Chapter 1. Name Calling
1221 Words
Two hundred years ago.
Deep in the Dark Sunlight Woods that high court of wood elves was summing up their case.
On trial was a young (by elf standards) princess of the Highest Darkest Fey called Glad Or-real, heir to the throne of the Dark Sunlight Woods.
She had darkest, flawless midnight blue skin and eyes like milk opals with flecks to deepest jade in them.
At the time of this trial, she had been alive for only a hundred years but being an Elf meant that she was only eighteen physically.
Glad Or-real would not physically age much more than that for the few next hundred or so more years.
A female judge, The queen herself of the Highest Darkest Fey was pronouncing sentence on her own daughter.
“For your crimes, you are to be exiled from your home.”
“Your name shall be scorched into the bark of the tree of curses.”
“You are no longer a princess!”
“You are no longer of royal twilight blood!”
“You are no longer a fey!”
“You are no longer an elf”
“YOU ARE NO LONGER MY DAUGHTER!”
“If you ever return you shall be crucified next to your name on the cursed tree to die, subject to the sadistic whims of any that may freely reach your pinned striped body there.”
“RUN!”
“…AND RUN FAR!”
“NEVER RETURN!”
Present-day,
The now three-hundred-year-old (physically in her twenties) Glad Or-real shot up in bed shaking at the dream memory.
That dark emotionless ruthless look in her own mother's eyes as she pronounced her exile, haunted her.
The nightmares were becoming more vivid and happening more often the closer she now got to Dark Sunlight Wood.
Going back home was a foolish thing to do.
However, while Going back home was a stupid thing to do it was also a very necessary thing to do!
Demons were threatening the world.
The demons were secretly controlling two vast empires the Sunites and the Satites and were manipulating both empires into a war that would engulf and destroy the world.
There was only a very small band of rebels out to stop the world from ending.
Glad Or-real, once a mountain bandit leader, was now a part of that rebel group.
She knew the rebels needed the dark fey’s help, both in their knowledge of demons and the military forces of the Dark Wood Elves.
Not just the Dark Wood Elves but the entirety of the forces of the Green both dark and light would be needed.
While she was on this task the rebel general Mal Wear was going to try and raise a proper army.
General Wear already had some goblins, some refugee humans and her former bandits among his forces, but he needed far more!
A force from the green as allies would help!
As for information, another rebel was trying to establish a decent information network by getting in touch with her remaining sons.
But the dark fey had some of the best-hidden knowledge of the secretly influencing demons themselves and the rebels needed that knowledge!
Glad Or-real was also hoping to find a cure for some nasty demons taint one of the main rebel leaders had recently been infected with before it was too late for them!
Although it was a fact that Glad Or-real was forbidden from ever returning home it was also a fact that Demons were trying to destroy this world!
Only something of such a world-ending nature warranted such risk of the princess returning home.
If things went badly, as they most likely would, it was not the horrendous fate that Glad Or-real so much feared. It was instead facing that look on her mothers face again.
Glad Or-real feared having to speak to her mother much more than she feared a torturous death!
Glad Or-real was in the upstairs room of an inn, somewhere in the Satite empire.
She stretched and put on her armour and made her way downstairs.
Her armour was studied boiled leather dyed dark purple.
She had twin blackened swords as her main weapons and also an elven longbow full of various arrows for doing range attacks.
Among the normal weapons was something a bit special.
It was a magical dagger of soul reiving, that was also permanently laced with one of the rarest and most expensive instant poisons ever created.
She knew it as the Death Dagger.
Annoyingly though, the Magic Death Dagger was bright gold and silver with big gems on it and therefore not suitable for any ‘stealth in the dark’ style of attacks.
It was also a badly balanced heavy dagger, of no use for throwing.
She did not want to mess around trying to change its looks, in case she accidentally destroyed the magical nature of it.
But as an open duelling or battlefield weapon, it was almost unsurpassed!
The slightest scratch on the largest of creatures would poison it with one of the strongest poisons ever made followed by the magical blade ripping out its soul in tattered shreds and into the dagger itself, empowering the death dagger as it did so!
It did not just kill the mere body! It also destroys the normally immortal part of a creature being!
She had taken it from an unconscious bandit who had disobeyed her orders and had then left him to die!
Where the hell a little turd like him had managed to get it from, she still had no idea!
It was nearly daybreak and the open room of the tavern smelt like a toilet. If that toilet also had its own wood fire and bar.
The place was almost empty.
A few drunks were passed out here and there.
There were a few dead bodies, some in pools of last nights spilt blood, as well.
Most of both empires had a particular way of swearing.
Instead of our classic s****l sware words that we use to curse, they instead said “What the Wipe!” or “Flush off!” ect, etc,
So, it was not expected, still, this far from the Dark Sunlight Woods, to hear an elvish male voice curse,
“What the Wipe!”
“My armour is covered in human ‘glad or-real’!”
“I only cleaned the Flushing thing yesterday!”
Somewhere at the back, just out of sight, a fellow elf was using her name as a debased curse word for some disgusting dirt on their armour!
Glad Or-real slowly and quietly walked backwards, up the stairs. back into her room again and sat heavily on the bed in shocked shame an humiliation.
That was one of the punishments of her kind, to have your names brunt into the tree of curses, and used as a type of gross expletive forever.
She had forgotten that she was likely to hear her name used in such a way more an more often as she got closer home.
Now that fact was heard in person by her for the first time, it emotionally wounded her deeply.
With a single tear running down her cheek she quietly said to herself,
“Welcome home…”
- Writer
