Blog 6 Kaitlyn Hunter

A long time there lived a young boy named Benedict who lived in the small kingdom of Vickery. Benedict was the youngest of three brothers who he both idolized and envied. His oldest brother was the master swordsman of the kingdom, and his middle brother was the finest horse trainer in Vickery. Benedict, however sought his interest in books which worried his widower father.  

"Don’t you want to learn to fight like your brother, Stanley? Or help Ron with the horses?" he would say.  

"No father, I want to be a scholar." His brothers often mocked Benedict for his love of books, tossing them into the chimney fire after dinner. They insisted that books were for the weak and that their late mother Queen Leah would be disappointed. Benedict spent many nights tearfully removing the singed pages from the ashes muttering the name of his mother who vanished when he was only five. One cloudy night, the kingdom of Vickery received a mysterious figure at the castle who was clothed in tar colored feathers and held a scroll. The man entered the castle and called for the presence of the brothers to speak about his message. The man spoke with an eerie softness about a small village that had been possessed by a curse for thirteen years and had been told the brothers could lift it. Ron and Stanley laughed abundantly at the man for his tale.  

"There is no such thing as a curse!" The brothers howled. The man plead with frustration and began to back track through the castle doors. As the brothers slammed the door the man dropped the scroll at Benedict's feet who lingered behind Stanley, and pointed to a black symbol on his hand. Before his brothers could take it, Benedict slid the scroll into his clothes next to the charred pieces of paper he had. In the candle light, Benedict deciphered a text that reminded him of an old book his mother secretly kept. The words made out a location which Benedict assumed was the village but in the top right corner he saw the same symbol that was inked on the mysterious man's hand. Intrigued by the man's request, Benedict snuck into the stables to get a horse and ride to the location on the scroll. In three days time, Benedict arrived in an abandoned village far from any other signs of life. Benedict cried out in frustration for following the man's map and threw the scroll on the ground. While glancing down at the crumbled scroll one more time he noticed a large flat stone nearby with the repeating symbol. When he bent over the rock, the charred pages fell from his coat which he now saw shared the design. 'This must be a code!" he thought and as he shifted his weight onto the stone, the ground began to shake and Benedict plummeted underneath the surface.  

After some time, Benedict awoke with a woman leaning over him tending to a wound on his head. When he finally blinked away his head fog he was shocked to see that the woman was his mother who he had lost years ago! Queen Leah began to tell him about the secret underground kingdom where she lived when she vanished so many years ago. She said that the true curse was not having her son by her side throughout the years to live in the underground kingdom. Benedict swore to stay with his mother and the two lived happily ever after.