The Moon Elves had believed themselves so powerful, so invincible, for so many millennia, that no one ever questioned their authority and every being on the planet was shaken to its core when news spread that every last Moon Elf was suddenly dead. Dead in a matter of minutes. Dead from the icy cold blast of an Ice Lich's frozen breath with froze every Moon Elf solid before they even knew they was a Lich among them.

When a traveller arrived and found the village frozen into a solid block of ice, with dismembered bodies of Elves strewn everywhere, there was no question that this had been a Lich attack.

The Elf Eater of Pepper Valley had left dozens of Elf villages in this exact same frozen, shattered waste. It was his signature trademark. It was what he did. It was no surprise to think that the Elf Eater of Pepper Valley had murdered every last Moon Elf, not after having murdered so many other villages of Elves in this exact same way, and so no investigation was done.

No one even took a closer look at the bodies, to see that the poor Elves had not died quickly, and had suffered in agony for hours, perhaps days. Their faces twisted in horror and pain, the frozen foam at their lips, a tell tale sign that they had been poisoned first and frozen later. It was also neglected, the sheer brutality, with which some Elves had been mangled, their bodies cut to ribbons, by hundreds of knife wounds and their heads cut off and never found. That the king and his brother and one of the king's daughters had been mutilated beyond recognition or that four children, stabbed to death in their sleep, had been the only ones carefully wrapped and placed lovingly on an alter.

The thing which everyone over looked most of all, however, was the fact that standing in the middle of the massacre, had been one lone survivor. Quaraun. The other thing overlooked, was the fact that Quaraun had been found standing over the headless bodies of the King and his own father the king's younger brother, covered in blood and holding a fearsome looking black obsidian dagger, encrusted with tear dropped shaped rubies, and rumoured to have been demon possessed.

With the Elf Eater on the war path and seen in the area, no one ever once considered that maybe, Quaraun had simply had enough of being bullied, and poisoned the village's food supply, then while every Elf in the village lay dying, went from house to house stabbing every one of them in the heart, before turning on his father and his uncle, the king, and stabbing both of them each hundreds of times before cutting their heads off.

That Quaraun actually was insane, and not just called insane, had never occurred to anyone. He himself maintained that he was not insane, that people only called him that for the way the sad eyed Elf dressed, but Quaraun also denied having a Thullid living in his head, eating his brain and controlling most of his actions these days. No one knew, what had happened before the massacre of the Moon Elves.

No one knew that Quaraun had, had a male lover named BoomFuzzy, or that both he and BoomFuzzy had hid their relationship for 30 long years, before being discovered and then tortured by the king's younger brother, or that Quaraun had been made to watch while BoomFuzzy suffered in horrible agony for three days as a slow acting poison melted his organs.

Quaraun had been a peaceful, shy, timid, quiet Elf who kept to himself and preferred to live as a princess instead of a prince. He also preferred to have male lovers. Either thing was seen as a crime by his people and while, they let him get away with wearing dresses, simply because he was the only male heir the royal family had, they put their foot down on his desire to be BoomFuzzy's lover.

The thirty years of keeping their relationship secret, had messed with Quaraun's head and caused him to live in dread of having any sort of sexual relationship at all. Years of being beaten, tortured, and humiliated by the other Moon Elves left him scared of his own shadow and jumping at every sound. But no matter what they did to him, the secretive little Moon Elf had always had BoomFuzzy to turn to.

What few knew was that Quaraun was no longer Quaraun the Moon Elf, but rather something else. When Quaraun was an infant, he and his mother had been attacked by Thullids. Horrible, amphibious tentacle covered aliens take had come to Earth from a galaxy far away, and whose method of reproducing was to spawn eggs in swamps and marshes, wait for the eggs to hatch, and then implant the tadpole-like larvae in the brains of Elves.

The poor Elf victim would slowly go mad, as the creature in it's head eat holes in it's brain, while sending long thing white roots throughout the Elf's body, replacing it's nervous system. Eventually, the creature would have completely replaced the Elf's brain, spinal column, and nerves with it's own, killing the original Elf, and replacing it with a Thullid instead.

