In Sickness, Health, and Fire

Gardenia wanted nothing more than to have a joyous celebration of her engagement to Lance, but thanks to the imps, that was not an option. If they had just stolen a little food, she might have let it go. If they had broken a couple things, maybe she would have threatened to hurt them if they ever came back. But no, they had done something so much worse. They had turned her fiancé into a tiny flame, and she was forced to keep him in a lantern so he wouldn’t go out.
With a bag of iron on her back, a machete in one hand, and Lance’s lantern in the other, she made her way into the hills to search for the imps. Gardenia had tried to avoid the family tradition of dealing with magical creatures, but she would not let that stop her from going straight to the imps’ lair to put the fear of death into them. She did not know how such weak creatures had such complicated magic. She was not even sure whether they knew how they even cast the spell in the first place, but they were going to turn Lance back, or die.