Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

It is story time once again. My series of old ideas rolls on. #1 here, #2 here, # 3 here, # 4 here and #5 here. These are scraps of writing I have mostly probably discarded as the basis for a larger story (one I will share I still have hopes to use – will you guess which one?), but think are worth letting folk have a random look at. I do of course assert full copyright control over these story ideas.

This week is something I sat down and committed to screen over 20 years ago. That surprised me when I looked it up: 4/21/2003. How time flies. I was looking for an idea of a tale told over three nights in three books, but in 2007 The Name of The Wind came out, and seemed to have a similar conceit, and was so superbly written I more or less permanently shelved this idea, unformed and unfinished as it was. So now I’m sharing it with you, with minor edits. If I ever revisited the idea this would be completely reworked, so not much of this would remain, I suspect. And this is like #48 on my to-do list of projects to follow up on, so I don’t see it ever happening, unless wild acclaim demands it, hahaha!

If someone wants to use this as a prompt, or continue the story as they wish, they have my permission to do so, provided I am credited for the portion I share below.

Tell you a Tale

“Tell you a tale? Why not? Something to ease you as the wind howls our doom outside, something to distract you from our slow icy death? What would you like? Something lyrical? A history or a tragedy, a heroic fantasy? What would suffice?”

– Tell me why we ended here ‑

“Ahh, I cannot tell you my tale, oh no, but perhaps I could assay yours, my sweet doomed lover—steady! Her memory pains you, yes, but I shall bring you more pleasant remembrances before my end! You asked for this tale, and now I shall give it.”

Between them, the fire flickered low.

“The King had laid in gloom for eight long years, the long winter of his grief, shrouded in his lightless hall, no more to feast, no more to laugh and brawl with his knights, to sing and dance with his Queen, to show his son the arts of war and leadership. He was as cold as the stone in his bare hearth, cold as the mutton he shared with his remaining dogs, listless and mangy, riddled with the same sullen anger as their lord, snarling at the fearful servants who scurried back and forth, chasing the rats who now thought the throne room their demesne. The King had lost the lights of his life, and then his hope of knowing why that light was lost, and had become a shell of despair, a shell of the greatness that shone from him in his bold youth, not so long past, yet forever behind him. He sat awaiting death, even as his Kingdom decayed around him, until you came to shake him from his torpor, until you came to give him the hope of knowledge, the chance to be revenged upon the strange forces that had eight years earlier extinguished his joy.

“Do you remember that day? The day you strode into his hall, kicked aside the rats and snarled down the dogs, the day you tore down the draperies and forced sunlight through the smoke and dust, the day you stared into those once blazing blue eyes and held the hilt of a dagger towards him, blade gripped tight in your fingers, and said, ‘I know from whence this came, my Lord.’”

– I remember ‑

“And the King rose and for a second was the colossus he once had been, towering over you in rage, the wound in his heart raw and bleeding again at the sight of the accursed blade, twin to the one he wore about his neck, badge of his grief. He snatched the blade from you and hurled it into the midden before collapsing into his throne, shrunken and sobbing, asking why you mocked his grief, what had caused you to counterfeit such a copy, why you sought to rouse him when his knights and counselors could not, when even his best friend and court bard could not.”

– And I told him the blade had killed my lord father, and that the kingdom’s marches were weak to breaking point without the King of yore upon his gilded throne in truth and not sniveling in the dark, and that I believed the forces that had broken him had returned to take the kingdom he had forged in his glory, and that I for one would be his bannercaptain if only he would rise and take up his sword again, defend his land and his people as he had done so brilliantly in the past, rise to be the man his wife and child had loved, the King his people had believed in, rise to defeat evil again –

“And the King looked up at you from his tarnished throne and laughed, a hollow joyless echo, and he said—”

– He said ‘Are there enemy forces in the field? Is there treachery in my house or amongst my captains? No. I have a dagger, you its twin. You have a belief. Prove it to me. Find the bearers of these weapons, bring them to me, bring them alive that I may hear their confessions. Then, and only then shall I do as you ask. Now go, and never return to my sight without that which I have requested, upon pain of death.’ And he turned from me, turned to fade into his past again, the present forgotten. I questioned then the worth of my allegiance to such a wreck, to such a shadow of a man, but I steeled against such thoughts with the memory of my King of old, of eight years before, and I swore I would make that King stand and face the threat I was certain would soon come ‑

“And I saw in you that same determination, to bring back my King, and so I followed you from that hall of tatters and into the castle beyond, followed to find what you knew, and to return to you that cursed dagger, rescued from the midden.”