Guardian's Folly, Dryad's Melancholy

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

With a life of retail getting him down, Cormac had long looked forward to his vacation of spending all week hiking in the woods.

Accidentally saving a dryad and getting dragged into hidden world of magic brought that to an abrupt end.

Ixia the dryad had been thrown into a long slumber, awoken by a kind man that she formed a fast bond with. She would need all the help she could get to reclaim her forest from sinister forces that had ruled her forest for ages in her absence.

As both work together, they will find neither world is what they had thought. A modern world with magic lurking at the edges, and a hidden world of magic stretching the limits of "hidden".

A dryad begins the slow path towards understanding the world she has awoken to as she tries to reclaim her forest, and a guardian wishes he had more than a shovel to help with all that.

(Cover art by https://www.deviantart.com/betterefyu)

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2021
Author: SylasWrites

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.4/ 5.0
Followers: 35
Views: 15,034

Reviews

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Community Reviews(2)

BullerRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
While I have seen a few stories with plot-line, I don't think I've seen it in this way. The way we get multiple ways to see it is something that actually interested me a great amount. Makes me wonder why nobody has really done it before.
Anyway. Grammar is more than above average, the style needs no real comment, and the characters are already the centrepiece of this story. 5/5
ABSOLUTELY HAREMRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
So far, an enjoyable story of a man getting introduced to magic and a magical existence being introduced to normalcy. The story follows a man and a dryad who know nothing about each other's world, who are now being pursued by an unknown evil. At least unknown to the man. Can't say much more than that due to the story still feeling like it is in the introduction phase. I am very interested in seeing where all this goes.
My biggest complaint at the moment is hard to describe so just bear with me.
Imagine each chapter of every story has 3 parts. Part A, B, and C. But this story does not follow this. It instead only has Parts B and C, leaving part A to be inferred via other characters briefly in passing. There are important moments that feel like they are just mentioned in passing, including the "boy meets girl" moment of the story. It feels like missing the first episode of a TV show and starting with the second. The second episode will cover all the bases of the first, usually, but you might be missing some context. This story definitely does intentionally to either make up for vaguely thought-out events or to leave the reader to imagine how things happened. I really dislike this, especially as the scene where the two characters meet for the first time is left out. Such an interesting part only gets a handful of sentences at best.
This is also seemingly used not to inform the reader of the importance of the "Guardian" role bestowed upon the protagonist. Cormac just so happens to unknowingly rescue/free/awaken the dryad, Ixia while hiking. And as of now, it seems the only reason Cormac has been chosen is just because of that. It feels off that a creature such as the dryad would just pick a guardian. I DO NOT want the MC to actually be the descendant of some important people who deal in the magical world, but it does feel wrong to me that Cormac became a guardian just because he was there. It is similar to the Legend of King Arthur. Pull the sword, become the king. Pull