Quaraun’s obsession with hair defied any sense of logic. And it was his hair fetish is what spurred him into joining the Guild.

The Guild meetings often talked of the topic of long hair.

Many debates there were on the question of: did or did not a wizard get his power from his hair.

Wizards were a superstitious lot and the bulk of the wizarding community did in fact believe that a mage’s hair grounded them and the longer their hair, the more powerful they were.

Quaraun had the longest hair of all, so everyone in the Guild just automatically assumed he must be the most powerful wizard, though they had never seen him do any magic.

However, there was one wizard who had hair longer than Quaraun’s. It looked short, because it was dread-locked. But every one knows a braid is only one third the length of its unbraided state. And so the wizard, who was famous for his 4 foot long dreadlocks, was deemed the most powerful mage of all, because unbraided. His hair was over 12 feet long.

But this wizard with hair longer than Quaraun’s was never in attendance at The Guild meetings. In fact, he wasn’t even a member of the Guild at all.

This infuriated Finderu, founder of the Guild, for he had taken it upon himself to make the laws and tell all wizards what they could or could not do. And for a wizard to not obey Finderu’s laws, well, that was just completely unthinkable by Finderu’s mind.

And so up went the wanted posters.

Wanted, Dead or Alive: The Elf Eater of Pepper Valley.

Finderu wanted The Elf Eater’s head.

Quaraun wanted The Elf Eater’s hair.

Quaraun was mesmerized by the drawings of The Elf Eater on the wanted posters.

Quaraun had never met the Elf Eater.

Few had.

He was an Illusionist, and a shape shifter.

But one look at his wanted poster, and Quaraun could see The Elf Eater had beautiful hair.

Wild hair.

Unkept.

Unbrushed.

A long tangled mess.

Exotic in its pure feralness.

Huge masses of untamed dreadlocks.

Quaraun’s lust for The Elf Eater’s hair burned uncontrollable, from the first time he laid on the dreadlocks he saw in the wanted poster.

That The Elf Eater was a serial killer, a rapist, a murderer, and a practitioner of the darkest arts, mattered not to Quaraun, for all he could think about was his burning desire to meet the Elf Eater and run his fingers through the woolly dreadlocks.

Indeed, every famous and very powerful wizard had a glorious head of hair and those who grew beards, had matching beards that they often tripped over.

The Elf Eater of Pepper Valley, most famous wizard the world had ever known, was often used as an example in wizarding textbooks as why a wizard should never cut their hair.

King Gwallmaiic, for this was The Elf Eater’s name, was said to be well over 2,000 years old, and had never cut his hair a day in his life. All who claimed to see him could never describe his face or his body or how he dressed, because they were always too mesmerized by his massive woollen dreadlocks. Huge dreadlocks that reached nearly to the ground, and were woven full if bones and cluotie ribbons.

Of course, those who saw him, never lived to tell the tale, as he was an evil Necromancer, Blood Sorcerer, Illusionist, and serial killer whom had built an army of undead and marched across the planet mass murdering all who were unfortunate enough to cross his path.

King Gwallmaiic had no royal blood.

He was just a mage, who’d grown very powerful, become undefeatable, and went on a killing spree across the Earth, leaving a mile wide path of blood shed everywhere he went.

He had built himself an army of Liches and crowned himself king of the undead, then later swept through the Realm of Fae, slaughtering every king of every nation, and crowing himself The King of the Faeries.

No beast was more feared than The Elf Eater of Pepper Valley.

Quaraun was fascinated by The Elf Eater.

Fascinated was probably not a big enough word for it.

Quaraun was obsessed with The Elf Eater.

Like a screaming fan girl, Quaraun grabbed up every book he could find about the mysterious evil wizard.

Quaraun’s fascination with The Elf Eater had been very worrisome for the Di’Jinn, for the Di’Jinn were masters of wish granting and had taught Quaraun this art, but Quaraun had used it to set about wishing to meet The Elf Eater. Fortunately, he had done this before mastering the art of granting wishes, so had never summoned the Elf Eater to the Di’Jinn temple, as he had attempted to do many times.

But those days were gone. For the Di’Jinn was dead.

Dead, because Quaraun had wished it so.

He hadn’t meant to kill the Di’Jinn.

It had been a wish spoken out of turn.

Spoken in anger.

Spoken without thinking.

