Peekaf

Though raised by humans, Peekaf is pictured with an elf's look, set apart by bright red eyes and pointed ears unlike anyone else in his village. Those very traits earn him his bullying and the taunts of Pointy-Eared Peekaf and Red-Eyed Peekaf, and they seed the doubt that drives his mournful tale.

Peekaf is a lonely, hurting child ruled by his sense of not fitting in. Taunted for his odd looks and eaten by the fear that the parents raising him are not his own, he lets that alienation pull him from home to seek the family he dreams is somewhere out there. The bitter twist of his fable is that the true family he sought was the one he had left, a realization that sinks him into lasting grief.

Peekaf enters the story when Guts overhears the elf apostle Rosine mock Puck by calling him Peekaf, prompting the swordsman to ask Jill the word's meaning, and she recites the fable whole. In it a boy named Peekaf, born with red eyes and pointed ears, is dearly loved by his parents yet endlessly mocked by the village children. Sure he does not belong, he creeps one night into the forbidden woods rumored to hold elves and finds them, matched to him in eyes and ears. But they tell him he is no elf, for he has no wings to ride the wind, and they lay bare the truth: long ago a desperate human pair carried their dying infant into the forest and begged the elves to spare him. Their magic saved the child but reshaped him to half resemble their kind, and the thankful parents wept for joy that he simply lived.

Hearing it, Peekaf runs home weeping, only to arrive far too late, for though he passed mere moments among the elves, a full century has gone by in the village, where not one soul remains that he knows. On a little hill set between village and elf forest, belonging to neither, Peekaf the Outcast weeps until his red eyes swell redder still. Rosine treasures the tale and comes to see herself in its hero, sure she belongs in the elves' land as he did, and that belief drives her to flee to the Misty Valley and at last become an apostle. Before dying, though, she admits she lost faith in the story once she found no elves there, deciding Peekaf and his elves were merely fancies conjured by some lonely child.