Chapter 1: The Cape and the Sword

The way it all started, you could never have predicted its end. As the sun emerged from behind the mountains it sent red rays of light down into the valley below it in a beautiful attempt to dispel the mist that seemed to gather there over the night. It was a daily battle between the two; the sun would do it’s best to convince the mist to leave, while the mist stubbornly clung to the trees that it shrouded. The mist always gave a valiant effort, clinging to the trees until well into noon, before seeming to retreat into the trees themselves. There it would wait, and gather its strength, before emerging slightly before dusk to reclaim the valley. The entire cycle was a monument to the power of nature, and this opinion was shared by the three humans that lived in the small house that rested on top of the hill that was opposite the mountains.
The house had been built by the grandfather of the man who now lived there with his two children. His grandfather had been a misanthrope of sorts, and so decided to build his home some half a days travel from the nearest village. There he felt he could live out his life with his family, working the land and caring for the livestock that he had inherited. It was a quiet peaceful existence far from wars of men and wizards that raged on the other side of the world. Stories would occasionally reach the house from the travelers that would sometimes visit, whether friends of the grandfather or simply people who had gotten lost. Each time a story would be told, the man’s grandfather would dismiss it as nonsense, while the man’s father would listen intently, memorizing the tales of heroism and evil, of men that could control the elements besieged by clunking monsters of wood and metal driven by steam. The man’s father would lay awake at night, his imagination wild with the hopes that he might one day see these sights first hand, and it was these stories that he would eventually pass on to his own child.
The grandfather warned him against such fantasies, and when he eventually died he passed his land and his mistrust of the world to his son. The father eventually married a woman of plain looks and average intelligence from the village nearby, the daughter of a blacksmith that disapproved of him greatly. They lived out their lives content as can be, the wife bearing the man two children, a boy and a girl. The girl they named Meadow, whose beauty surpassed the meadow of flowers after which she was named. The boy they named Airk, after the wife’s ancestor; a great warrior who, it was said, stole a mystic spear from a dark sorcerer and used it to slay him and then went on to found the town that she came from. “Airk the Great” he was called, and when a nearby king called for aide, he rallied some of the town’s warriors and was never heard from again.
And so the children grew, listening to tales of adventure and fantasy just like their father had done before them, and though he disapproved of their enthusiasm he took comfort within the certainty that they would soon outgrow it, just as he had.
*WORK IN PROGRESS*