Because the Thullids had no way of themselves actually reproducing, they took to crossing their eggs with various sea life, usually octopus or squid. Their most successful crossing had been with Giant Squid, but this had an unfortunate side effect. Eventually the squid would outgrow it's host body and hatch out of it, resulting in the strange semi-humanoid, bipedal squid headed monstrosities, which most people thought of when they heard the word Thullid.

For centuries the Thullid experimented with various sea life and shore creatures: starfish, sea cucumbers, sand worms, barnacles, moonsnails, eels, crabs, lobsters, clams, trout, goldfish, frogs, toads, salamanders, stingrays, all with varying degrees of success, and never with the success they had hoped for.

The goal they had hopped for was to create a Thullid that could remain, forever, inside the host body, never hatching out, never changing the outer physical appearance, making them able to fully take over a host and it never be known that the host was in fact a Thullid and not an Elf.

And one day, the Thullids captured a pack of jellyfish. After decades of experiments with crossing Thullid eggs with jellyfish, and implanting them into various other creatures, the Thullids at long last concluded they could successfully take over an Elf, and with plans to take over the planet, what better Elves to pick, then the Moon Elves who already thought they owned the planet.

Two Elves were captured, the plan fast fell apart, when the Thullid invader was captured and the young she-Elf and her infant were put under constant guard to watch for changes. After three years, the young mother had mentally changed and it was clear, that she was dead and her body controlled by a Thullid parasite.

The Moon Elves promptly beat her head in, smashing open her skull, to discover, that yes indeed, there was a Thullid living in side. The Elves crazed by fear, squashed the beast with far more violence then necessary.

Quaraun had watched the event unfold. Only three years old when his mother was brutally murdered by his father, Quaraun lived in mortal terror that he would be next, mostly because his father constantly told the young Elfling, if Quaraun ever dared become a Thullid like his mother had done, he would personally kill the boy.

The Elf, Quaraun, had died and been replaced by a Thullid around the same time as his mother had, but fearing his own murder, Quaraun had been very careful to do everything possible to be a Moon Elf and not a Thullid, and so by the time the skittish little Moon Elf had reached adulthood, he had successfully convinced himself that he was in fact a Moon Elf and that the fear of being a Thullid was nothing but a bad dream caused by his father's threats.

Unfortunately, Quaraun had developed a bad habit of killing anyone who suggested that the timid little Moon Elf might in any way be a Thullid and not an Elf, which was in fact proof that he was a Thullid, as Elves were not prone to bloodshed. Elves were peaceful and avoided violence for the most part. The Moon Elves had only ever been violent towards Quaraun, because they feared he might be a Thullid.

Thullids were insane.

Having been made insane by an event long ago forgotten, and now trapped on a primitive planet, forced to spawn their eggs swamps and cross their larvae with earth sea creatures in order to survive, they had at some point corrupted the mental development of their brains. There simply was no such thing as a sane Thullid.

Poor Quaraun had been an Elf not born healthy to begin with, not infested by a parasite that had eaten his brain and replaced it with a twisted corrupted brain, and then bound his soul to a Lich that was even less sane then he was, only to have the Lich die and leave his soul as shattered as his brain, all the while with Moon Elves threaten to kill him if the unusual Elf ever displayed Thullid tendencies and then threatening to kill his male lover if they ever got caught together.

The whole thing had been too much stress for him to handle, and so when the Moon Elves drove BoomFuzzy to suicide, Quaraun simply went Thullid on their asses and murdered every last one of them in a very Thullid-like fashion of absolute psychotic insanity.

And once every Moon Elf was dead, the very depressed Elf captured a Lich, let it lose on the village, made it look like a Lich had killed everyone and then set out to drink himself into a stupor to try to forget everything in his life that wasn't BoomFuzzy.

BoomFuzzy had tempered Quaraun's growing insanity, keeping him tame, but now without BoomFuzzy, Quaraun's mind spiralled into a whirlwind of madness, that left the Elf, spending most of his days, skulking in dark corners of taverns, drinking the powerfully psychotic, hallucinatory Faerie wine, and avoiding contact with anyone. Three hundred years alone, bullied at every turn, fleeing a group of competitive mages who thought he was after their titles, had made it even more difficult for Quaraun to stay sane.

