This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/duddlered on 2026-02-06 15:31:07+00:00.

Had to stub chapters 1-31 because of Amazon, but my first Volume has finally released for kindle and Audible!

If you want to hear some premium voice acting, listen to the first volume, which you can find in the comments below!

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/duddlered

Discord: https://discord.gg/qDnQfg4EX3

******* The rain came down like God himself had decided Alabama needed to drown.

This wasn't the usual shower, or even the kind of early-autumn downpour that would make any sensible person stay indoors and wait it out. No, this was something entirely different—sheets of water so thick and heavy that visibility dropped to maybe fifty feet at best, a freak storm that was almost deafening. It was the kind that turned dirt roads into rivers and made flash flood warnings actually mean something for once.

Despite the adverse conditions, two men worked inside a covered carport attached to the side of the compound, loading an old white cargo van with enough film-wrapped bricks to make any DEA agent salivate. The overhead fluorescent lights cast harsh shadows across the only refuge as the men moved back and forth from the building's side door, sprinting through the rain to get the loads into the cargo van.

The packages contained the usual narcotics seen distributed within the continental United States. They were handled with very little care, unceremoniously tossed in, and simply shoved against the back. However, among your bog-standard bricks of low-quality cocaine or heroin, weren't the only things being loaded.

Among the usual filth were strange, otherworldly plants, still in their plastic pots, but each of them had water jugs that had been sawed in half and fitted over the plants like makeshift terrariums. These were layered inside the van and braced with bricks of drugs to keep them from shifting during transport.

The plants themselves looked fundamentally wrong in a way that made your eyes want to slide away from them.

One species had leaves that looked almost jet black, with veins running deep among its stems, arterial crimson that pulsed as if it had a heartbeat. These weren’t painted or dyed, but seemed to be part of its biology. It was as if the plant had evolved to have its own circulatory system. Even these leaves were strange, layered thick and waxy, almost leathery, and they curved inward like grasping fingers. When a worker got close, the strange leaves fluttered and stretched toward the man as if trying to grasp at them.

Another plant had fronds that looked similar to marijuana, except each individual leaflet was covered in what seemed to be fine, downy fur that was white and soft like a rabbit's hair. The workers knew not to get too close to this one; when a poor guy had accidentally brushed against it a few months ago, the ‘fur’ had stuck to his skin like fiberglass insulation. He hadn’t told anyone, even though he was explicitly instructed to scream for their ‘consultants’ for help and guidance. Hours later, the man’s skin had fully absorbed the fur, leaving him a drooling, unrecognizable mess, his body twisting and writhing as if he were on fire. However, instead of pain, the man was overwhelmed with euphoria, and his senses were completely overloaded.

For almost an entire day, the worker endured the high until he finally started to calm down, but after such a concentrated dose, he was never the same. Now, the workers made sure to stay away from the damn thing without some kind of barrier to protect them, whether that be a plastic water jug or a full-body painter's suit. Regardless, they knew to treat the plant that swayed gently despite being inside a protective jug with a great deal of respect. Or more like fear, as it kept moving along with a breeze that didn't exist.

Trotting through the rain and puddles to stay dry, a short, stocky man finally ducked into the dry safety of the carport, holding his extremely short AR-15. A Sicario. His rifle looked like someone had taken a hacksaw to it with malicious intent: no stock, just a buffer tube and foam pad, a drum magazine that probably held a hundred rounds, and a Chinese-manufactured red dot seemed more like an aesthetic choice rather than a practical one.

The Sicario himself seemed more or less unassuming, save for the over-the-top weapon and a badly faded neck tattoo that denoted he belonged to the Los Errantes and the Dallas Cowboys snapback pulled low. After shoving the gun into the passenger seat, he shook the rain off his arms and looked over his shoulder at the two men struggling with the cargo.

¡Ayy, Tortuga, güey!" The Sicario called out, his voice cutting through the rain's assault on the metal roof. "¡Apúrate y carga todo, no quiero estar atrapado aquí afuera!"

