FOREWORD

Hello fair reader. It is my pleasure to greet you here in this little space—my little space as a writer to directly speak to you. If you're a return guest in this cozy little home I've built up here then welcome back. You can take anything from the fridge so long you clean up after yourself. I just got that carpet dry cleaned and let me tell you, it is not easy finding someone willing to take the proper effort to clean a hypothetical carpet. If this is your first visit then I welcome you with open words and a piping hot coffee—or tea if you are of that sort.

This foundation here is as close to my own mind as many of you will get. If you look to your mental left you'll see some of them I have hanging up—RADICAL-9, my first story I've ever published sitting right beside the others of its trilogy—TELOS and DREAMER. Those three stories are very close to my heart since they comprised most of my first three years at this shindig. I would say this with each of my projects and the characters that live inside, but I do not believe there is any that ring any truer than the characters you'll meet here. The only that I would place closest would be those that live inside TELOS, my second novel. I've not made it a secret that TELOS began as the first story I ever completed, and that after heavy edits it became the book that it is today.

Now, there about this situation is a nugget of information I've kept concealed under the surface. Even though the world of TELOS is the first that I completed it wasn't my first attempt at a serious story. I guess in hindsight it isn't that surprising a piece of information, as I would place a healthy bet on any writer having a treasure trove of stories unfinished before their first completed novel. Such is true with me and if you weren't object to it I'd like to talk a bit about the first story I had tried to write. If you do object, well, I cannot really stop you. I may have built this house, but you're free to speed along ahead of me in this guided tour, examine the rooms yourself and move onto the story you bought this book for. That's fine, I won't judge if that does happen to be the case. We're a busy people and winded introductions aren't for everybody. If you find you're in this camp then you can just skip to the first numbered page and begin the journey I've laid out here.

Now that that matter is settled, it is high time we flash back to early March of 2013. I was a junior in high school by this time—just moved from upstate New York to slightly south of upstate New York. I was in this small town called Mayfield. This was from a population of about 27,000 people all the way down to almost 7,000, so you can bet that there wasn't much in the way of people. My graduating class was only around 70 kids total (give or take a few). All of this is important for context as there were few kids my age I cared to associate with. I had my fair share of friends, but they were definitely a fair distance as farmland dominated the landscape.

In my downtime since I wasn't socializing every day of the year—or even most days was spent with books. My love for reading began to grow and evolve into the desire to create stories of my own. I researched online all different kinds of places on the subject. I couldn't tell you what kinds of sites I went to since it never really was for longer than a few minutes—the fire I'd been feeling wasn't satiated by what they had to offer in advice or platform.

That was until I stumbled onto FictionPress.

For the uninitiated, FP is a site home to budding writers off all sorts of different platforms and genres and even houses forums for a community to come together and share their works. Stories could be posted and reviewed by other members. Funnily enough, my profile on FictionPress is still online, however I'm not going to share my account name as I'm a bit too shy to freely condone that work going out to the public (but I'm not so shy to delete it forever, so consider it a gift you can cringe at if you can find it. It shouldn't be too hard.) And the cringe level by the way is quite real on that account. I mean seriously, wholly, and fully shiver with the knowledge that you're reading some of the worst slop humankind could have ever created, but we all start somewhere.

I was bad at writing, but that's okay. I was just starting out. I didn't take in as much as I should from what I was reading and didn't think too long about form, grammar, or even basic structure. It was like you take a fish and throw it on the port-side; my early writing was that fish flopping around struggling for air. They just needed to come out of my head and onto some platform for others to see.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. I found this site and signed up quite immediately. I don't remember if I dreamed about getting published at this point—I was at a strange time in my life where I wanted to be a lawyer for a chunk of my teenage years. It was around this exact time that my desires shifted and I engulfed myself more in the literary world. I found a forum on FictionPress that didn't seem too populated—I was looking for something small enough to show my shitty work when I eventually got around to writing it. I was terrified of feedback and people thinking I wrote garbage, so big forums were a big no.

I eventually found a forum that was perfect. I won't give the exact name of the forum, but I remember it clearly because it actually had an accidental typo in the title that gave it a funnier, unintended second meaning. I wasn't there for the absolute beginning of this forum (which I'll just call WU) but I was there pretty early in its lifespan. The very first thing I did after introducing myself to the locals was participate in…wait for it…a forum role play.