At some point, a hallucination convinced him that Liches had in fact killed the Moon Elves and thus he set out to kill them back.

Quaraun lived, plagued by the memory of his lover's agonizing death. He couldn't get BoomFuzzy's final hours out of his head.

The fact remained, that BoomFuzzy had himself been a Lich, and BoomFuzzy was one of the many incarnations of The Elf Eater of Pepper Valley.

Being a Lich, he didn't stay dead long.

Quaraun, being insane, took up killing the Lich over and over again, and hard now wandered aimlessly across the country following the Lich or being followed by the Lich as was more correct, and had finally succeeded in injuring the Lich to the point that the Lich fled and went into hiding for fear it could not regenerate in it's wounded state. Lich retreated back to it's lair and Quaraun, set out to killing anything that got between him and where he thought the Lich might be.

BoomFuzzy was in his heart and mind, every day and every night. BoomFuzzy had been a candy maker who lived in the Moon Elf village. He and Quaraun had hidden their relationship for 30 odd years before, Quaraun's father and the king had found out. Male Elf were not allowed with other male Elves and to have such a scandal in the royal family was unthinkable. They couldn't imagine banishing Quaraun. He was after all the only son of the king's younger brother, which made him a potential, though unlike heir to the throne.

BoomFuzzy and Quaraun had hidden a lot.

BoomFuzzy wasn't a candy maker. The candy shop was a front for his laboratory.

BoomFuzzy was a wizard.

An evil, dark wizard.

BoomFuzzy also wasn't an Elf.

He was a Faerie, disguised with a Glimmer Spell to appear as an Elf.

BoomFuzzy was a Necromancer and Quaraun had been more then just his lover, he had also been his apprentice.

And what the world did not know was that Quaraun was hunted down the Lich Lords, not because they killed the Moon elves, but rather because he had been one of the wizards who had helped to create them.

The Lich Lords had once been 13 powerful Necromancers. BoomFuzzy had kidnapped and tortured to death, the world twelve most powerful Necromancers, before turning them into Liches, against their will.

BoomFuzzy and Quaraun had been building an army of Liches.

BoomFuzzy had had great plans of global domination.

Quaraun didn't care about global domination, he just liked being dominated by BoomFuzzy and would have been perfectly content to devote the rest of his life to serving BoomFuzzy. In spite of the rumours saying otherwise, Quaraun was a very weak willed Elf, with no big goals, no big plans, no drive, no ambition. Nothing. He was quite content to serve King Gwallmaiic forever. Quaraun never expected BoomFuzzy to die, much less that he would commit suicide.

And now, instead of 12 Liches, there were thirteen.

But then, Quaraun had not realized that BoomFuzzy had already been a Lich to begin with.

The rumours however, contained no mention of BoomFuzzy at all and instead said that now Quaraun wandered the world alone these 300 years seeking the Lich who had killed his family and kin. Or rather seeking a way to permanently kill any Lich at all, which didn't seem to be an easy feat, given that dead Liches simply regenerated after you killed them.

Quaraun had killed two Liches, or rather one Lich killed twice, before discovering this fact.

The Elf Eater of Pepper Valley.

King Gwallmaiic.

BoomFuzzy.

The Elf Eater was really the only Lich Quaraun was interested in, in spite of what the rumours said about him.

Quaraun didn't care about the twelve original Lich Lords.

Just the Elf Eater himself.

Finding him.

Killing him.

Curing him.

UnLichifying him.

Or just becoming a Lich himself to join him.

Quaraun didn't really care which one he did at this point, just as long as he got to see BoomFuzzy again.

BoomFuzzy.

To be reunited with BoomFuzzy.

That was all that really mattered.

Finding BoomFuzzy and being together with BoomFuzzy again.

Quaraun didn't care about anything else.

And people who got in his way, just died.

Turned into frozen blue crystal statues.

Eaten by undead rose bushes.

Fed to PocketLich, Quaraun pet DracoLich that lived in his pocket.

Eyes gouged out with King Gwallmaiic's ruby encrusted black obsidian blade daggers.

Castrated and hung in trees.

