The alarm went off and wouldn’t shut up until Lady Duchess Baroness Countess Champion-Captain Magewarden Fist of the Southeast Jessica Dark’ness Damselblade got up and punched it in the nose, sending it scurrying and squeaking back to its house in a huff.
Stupid thing wasn’t even necessary. She’d woken up well before it, as usual.
Three hours of sleep, six days in a row. Her body hated it but now it demanded it, and she’d been up before dawn weeding her mandrakes and repairing the rents in the vegetable lamb’s pen where the neighborhood basilisk had tried to claw its way inside. By the time she was done her gleaming +11 Platemail of Plentiful Shining was a muddy mess and the crackling power-gems that roared in her gauntlet were beginning to short out.
Then the neighborhood basilisk had tried to claw its way inside just as she was finishing the repairs on the fence and all she’d had to hand was her Phillippe’s –head morningscrewdriver.
Her eyes were burning red – and not from that nasty hellbat scratch last week – and it felt like there was a demented bellringer going bananas inside her brain with a spiked mallet.
Oh. That was her doorbell screaming.
The doorknob was stiff – probably due to Jessica coating it in basilisk ichor on her way in. She fixed the problem by removing it with her fist, then removing the door with her fist.
There was a peasant on the other side, regarding her fist with some alarm. Of course. First quest of the day was always a fucking peasant. Little shits couldn’t even make it through the night without being imperilled six times over.
“What,” she grunted.
“My deepest, most profound apologies for disturbing you so early, oh Lady Duchess Baroness Countess Champion-Captain Magewarden and Fist of the Southeast,” mumbled the peasant at high speed, eyes downcast to the hem of her awful grubby little tunic, “but wolves have beset our shepherds overnight, and now-”
“You want me to kill twelve of them.”
“Yes please.”
“And?”
The peasant’s mud-brown common eyes stared blankly from her grit-grey common face. “I’m sorry, Lady Duchess Baro-”
“There’s always something else. And. What. Is. It.”
“…sixty-three of the sheep have wandered away in the night’s chaos. Please find them and bring them back from the depths of Armsaw Woods.”
“Aw piss,” said Lady Duchess Baroness Countess Champion-Captain Magewarden Fist of the Southeast Jessica Dark’ness Damselblade, and she slammed her door in the peasant’s face, downed a bag of coffee beans, and was halfway to Armsaw Woods before she remembered she didn’t have a door anymore.
“Then what did I slam?” she wondered, as she pulled out Dragonsnipper, her third-favourite longblade. “Aw hellworms. I punched a hole in the wall again, didn’t I.”
***
At ten in the morning Jessica had a working brunch of raw wolf flank with charred wolf fur cooked over a roaring blaze of damp tinder and soggy branches, washed down with the few coffee crumbs she found and licked up from the very bottom of the bag of beans. She barely chewed; since she was using her mouth to swear and both her arms and legs to shove sheep. At last the dim woolly bastards had been ushered, bleating, towards the arms of her shepherds, and Jessica was about to follow suite when she heard a faint and beautiful melody, woven of laughter and threaded with delight, redolent of dewdrops and starlight and gilded with golden lilies.
“Oh FUCK,” she groaned. “Fuck fuck fuck. Is this more fae shit? It’s more fae shit.”
“Indeed,” proclaimed a voice that would’ve made any mere mortal singer break down into sobs. And lo, from the surface of a nearby pond arose a figure robed in petals and crowned in sunbeams, with ferns for lace, bracken for brocade, and lady slippers for lady’s slippers. “I am Queen Morning-glory, daughter of Hibiscus, mother of Jack-in-the-pulpit, guardian of all that is green and good and great and grand. Thy hath trespassed upon mine woods and slain mine creatures, and-”
“Weregild in gold or stabbing?”
“-thy DARE-”
“Gold or stabbing?” repeated Jessica, who was currently using Drakesplitter (her fifth-favourite polearm) as a sort of crutch for her entire body. “Because if it’s gold I’ve got to go home and get it and if it’s stabbing I bet it’s out here in these shitty-ass woods. Now tell me which it is and be done with this bullshit so I can go home and you can go back to naming your family after your flowerboxes or whatever the fuck.”
