Note: I would like to thank everyone who sent me helpful advice and suggestions on this my first story.
*
The camp was set up in the woods next to a small trickle of a stream. Above tree line, the glow of the full moon filtered down illuminating the scene below. The black skin and white hair of the young elf marked him as the most feared and hated of elfin kind, the drow. Evil creatures which dwell in the caverns deep below the surface, they typically only travel to the surface to raid, pillage and murder, which made this particular elf odd. He was dressed in clothing one would find on a woodland elf and he was singing drunkenly in the common tongue of the surface. I had been watching him for quite some time now. Who am I? I am the guardian of this forest. You would know me as a unicorn. Every story you have heard about us being majestic white creatures with a glowing golden horn more or less is true. However, the legends about virgins are fabrications. We will aid anyone in need, and show no mercy to evil. This particular situation confused me a great deal. I was alerted to this elf's presence sometime in the early morning hours by a concerned woodland creature. I immediately rushed to his location expecting to find him preparing to do some malicious mischief, but instead, I found him walking alone through the forest quite aimlessly. From the state of his clothing, it looked like he had been traveling for quite some time before he came across the stream more by accident then design. Typically, I wouldn't have hesitated to simply kill him and be content at having rid the world of an evil, but something about him made me pause. So I chose to watch him for the time being instead.
To be fully honest, His appearance did sway my decision a bit. By nature, most drow are beautiful creatures elegant features, vivid red or pale colored eyes depending on birth, but he was stunning even by those standards. His shoulder length snow white hair fell around his face like a halo as he set up his camp. As they were not red his eyes should have been pale in color, His were a vivid azure shade of blue. The method in which he set up his camp was haphazard. He half-heartedly pitched his tent and tossed his bedroll inside. The amount of wood he gathered was barely enough to start a fire which makes me wonder why he bothered. His entire manner seemed like he just didn't care about anything. After making a meal he didn't eat, He pulled a dark brown bottle of some sort out of his pack and began to drink.
It didn't take me long to figure out the liquid it contained was some sort of liquor. I have seen enough travelling dwarves in my forest to know the signs of drunkenness. The more he drank, the more I began to understand what brought him to the forest, mostly because he started talking to himself. If I had been in my humanoid form, the deep tone of his voice would have made my toes curl. As it was, I could feel the length of my masculinity beginning to fill with arousal.
The world of sunlight was the only place he could remember. His mother had fled to the surface with him when he was a baby and raised him in a village that tolerated their presence. Despite the cold stares of distain from the villagers, the two of them were quite happy. They had a small one bedroom hut outside of the village close to the forest. His mother kept a small garden and raised chickens. She sold the eggs and the few excess vegetables she harvested to keep them clothed. They knew the villagers were not paying the true worth of what they bought, but it didn't matter. They had everything they needed, and as far as he was concerned it was a perfect life.
However, Contentment does not last forever. When he was about eighteen years of age, the perfection of his life began to fill with discord and strife. It started with an illness that spread through the land. No one was safe from it but it wasn't necessarily fatal. It caused a fever, sickness to the stomach and general aches similar to that of the flu. The difference was it had a much longer recovery time. Both he and his mother caught the illness, He fully recovered, but his mother never did. She suffered for months before she finally passed into the next world. It was hard for him but he was able to step up to the challenge of living alone.
The next note of discord came in a more attractive form. One of the young ladies from the village suddenly seemed to realize they had a handsome elf living among them. She started making excuses to visit him and spend time with him. At first, He was extremely leery of her attention. After all, it wasn't like he hadn't been living there most of his life and honestly, he was accustom to those his own age pulling nasty pranks on him. However, He was lonely since his mother died, so he was not as guarded as he should have been. This much of the tale, I gleaned from his random ramblings as he was drinking. When the bottle was empty, He seemed to settle down a bit and then the story became unsettling.
It seemed she wormed her way into his lonely heart one smile and kind word at a time. He foolishly let his guard down enough to fall in love with her and she shattered him. He didn't go into details about what she to cause him pain, but it was both emotional and physical in nature. He recovered physically, but the emotional was more then he could handle given the recent death of his mother. When he removed a small vial from his pack and announced his intention to poison himself, I could not stand by and do nothing. He may have been a drow, but he was not an evil being.
The drow sat up a bit and regarded the vial in his palm. It contained a deep red liquid. According to the shady traveling merchant he purchased it from the poison was painless. He would simply fall into a deep sleep and never wake up. Truthfully, He didn't fully believe the man, but at this point even if it wasn't painless it would be better than the misery he was suffering now. Cassandra and the others had always teased him, tormented him verbally, but this was the first time they had physically abused him. He had been blinded by love. He berated himself for being a fool. She had lured him into the forest and sat back laughing while the local ruffians beat him down. "River, did you honestly believe I could feel affection for a vile creature like you?" Had been the last words he heard before he passed out from pain.
It had come as a surprise when he woke up in the local healer's hut. He had gotten the impression he wasn't going to survive the beating they gave him. However it seemed fate wasn't quite done with him. One of the townsfolk came along at the perfect or worst time depending on your point of view. They all hated him but were afraid of the possible consequences of getting caught murdering him, so they ran. The healer was sworn to help all those in need, but it didn't mean he had to be gracious about it. He had given River the bare minimum care possible leaving him for hours with nothing to think about but his pain both emotional and physical.
By the time he recovered, they had trashed his farm and burned down the only house he had ever known. The town magistrate was dutifully sympathetic to his situation and did nothing about it. River heard them laughing as he walked out of the town meeting hall. That had been the final straw to break the mule's back. He gathered up what little he had left, sold the farm land for what he could get for it and left. River's only plan had been to get as far away from that place as possible, but the further he traveled, the more pointless it seemed. He would never be accepted anywhere. He would never be left alone. His entire life would be five hundred years of unending pain.
When he came across the gypsy caravan, it seemed life was finally going right for him. They regarded him with distrust and disgust, but they at least would talk to him. After a few brief inquires among them, He learned there was an alchemist with them. He spent the money he had gotten from selling the farm on the bottle of cheap whiskey and the vial currently in his hand.