Dun dun dunnn…cue the screaming children. Yeah, I know. Not to insult people who are RP'ing to this day, quite the opposite in fact. Honestly, until you try it you won't know just how you can get to know someone, and exactly how creative they can be through maintaining a long form story. For those not in the loop, forum RPs can go quite a few different ways based on the story you're trying to tell. In our case we each had our own characters from whatever works-in-progress we were working on at the time that we inserted into a sandbox with no immediate plot. The first few hour's worth of story was kind of just finding the story.

Now, I didn't have any works in progress at the time since I'd just signed up onto the forum. I had an idea for a story that dealt with a protagonist who was half-animal half human (called a Chimaera), but I didn't have a name or any details about him. Technically speaking, this was the first character I'd created, but I'm not going to count it.

First of all, this is probably one of the barest character sheets I've ever seen (it got the job done at the time). Second, this character was pretty much the worst thing ever. The name was entirely stolen from Dragon Knights by Mineko Ohkami (a fantastic read that I highly suggest you check out). Rath was one of the three protagonists from that series and my favorite of the bunch so of course his name was directly taken for this character. The last reason is that he wasn't really a character, per se. He was solidified edge and it's not a phase, mom rolled into one annoying, poorly written mess.

Through the course of the RP I learned a bit more and he became less…awful. The RP lasted until almost mid-June of that same year. There was no real conclusion—people got busy and stopped visiting the forum as often as they used to, me included. I still kept in contact with my friends on the forum, though. We had other topics we talked in more frequently about our day-to-day's and about our own separate writing projects.

I remember complaining that I couldn't think of any plots to work off of and that I felt if I could just get that ball rolling to start I could keep it going. This was when one of my friends on the forum messaged me about a story idea they had (we'll call them Double-D like from Ed, Edd, n Eddy since I don't particularly have their permission to post their name. And let me say that nickname here isn't for the reason that immediately comes to your mind, you cretins. It's because of the username, sheesh.)

Double-D had said they had the idea for a story centered around a girl who was a fairy—magic existed in the universe and she would grow into this new world and learn more about her kind while trying to live among humans. Double-D said that they really liked how my writing style was and would love to see me tackle that idea. They gave me the go ahead and I went.

The story was called Feyble and it starred protagonist Allison Fae and her uncle Nick. Allison's parents were brutally killed by a clan of Yōsei—Japanese demons that rivaled the Fae clan. The story would start right as the action got going—Allison and Nick lived in France as a terrifying note arrived on their doorstep. It contained killer-like markings that mentioned her Fae-name—what was basically a Fae's true name. Allison had just been her human name that her parents had given her to help blend in. Legends of the Fae family say that if someone were to utter your Fae name aloud, you would be dragged into the pits of hell. It was an instant death sentence.

So, of course Uncle Nick finding this threatening note was the instigating sequence for what would have been a large novel that threatened death for Allison at every step. Who sent the note? Why didn't they just go up and speak to them directly, why taunt about the name when you could just say it? All this and more would come to light through the case of an epic story.

…Except for the fact that it was only an extended prologue to a story that eventually would have been. I never finished it. This was back before I planned and story-boarded, so even I don't know the full answers to those questions. I do know Uncle Nick was going to be in on it, so I guess spoiler warning for a character whose story will never be finished. Now how does that relate to the book you hold in your hands now? Well, the protagonist of this novel's name is Allison Fae. That is no coincidence. While she's changed as a person (and is quite human, I assure you), she's still the same personality that I started off with way back then. She's younger, too. Feyble had her at sixteen years old where this book has her starting out just three years younger. I felt that I could get a deeper look at how her character will grow with the younger response to the events that play out in the story. Allison is my youngest protagonist. I hope that this new look at her is able to show what I see in her, and for her in the times to come. As a special treat to you fair readers I've included the original chapters of Feyble inside of this novel—its natural evolution. If you're curious to how the story originally was going to go in tone / writing style you can check that out. The story is 99% preserved from its original state, so any spelling / grammar errors are present in the original. The only thing I've adjusted is the formatting so it doesn't take up fifty pages of blank space. If you don't care much to see then you can now head to the first numbered page and began Allison's true story. I hope you like it.

-RG, 2018