10 Years ago

The dark lord stood tall, towering so high that the horns on his helmet grated against the stone ceiling as he walked forward. His neck was like an oak tree- it bulged as he kept his head steady and left two equidistant trails scratched deep into the rock above and behind him.

He stopped in front of the little boy daring to disturb him on challenge day. He didn’t even bother to look down, like he would at a bug he was about to crush. Instead he lifted his foot high in the air, ready to stomp on the child with his enchanted obsidian boot. He banged his foot into the ground, and the concrete shattered like glass.

He lifted his foot out of the rubble, but there was no red mush stuck to the bottom. He cast his first glimpse down; the glower of his pitch black eyes was so intense the crumbled stone began to smolder. He scanned the area from left to right, but because his entire eyes were the color of his pupils it would have been hard to tell.

The boy was nowhere to be seen. The dark lord knelt to inspect the floor more closely, to make sure he wasn’t missing pink specks of flesh.

Just as he edged he inclined his head, it was pulled back. His neck was yanked like it was a twig and not a tree trunk. The boy’s legs were looped around it, and his hands were on the horns, using them as handles.

The dark lord struggled, but his considerable neck muscles weren’t enough to resist the boy’s grappling. He lifted a gauntleted hand and grabbed the boy by the collar. He tore the boy off with surprisingly little resistance. He moved to toss the child off like the kittens he’d bruised when he was that age.

There was something dark and twisted in the boy’s hands. The helmet- he’d ripped off the helmet.

It flew out of the child’s hands; the two horns pummeled towards the Dark Lord’s abyssal eyes.

He blinked-

“Wake up, Hazen!” The father called out, pulling back the covers. Hazen was seated beneath it, balled up, hands out like he’d just tossed an object forward.

“I wasn’t sleeping Dad!” Hazen said, frowning. “I was envisioning. I’ve got to run through the scenario as many times as I can. If I plan for every possibility, I’ll never be surprised.”

“Enough games,” his father sighed. “Get to school, up and away with you now.”

Hazen sighed but didn’t put the covers back. He lifted his pillow which he’d secretly stuffed with sand, and did a series of 50 squats with it, then got ready within seconds. A hero could always get ready at a moment’s notice.

He walked with his sister Grace to school. She pattered away but he didn’t listen. He scanned threats on the forest trail, because that's what a hero would do, even if the damsel in distress was super annoying. For every step his sister took, he took 6 steps forward and 5 back. He did it so quickly she didn;t notice. Agility, he’d need agility. He was too small to fight with brute force.

The schoolhouse was one room set at the top of a hill. The wooden structure was rotted with holes and pierced with several misshapen nails barely holding it together. Hazen knew that because he had climbed it over a dozen times.

There was only one class, so Hazen was stuck with his bratty blonde sister as well as a farmer’s boy 5 years his senior. They were learning to read and write. It was a rare opportunity but the students didn’t appreciate that. Hazen was one of the few exceptions- yes, he played with his quill pretending it was a sword for most of the class, but one day he would need to write signatures. He couldn’t just put ink on his palm and mark things. Way too many adventurers already did that and it was impossible to tell what a forgery.

The teacher was a woman in her 50s, a scholar who’d left the imperial academy when the Dark Lord took over, and fled to her backwater home town as a result. There was no energy behind her words.

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“Today, I want you to write what you want to be when you grow up,” she said.

The farmer’s boy wrote farmer, the merchant’s son said merchant, the seamstress’ daughter said seamstress. The fisherman’s son wrote bird and the teacher scowled at him.

“I’ll do it though!” the boy swore. “There’s a potion out there that can turn a person into a bird! Then I’ll be able to catch way more fish than my dad, and fly anywhere I want!”

“Nah, I’d shoot you down,” the hunter’s daughter said. “But maybe if there’s a lion potion I could take that and eat you!”

“No potions,” the teacher tried to snap, but there was no energy behind her words. “Just write down what your parents do.”

She glanced at Hazen's scroll. He wrote the word HERO down in bold, blocky letters, and had even drawn himself with a sword in one hand and the Dark Lord’s head in the other.

“Cross that out,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Your dad is an undertaker, you’ll be an undertaker. Come on now.”

