"Guilty" Is all my gravestone reads, for I committed the greatest sin my people know, I died. My sentence is eternity, my soul bound to the grave standing its lonely vigil in the hills above the village of humans I died to save. If only they knew. The villagers view these hills as unhallowed ground, the hunting grounds of myths and a place where legends stalk in the mist. Perhaps they choose their superstitions with more wisdom than I chose my causes.

My people are not immortal, though death cannot claim us through age alone, and our magic renders disease a long shot at best. We are forbidden from engaging in violence, except in the highly ritualized sparring matches that form our greatest spectator sport. We are few, and despite our great strength of spirit and quickness of body, the risk of death is a shadow that hands over our head if we even think of fighting. I never was afraid of the dark, or the things that lurked there.

So perhaps it was foolish of me to take a stand to protect humans, after all, in comparison to us they seem so frail, so weak, so slow and oh so backwards. They are violent things, killing each other over land or in the name of gods that they have never seen or truly bothered to listen to. They have something my people lack however... they have potential to be more. My people are lazy, they consider our current state to be the pinnacle of our race. Humans have just begun, and even as a formless ghost i have seen them change more in a few dozen years then my race did in thousands.

My death by any other standard then ours would be a noble one, I fell surrounded by the broken bodies of assailants set on a goal no more complex then to murder the hamlet in the hills below, completely and utterly. My sword sung with the glory of my cause, and every wound i received was turned back a thousand fold. But my race are different, no death is noble, and to die in such a preventable manner, protecting an inferior people is foolish, worse than that it is the only thing our mostly secular people still view as a true sin.

(I know it ends rather abruptly... -sweatdrop-)