Chương 1: Prologue and Chapter 1

Prologue Drasil of Greenwood Twenty Years Ago"You're off to war again?" The voice of his beloved caught his attention, making his ears twitch back and pulling his eyes along. His ardur, his fieldmaids, continued their work in readying him for battle, securing plates of mithril along his limbs and applying preparatory oils and polishes to his greatblade. Each was clad in armor of their own, with dresses of black silk and white lace beneath ready plates.

"We are," Drasil replied, flickering one ear in an apology.

"The mountainfolk of Erem have been driven back to their stronghold, and laid to siege. A dragon and her minions." His beloved approached, and his ardur moved back to permit her presence. Her curly golden hair, her bright emerald eyes, and her long expressive ears. Her hair was short at the moment, only coming to her shoulders, recently shorn to give material needed for her new battledress. She reached up to brush a hand along his jaw, then down along his dull chartreuse braids.

She was much too lovely for a stern-faced northern prince as himself.

"They will not thank you for this," she muttered, clearly worried for his safety, as she always was. A hundred times he had departed for war, and a hundred times he had returned, and the ritual was as it always was. He cherished this ritual.

"They are mountainfolk, we'd be surprised if they thanked the sun for shining or wind for blowing," he refuted her worries softly. Just as it was natural for those things to be true, it was natural for him to do this. He was, after all, a prince of elves.

"It shall be fortunate for your son to not grow up to be like you," his beloved muttered, expressing her annoyance with a flick of the ears. He laughed softly, leaning forwards and planting a kiss upon her brow, then her lips. Her face tinged with red and his ears bounced in delight. Her prickly side was delightful.

"Our son is much too quiet. By my departed mother's words, we were obnoxiously loud." He smiled, tapping his head against hers before slowly pulling back. Their first son, Rasil, was born just earlier in the year, and was wonderfully restrained. None of his three sisters were so well-behaved at such a young age- it took nearly the whole century of childhood for them to finally try to act mature. Just like himself, in that regard.

"We will return soon enough," he assured his wife with a strong hug.

"I will visit the chapel and pray to Amarami before we move through the waygate."

"I will pray until you return," she promised fervently, planting another kiss on his lips before slowly pulling away. Her bright eyes clouded with worry. He smiled at her, before finally letting his hands slip away from around her, freeing him to take up his sword and helm. His ardur gave their own silent promises to his wife, promising his safe return with flicks of their ears. Readied for battle, he waved one hand, and summoned over his manastars.

Fragile lights that danced over his brow, with barely a decade of power apiece. He kept needing to replace them, with how often he was called upon to war. It was necessary. He'd sooner die than let his children grow up in a world of Corruption.

Rasil of Greenwood He was at his wits' end with elves. It was no real sin on their part, ultimately. Elvish society seemed to work well to the satisfaction and safety of the elves who lived in it. Unfortunately, it was also totally intolerable for someone like him. The memories were getting foggy, but he was pretty sure he wasn't an elf. At least, he hadn't been one before this life. The names had faded from his mind, but he remembered life as a human in an altogether different world than this one.

He remembered a life much like this one, in a world of stone and glass towers vibrant with artificial lightning and drowning in trivial information. He'd been a human then, certainly, with a human family and human siblings and living at a human pace of life with human expectations and pressures. He had his complaints about such a world and such a life, of course, but he was finding it increasingly preferable to living among elves.

A human finished schooling by twenty or so, got married and had kids around thirty or so, was expected to perform and adhere to external pressure to succeed the entire time. The males were generally masculine, the females were generally feminine, and most people spoke what they meant to say. Elves lived a very different life in a fantastical world. He was twenty now, which meant that he still had another eighty years of schooling to finish before he'd be considered a properly educated adult.

He was under no external pressure to succeed, to a maddeningly, patronizing degree as older elves simply waved off his questions with platitudes. The males around him were generally feminine, the females around him were hyper-feminine, and everyone adhered to a manner of speech focused around implications as a matter of fact. It would be ungrateful in the extreme to not appreciate a second chance at life, but it was a kind of monkey's paw from what he had experienced thus far.

