Rhana was bathing in a pool deep within the forest, her pale skin a beacon in the heavy shadows of the canopy, when she first met Elyasa. She saw a man walk out from under the trees, and stare at her. He was filthy, covered with dust, and Rhana, frightened, read in his eyes the madness that the forest cast over those who did not know its true nature.
She did not speak, did not move. The man said, in a voice that rang still with the cries of the birds under the trees, ‘They cast me out.’
Looking into his eyes, Rhana felt an odd kind of pity rise in her.
‘They cast me out with nothing, not even the clothes on my back, not even a name.’
She spoke at last, dredged up the words from some infinitely far away place. ‘Who–?’
The man did not answer. His eyes trained on her, he was repeating the words of a prayer, ‘And guard us from the shadows of the wilderness, guard us always, o Protector…’ Guard us. Elyasa, in the old, sacred language. Already that was the name for him in Rhana's mind, the name she would give him later, and everyone knew that to name something was to have power over it until the Protector withdrew his hands from the world at the end of time. Elyasa.
[This message has been edited by Silver6 (edited April 27, 2004).]
POV nits here and there, like "her pale skin a beacon" and some omissions "She did not speak, did not move." More omissions of POV information than inclusions of non-POV information, so perhaps you are simply writing a fairly sparse POV. But it comes off a bit uneven. Sometimes we get Rhana's thoughts, sometimes not.
Use paragraphs for your dialogue, and don't do it mechanically. The reason for the paragraph formating of dialogue isn't a grammer thing, it is a visual aide to the reader, so the dialogue (including non-verbal components) is set off from the narrative or POV text.
One last little nit, have Rhana figure out what language the man is using before she figures out what he's saying. That is both a POV and continiuty issue.
Storywise, I think that this is a pretty engaging beginning...as long as these two are main characters in your story, that is. Where the relationship between two characters is a major element of the dramatic arc of the story, the start of that relationship is a natural starting point for the story, though not the only possible starting point.
So it works, but still needs work
Not sure I'd recommend doing that, unless this is going to be a fairly short work.
For a fictional epic, I would use a narrative frame, a sort of story around the telling of the story which shows how the story comes to be told. All real epics have "provenance", so that a person reading the Mahabharata for the first time knows that it is an epic cycle involving the Hindu gods which is central to Hindu meditations on Justice and Righteousness and all that. In a fictional epic, you need to create that, usually through a narrator character that has some kind of investment in the epic story you're telling.