Tongues cut out.

Shrunk to the size of a beetle and plopped into a vial, then locked into a box of vials.

Killing had become second nature to Quaraun and he had not noticed.

In his mind, Quaraun was still the peaceful, harmless little Moon Elf tailor, that he had been before meeting BoomFuzzy. He justified his killings by the fact that he was simply ridding the world of evil.

And he was.

Quaraun was ridding the world of evil.

Quaraun was killing bullies.

Quaraun was slaughtering racists and bigots.

Quaraun was murdering lying ass gossips who spread rumours and slander.

Quaraun never hurt any one who was innocent.

Quaraun was simply eliminating from the world, evil people who did evil things.

Quaraun never killed anyone who didn't deserve to die.

A hero in his own mind, the rest of the world saw Quaraun as not only the most powerful and most feared wizard of them all, but also as the most evil super villain to ever exist.

Quaraun had spent the last 200 years chasing down the Elf Eater Lich Lord. Caught him. Killed him, hoping that by killing the Lich, the man he'd been in life would return, but the Lich had disappeared.

BoomFuzzy did not return, and Quaraun was becoming very discouraged.

The Elf Eater went into hiding while his wounded body regenerated back into a Lich.

As a Lich he boldly attacked, slaughtered and terrorized all the Realms, until Quaraun caught him again, and again killed him.

And for a second time the Lich transformed out of his Lich form and retreated until his body could regenerate.

Quaraun had spent the last decade following what he had thought, had been a trail leading to the wounded Lich Lord, but that trail turned out to have gone to a different Lich.

Quaraun had tried fighting that Lich but was now himself wounded and forced to retreat. It was a very complicated mess his life had become, and Quaraun was now reaching a point where he simply wanted to be done with all of it. He was tired and sad and lonely and frightened and wandering through a field that was heading into a dark and forbidding forest, while thinking about the rumours people said about him and trying to remember what was fact and what was fiction and if anything in his life had ever happened at all.

Quaraun began to wonder if BoomFuzzy hadn't had the right idea and had perhaps Quaraun should simply forget about hunting Liches and kill himself.

And so Quaraun's bloody thoughts turned bloodier as he made plans to kill himself the same way BoomFuzzy had done.

Quaraun was not a Lich, like BoomFuzzy had been, if he died, he wouldn't regenerate, he wouldn't come back, and BoomFuzzy knew this. Their souls were still connected. BoomFuzzy kept his distance from Quaraun, because Quaraun had become hell bent on killing him, but through it all, he could still feel every agonizing heart break that surged through the Elf's broken heart.

Quaraun had thought of suicide before, but something had always brought him out of it. This time was different. There was no glimmer of hope left in his heart.

The Elf felt so very alone, unloved, unwanted, and with no one to turn to, and now he was lost and sitting in a field with a map in one hand and a black dagger in the other.

Cast out of society.

Alone.

Unwanted.

Unloved.

Quaraun was deeply depressed and becoming more so with each passing day.

The anniversary of BoomFuzzy's death drew near and all he could think about was how much he simply wanted to die with BoomFuzzy.

The wound in his side wasn't helping him to feel any better.

Quaraun sunk to his knees and burst into tears.

The sadness overwhelmed him.

Sadness.

Loneliness.

Emptiness.

Quaraun lay on the mossy grass and did nothing but cry, for crying was all he could do. He had lost all will to do anything else.

"I wish I had someone to talk to," he said to himself. "I hate being alone."

I wish.

What a very bad thing to say.

Wishes are always granted, but not always as you wanted them.

Wishes must be carefully worded.

Very carefully.

Especially when one has stopped to rest in a Faerie Forest.

Even more so, when one is a wizard, whom among other things, sells bottled up wishes.

A merchant of wishes.

A DiJinn.

Many years ago, the Di'Jinn had been a powerful guild of wizards. Formidable above all. Feared by all. Squid-headed alien creatures, known as the Thullids. A race from another galaxy. Capable of granting wishes. They took Faerie Magic and mixed it with their own, and they put everything they knew into a tiny pink jellyfish and implanted her in the brain a baby Moon Elf. This Moon Elf.

Quaraun the Insane.