The Land of Shadow (1)

Introduction
For several years I had a problem unusual among volatile youth. I had too many ideas about high fantasy, adventure and heroic romance. One of my weirdest fancies, back then, was The Land of Shadow. The idea of putting it on paper was something that had invariably haunted my little brain when I was an employed student. However, my wishful thinking never came true.

I knew very clear that it would make me throw my cap into the air and shout "Huzzah!" if The Land of Shadow could be eventually moved from my head onto papers. Now, to be honest, I want that "Huzzah". It is quite an arduous and exhausting work to pump out stuff in my head onto a stack of papers, but somehow I decided to give it a firm shot, an ounce for a time, piece by piece and in a "rushless" manner.

Feel free to let me know should you want a seat in my fantasy.

Acknowledgments
The ideas of writing this epic fantasy oddly emerged during a heart-stirring dialogue with one of my friends, I'd like to keep the stirrer anonymous for the sake of anonymity though. It was really a stressful time in both my professional and personal life; thus while I'd say it's often difficult for an author to thank everyone who has helped him/her made a final decision to turn all great minds and ideas into a manuscript, it's just downright impossible in my case. Without all my friends, this piece would have been largely impossible to write.

I'd like to thank God here since I've had the fortune of reading J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpieces, which had helped altered my writing style in a significant way. Thinking of the early stages of my life, tough and rough, I couldn't think of other words except these two to portray my early existence, but now the hardest times are fairly behind me, I can finally express my true love for high fantasy literature in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years, from the deep bottom of my heart.

Author’s Note: each chapter in The Land of Shadow will be a bit long as I will try to put in all the details I have in my rhapsodic head. However, I will also constantly remind myself throughout this work to never present it as a long-winded and verbose piece. Terseness and succinctness are always the essences in my writing. With that firmly being in mind, I will go to great lengths to keep each single chapter in a manageable length and make them reader-friendly and presentable. I hope my magic will work, at least for this piece. Thanks.

Chapter One - The Time Wrap
I'm Dennis, like any ordinary man you see on the street, just a plain fiction fan with no special talent at all. Though I do have a scar that looks like a bolt of lightning on the right side of my butt, it didn't give me any goddamned magic like those Harry Potter possessed. Not a theologian myself, but I do have a liking for Diur, a country ruled not by law, but by theocracy indeed, according to The Dieble.

The Dieble, a spinoff of Bible, stated in the brutal era of unholy wars that tore Diur apart in the closing days of the first Judgement Day, no period was more gory, or more tragic, than the nearly two thousand years the people of Diur spent locked in bitter fighting with the demonic abominations. This era, known as the Age of Goriness, would lead to some of the most ghastful acts and miserable fate ever in Diur.

But who cares? All these were fictions...unless one day on my way home I heard a grisly sound coming from rear and became unconscious after that.

I didn't really know how long it took to regain consciousness, but I found I was somehow placed in a very unfamiliar space when my eyes opened with great sore. The buildings around were all in ancient style, had a striking parallel in medieval style to be specific. The people here all wore grotesque faces, which you would never see on Earth, but apparently I was not in a good mood now to describe how grotesque they were. I looked around and noticed meters away there was someone speaking in the centre of a large crowd. Pulling myself up to feet, I strode to the throng, wondering what had happened to me.

"There were two mortals, Joe and Echo." a somebody was lecturing in the middle of the crowd.

It seemed to me the lecturer was telling some kind of crackpot stories. I squeezed a bit in with the help of my elbows.

Now I got a closer look at the speaker. He was very old, judging by the snowy beard on his jaw, and had a weirdly-green face, I promise you would never see this hue on Earth. He was wearing a long white robe and a pointed hat, on which stuck a crooked quill. His right hand was holding an emerald-green magic stick and another funny feature was I saw a warty toad crouching on his left shoulder.

"Is that toad a toy from toysrus.com?" I sniggered.

"They lived in a small township ten miles away from our village." The old man said slowly while his face was being covered with tears, not common tears though, because it was also weirdly green.

I noticed a bunch of children with queer pointed ears were sitting quietly around the narrator and staring firmly at him as if they didn't want to miss any word coming out from his smelly mouth.(Smelly? Well, maybe my nose was just too sensitive to any bad breath) The old man took a few seconds to hold himself back from a perceptible grief and went on his story.

Author’s note: The old man speaking was turned out to be Henry, a wonderful scholar who had a moniker of "human encyclopedia", so no wonder if you find later he might talk like a book for no appreciable reason.

"Joe was an outstanding knight, he was one of the greatest Knights of the Round Table in this world! and Echo, if my memory serves me right, was an enchantress who could cure human from death no matter how severely they were hurt. The old man wept again. "They were heroes! They were heroes!", he added in an incoherently faint voice after sobbing another while.

The old book continued, "It happened about 300 years ago, an evil demon named Ring had somehow shaken off the power of thearchy and escaped the control of a holy aura set to trap demonic creatures. The devil ran amuck after freeing himself and announced he would kill all the living under the sun and turn the world into a real inferno in seven days. Meanwhile, a towering charnel was created by his formidable black art on an icy mountain as his kingdom, and the goddamned devil summoned a great deal of powerful skeletal warriors from limbo to build up his troops. All parts of the world were under a cloud of terror. In just two days, all the resistance from the king's arms and some brave swordsmen had been smashed by the devil's pawns."

"WoW!" The children exclaimed in unison at the point of hearing the power of the devil.

It's such a nice tale." I thought.

"We were all in despair and thought a doom was ahead of us. However, a glimmer of hope appeared as Joe and Echo determined to rescue Diur from the fiend's control." The man paused, seemed trying to search something out from his remembrance.

"They finally killed the devil after a long and fierce battle in his charnel castle, but the demon, at the last breath of his life, uttered he would revenge after reincarnation." The speaker stopped utterly and now you could sense a horrible quietness in the air.

"He will be back soon. Now Joe and Echo were gone. We have no hero here and we will all be ... dead." he ended in a soft and broken voice.

"Nice! You guy have developed a good imagination!" I shouted out recklessly.

To be continued.