children, who remained captivated by silver's shapeshifting the entire time they live there.

as always happens, silver eventually becomes overcome by the awareness they are ultimately still an outsider. the undercurrent of being seen as an object of curiosity and wonder rather than as a person cut through many interactions, and a few were not exactly secret about their wariness of the "strange, shapechanging creature" from the deep ocean. silver eventually bid shen-zin su and the pandaren farewell, reassumed their hippocampus form and slipped back into the ocean from where they came.
over the millenia that pass since silver's visit to the isle the true source of many of the tidbits of night elven culture silver shared with the pandaren are long forgotten, the few that didn't end up lost to time being merely considered part of the isle's own culture. The folktale told to the isle's pandaren children of the "magical talking fish" remains persistent, though.

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??? BDP

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the lost

current time

(this is another summary and also the last thing to occur in silver's backstory. there's a lot of things that happen to them before this! i just still need to write everything out, so though this is the last entry of their backstory many more chapters will be inserted later above this one when i have the time and energy to write them out.)