Berserker: A LitRPG Urban Fantasy Adventure (Apocosmos Book 1) by Dimitrios Gkirgkiris (phonics readers .txt) 📕

kept my mouth shut. He might have been drunk, but he was opening his heart. I wouldn’t make him regret it.

“We fought. We fell in love. Then we fought some more and we married,” he said and held one of his cleanest beard braids between his fingers. “This is me marital braid. The rings holding it together were crafted by her.”

Both Louie and I leaned forward to inspect the carvings on the metal rings. The geometrical shapes on them were thick but carried a certain elegance.

“They’re beautiful, Rory,” I said and Louie barked in agreement.

“Aye, she’s a great smith,” he said and stroked his braid lovingly. “In the fifth year of our marriage, she gave me the greatest gift a person can get. Owen. Such a sturdy little bastard. He almost had a beard when he was born.”

“Your son,” I whispered, finally confirming what I was afraid he was getting at.

“Aye, me firstborn and only son,” he continued. “First to pick up a hammer among the boys his age. Little slower on speaking but who cares. The boy was strong. Until that gods-damned day when the nightmare fell upon us.”

With the corner of my eyes, I noticed Louie pulling back his ears in anticipation of the negative turn Rory’s story was surely about to take.

“It was a day of celebration. The king’s son was turning five years old. Exactly four years ago today. There was dancing, and drinking, and great brawls. It was a happy day. Until the bells started tolling… We were under attack by the only enemy that could surprise us. An army ye can see coming, but a dragon fucking surprises you.”

A dragon attacked his hall? This sounded a lot like a couple of fantasy novels I’d read but, looking at his face as he recounted the events, I could tell he was reliving a nightmare worse than any book.

“Maelcrux the Cruel,” he continued and bared his teeth as he spoke the name. “That was the name of the gigantic silver dragon that fell upon us like a meteor. We fought with everything we had, but our arrows wouldn’t pierce his scales and our axes could not reach him as he flew through the halls of our ancestral home. He froze us alive. He buried us under tons of stone. He devoured us.”

The dwarf paused for a second and took another large sip from his whiskey. Then he produced his pipe from a pocket, lit it, and breathed in the magical smoke.

“The dragon eventually found his way to the throne room. We fought tooth and nail, but he was an indomitable force. He was clawing away my best warriors as if they were made of water. I had a duty as a father to protect me family and as a king to protect me people. I failed at both with one breath of the dragon’s fire.”

His hand was now trembling and he almost spilled the whiskey on the table as he refilled his glass.

“He froze me boy and then he shattered him into a thousand pieces. I tried to protect him but I wasn’t enough,” he said. He showed the scars and frost burns on his body. “There was nothing to bury, half-Celt.” A tear ran down his cheek and he wiped it awkwardly as he raised his hand to drink again. “I lost it. I charged at the dragon. All it took was a swipe of the beast’s tail and I was thrown against a pillar, me helmet destroyed and me skull fractured. Me wife and me men carried me to a spellcaster who healed me. But not before we were pretty far down the road leading away from our home. Hundreds of us, including me son, were killed on that day and the rest of us, the ‘lucky’ ones, were driven into exile.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said quietly.

“It didn’t happen to me, Alex. I let it happen. I, the King of Adamant Hall, was not prepared for it. That’s why it happened.” He chugged another big gulp of his drink. “I’m not a complete man anymore.” This time he raised his beard and close to the throat, there was a braid missing with scar tissue from a burn in the place the hairs would have grown from. “This was the braid of me son. I can never grow that back. But this one…” This time he ran his fingers over where his mustache would be. “This I can gain back. A king without a hall is a king not worthy of hair on his upper lip. For the honor of the Battleforge clan, and for the memory of me son, I will slay the beast that attacked us and reclaim the hall of me ancestors.”

“So that’s what was taken from you and what you want to get back,” Louie said, and the dwarf nodded but something else had just clicked into place for me.

“All those negative reviews from years ago. Those were from your people, right?”

“Aye,” the dwarf said, falling back to his usual short answers.

“But they couldn’t have blamed you for what happened with the dragon?” I asked, and got nothing but an intense stare from him. “No. Nobody would. They didn’t like that you abandoned them.”

“What the fuck was I supposed to do?” he said and slammed his glass down on the table, spilling whiskey everywhere. “Ye don’t know the heavy burden that falls on the shoulders of a king. The first thing I started doing once we’d found a place to set up camp was to scan the ranks and levels of me warriors. I didn’t even stop to shed a tear for me dead son. I wanted to kill that thing. But then the reports of the dead and the missing started coming in. One after the other. Brothers, cousins, nephews. People who knew me since I was born and people who had just been born. It was too much, half-Celt.”

“I understand,” I whispered, though I couldn’t be