Well, it's the final round of the current Fantasy Smackdown and I have the honour to be competing against the august personage that is Bloodsword.

For this round, we've gone Paranormal Fantasy to produce a story between 2000 and 4000 words. We had to choose a Rider of Legend from a group of picture, so I chose what I've decide to call a Dragonrider (see picture on right). We also had to choose a random object from a fan, a plant pot, a unicycle and a car crash. I chose to include the fan in my story.

In addition to the above we also had to use three of eight quotes provided. The three I chose are included in bold text in the story so that you can see them.

Finally, and just to make things slightly trickier, we had to choose a well known character from a Fantasy novel as a sidekick / secondary character. I've long been a fan of David Gemmell's work so I chose Druss the Legend, but wove in some other little bits and bobs from both the Druss books and the Skilgannon series. Hope you enjoy the story.