How to Slay a Dragon - Bill Allen [0]
But Greg Hart can’t slay a dragon. He’d be lucky to win a fight against one of the smaller girls at school.
His only real skill is that he can run faster than any other twelve-year-old boy in his class, a necessity, since that’s who he’s usually running from. Oh, it’s not like he’s never been the hero at the center of an adventure. It’s just the kind of adventures he’s been involved with have always been the made-up kind he’s written about in his journal.
Now the magicians of Myrth have yanked Greg into a strange new world, where the monsters he must run from are far scarier—and hungrier—than anything he’s ever run from before. He tries to tell everyone there’s been a mistake. Ruuan is a very large dragon, while Greg, on the other hand, is neither large nor a dragon. He’s barely much of a boy. Unfortunately, such trivialities could never stop the people of Myrth from believing Greg will rescue King Peter’s daughter from Ruuan. After all, Greg has been named in a prophecy, and no prophecy has ever been wrong before.
Why, Greg wonders, does he have to be at the heart of the first one that is?
How to
Slay
a
Dragon
Journals of Mryth
Book One
Bill Allen
Bell Bridge Books
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
PO BOX 300921
Memphis, TN 38130
ISBN: 978-1-935661-87-0
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 by Bill Allen
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo credits:
Dragon © Alexey Bakhtiozin | istockphoto
:Lhd:01:
Dedication
In memory of Mom, who, along with Dad,
inspired more absurdity than anything on Myrth.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Raymond and Barbara Feist for their encouragement in the beginning, to the members of the Brevard Scribblers and the Space Coast Writers’ Guild for their feedback along the way, to Gene Davis for helping give the book its second wind, to Debra Dixon and the many others at Bell Bridge Books for helping me to make Greg Hart’s story a better one, and most of all to my wife, Nancy, for enduring it all.
The Mighty Greg Hart
Greg Hart’s name had never caused him trouble before.
It was nothing like the name for Winnie Weimar, who everyone at school was always calling “Whiney” Weimar. And it was way better than the one pinned on poor Richard Kinickey, more commonly known as “Icky Ricky” Kinickey. It wasn’t even as bad as the one for Dewey Doolittle, who everyone called—well, Dewey Doolittle. No, Greg Hart had a perfectly normal name, which is why, for the most part, the other kids just called him Greg and were done with it.
Problem was, for twelve years now Greg’s name may have simply been biding its time.
In the center of the woods behind Greg’s house stood a large oak, where between two boughs rested a smattering of scrap wood that might have been called a tree house, had a person been feeling especially generous. There Greg sat, cross-legged on the creaking wood floor, writing in his journal, his tousled brown hair jutting out in all directions. Another boy might have written about the events of his morning, or even about his apprehension over starting junior high tomorrow, but not Greg. As always he chose stories more to his liking.
Today he’d been chased by a giant.
I was a little worried at first. With each step the giant took, the ground trembled and split.