The most powerful weapon an assassin can have is, of course, the elf-bolt.

These flint arrowheads, tinted yellow at the very edge, are alleged to have once been forged by vengeful elves, and used to kill man’s cattle.

Their use is difficult to detect, as by some weird magic they kill without breaking the skin.

Each elf-bolt can only be used once.

None are immune to their effects, it is said.

How many murders by elf-bolt have occurred over the years, leaving coroners scratching their heads?

They are extremely difficult to make or obtain, for better or worse.

Once, there lived an undistinguished hitman who wished to differentiate himself from his rivals and amass fabulous wealth, but alas he was too impetuous to hone his art through discipline and dedication.

The hitman didn’t dismiss elf-bolts as myth, for he’d seen his own father felled by one, whilst they were hunting in the woods.

The hitman didn’t hate the archer who’d taken his father’s life, as the hitman knew that his father had many enemies, and that the archer was simply a means to an end.

After years of searching, the hitman captured, chained and tortured the archer, until the archer finally garbled the information which the hitman wished to hear: where the elf bolt came from.

“A witch made it,” the archer sobbed, begging with his eyes for death.

After several more days of pain, the hitman accepted that the archer did not know where the witch could be found, so after allowing the archer to swallow a razor-blade, the hitman set off to find the witch for himself.

He ventured deeper into the woods than any man had ever set before, and many, many miles from where our civilization ends, he found a woman by a brook, conversing with mushrooms in a frequency ears cannot hear.

The hitman bound the woman in rope, and took her to his subterranean hideout, finding the archer somehow still alive.

The hitman produced a flint, and demanded that the woman produce elf-bolts, but the woman couldn’t understand his language, even when he broke off a sharp arrowhead and mimed an agonized death, by clutching at his throat and clawing at his chest.

The archer, with swollen tongue, garbled for him not to give the arrowhead to the woman, for “If a witch bleeds, she dies.”

Angered, the hitman demanded that the woman conjure him an elf bolt “from thin air” by dawn, or he’d burn her alive, and with that, he went to bed.

Sometime that night, the razor-blade completed its internal journey, and the archer finally died. 

The woman used the blade to free herself, and for the longest time she stood over the hitman, pondering what to do, whilst he slept uneasily.

The gentle creature just couldn’t comprehend these savages and their strange ways.

She decided to give the hitman what she thought he wanted, by slipping the razor-blade into his mouth and massaging his Adam’s apple until he swallowed.