He bit into his cheek before he glanced at Jacob. “Friend, tell me, what’s going on?”
Jacob was silent for almost a minute before he nodded to himself. He came into the forest today with a plan. This was his last chance to back out, but he wasn’t about to. Not when it meant so much for them to start now. “Friend, you and I have always talked about making a difference. Making the world a better place. Well, there’s one set of people who have been ignored for longer than you can imagine. If they were to step into the light without friends and support, they would likely be prosecuted even to possible extinction. With support though… Well, you could do what no man has ever been able to claim.”
Will raised an eyebrow at that, even as he noticed shuffling around him. Then he saw as people emerged. People with clothes that were older in style, almost hundreds of years old like Amelia wore, and they all had something that was very… off.
They all had pointed ears. All fifty of them in the clearing. They ranged in ages from what looked to be woman in their forties, maybe fifties, to children who were only a few years old. One in a white dress and who had wild, curly hair held a baby in a wrap, too young to even walk still. Jacob walked closer and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and simply stated, “You can bring magic back to the world.”
Will looked to his friend, then to the people around him, and then straight back to Jacob before whispering, “Are they… Are they really elves? Like, they’re not just a bunch of cosplayers, are they?”
“I wouldn’t be forty myself then, asshole.” Amelia dropped her hood to show her own set of ears now.
Jacob kept his eyes locked on his friend’s though, not letting anything distract him as he said, “If you had talked to me twenty five years ago about what my greatest dream was, I would have told you it was to own this forest. I still want you to buy it, because then it buys us time because they live here, even deeper within. However…”
“However, you want me to start setting up for them to come out into the world. That’s what you’re about to say, aren’t you?”
Jacob was silent. He didn’t have a magical trials or traditional tests to have prepared him for whether he was right or wrong about Will. The wood didn’t love him like it always had Jacob, so that couldn’t even speak to his character. The only thing that could now was him and his next move.
A move made with a long, hard laugh. It was something that none of them except Jacob could read. After all, to an elf, a random laugh from a powerful human could mean the sudden genocide of them all.
To Jacob though, he knew exactly what it meant, just as the glimmer of excitement in his friend’s eyes told him he hadn’t failed. Will looked to Jacob and clasped him on the shoulder as he shouted, “You want me to do the impossible? Well then, I can’t think of a better damn legacy to leave than proving myself better than some stingy, bigoted assholes!”
To which Jacob could only smile too. There would still be work ahead of him. So very much work, but as he looked to Amelia he knew he at least had allies. Friends. They would find more who would be able to protect the elves that he loved.
The elves that he considered family, and who he would never have met had Amelia not crouched in the same place she now stood twenty years ago.
Author’s Note
This one was born from the simple concept of: “What if we took the hidden village of elves doujinshi trope and made it… reasonably sane.” So, lots of build up, creating that relationship, forging a bit more of an interesting way for elves to be reborn to help explain the lack of males, and then a male character who could actually be seen as likeable. It was a lot of fun to do, and I really hope you all enjoyed the ride I made out of it. If you want to help support me, or follow me in various place, I have a patreon at patreon.com/mdhwrites, I am @MDHWrites on Twitter, and stream under that same handle on Twitch where I’m even trying to stream me writing to help put things on my Tumblr at https://mdhwrites.tumblr.com/ . No matter what though, thank you so much for reading, please leave a review if you liked it, and have a wonderful day.
Acknowledgements
Daniel Knight (https://www.deviantart.com/coldsixthousand ): As always, huge shoutout to my cover artist who is quickly becoming my go to man for my covers. His work is always impressive, he does well to portray the size of these girls’s… situations, and fits well with my own anime inspired writings. If you haven’t already, please go check him out.
Teaser for:
Trials of a Past Wood
Introductions
Ayida hummed to herself as she walked across the floor of her small cottage, moving into the rather large main room. It was in a classic setup for a ‘voodoo witch’ such as herself, though really she enjoyed Herbalist Extraordinaire more. After all, she didn’t deal in zombies or curses. Well, not usually, but you need humans for those usually. Instead, she just spent most of her days working on her potions, hence why a large cauldron dominated her domicile, and the rest of the main room was simply made up of shelves and cupboards of ingredients so she could retrieve them.