But it was a wish, never the less, and now, all the Di’Jinn were dead. In the blink of an eye, hundreds of mages were turned into ash, to save the life of a tiny black Shetland Pony.

A strange black Unicorn, that had appeared mysteriously one night in the desert, while Quaraun was reading a book about The Elf Eater and had mentally, unconsciously wished to meet the famous beast.

“I don’t want to go to Ivujivik. I want to find the Elf Eater. I wish I knew where to find him.”

Quaraun was brought out of his thoughts of The Elf Eater, the dead Di’Jinn, and his beloved little pony, by a sudden gust of wind, that sent a pine branch full of snow down in front of him.

“You almost hit me!”

Quaraun stared at the broken limb, which now closed off the path ahead of him. He was too busy thinking about the fallen limb to notice he had just uttered a wish, or notice that black clouds were filling the sky all around him.

He was also too preoccupied to notice that he was in the tundra of the deepest depths of the Deep North, where there were no pine trees. It was too cold for pine trees.

Had Quaraun been smarter, he would have paid less attention to his wet shoes and more attention to the vast acres of giant pine trees sprouting up around him, like a huge mushroom ring after a thunderstorm.

But Quaraun wasn’t noticing the impending arrival of The Forest of No Return, or the tiny black pony standing on the hill watching him.

A little black pony, with a gleaming silver horn, and a long black mane, many decades ago braided and left unbrushed, now flowing in wild dreadlocks down to the horse’s hooves.

No, Quaraun was too busy looking down at his tickle-me-pink brocade slippers.

“My feet are wet.”

Quaraun sat down in the snow.

His hair was wet.

His feet were wet.

He was cold.

He was hungry.

He was lost.

He was tired.

And lonely.

So very lonely.

He didn’t know where Ivujivik was.

He didn’t want to see his father.

Or his sisters.

He wanted to find out where The Elf Eater lived and go there. A foolish thought, as Quaraun was an Elf and King Gwallmaiic was called The Elf Eater precisely because he ate Elves, But, Quaraun was a bit too stupid to think about that, just like he was too stupid to not keep starting sentences with the deadly phrase: “I wish.”

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He was only on the road to Ivujivik to visit his father, because everyone else he knew was dead.

He didn’t know where else to go.

He was lonely and wanted to be in a place where people knew him and welcomed him.

But therein lay the bigger problem.

The problem which Quaraun had forgotten.

One thing Quaraun had forgotten was how utterly insane his people were. Especially his father, who was good at preaching charismatic conspiracy theories into the crowd and gathering up lynch mobs to march along with him terrorizing anyone and anything he deemed as Evil.

Somehow, many hundreds of years ago, Quaraun’s father had gotten a hold of a Human Bible, and while he didn’t believe any Human Christian religion, the old Elf firmly believed that the archangels of the Bible, the Alfar, the Watchers, and Grigori were in fact Elves. Moon Elves, to be exact.

And so Quaraun’s father had fervently studied every Human folklore he could find about angels and had created a cult that believed the Moon Elves to be gods over Humans and gods over plants and gods over animals and gods over the entire Earth in general.

Quaraun had forgotten about his father’s radical extremist cult and his violent, riotous followers who devoted their lives to torturing and killing anyone they deemed to be not worthy - and that was pretty much every one outside of their psychotically deranged fear mongering group.

Quaraun’s father had murdered Quaraun’s mother, and would have also murdered Quaraun, had Quaraun’s uncle not stepped in and handed the child over to a local Thullid priest, ZooLock, and told the priest to take the child and run.

ZooLock grabbed the child and ran.

He fled the, still yet undiscovered by White Humans, and not yet named the land of Canada, and made his way to his temple in Persia. Thus Quaraun came to live with the Di’Jinn.

Quaraun remembers his father murdering his mother.

He remembered his father trying to kill him as well.

But he couldn’t remember why his father had done it.

And it was now 70 years later.

Quaraun had concluded that is so much time, his father had, had time to change.

Become nicer.

Kinder.

Less violent.

Less radical.

Less insane.

Maybe he didn’t even lead his little cult of extremists any more.

When you live so many decades away from someone, you tend to forget the bad things and reminisces for the good. Quaraun liked thinking about the good.

There was so much bad.

Lots of bad.

Good was good.

But there was so little good.

Quaraun’s childhood had been bad.

Very bad.

He’d witnessed his father murder his mother.

His father knew this and beat him often.