Limp-wristed, reserved, arrogant, dextrous, magically gifted twats who dressed in scant clothes. He didn't belong here. He couldn't live through the better part of a century doing nothing but lazing around, attending tea parties, and getting gold stars for successfully completing an agonizingly slow coursework of education. He'd go insane. Every other Elven male seemed content being a loser who focused on grace or sorcery or whatever.

Wizards and duelists, who wielded devastating magical spells and swayed like willows to avoid mountain-cleaving blows. Lightly armored, lightly armed, and smiling arrogantly at any elf that was younger than them. He, on the other hand, was going to hit things in the face very hard, and laugh when things hit him very hard. He was going to wear heavy armor, use very big weapons, and throw himself into danger with absolutely no regard for potentially wasting a thousand-year lifespan by dying young.

Naturally, this meant he was running away from home at the ripe age of twenty. Longstanding cultural, legal, and religious policy among Elvenkind held that an elf wasn't really an adult until they were at least one-hundred years old. Not because they actually physically matured slower than humans did, but rather because when you lived a thousand years, you tended to look down on anyone with a two-digit number for their age.

Biologically, he was a young adult, and he was going to be one for the next nine hundred years or so. He was more than ready to ditch his home, full of people he really couldn't stand, and head out to start hitting monsters in the face with something heavy and made of steel. Step one being actually finding something made of steel. The only metal the elves here used was mithril, and mithril was entirely too expensive for him, the son of a very minor Elven noble house, to afford.

At the moment, he was stuck with a bow, wooden spear, and wooden sword. They were made out of 'Ironwood', a classic material of Elven design originating some thousand-thousand years ago when an elf had been bored and crossbred trees over the course of his entire life to make super-strong wood. This wood was then heated and pressed together in crossed layers to produce a material that was strong and durable, but much lighter than steel. Thus, it wouldn't help him gain much muscle if he stuck to it.

Clad in a mixture of ironwood plates and boarhide leathers, with a large backpack full of supplies over one shoulder and a quiver of arrows over the other, sword at his waist and spear in hand as a walking-stick, he was ready to take on the world.

"... Master Rasil?" A voice called out to him, just as he was placing his hand on the doorknob. He turned a flat expression back towards the source of the voice, the long-time head maid in service to his family. Long black hair, bright blue eyes, inexplicably vaguely-French style maid uniform despite this supposedly being an entirely different world with its own cultural evolution, she was as beautiful as every other female elf he has thus far seen in his twenty years of living in these woods.

"Teresa," he replied blankly.

"Do you need something?" he asked, knowing full well that she was attempting to silently convey a question about where he was heading off so early in the morning. It was well known by now that he had very little patience for the games of interpretation and implication that every other elf seemed obsessed with. His mother had seemed worried that he was stupid for the longest time, which was fairly insulting.

She took several moments to overcome both Elven instinct to rely on unspoken words and natural subservience to his bloodline, eventually getting out a direct question.

"... May I inquire about where you are going, clad in your plate and burdened with bags, out the door before even breakfast has been served?"

"Camping. Again." She took another few moments to work up a clarifying question.

"I see… without Lady Titania?" The woman in question being his assigned bodyguard and martial tutor. When he had made clear his interest in martial prowess to the exception of everything else, his mother had relented and sought the services of a warrior from the Elven capital for such a position, with the requirement that he keep up with his magical and religious studies as well. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

She was trying her best to teach him how to avoid hits. Rasil was keen on not being such a loser.

"I'm more than experienced enough to go camping on my lonesome," he replied with an irritated twinge to his expression and tone.

"Five summers now I've spent nights in the woodlands of my household under the supervision of Lady Titania, and she has taught me more than enough for me to manage on my lonesome. A mere week alone is well within my abilities." This was, of course, a lie. It wasn't unreasonable by any means.

Many times over the years, he had gone camping specifically to make this excuse incredibly plausible, to establish that he would eventually seek to go off sleeping under the canopies and stars on his own, and eventually come back home covered in twigs and dirt. The trick was, of course, he had absolutely no intention of ever coming back. He was going to go into those woods, emerge on the other side in human lands, and keep walking until this place was a distant memory. These elves were intolerable to be around.

