1. There was once a fishwife’s daughter who ran away to sea to lean
metalsmithing (why it needed to be at sea is anyone’s guess). In her
seafaring days, she sailed over at least three of the lost enchanted
oceans and made a number of magical swords to use in exploring the sort
of shipwrecks one finds there. On her forty-fifth birthday she was
forced to return to land by the sudden eruption of a salt allergy. She
determined to enter the third magical sword (which was the least rusty
of the bunch) into the royal sword contest. But, on arriving at the
contest, she found that entrants were required by law to be members of
the King’s Brotherhood of Swordsmiths; an organisation which she was
ineligible for election to in several ways. In a fit of temper, she
threw the third sword into a thicket and stomped off home to start a
carpentry business (which, alas, she was terrible at).
2. There
was a youngest son who was just passing by on his way to find his
fortune. Since he was still rather lacking in fortune he had been thrown
out of the stables at the back of the nearest inn and ended up spending
the night in a very uncomfortable thicket. In the morning, he found
that many of his troubles had been caused by lying on the flat of a
rather unusual-looking sword. He took up the weapon and was fortunate
enough to blunder into a pack of dragons on a working brunch. Arriving
at the city with seven dragon tails and a red and buzzing sword, he was
soon adopted as the King’s champion. He spent a number of fruitful years
amassing lost hoards, making babies, and trying to persuade the sword
not to eat his friends (it had, alas, got a taste for blood after all
those dragons). Stories of his fame spread far and wide.
3.
There was a thin blue dragon who had survived the massacre; he did so by
hiding in a tree. In fact, he was so terrified that he stayed in the
tree for fifteen years, living on squirrels and sunlight and rain and
occasionally drenching the rabbit warren below with lukewarm dragon
piss. After fifteen years, the tree had grown round the dragon and he
could no longer leave. He found this somewhat bothersome, as did the
rabbits. Now, blue dragons can sometimes worm their way between worlds,
if given enough time to find the weak spots in the space-time continuum;
and this dragon set to chipping out a window into a world that did not
have a tree in that place. If took him another fifteen years, but
finally the window was large enough for him to slither through. However,
by this time the rabbits had banded together and found a champion of
their own, who had set up camp on a tree branch and had been nibbling at
the dragon’s neck scales for a few weeks. On the evening the dragon was
due to wriggle free, the rabbit champion at last prised a scale loose
and put a sharpened stick thorough the dragon’s jugular.
4. There
was a teenage girl who lived nearby, and who was shunned by many of the
villagers for her mildly eccentric views. One day, whilst out walking,
she found a tree that was surrounded by the most amazing blue flowers.
And then to look up, and see the tree crowned with fantastical bones!
There was nothing to do but climb it. And if she came down from the tree
into a different world from the one she went up from, well: there was
nothing very much to miss in the first world anyway. And how well it had
equipped her to live in the second world! For all their myriad
fantastical quantities, the inhabitants of the second world were a
little silly, and curiously easily won over with a small amount of basic
science and occasional acts of compassion. Soon she found herself
saving the king of the second world, who was in disguise following a
republican coup led by some cranky goblins.
5. The goblins were
most put out to realise that the king was not dead after all, and did
not put up much of a fight. When it became clear that the forces of
light were about to triumph, they called together all their elven
servants and set them free with directions for the safest way to leave
the kingdom and individual bags of golden fixtures and fittings from the
palace bathrooms. Furthermore, they requested, if the elves could see
their way to calling in on some of the republican movement’s chief
donors and asking them for some aid, it would be very much appreciated.
As it ended up, only one of the elves got that far, and the donor was of
very little help; but, being schooled in magic, she was able to suggest
a location a few worlds away where a hero or two might be found to stir
things up in the kingdom a little.
6. The elf came finally to
the house of a young boy who had been living a rather dull life with
unremarkable parents. Since elves are terrible navigators, he did not
realise that he was at the wrong address and informed the boy that he
was the Chosen One who was needed to save a distant and magical land.
Fortunately, the directions he gave the boy were typically terrible and
the boy ended up in the wrong distant and magical land. Although this
land also needed saving, the task of saving it could be done by just
about anyone; in fact, it was more like a road trip than an adventure.
So the boy did as well as any other child might have done, and he was
certainly very good at believing he was Chosen. As a reward, he was
given three castles in the fairy hinterlands and a host of humorous
magical servants.
7. Later on, the elf (who had decided he liked
the mortal world and was reluctant to go home) was arrested for driving
the wrong way down the M1 and developed an alarming beard whilst in
police custody. After a series of increasingly frustrating interviews,
he was charged with storytelling and sentenced to shut up.