A beginning

He woke up knowing that something was terribly wrong. As he lay there in the darkness he realised that he was alone in the bed. He turned to his right, and stretched out his arm. The mattress was cool; the comforter had long since lost any sense of her warmth. With a cry he surged up out of the bed, flinging the bedclothes to one side as he called her name. There was no cry, and naked, he padded from the small bedroom into the main room of the small cabin. His heart beat fast and his breathing was shallow and rapid as he slid on silent feet over to the crib. One look was enough to see that it too was empty.
With a great wail, he threw open the cabin door and screamed their names in to the uncaring night. He ran out into the small garden that she had tended so religiously and sank to his knees sobbing uncontrollably. After a time that seemed to him to be forever, he regained control of himself. The sobbing slowed, and then stopped, and he slowly rose to his feet, gripping a handful of soil from the garden. Stretching the arm out in front of him, he allowed the dirt to slowly trickle from his hand as his mind raced. That she had gone and taken their daughter was not in doubt. The question remained why? Had she gone alone? Or had someone forced her?
He remembered the visit from her brother a few days earlier, the cool arrogance of the man, and his disdainful demeanour. Her family had despised him, and never missed an opportunity to ridicule and degrade him, cursing his human parentage and reminding her of her birthright as an elven lady. He remembered now the quiet conversations she had had with her brother, conversations from which he had been excluded.
He stood in the cool dark of night, the dirt falling from his fingers and dissipating with the light wind. As he did so, a darkness grew in his heart. It did not matter why she had done this he decided, what mattered was his daughter. From the moment a year earlier that he had first beheld he, puffy faced and red from the difficult birth, his little angel had been all he had lived for. No one would stand between them he had vowed that day, and it was a vow he intended to keep.
Kallian turned and strode back into the cabin. He had long ago put aside the tools of his first trade to try his hand at farming, but it was time now to return to the dark days. He moved first to the bedroom and hurriedly pulled on his undergarments, then returned to the main room. Grabbing a knife from the pile of dirty dishes piled on the table, he crossed to the front of the fireplace and stopped down. Using the knife he prised up the floorboards directly in front of the hearth and reached in to retrieve a long, narrow chest. Turning he set the chest on the floor beside him, then ran his hands slowly over the lid. Finally taking a deep breath, he flipped the latch on the front and lifted the lid.