The gates were open.  This was not an unusual state for the gates of Leafdwindel, as the elves tended to welcome all travelers through their lands.  Today was different though, and the gates were opened differently as well, they had been ripped open.  The gates stood ajar and clinging desperately to their massive hinges as their bases gently smoldered.  Corpses littered the grounds around the gate, many of them being those of the elven guard, but a single body between the gates seemed to stand out.  A young female elf’s body rested serenely between the gates, her stomach showing the first delicate curve of motherhood.  She had been hurrying home, but hadn’t been quick enough her side had a large piece taken out of it, the shape of the wound seeming to indicate it was been done by a ballista.  She could no more guard the child that never would be, and nor could the guards of Leafdwindel have held the gate anymore. Mother and child, guards and gate, all were dead after their own fashion.  The city of Leafdwindel had been sacked.
Inside the gates, the residential quarter was burning and more guards lay dead beside the bodies of those they had sought to protect.  In one doorway corpses had been piled up as a morbid barrier against the attackers, and those within were just beginning to try and move their barricade to see what had become of their city.  At the base of the steps to the home, an older elf lay dead with a spear protruding from his side.  He had been a soldier when he was younger, one of the royal guard.  It had been a mostly ceremonial position, but they had received some of the most vigorous training despite it.  The scattered soldiers around him spoke for the skills that hadn’t entirely deserted him in his advanced years.  Here and there building burned and soot faced bodies hung out of the windows, desperate for air in their final moments, but equally desperate to stay out of sight.
At the ruins of one of these houses, a couple in their prime sat quietly crying.  Their soot stained faces stricken with grief in the form of the deltas their tears had etched through the soot.  The woman mutely clutched the remains of what seemed like it was a child’s arm and simply shook as the tears traced new paths for the rivers flowing down he cheeks.  The man was trying to comfort her as best he could, but failing as he too was fighting the same sort of despair, partly from the loss of the child and partly from the ruin the city had become.  Equally stunned people wandered through the streets some stepping around the debris in the streets, others not seeming to care or too horrified to notice trailed blood in their footsteps as glass and shards of rocks bit into their feet.
As one left the residential quarter and entered the merchant quarter it was apparent that it too was burning; the only targets had been chosen with great care.  Taverns were among those attacked, as one of the stunned people entered the quarter, a nearby tavern exploded due to barrels of lamp oil, ale, and gnomish firepowder that had been placed in the main section of the building.  The stunned man was knocked to the ground by the blast and shards of wooden embedded themselves in his side.  Down the street, another explosion occurred in a warehouse where a similar arrangement to the one in the tavern had been made.  The outer face of the warehouse cracked with the force of the explosion, the windows exploded outwards raining glistening daggers onto the ground below.
The elves might later say the most horrible thing they saw that day was that the palace itself had also been put to the torch, and the training halls.  The most skilled guards and where they were trained had been destroyed.  Along the walls of the palace, archers in light leather armor with silver details were slumped over at intervals.  The Trueflights had tried their best to pick off as many enemies as they could, but it had been to no avail, they hadn’t been killed from the outside, something had come along the wall and broken their necks as it went by.  At least one of the archers had noticed what was coming, because his neck was almost bent over backwards.  It appeared some had pretended to be dead of arrows wounds beforehand, as they were slowly dragging corpses down from the wall and putting them into piles to be buried or burned later.
A lone elf walked by his fellows assembling the piles with a determined look on his face, he was headed directly for the center of the palace, which seemed like it had yet to begin to burn or was protected from the flames.  There was a bow slung across his back and several arrows clenched in his right hand; he had abandoned his quiver some time before so as to be able to move more effectively.  One each hand a three moon symbol glistened from amidst the grime the elf’s hands had acquired.  A caked mixture of blood and ash was on one of his legs from where he had helped retrieve some people out of the burning buildings and had his leg sliced open by a falling beam.  He had known this way coming, he had tried to warn them and by the time they had listened it had been too late.  He had tried to do his duty to his people earlier, and now he had to due his duty to his kings.  He had to find the brothers and the old queen if the elves were to have someone to rally behind.  If the brothers had been slaughtered…well, he didn’t want to think about that.  And so, he walked on.