Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

As a hero, he used to be a little reckless, like when he alone and with a broken sword defied the fearsome Leprechaun Prince to a fight that lasted five days straight, or when having arrived late to the battlefield he found his realm mates defeated and he alone charged against the enemy army to balance things out. Both times he resulted victorious and his legend grew.

Of course he also had a few defeats, but not of the lethal kind of course. Well he died once, but only for a while and when he rose from the dead -which resulted a very unexpected event- he had became at least twice as powerful as he was before.

But his more significant defeat wasn't in a battlefield or duel against an obscenely mighty enemy, but in the more common and ordinary game of love. He fell in love, though not with any lady, but with a fae princess.

Such kind of love, the one between a human and a child of the ever young, usually ends badly, but he was full of resources and awesomely lucky, at least enough to make of the relationship a nice and safe enough experience for all the involved. He had to defeat a witch, steal the eye of a crone, free two realms from evil warlocks, rescue her beloved from a dragon made of crystal and from a dragon made of flesh, show his worth to the father and mother of his love and then defeat the first in a duel of magic and charm the second in a duel of poetry, and other twelve or so things for everything to work fine, but it was worth the effort.

The hero got married, but even then he was still a hero; still reckless, spectacular, invincible, putting his life on the edge every time, laughing at the face of Death. An invincible hero appears not very often in this or any other world, and many of them are strong or clever enough as to cheat Death for centuries or even millennia, when not forever.

Sometimes, life has a special way to kill heroes, even invincible ones, which goes beyond steel and sorcery. Our hero fell for that trick of Nature one day, after returning from a long campaign where he defeated a clique of tentacled giants.

"There's somebody waiting for you in our room." His wife said, and so the hero, curious as most heroes, walked to that room and there...

...the hero died.

Just a smile and a coo were necessary as he lifted the little body from her cradle. She had his eyes and chin and something in her by now fragile and soft wrist that made one think about a great sword grip, given the required training of course.

The hero smiled back as his heroic days were left behind and an internal oath was taken to never abandon his little girl, to never take risks that would separate them, to never fail in his duty to protect her. The hero died, a father was born.

But don't worry. Not all heroes are like him, though every hero has a weakness. In other words, there's always a hero... and a way to kill him.