“Yeah, I’ll be an undertaker,” Hazen exclaimed. “But only for the evil people I slay! I’ll go for glory, not graves, and…” The teacher had walked off, not paying him any attention.

His sister Grace smirked at him. “You’ll be a hero and I’ll be the Archmage of the Order of the Half Moon,” she sneered.

Hazen swung his quill-sword at an imagined impish version of her.

He made his way straight to his father’s workshed by the graveyard. He lifted an ornate cedar casket designed for the mayor’s father. He held onto both sides and moved it around like a shield. The door creaked open and he dropped it.

He cursed under his breath as his father stepped in. A true hero would have been able to hear a threat before it arrived.

“This hero stuff needs to stop, son,” His father said, sighing as he fiddled with his unkempt mustache. “I’ve buried people my whole life, your grandfather did the same, and his father did too. And you will as well, until the day when your son buries you.”

“I’m going to be a hero, dad,” Hazen said. “I’m going to defeat the Dark Lord and save the world.”

“Son,” his father said. “It’s nice to dream, but you have to be realistic. Half the people who make it to challenge day are youths like you, with bright eyes looking to the future. And you know what the Dark Lord does? He rips those eyes out. You can’t defeat him and besides, why would you want to? He’s great for our business. All those famines mean more death, and more death means more work.”

“It doesn’t matter if other people fail,” Hazen said. “I won’t fail. I’m strong, I’m fast, if I get the right training I’ll be unstoppable, you’ll see-”

“Son, you live in my house. I’m not going to see you waste your life. I’m not going to bury you. As long as you're here with me, you’re giving up on this nonsense.”

Hazen thought for a long moment. He thought of sneaking out at night, he thought of playing pretend and training without anyone knowing, wielding a shovel like a weapon. It was too close to burying his dreams.

He could leave after dark, but a hero faces things head on. “Alright then dad,” Hazen said, walking out of the shed. He walked out of the village, and kept walking, never looking back.

The Present

“So the Dark Lord is dead?” Hazen’s father asked. “And you didn’t kill him?”

“I was going to,” Hazen said, his bottom perched on a casket. “But he had an accident.”

“So you’re not a hero,” his father said. “You left that day and I looked for you for weeks. It wasn’t a real ultimatum, but you just... Left. You didn’t take a caravan or steal or horse. No one in any surrounding town saw you. I got the hunter and his kid to look too. They found camp fires out in the woods. How long did you travel in the wilderness?”

“Survival training and learning to avoid pursuers,” Hazen said. “Every hero needs know how to do that. And I am a hero- or, er, I will be a hero.”

“Then why are you here?” his father said.

“My master said I should come back here and work for a while. That a return to origins will give perspective.”

“You came at a bad time,” his father said. “I’m closing the business. Less people dying now that the Dark Lord is gone, and half the town left for the big cities now that they’re safe. Almost nothing for me to do.”

“What are you going to do?” Hazen asked. He always imagined his father conducting a state funeral some day. He was going to pull strings after achieving fame to get his father a job as the royal undertaker.

“I’ll live with your sister, she makes more than enough for me to retire.” His father said with a smile.

“Grace? Where is she?” Hazen asked.

“She’s the Arch Mage of the Order of the Half Moon now,” his father said. “Apparently apprenticing as an undertaker gave her an excellent aptitude for Necromancy and chemical magics. Staying really helped her.”

Hazen braced himself for the I told you so. It never came. “I’m going to be a hero. Dad, you’ll see,” he said.

“Sure, sure,” his father said. “I could have used you when your mom got sick, but you were out there training somewhere. Good job saving the world.”

“I’ll let you take care of my last job. You can accept the payment given in advance, I imagine you’ll need it,” his father continued after a brief pause. “That casket beneath you is all ready to go; no relatives so you bury her right away.”

Hazen jumped to his feet as he realized there was a corpse beneath the cheap oak he was sitting on.

His father walked off. “Don’t wait 10 years to visit your sister and I,” his father said. “Goodbye, ‘Hero.’”

Hazen opened the casket. The woman was in her 60s, a tired scowl etched into her frozen face. He could still hear her, the town’s teacher. “Cross that out… Come on now.”

He carried the casket out under one arm, and dug the hole with his barehands. It took only a couple minutes. Not enough time to mourn anything.