The Tale of the Sleeping Knight
In a land where day and night couldn’t agree on which one was on duty, there stood a fortress surrounded by trees. These trees intertwined their crowns above the ruins in a way that looked as if, while studying architecture, they had tried very hard to make a perfect roof, but then had a quarrel and each started growing in its own direction. Any canopy designer would have eaten his own pencil in amazement at the sight.
But this story isn’t about trees, it’s about a knight named Arwid. This name, in an ancient, long-forgotten language, meant “one who has no idea what he’s doing, but does it with great enthusiasm”. Defending the poor and weak came to him as naturally as breathing, which was somewhat problematic when the poor and weak were busy arguing about which member of the court was making the smallest scams and therefore deserved the position of Treasury Minister.
Tyrants, hearing Arwid’s name, reacted the way people react to the sound of a fork scratching a plate. No one missed the fact that Arwid’s sword gleamed in the darkness like a ray of hope, though the more inquisitive noticed that the reason was a special cleaning mixture of his own recipe, which consisted mainly of dragon tears and oil from frying potato pancakes.
And then, as usually happens in such stories, Arwid disappeared. Not in the ordinary way, when someone simply goes out for milk and doesn’t return for eighteen years. No. His entire castle disappeared behind a curtain of fog so thick you could slice it and sell it as dessert.
Gargoyles appeared on the walls, which, by the way, had no practical use besides scaring pigeons and looking rather ugly during rain. People, who always invent the most complicated explanations for the simplest things, decided that Arwid had fallen into an enchanted sleep.
Rumor had it that the curse was cast by an evil sorceress who got offended because she wasn’t invited to the afternoon tea. Or perhaps it was a sorceress whose favorite beetle Arwid accidentally stepped on. The story is unclear on this point, which didn’t stop bands of wandering bards from composing fifty-verse ballads with a chorus that everyone could hum after the third cup of hot chocolate, though no one could write it down afterward.
Either way, the curse could only be lifted by a person who would pass a series of trials. They couldn’t be, of course, normal trials like “lift this stone” or “count to ten.” No. They had to be trials requiring courage, compassion, and the ability to see things “with the heart.”
What exactly seeing with the heart meant, nobody knew, but everyone nodded wisely when someone mentioned it, because no one wanted to admit they had no idea how to do it at all.
And so begins our story. A story about a curse that might have been the result of a misunderstanding, about a knight who might have simply needed a long weekend away from everyone, and about a hero who will have to face all this, armed only with common sense — which, as we all know, is a weapon more rarely found than a magical sword forged in the fires of Mount Destiny.
