The Epic Saga of Haekreaild

This Friday's entry is a stop-gap of sorts, something sort and simple and light-hearted, inspired by the Lytton-Bulwer Fiction Contest, but given an ending. The stop-gap part? Well...expect some "supplemental material" to appear on the blog within the next day or two.

The Epic Saga of Haekreaild: Being a Translation of the Great Bardic Cycle Only Recently Recovered From Certain Ruins in Northern Iceland, Itself a Translation from the Elvish: Volume One

After spending many days along the half-forgotten spine of the world completing his final rite-of-passage in order to attain manhood, having been bruised and battered by all manner of crags and thorns and beasts too terrible to name, Haekreaild decided to leave his peasant village and widowed mother and go on a quest to save the world from the iron grip of King Maliorious and the coming blight of a supernatural winter longer and colder than any other since the Winter of a Thousand Nights, for a prophecy foretold that a child would be born on the exact day and in the exact place where Haekreaild was born and that after the child had seen seventeen winters pass, he would be called to unite all the nations, learn the secret arts of the elves from far beyond the reach and ken of man, draw the Sword of Throatenguarde from the old tombs of Bael Kai where it lay hidden for ages beyond ages, break the false idols in the Temple of Solitude and expose the church as nothing but a tissue of lies and corruption, and, at last, die in the final battle for the fate of the earth; and so, Haekreaild left the village carrying nothing but meager morsels of bread, his father's trusted sword, which had been handed down his family line since the Age of Myths and kept hidden by his mother in a secret chink carved into the floor for this very purpose after his father died, and his will to save his home and the family he has loved so dear.

Rocks fall. Everyone dies.