War of the Seasons, book one: The Human

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Dryad

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Dryad

“Wait! Hang on.” Story pulled against the girl and found that she was surprisingly strong, especially for her size and build.

Geez, what’s in the water here?

It seemed like everyone in Ailionora was ridiculously strong. In the bright sunlight, Story could see that Adair was a couple inches shorter than herself, making her easily taller than a gnome, but much shorter than an elf. She clearly took after her mother in her looks; Adair had full hips, a tiny waist, and very large breasts, with not much covering her up. She was wearing a short, green sarong tied around her waist, a piece of the same fabric tied around her chest that barely kept her contained, and she was barefoot. Aside from her father’s pointed ears, and what Story assumed was the standard set of silver-colored elf eyes, she looked nothing like him; except when she smiled. Her laughter and smiles were identical to her father’s.

As Story appraised her, the girl continued to pull her down the road, oblivious to her struggles, and chattering on incessantly about several different topics, most of which Story could barely keep up with, much less understand. She pulled again, harder this time.

“Seriously, STOP.”

Adair did stop, but didn’t drop Story’s arm. Instead she turned to look at her, a wounded expression on her round face and hints of blue in her eyes. “But… don’t you want me to fix your hair?”

Story eyed Adair’s hair warily and noticed that her first impression had been wrong. The girl didn’t have fraying dreadlocks but dozens of well-kept braids, some with colored ribbons woven throughout and others with seashells and bells in them.

“Yeah, that’s fine. You can help me get my hair tamed. I just don’t need to be dragged is all.”

Adair promptly dropped her arm, leaned in close, and smiled. “I like the purple in your hair! I wish I had purple hair sometimes. Other times I wish I had blue. Or green. Or yellow.” She continued on like that and turned to walk toward her camp. Story obediently followed, unconcerned since Eirnin didn’t seem to be. Plus, she really was longing to finally brush her hair, and it seemed pretty harmless to let Adair have her way in this case. She could certainly do no worse than the mess that currently sat atop her head.

Once they reached the outskirts of Stoneybrook, Adair turned off to her right and walked down a gentle hill toward their campsite. Story squinted into the bright afternoon sunlight and could make out a wagon that looked like a huge technicolor barrel mounted on top of four wooden wagon wheels. There was one chestnut-colored horse grazing untethered on the grass in front of the wagon and another set of horse legs peaking out from behind.

As she got closer she could see that the riot of colors on the wagon was not haphazard, but instead, a stylized depiction of an underwater seascape. Multi-colored fish were portrayed swimming all over the round wagon against the brilliant blue background. “Who painted the wagon?”

“Oh, I did. Do you like it? My da lets me paint the wagon whenever I get to feeling like it. I usually do underwater scenes so that we can bring the sea with us wherever we go. Though Da does try to keep us near water as much as possible so I don’t go mad.”

She would have kept on like that had Story not let out a loud and very surprised, “Oh!” The other horse had come around from the other side of the wagon. It looked unremarkably similar to the first horse… until her eyes locked on the massive ram’s horns on its head. The horse walked directly over to Adair and began nuzzling her, and the other one soon followed.