AN EBOOK-SINGLE SHORT STORY — A TALE OF THE ENDLANDS

An excerpt from the fantasy anthology "A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales", "Stories" tells the tale of a reclusive storyteller who yearns to be a hero — and who is forced to rise to the occasion when the story of his own life becomes more heroic than he ever thought possible…

EXCERPT

For another week, they came. For another week, Hjorn carried out hit and run attacks on the growing number of warriors and mercenaries amassing below his front door. Using the power of the axe, he shifted between his home and the wilderness around the bluff in search of increasingly ingenious ammunition.

When the Ilvani war-mages came, they blasted his porch and front door with fire and lightning, but the stones that Hjorn had laid using the ancient craft of his people held fast. In response, he collected boulders from the shattered rockslide wall that was as close as anyone could come to the dark chasm where the river disappeared. He dropped them from the edge of the porch, sending them down the bluff with a sound louder than the spells that had scorched his walls.

He jaunted into the camps of some sort of doglike creatures that walked on two legs, leaving with them a brace of skunks he plucked from their twilight dens in a distant meadow. Over long days and sleepless nights, he countered the fury of the horde below him with his best ideas, but Hjorn’s ideas were beginning to run out. The axe’s voice was growing more and more erratic in his mind. It had moved beyond threats aimed at him and was shrieking about how it wanted to kill everyone, everywhere, just because.

Or were those his own thoughts he was hearing? Hjorn wondered suddenly. It was getting hard to tell…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott Fitzgerald Gray is a specially constructed biogenetic simulacrum built around an array of experimental consciousness-sharing techniques — a product of the finest minds of Canadian science until the grant money ran out. Accidentally set loose during an unauthorized midnight rave at the lab, the S.F. Gray entity is currently at large amongst an unsuspecting populace, where his work as an author, screenwriter, editor, RPG designer, and story editor for feature film keeps him off the streets.

More info on Scott and his work (some of it even occasionally truthful) can be found by reading between the lines at insaneangel.com.