His uncle, his father’s older brother, had decided that before the bitter Elf beat the boy to death, to send Quaraun to Persia, to a school for wizards.

But that was 70 years ago, more or less.

And now the wizards were all dead.

And Quaraun had no place else to go.

Outside of the wizards, he knew no one.

So, he was walking his way across the world, from Persia, all the way back to Ivujivik. The Atlantic Ocean had posed a small problem as Humans did not believe there was a country on the other side, so finding a ship willing to cross the ocean had been difficult.

Quaraun couldn’t remember any good, but he knew there must have been some.

Everyone had good in them, Quaraun often said.

Common Elves and Lower Elves, in all their many dozens of races, were friendly and tolerant of of races and other species. This could not be said of the High Elves, not any more at least.

In centuries past when Elves were common across the land, no Elf lived in fear, but the Elves were a dying species now, and with so many bigger, stronger beings taking over the planet, the Elves had become fearful of their own survival.

Once hundreds of races of Elves had walked the earth, but most were now extinct or fast in danger of becoming so. In an attempt to preserve the last few serving races of Elves, the Elves had begun to live in very isolated communities, shutting out outsiders, even shutting out other races of Elves.

Only a few thousand Elves now remained.

On the entire planet.

Elves were nearly extinct.

In most cases, each race of Elf was down to only a few dozen left. Their numbers were fast dwindling as Humans spread like a plague across the earth.

With a group about 500 members strong, the Moon Elves had one of the last large Elf communities left, which further supported their belief that they were superior to all other Elves. While the other races of Elves were dying out, the Moon Elves were surviving, a fact that inflated their already puffed up egos.

The Moon Elves lived in an arctic region only a few miles south of Santa’s Village, which wasn’t exactly in the North Pole.

It was just East of Ivujivik, in Labrador.

Far enough North that everyone said it was in the North Pole.

The Moon Elves lived on top of the world.

Isolated.

Lords of madness.

Rulers of their own insanity.

Gods in their own private insane asylum.

With nothing but ice-capped mountains, glaciers, and icebergs for neighbours.

And only each other to tell themselves how great they were.

The Moon Elves had long ago sunk into a genetic insanity caused by centuries of incest.

This had resulted in horrific blood lusts and violence.

The Moon Elves often turned to cannibalism out of nothing more than boredom.

Whitest of the albino white High Elves, the Moon Elves, based their superiority over others, by the near colourlessness of their skin. Quoting the Human Bible as they did so. Self-bred to match the colour of the vast endless miles of snow.

Slaughtering any infant born with dark eyes, dark hair, or heaven forbid dark skin. Moon Elves could move through the snow and be seen by no one. Moon Elves lived in the glory that was their pure whiteness.

White skin.

White hair.

White eyes.

They moved like ghosts through the snow. Their great whiteness made them better at hiding. Better at blending in. Better at disappearing into their surroundings. For this they thought themselves superior.

Only this and nothing more.

They were the whitest beings on the Earth and therefore, they were the best, or so they had convinced themselves.

Nothing else made them any better than any other Elf, other than the colour of their skin.

The Moon Elves had never seen deserts, rain forests, swamps, pine forests, hard wood forests, marshes, prairies... that these things existed, were lost to them. They lived in the caves, along the coast of two sheer cliffs, that dropped into the ocean.

To their North was nothing but frozen ocean and towering glaciers.

To their South was a vast snow-laden tundra,

To their East was Ivujivik itself, a tiny Inuit Village, home of the only Humans for hundreds of miles.

To their West lay Otchipwe-kitchi-gami also known as Lake Gitchagumi, and across it was the start of Canada’s vast seemingly uncrossable rocky mountains in to the Yukon territory, still yet untouched by White Humans.

Elves did not keep track of time, but Humans in France and Rome did and Quaraun had lived in both, briefly.

The year was somewhere around 800AD, though Quaraun did not know the exact year, nor did he care.

It would still be another several hundred years before Europeans would discover this vast continent in the world’s unexplored Western oceans.

Quaraun, while living with the Di’Jinn, had been much travelled.

The Di’Jinn priests had taken him on treks across Europe and Asia and Africa and of course the Middle East where Quaraun had called home these past 70 years.

The Moon Elves were whiter than the snow they lived in, and that made them better than anyone, or so they said, because they were able to blend in with their snowy surroundings and nothing could find them to kill them.

If your hair, skin, or eyes could be seen against a backdrop of snow, you were inferior and worthy of the death that came for you. When they started killing off the other races of Elves, they started with the darkest skinned races first.