It was fairly well known among the township that Rasil, lone son of the creatively-named House Greenwood, did not enjoy company. What was not known that it was more that he just couldn't stand other elves. At least, the elves of his homeland, who were pathologically incapable of having fun, unless it involved some social word game or something that involved entirely too many frills, sweets, and saturated colors for his tastes.

"... Is this to avoid Mistress Amaryllis' visit?" Teresa asked, clearly struggling to get out the question in the face of his hard stare. Amaryllis Greenwood, the third of his three older sisters, was a perfect Greenwood elf. Highly educated, talented, beautiful, other descriptors for "valuable"... and also constantly making snide remarks and mocking jabs at just about everything he did.

Allegedly, it was to try to help him, by disencouraging unhelpful traits, in practice it only ensured that he didn't have any interest in interacting with her.

"Yes." He was exceptionally blunt with his reply, making Teresa flinch back.

"I'm leaving now. I'd appreciate it if you refrain from mentioning where I've gone until someone directly asks." He wasn't wording it as an order, but rather just an indirect request, which was way more effective for bossing her around. Knowing elves? It would be at least a day before anyone asked. He didn't bother sticking around to hear her reply, opening the door and stepping out into the cool early morning of the Greenwood estate.

He would walk from the front doors to the surrounding woodlands, and from the woodlands and into the rest of the world. Mayhaps he'd even meet elves that weren't snobbish, implication-obsessed pricks in slutty clothing. — The Greenwoods were very minor nobility in Elven politics, something like mayors. Their control was over a single Elven settlement and the surrounding lands, serving on behalf of a higher noble and having a small number of knight-equivalents sworn to serve them.

The higher noble in turn served Elven Royalty, who were the supreme rulers of all of Elvenkind. Save the dark elves, who were ancestral enemies of the elves on the basis of the content of their character and color of their skin. Of course, being elves, even the minor nobility ruled over vast swathes of land.

The size of a very small country in total, with a central urban township built around an ancestral estate surrounded by a reasonably large ring of farmland, which in turn was surrounded by miles of well-cultivated wilderness. This wilderness, whatever form it might take, Elvenkind was religiously obligated to maintain and defend. This wilderness was kept in good shape through an absence of any and all roads. Elves did not have roads, did not use roads, and did not build roads.

Elven cities were built around central courtyards ringed with magical stone waygates, allowing for rapid transit across the whole of their empire and ensuring that the most distant buildings around each settlement were probably farmhouses, pastures, or watchtowers. The waygates didn't connect every location to every other location, but they were quick enough that one could walk to the other side of the world in maybe half an hour.

Very impressive, magically speaking, and totally useless to his intended goal of getting away from other elves. Those gates were constantly monitored, which meant another person would know where he had gone if he moved through one. Not ideal by any means. The Greenwoods lived in a very temperate part of the world anyways, which made it perfectly suitable for walking. Instead, he went due west for half a day, then into a relatively shallow but wide river which ran due south.

He stepped out to the middle, then started walking south for another half-day or so, and stepped out on the opposite bank and kept walking until nightfall and it was time to make camp. Walking through the water would disguise his tracks and scent, and necessitate checking the entire length of the river to find where he had gotten out. Which would make it harder again to follow in his path, as by the time they had checked the entire riverbank, his tracks would be that much older.

He ate a loaf of waybread for dinner and slept in one of the trees that night. A loaf of waybread supposedly could feed a single elf for a week, but that was both a slight exaggeration and only applicable to normal, much scrawnier elves. Rasil had been exercising his entire life, with both calisthenics and homemade weights, and was substantially more brawny than most of his peers.

A loaf of waybread could tide him over for about a day, which was still very impressive for a brick of honey-flavored hardtack made of tree-nut flour... and honey. About halfway through the next day of travel, Rasil exited the part of the wilderness that was carefully cultivated by generations of elves and entered the part of the wilderness that was actually wild. Everything within about thirty miles of Greenwood was their territory, which was something like three-thousand acres if he remembered his maths right.

'Minor Nobility'. This line between cultivated wilderness and true wilderness was denoted by the occasional boulder covered in runes and projecting several useful 'go away' wards to everything that elves didn't like, such as invasive species, monsters, and other races, which to elves were all the same thing. Naturally, the wards didn't do anything to stop him, an elf, from passing through. From here he would actually be in danger from various threats, such as invasive species, monsters, and other races.

