"... Lovely, it was a tale of friends in their prime. Why should I care?"

"No, it was a tale of betrayal," she replied. "And it has a connection to you, to the reason you were summoned here. And the reason I'm here."

Rolf's head snapped up. "What do you know?"

"What do I know? You know the story of the three friends? Do you know how the story ended? Do you know why Susanne will end up dead? And in hell?"

"But what if," Iris said, her expression serious, "the tale of the three friends, which is a tale, I must stress, that has been told again and again, was only half the truth?"

"You can't possibly be suggesting that my ancestors lied to me."

"It's not a lie, they got a lot of things right. They just couldn't have known the whole story." Iris glanced down at her hands. She was wearing the same ring I had seen on her before. A ring from the time of Constantine. "In fact, they got some of it very wrong."

"Why are you telling me this?" Rolf demanded.

"Because they left out the part about the one who escaped. The one who wasn't killed by the wizard's spell. The one who would return to kill the wizard and free the friends."

"Brently..." Iris murmured.

"This is my story," Rolf said. "This is the tale of the other half of the story of the three friends."

"Wait a minute," Susanne said. "The three friends... we are the three friends! How the hell are we supposed to save this world?"

And indeed, how were they? No one even knew what their destiny was.

Rolf had to go on. He was a storyteller at heart. He began...
-END OF CHAPTER ONE-