Yet he did not give up the search, for he was a stubborn and loyal old dragon, and not the...
Wednesday Apr 2013
King Ragnar
Maximillian Straker
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“Courageous, untroubled, and violent — that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
CHAPTER ONE
‘Open the gates!’ roared the scar-faced traveller, hoping somebody would hear him. The wild north wind whipped away his voice and howled between the towers of the icy castle rising up before him. The gloomy Gothic edifice seemed to brood on its perch halfway up the snowy slopes of Mount Hyperborea. Ancient halls carved with warrior angels stood weathering a storm barely relieved in centuries; tall spires pierced the sky, sheltering frozen gargoyles with fanged mouths agape in silent screams, and blocky battlements slippery with ice looked down over a world whose only colours were black, white, and grey.
A knight popped his head up over the parapet, took one look at the traveller, and shouted, ‘Fok off!’
Unlike the traveller, he was properly dressed for the snowy gales of the Dragon’s Back Mountains, being snugly wrapped in a polar bearskin that concealed the crusader cross of his tabard and the oiled chainmail beneath it. The traveller, unbelievably, wore only boots and trousers and a sleeveless jerkin of thick black leather, studded with frosted iron rings. His hair was short and black, his eyes were a tawny lion-gold, and his arms were so grotesquely muscular that he seemed to have some sort of growth disorder. He carried only a light backpack, a half-eaten deer leg, and a pair of swords.
‘I said open up! What, are your ears painted on?’
The traveller’s outlandish appearance, and the fact that he had come here in the darkest depths of winter, only confirmed in the knight’s mind the impression that he was dealing with a madman, and he was not of a mind to go letting madmen into his lord’s castle. He waved a crossbow. ‘I told you politely to fok off. I’m going to be awfully annoyed if you make me go to the trouble of loading this.’
This website copyright Maximillian Straker 2012. All rights reserved. No material on this website may be copied, reproduced, or distributed without the prior written consent of the author (with the exception of attributed quotes). King Ragnar, Chained God, Inga's Wargames Corner, and all short stories and blogs are works of fiction: all the characters, places, and events portrayed in them are fictional, and any resemblance to real persons, places, and events is unintentional and coincidental. Any and all advice contained within them is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be followed.
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