Fairy Short Story Part 1

This is just the prologue section, but it's been drastically rewritten. I needed to cut it into smaller parts so I could focus on refining it better. I've made progress in the sex scene, too, and finishing it before editing more is my next goal.

This section is now mostly done, I think. Doesn't need to be edited much more than it already has been.

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At the Cransmere Adventurer's Guild, there was a quest waiting to be accepted that would lead whoever took it up into the infamous Gnarled Woods. This quest was a kill quest, albeit it was a peculiar one.

The target in question was a spirit that had taken a fancy with stalking and tormenting whoever wandered too close to its territory. It preyed on fear, sapping the negative emotions straight out of its victims and adding them to its own vile reserves of power.

Whispers of this monster began to spread, but it wasn’t until it manifested before a team of lumberjacks that the threat was taken seriously. They set forth from their little hamlet on the edge of the woods and came into contact with the monster not long after.

What they saw while out in the forest was a pumpkin-headed specter wearing wispy rags and brandishing a dull scythe wrapped in pale blue flames. It led them deeper into its domain using tricks and illusions before it struck. By the time they noticed the landscape was covered in jack-o-lanterns, it was too late.

Of the ten burly men who made their living taking from those accursed woods, only seven made it back that day. Until then, the spirit had never taken a life before. This meant that it was growing not only in power but in cockiness.

Something had to be done.

After escaping from the dreadful apparition, the leader of the woodsmen journeyed to Cransmere where he put in an official request with the Guild. The offending spirit was named ‘Jack o’ the Pumpkins’, and the woodsman negotiated a deal for its termination.

Goddesses knew that the Gnarled Woods would never be safe, but the province of Arrark would be better off if it had one less wicked wisp skulking about the place.

This entire ordeal put the Guild Mistress, a young woman by the name of Dorothy Whittle, in a rough spot. She had buttered up the lumberjack so hard just to get him to agree to her jacked-up price that she didn’t even check if she’d have a team ready to deal with the problem.

It turned out that any of her adventurers who were able to permanently kill a spirit-class monster either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Her priestess and her cleric were farming for artifacts up in the Labyrinthe of Light, none of her mages showed interest in the quest, and of the remaining members of her Guild, none had enchanted weapons suited to handle this specific task.

This meant that Dorothy’s job would once again force her to do something she hated doing. She would be forced to lie.

The Guild Mistress would send an adventurer who could damage and weaken a spirit using a weapon coated in cheap alchemical oils. While this wouldn’t kill the entity, it would push it to the point where it would take years of laying low to regain its strength.

When the spirit did eventually become powerful again, most people would have likely forgotten about it. If they were lucky, the Guild might even be paid to do the same job twice.

Canceling the quest wasn’t possible, not after how hard Dorothy haggled the lumberjack over the bounty. If she backed down now after the fact, word would spread of her incompetence. This would lower the reputation of her Guild, and also potentially lead to the Association replacing her.

It’s not like she could equip an adventurer with an alchemical solution strong enough to actually kill it, either. Such a concoction would take one very expensive trip to the apothecary, and Dorothy’s Guild barely made a profit as things stood.

This was all one big headache, entirely of her own making.

Dorothy wanted this quest over and done with so that she would no longer have to think about it. Luckily, there was someone who she could always turn to in a pinch. Someone who asked no questions, and did as he was told.

He was a young adventurer by the name of Coye.

Dorothy found him in the Guild's dining hall as he was trying to enjoy his breakfast. This proved difficult since at the moment he was suffering the latest round of teasing coming from a group of four female adventurers who called themselves the Baddest Bitches.

The girls hounded Coye, as they always did, asking him lewd questions while getting up in his personal space. Their hands touched his shoulders, his back, his thighs, doing just about everything short of groping him.

Dorothy would never admit to it, but she felt jealous over how overfamiliar these self-admitted bitches acted with the boy. Not that she could be blamed, Coye being as cute as he was.

The Guild Mistress struggled to assert her authority over the Bitches. Hardly anyone ever took Dorothy seriously, let alone these girls. After an uphill battle, Dorothy eventually succeeded in separating them from their prey and explained her current predicament to Coye.

Coye didn’t ever speak all that much. He was a quiet, timid boy, and the word ‘no’ wasn’t part of his vocabulary. Even if it was, he wouldn’t have turned Dorothy down. He had a soft spot for the Guild Mistress which she was well aware of, her job forcing her to exploit the fact more often than she was proud of.