The two men poked their heads out from around the cargo van with pure unadulterated agitation on their faces. For a moment, they just stopped what they were doing and snarled in frustration at the fact that this random, useless idiot was talking instead of working.

"¡Cállate, cabrón!" the fatter worker growled, water dripping from his beard as he hoisted another bundle into the van. "¡Tú estás parado ahí sin hacer nada mientras nosotros hacemos todo el trabajo!"

His partner, a skinny, wiry guy wearing an oversized poncho, jerked his head aggressively toward the van. "¡Si quieres que esto vaya más rápido, trae tu culo estúpido, flojo y feo pa'cá y ayúdanos, pendejo!"

The Sicario started to say something back—probably something equally colorful—but movement from the main building's door cut him off.

Another individual emerged into the rain, casually strolling through the deluge with an umbrella held over his head like he was taking a leisurely walk through a park instead of fleeing a drug operation in the middle of a monsoon.

He looked... wrong. Out of place in a way that made your brain stutter trying to process it.

He was extraordinarily pale... Not Caucasian pale but truly pallid, as if he had been dead for a long time and blood had completely stopped flowing through his body. His shaggy black hair hung past his shoulders, frayed at the ends as if halfway burned away. Most striking of all were the long, pointed ears that swept back from the sides of his head, denoting that he wasn’t human. He looked more at home in a fantasy novel than a cartel grow operation in rural Alabama.

The juxtaposition was truly jarring. Here was a bona fide, honest-to-God elf, standing in the rain at a narcotics production facility as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

Ignoring the bickering cartel members completely, the elf didn't even glance in their direction as they hurled Spanish obscenities at each other. Instead, he folded his umbrella, opened the rear passenger door of the cargo, and slid into the back seat with the kind of fluid grace that suggested he'd done this a thousand times before.

The door closed with a solid thunk, and through the rain-streaked window, the elf could be seen settling into his seat with a heavy sigh. His expression was one of profound exhaustion mixed with resignation and dread. He wore the look of someone who had given up questioning how his life had gone so catastrophically off the rails and into the gutter.

"¡Ya estuvo!" the Sicario at the front of the vehicle smacked his palm hard against the hood in an effort to speed up the workers. "¡Ándale, vámonos antes de que se inunde!”

The men at the rear of the vehicle grumbled as they finished securing the rest of their load. Luckily, the majority of the work had already been done. Now, they just had to make sure their more precious cargo wasn’t going to shift and slam the rear doors shut.

When the workers finally got into the van, each of them shot a quick, uneasy glance at that unnaturally pale figure. He resembled La Llorona—tall, deathly pale, and wearing gown-like robes. His skin wasn't just white; it was a disturbing shade of ashen, devoid of any visible veins or warmth, as if the blood had curdled or been completely drained from his body. Even the sicario assigned to the run shifted uneasily. He usually laughed and bragged about shootouts and whom he would murder, but this unmoving, bloodless statue made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

The cartel members who worked around this... elf... always found him to be deeply unsettling—not just because he wasn't human, but because of the way he moved, the way he looked at you with those colorless eyes like you were something that had already stopped breathing.

They got into this situation the same way most people do—money. A lot of it. More than they had ever seen in their lives just by smuggling fentanyl or cocaine across the border. The local Jefes had connected with these... people... through secret channels nobody talked about, and suddenly the organization was dealing in a product that made their usual narcotics look like Ibuprofen.

At first, they'd thought there would be some random guy acting as a translator when dealing with these fantasy freaks. Maybe some Gringo who had learned their language, or hell, maybe the elves would speak broken Spanish like everyone else trying to do business in their territory.

They'd been very… Oh, so very wrong.

None of the strange beings they worked with spoke even a lick of English or Spanish. Not a single word. They communicated through... intermediaries. And those intermediaries weren't people. At least not anymore.

The Sicario remembered the first time he...

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1qxkpsw/grimoires_gunsmoke_operation_basilisk_ch_151/