Lancelot du Lac

By: A. A. Attanasio

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In the Year of Our Lord 524, I am the wrath of God. None can defeat me in battle, for I am the joy of the blade. Beardless as a Roman, my chin is the Lucky Life—bold, square and dimpled at its center like the eye of a die. Mine is the nose of Apollo above lips as enigmatic as any Greek statue. I carry all the seasons onward from my thirteenth summer in my hair, yellow dark as dusk and long as wind plowing the west at day’s end. The scent of my flesh is the incense of trampled grass, and my breath is cinnamon.

That fragrance alone is the supernatural mark of the fairy that reared me from infancy and fed me upon breast milk thin and blue as starlight. In all other ways, I am wholly mortal and possessed, like you, of a soul deep as any dream, where thoughts come as they may. This is the story of my origin, wondrous and strange, told as I remember, and in my own words.