6If the young Jameson claimed he never loved the old stories, he would be telling a lie. In fact, in that land purged of all remnants of those tales, Jameson had a very specific longing for them. Those stories were the only return he could ever attain to that long lost world.
He loved the elves, the dwarves, the gnomes, all of the bipeds that once resembled men. The magics that lived in their airs he found simply wonderful. That folklore, however, had never been told to Jameson in its simply truthful form. No, as all stories must be, they had been warped and corrected to fit smugly into the minds of the children.
Jameson always longed for those days to return with their infinite poetries and occasional adventures. He believed in all earnest that they were gone, never to return. That, you see, was the real twisting.
"And then, as the dragon flared his horrible snout into the damp sky, Tril summoned a shield from the mystical Earth. He held it firmly against the stones of the ground, hoping it would protect him from that horrible breath. But Tril was not scared, oh no. He was an elf, and a stalwart one at that. He held that shield with the determination of a thousand men. The fires of the dragon beat against his soil guard until finally the moist air of the evening had extinguished that beast entirely! The dragon tried fleeing into the blackness of his cavern, but Tril's magics were too much to escape. He threw his enchanted sword through the sky, and a sharp cry cut through the darkness as it struck through the heart of that fell creature."
These were the types of stories Jameson had always been told, and in them I think one can see the most intrinsic flaw. Tril, our hero, as all stories tell of their heroes, won that battle with little to trifle his body. Naturally, some dramatic sequences of storytelling were introduced, but all in all, the elf never suffered a scratch.
Why were the stories told this way? This story was, to some degree, a factual one, but the actual history of it seems to have been mistaken in its entirety. Tril, the young elven hero, was not alone, or, at least, he was not all alone in the beginning. Nor was he a hero in his own right. In fact, Tril was a merchant boy following at his father's side.
They were crafters of magical pieces, and since the good elves had little use for arms, their home was the road, peddling their wares. On that one particular day, it happened that a dragon had caught wind of their caravan, and dragons do love treasure, you know, especially the magical sort. That blue-scaled fiend flew through the night, sniffing the air for that intoxicating whiff of mana. It was very particular, the smell of that magical essence, and dragons have very keen noses.
The alarm first sounded in that camp at night, as dragons love the darkness almost as much as they love treasure. The twelve elves gracing those roads rose from their berths in curiosity. Elves, it must be said, were not creatures particularly susceptible to chaos, for chaos was not in their nature. They awoke with only a knowing that something was wrong and an unknowing as to what, exactly, it was.
This is where the details of the actual history become foggy. Tril was just young, but even he had the wit to realize he was the only survivor. Dragons despise elves for their intrinsic perfection, and so, while the dragon had found a small cache of magic, he had also found an opportunity to strike down his foes. A searing flame, unimaginable in intensity, smote through the wood-and-canvas of the elves traveling stores. It is said that elves do not leave a skeleton, for they have no bones, such is their grace. This situation cannot verify that, as that flame would have incinerated any strength of any tissue of any living creature.
At the sounding of the alarm, Tril had scurried off to find a place of hiding. That is what elven boys were to do in the case of emergency, at least until they had acquired the skills necessary to fight. He hid in a mud hole, submerging his face so the approaching threat could not detect him by either sight or scent.
When the dragon had slain the traveling elves, it swallowed up their riches and began to travel back to its cave. Dragons love the darkness, after all, and this particular one was growing weary with the rising sun. Tril's decision to follow it was not altogether the brightest, but despair had crushed his once-faithful heart, making it now reckless.
He followed perhaps twenty paces behind the beast when the dragon stopped. The gargantuan monster sniffed the fresh morning sky with a new lust. Although the morning mist had encumbered his senses, he could tell there was something on his path. He turned around, taking a fair amount of time moving his enormous tail, to face Tril.
At that, Tril was petrified by terror. His muscles would not move, and his mind would not focus itself on anything other than the thought that this was the end. He fell to the ground in anguish.
The dragon raised his majestic head to spew forth the fires that ended Tril's kin, but then that beast met a piercing sensation inside his belly. Dragons had known for centuries on end never to swallow weapons because the blades always stuck in the bellies and were terribly difficult to remove. This dragon, however, had assumed that elves would not be relating themselves to warfare, and swallowed that treasure without regard to what it actually could be. He now felt his mistake, a striking needle inside his innermost gut.
The dragon turned round again, beating his wings furiously in the morning sky. It withdrew into the distance, not to be seen again by any elf for a very long time.
Jameson had never heard the true facts of that story because there was nothing to be gained from them. In fact, there was not really much to be gained from any of the histories of that land, save perhaps a knowledge of the truth. And every citizen of every world knows the virtues lacking in almost every truth, thus leading to the replacement of actual history by Jameson's beloved stories.