He listened to her request, said nothing, and nodded his head. Coye then left for his dorm room on the second floor of the Guild to get suited up, and Dorothy felt relieved knowing that this quest was as good as taken care of.

At a glance, it would be hard to Coye this adventurer as anything more than a boy. He was twenty years old, and he was a half-elf on his mother's side. This heritage was the main source of his troubles, as it was why he looked the way that he did.

Calling Coye cute would technically be correct in the same way that calling a lion a kitten would be. It was true, but it didn’t do enough to paint the full picture. Coye wasn’t just adorable, he was abnormally so.

He had smooth, soft, baby-like porcelain skin. Short, silken blond hair framed his face, parting around his pointed ears. His round, childish eyes were bright blue and he had thick eyelashes which would inspire envy in any woman who saw them. His short height did little in the way of making him appear more manly, either, as he stood at only five feet tall.

Everywhere Coye went, he was surrounded by female attention thanks to his overwhelming cuteness. If only he weren’t so timid, meek, and oblivious, he might’ve been able to use this to his advantage.

He didn’t understand why the Baddest Bitches toyed with him, or why the widow who ran the item shop he frequented would always expose so much cleavage whenever he was around, and whenever Miss Whittle gazed at him longer than appropriate, Coye assumed that she was just exhausted like she always was.

It wasn’t that he was uninterested in girls, far from it. Coye was a simple-minded lad who was childish and naive to a fault. Little did he know that day he would learn of the effect he had on the fairer sex was much sooner than he thought.

At the moment, though, he had a job to do.

The day had only just begun and Jack o’ the Pumpkins destination was only a few hours to the west, so Coye was resolved to take care of the quest today if at all possible.

He didn’t like it when Miss Whittle was stressed and he wanted to help lessen her burden as quickly as he could. Sadly, the Guild Mistress’s default state of being was an unending nightmare of pressure. Even if Coye took care of it, something new would come along and ruin her day sooner rather than later.

Still, Coye got ready for the adventure to come, shedding his casual wear and donning his equipment.

He was the type of fighter who preferred speed over protection, so he wore a blue-green tunic padded with leather on the inside. Beyond that, Coye worse brown leather pauldrons, greaves, and gauntlets. To top it all off, he brandished a pair of white trousers which gave him ample room to breath down below.

All of his gear was practical, save for a signature cap he always wore which was the same color as his tunic. The only purpose it served was to take some attention away from his pretty hair, for all the good that did.

Next, Coye fastened the strap he wore over his shoulder which carried his sword and his shield when they were not in use. Neither of these tools was all that impressive. His shield was simply a shield, while his sword possessed a weak enchantment that sounded a lot stronger than it actually was.

It would allow its wielder to shoot a damaging beam of light from its tip when swung, so long as said wielder hasn’t been injured in twenty-four hours. Its power was middling at best, and it was picky as to what counted as an injury. Coye couldn’t even stub his toe without the enchantment refusing to work.

Aside from his weapons, Coye wore a number of pouches and bags strapped across his belt. He was a forgetful, absent-minded boy. Rather than falling victim to his own carelessness, he made it a point to over-prepare for any situation he could possibly think of.

Despite his youth, Coye was not a rookie. He had been trained as a fighter by his father, a former adventurer himself, since a young age. He knew a handful of Arts, special techniques, and he showed much promise in the blade.

It’s a shame that he couldn’t get a handle on magic, because he wasn’t satisfied being just a ‘fighter’. He wished to reclass into a spellsword one day, a type of warrior who wielded simple spells cast with even simpler hand gestures, but it was just his luck that saw him inheriting the good looks of an elf along with none of the race’s magical talent.

Coye had been at this for nearly two years now, joining Cransmere shortly after the previous Guild Master was unceremoniously removed from his position and replaced by Dorothy. He’d been working non-stop ever since, blazing trails so fast that he qualified to become a silver-ranked adventurer after a little past his first year.

A spirit hiding out in the woods would prove little trouble for someone of his skill, and he was ready for whatever came next. Coye triple-checked all of his supplies, he sharpened his sword, and he waved goodbye to Miss Whittle as he left the Guild.

Not long after, Coye would leave the forlorn village of Cransmere for what felt like the hundredth time, unaware that he would return as a man.