His first priority was finding signs of civilization, preferably human, and getting his feet on a proper road for the first time in this entire life. If roads were good enough for the Romans, the greatest empire to ever exist, they were certainly good enough for him. He kept walking until he found another river, then started walking down along it, making sure he was stepping in the water so that it would wash away his footsteps and scent.

That night, he picked another tree to sleep in after thoroughly inspecting it, and ate his second loaf of waybread. Naturally, it was delicious and filling. It was a loaf of honey-flavored nut-based hardtack, it would be strange if it wasn't delicious. He awoke suddenly halfway through the night, rolling off his suspended hammock and landing on the forest floor some twenty feet down.

Another roll once he hit the ground bled off the shock of the impact into something manageable, and gave him a look up at his sleeping spot. His weapons were secured to his body by hooks and straps, and clattered about as he landed. Above him, the suspended hammock was now engulfed in webbing, and creeping insectile legs were peaking through the gaps of the foliage. Those keen senses of his had awoken him just in time. He could hear the acceleration of his heartbeat.

A giant spi-"There's no need to be like that, little elf." A feminine voice called down from the canopy.

"I just want to hold you tight~" Ah, a drider then. Slightly different, but still probably something that wanted to kill and eat him. He pulled up from his crouch, hoisting his wooden spear as he did so.

"Truly? Well there's no need for all of that nasty webbing of yours. Mayhaps if you had called out to me and spoken aloud your desire, I would've considered it." He shook his head, doing his best to bury his alarm and sudden panic beneath dry humor.

"But now you've gone and woken me up in the middle of the night, and taken my travelbag besides."

"Oh, I'm oh-so sorry. If you come up here, I could make it up to you~" she replied with a sultry tone. He frowned and glared up at the branches, at where he could vaguely make out a feminine upper half suspended on creeping darkness.

"If you truly want to make it up to me, you'll remove your webbing from my bag and toss it down here to me." He pointed his spear up at the monstrous woman, the outlines and glimpses of which could barely be made out through the dark and the branches. If he'd been a human, she would've been entirely invisible.

"Oh no, I couldn't do that. It's in my web now, you see, and I'm so loath to let go of anything that enters my embrace." She gave a teasing giggle.

"Though, for you I can make an exception, you just have to come up and retrieve it. I won't try to stop you." Rasil considered that proposition for a moment.

"Pft." He scoffed with an amused tilt to his mouth.

"Oh well." He shrugged, turning around and starting to walk away.

"W-wait a moment. Where are you going?" the drider called out from the canopy.

"On my journey, of course. Now that I'm awake, I might as well make more progress out of this blasted forest."

"B-blasted forest…? But wait, I still have your bag! D-don't you want it back?"

"Oh yes, going within reach of the monstrous spider who wants to cocoon me, inject me with digestive venom, and drink the food-slurry that was my internal organs afterwards." Rasil rolled his eyes.

"There's nothing in that bag that I truly need. You are free to it."

"N-now wait a minute!" She moved through the canopy rapidly, not quite fast enough to actually keep pace with his overland walking pace unobstructed by branches.

"I-I'm not going to kill you! A-and I eat normally!"

"I met this old fat spider, spinning in her tree~" Rasil began to sing, walking along at a comfortable pace.

"O-old and fat?!"

"I said, hah, old fat spider. I bet you can't catch me. You've grown too fat, you lazy lob, you're just an old tomnoddy~" A smile began to grow over his face.

"You- G-get back here, elf!" The voice was growing more distant by the second, so he increased the volume of his song to compensate.

"Ho attercop, ho attercop, she can't catch anybody~" The smile had grown into a full-blow grin.

"Stop calling me names! I don't even know what those mean!" She had started to wail, thoroughly flustered by this point. He needed to reach a clearing or something, lose this pursuer before he tried to rest again. She had way more legs than him, and was probably burning way more calories as a result.

"And then the old, fat spider, she spun a final thread~" He kept up the song as he walked away, amusing himself with the reactions.