The perfect apple-red lips of the faerie queen tightened most firmly, and her forest-green eyes glittered just a little colder than midwinter. “Annihilate the foul hag-witch of the foul Hagwitch Moor,” she said shortly.
“What, kill one-tenth of her?”
“Your mother was a bitch-hound.”
And with those final mysterious words of parting and a gentle wind that smelled of honeysuckle and raspberries, the elf was gone.
“Thirty miles if it’s an inch,” groaned Jessica. She shoved the empty bag of coffee beans in her mouth and chewed it up, muffling many slurs against all the world and existence itself.
***
At five-twenty-six pm Lady Duchess Baroness Countess Champion-Captain Magewarden Fist of the Southeast Jessica Dark’ness Damselblade’s eighth-favourite broadaxe, Oakfeller, swung in a perfect one-hundred-and-eighty-degree-arc and bowled off the head of the foul hag-witch of the foul Hagwitch Moor.
“Fool!” croaked the head. “Twice-fool you! The spiteful faeries have caused a calamity for the smallfolk in sending you to be my doom! Now mine spells of slumber have left the barrow-dwellings of this place, and the tombs of the wizard-lord Skullmageddon have been thrown wide! He will drown the whole word in skeletal death-troops if he be not stopped with all speed and great force! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe!”
“Oh my god shut up.”
“Make me,” cackled the head. “Woe! Woe! Woe woe woe woe woewoewoewoewoewoewoe-”
Jessica kicked the head out the door of the witch’s cottage into her spellbog, and it laughed all the way down.
“Right,” she muttered, swaying on her feet. “Right. Just a Wizardmageddon. And then home. And bed. Right. No big deal, just like last Wednesday.” Or was it Tuesday? Did it matter? Wait, was Tuesday real? Maybe she was mixing it up with Thursday – that was real. Probably.
“Right!” said Jessica. And she fell asleep.
Ten minutes later she woke up in a blind panic and ran pell-mell across the Hagwitch Moor in such a hurry to catch up with the army of death-troops that she forgot Oakfeller and had to go back for it.
***
At eleven forty-six pm, with arrows sticking out of every other spot on her body, Jessica got home, opened her front door, staggered to the couch, and remembered she didn’t have a door. She did, however, have three big holes in the wall.
“Fucklebuckle,” she mumbled. “Carpenter’zgonnaeatmealive. Piratepricing. Frrmp.”
Her eyes were too tired to close, so they just sort of sat there, pruning up, and it was pure lack of thought that let her ignore the figure standing in front of her until it let out a polite cough.
Jessica focused, much to her regret. There was a peasant standing in front of her. Again. It was the same peasant, probably. Again.
Of course. The last quest of the day is always another goddamned peasant.
“Excuse my haste and pardon my insolence, oh LadyDuchessBaronessCountessChampion-CaptainMagewardenandFistoftheSoutheast,” rattled the peasant with alarming haste, “but there’s a dragon eating the town and we would be forever grateful if you could do something.”
Jessica stared through the peasant.
“Lady Duchess Baroness Countess Champion-Captain Magewarden and Fist of the Southeast?”
Jessica sighed, and it was the sound of someone exhaling their whole life through their mouth and out into the hereafter. “Sure. Yeah. Do something. Right. Dragon. Bye.”
She opened her door and picked up Giantsmasher (her tenth-favourite Warhammer) and opened her door and put on her boots and opened her door and missed and opened her door again and walked down to the village and into the dragon by mistake and let it eat her on purpose.
***
The feudal-adventurer system itself lasted only a few more decades, which was scarce a surprise to future historians, rendered dispassionate by distance. Delegating tasks to dangerous individual heroes may have saved the nobility a lot of work, but the peasantry correctly realized that the best way to keep the home life quiet was to pile on tasks until their protectors were too tired to care about what they were doing, and the increasingly-copious bestowment of titles, gold, and magical weaponry bankrupted many crowns in search of reliable assistance. In the end the adventurer supply ran out and the species became extinct, soon followed by the complex ecosystem of wizards, monsters, and magic that relied upon them to provide entertainment, handiman’s-work, and nutrition.