The Tale of Heorogar

Heorogar immediately thrust it over his neck and sucked in the thick joy that now suddenly surrounded him. Quickly he was content.

He immediately found that where he stood was indeed the place that he had died. The rock around him was hot and charred black, its crater extending for many meters. His sword lay on the crater's perimeter, and Heorogar noticed his own, severed hand clutching it. He checked his right wrist and smoothed his fingers over his right hand, to ensure that it was still real. Something quite incredible had occurred-Heorogar was alive. He felt a happiness unlike any other he had experienced envelop him, it throbbed through him, now, and he fell to his naked knees, his hands pressing against the rock. He laughed aloud.

A great wind picked up, and the gasses flew away from where Heorogar stood. All of the sky, except for the sickly blurred horizon, was now blue, and the crescent moon hung lazily above it. From his whitened fingertips grass speared up from the browned earth and swiftly covered the land, stretching into the horizon in grand, dew-glimmered carpets. The sky thickened with storm clouds that gathered themselves from nowhere, and the lightening from within them crackled as a downpour drenched the world. Trees leaped out of the moist earth, some of them oak, others evergreen and birch, each with its leaves swaying in the rain-sweetened breeze. He heard the melodies of birds on the wind, and animals whose names he knew not galloped and frolicked about the landscape.

"What heaven!" he shouted.

III

For many hours he watched as this cacophony surrounded him, as life spread from barren rock. He strode among his creations, patting the heads of any creatures that approached him, whistling along with the songs of birds in the canopy of trees. Heorogar was in a forest. He had almost forgotten what a forest was. He walked for many miles, through the groves of fruit, the rain occasionally falling through the roof of leaves above his head. He would test the power of his fingertips by pressing them to whatever he could find. By careful guidance he found he could nurture a branch from a tree, could raise it from the trunk as long as he kept his fingers on its surface. Years of this flew by, and Heorogar all but forgot the savage hell he had eradicated. Through subtle manipulation he found that he could even create human life, and he did so in secret from the beings that sprouted from the earth around him, so that they would not, by chance, try to destroy him or attack him.

All he could do was revel in his power.

With the pendant around his neck his consciousness gradually grew, and he could feel the whisperings of the world. He spoke gently in reply, as a father to his child. He heard of evil lurking in the empty abyss of night, loping over the deserts his powers had missed and hiding in the caverns of mountains, all of them waiting for a time ripe enough to strike. He could see their eyes from great distances, and he would glare at their ferocity with unequalled anger and hatred. They would cower and retreat into the murk, as was their way. Their horde would mass again, but not in Heorogar's time.

Throughout the course of his long life he would see the flapping wings in the sky, and hear the scream of the rider's horn tremble the earth at his feet. But it never approached him. Somehow it was responsible for all of this, whatever it was.