The Moon Elves had been driven to the Deep North nearly a thousand years ago, in the great war between the High Elves and the Common Elves.

Crowning themselves Kings over all life, the Moon Elves had taken to slaughtering all the other races of Elves in a fanatical cleansing of the bloodline. The war had battled on for decades, ending with the few remaining unannihilated races of High Elves, banding together with Common Elves, Dark Elves, and Blood Elves, in an attempt to drive back the psychotically deranged Moon Elves.

The problem with fighting the Moon Elves was they didn’t care if they died for their cause, nor did they care who they had to kill to prove they were right. They were zealous fanatics ready to die for their cause, and they were led by a Necromancer King who was resurrected the dead of their fallen enemies to do battle for them.

The war would still have been raging on, had it not been for a blinding white light that flashed through the sky, followed by a huge silver ball the size of a small planet crashing into the Atlantic Ocean and flooding most of the planet.

Entire nations were wiped out.

Many species simply vanished, drowned in the great flood.

Dragons and Unicorns, once plentiful beasts, were now rarely seen.

Nearly every magical race was brought to the brink of extinction, allowing Humans to take over the planet.

The Moon Elves retreated to the Deep North, while the few races to survive the flood banded together in a desperate attempt to rebuild their crippled world.

After many months of watery terror, the flood waters went down, and while nations tried to rebuild, a new enemy arose from the depths of the ocean.

Sightings of strange tentacle beasts began to be reported by sailors.

Stories of monsters pulling ships below the waves, and later resurfacing, the crew dead, their undead bodies animated, the heads of the dead men replaced by squids.

The alien squid headed beasts soon left the ocean in search of more bodies into which to implant their young.

Soon the world forgot about the terror of the Moon Elves, as a new terror walked among them: the Thullids.

Little was known of the Thullids.

Where they came from was unclear.

All that was really known was that these were the last survivors of a planet whose sun had blown up and burned its solar system. Their goals however were very clear: capture all life and take control of the planet.

Captives were divided into three groups: food, slaves, and host bodies for implanting young.

While the squid-headed Thullids were the ones most people saw, there were also bird headed and octopus headed Thullids, likewise easy to detect by their outer appearance, but what few people knew was there were others that never hatched out of their host’s head, and walked among the world, undetected: the Jellies.

The most well known of the Thullids, were the Di’Jinn, a cult-like group of Wizard priests whose one goal in life was to worship and protect a tiny pink Jellyfish, whom they called The Grand High Emperor of the Triple Planets.

The Di’Jinn stood out among other Thullids by the bright pink robes they wore, all heavily embroidered with jellyfish-like abstract patterns, an outward sign of their loyalty to the insane and immortal pink Jellyfish they worshipped. A JellyFish who was also an Elder Brain.

In the Temple of the Di’Jinn, sat one Thullid, ZooLock the Great, who had served the Grand High Emperor for millennia.

It was his job, to carry with him everywhere he went, a small round glass bowl of water, in which lived a tiny pink Jellyfish, that was the ruler of all the Thullids.

Dozens of Di’Jinn priests, trained as fierce warriors, guarded ZooLock, who guarded their precious pink Jellyfish.

For centuries, ZooLock stood at his post, until one day, rumour arose that an army of Liches had arrived from the North, and fear stuck the old Thullid’s heart.

As powerful as the Thullid were, they were no match for Liches, especially not Liches built by the evil Phookan Necromancer Gwallmaiic, King of the Faeries.

Everyone knew of Gwallmaiic, The Elf Eater of Pepper Valley, a power hungry shape shifting Phooka, who for nearly a thousand years, had been slaughtering Elves and Faeries and had recently begun targeting Thullid villages.

Rumours were circulating that Gwallmaiic was looking for the Thullid’s infamous Jellyfish King, and with the Elf Eater’s army seen marching across the desert of the Di’Jinn, ZooLock gathered up the Grand High Empire and fled.

Terror seized every Thullid on the planet when news of the kidnapped jellyfish went out across the land, and try as they might, no one could find the squid-headed priest or his tiny pink ward.

A new war broke out, this time between the Thullids and the Faeries, but in the end, the King was gone and for centuries there was no word of what had happened to ZooLock or the sacred pink Jellyfish.

Fearing The Grand High Emperor was dead, the Thullids fell into mourning.

~o0o~