Old Iron Heart

Many at the College found it strange to have the Ancient Prince as the new Dean.....it was like legend had come to walk the campus.  As children we had all heard the tale of the young prince who had done his four years study, been awarded his Bachelor of Arts, and then left College Grove.....not to return to his ancestral home, but to ride off escorted by a dozen Knights of Elfheim, to be the groom of a High Fairy bride.  They had ridden under the hill to the Court of the Fae Queen.  There the Prince had wed and sired a son and a daughter, and performed deeds of both warlike and magical nature, which we have heard sung by the bards in halls and in village greens.....Eleven Summers passed for the Prince and his in Elfheim, when one came carrying word that the High Prince of Iron Hill was dead.  Duty called Iron Heart away from the glories of the Fairy Court, and away from his sweet wife and their children....he came one morn at dawn to Iron Hill, and sat himself down on the Iron Throne....and the Sacred Sisters brought the Dragon Crown, and set it on his head.  Eleven Summers had passed in Elfheim, while in our mundane realm seven times that count had sped.  The Old Prince was past four-score and ten when he left....his Crown passed to man who looked to be perhaps thirty years old, but who had been born in this same Castle almost a century agone.  At College, the curious could read his name on the rolls, alongside the names of some of their grandfathers....for it was now twenty years since Iron Heart returned to Iron Hill.  One historian had pointed out that a similar Ancient Dean had held tenure five-hundred years before, when the Old Tribes still fought long and bitter war with the Eight Princes......