She had smaller cauldrons of course, which she now pulled out and tucked under one of her arms to work with. The large one was for anything she wanted to make a large batch of, such as the growth elixir she made to grow her plants year round, medical poultices for the various creatures she had pacts with, and the poisons that she used to make wards that would make sure she could force invaders away like the time the king sent his army in. That was a day.
Now though, she felt one of her wards go off, just as the globes of magical fire in her house dimmed. The ward depicted a cave painting to her, a basic idea of what it saw that could be parsed easily and kept the magical tax of creating it low.
“Claws, sword, and knife. Oh, wait, that’s a moon behind them. Interesting.”
The lights dimmed again, before the fire beneath her cauldron flared to life. It was all very cute of her visitors, but Ayida didn’t want to be given a reason to have to stop them. After all, she lived in a wood, so her house was made of the most common material in the area. If she lost it just because of someone getting overly excited, she was going to be miffed. “Now, where is the sparkroot?”
The next painting came to mind, along with three others, and then one that was an actual photo. The first four depicted, a swipe, a parry, a shield, and then a charge. The last one showed a young man, clad in what appeared to be armor, being thrown against a tree while a large, hulking, black beast made its way towards him. “Common soldier’s garb. Velixia, please do be careful not to explode.”
That got a click of gears and the whir of motors. That was actually somewhat surprising, especially as Ayida began to grind the root with one hand, and with the other redid the white, tribal markings on her body. Then again, she normally didn’t wear her mystic runes, made up of stripes on her thighs, circles in a chain just under both of her shoulders that wrapped around her arms, and finally two crescent moons, one above and one below her nipple, two circles at the left and right of her nub, and large dot that was painted over the center of each breast. Honestly, that all was fun to do, even a bit arousing with how she had to lift up her large breasts to get the undersides with the paint. The problem was the face paint that covered everything above her lips. Like her visitors though, she had been expecting this visit for a few days now, which had allowed even the most odd of her friends to make their way here.
The next warning as to the young man’s arrival came in the sound of a roar. Ayida’s ears twitched as her purple eyes glowed green for a moment, the markings following in the action a second later as they helped attune her to the emotion behind the howl. She could tell what many of them were by the exact tone, but that left room for error. This sort of reading didn’t. “Pain, and failure. She had to disengage for some reason.”
And then she let out a long sigh of relief. “Good. I was really afraid she was going to over do it. I guess I’m up next then.” She dumped the dust in her pestle bowl into the cauldron be
fore waving over to the front of the cabin. A purple wrap came over and slipped around her head, helping to control her long, sleek, black locks, before a similarly colored thong and loincloth slipped under legs as she kept walking. She didn’t want to be entirely informal after all, and she needed one of the bone pins in the wrap anyways. Made cutting the burnswax she needed a lot easier.
The final wards came with video, showing the young man as he slowly walked towards the cabin. He had a cloth out and wrapped around a short, silver dagger that was in his hand. It had to be the one that was missing from the scabbards on his belt, each made for a different type of dagger. It fit with the Steam Dragon insignia emblazoned on his breastplate, which was the heaviest his armor got. Imperial Lightning Drake standard issue, with a leather bracer for one hand, and a steam powered, heavy gauntlet on the other meant for blasting anything that got too close with high pressurized and heated steam. The leather greaves and shortsword on his back finished the standard kit, though she found it interesting that he was missing a helmet. Then again, given the circumstances of how he got the armor… Well, the black bandana over his face worked well.
The boy had grown up well, with a strong chest, long args and legs, but he wasn’t overly burly. Instead, he resembled the figure of a hunter more, which made sense with what Ayida knew about him. That fact would have also helped him even more with the beast he had faced before as he was likely faster than most soldiers would be and could actually use the fact that they were equipped with daggers rather than fumbling with them with fingers that were the size of sausages. Yes, he was everything she had hoped he would be looks wise.
Now he would hopefully be able to prove himself at heart.
The Secret Village of the Elves Page 6