Warmth. That’s the word that comes to mind when I think of my grandfather. He was one of those rare people who radiated something special, something you couldn’t quite touch but could always feel. Like a light that made everything around it seem brighter, warmer... Alive. Most people just seemed that way, but something in the soul of him really was special. In the first five years of my life, I was surrounded by that light, never knowing how quickly it would fade.

  When he passed, it was the most troublesome and emotional day of my life. I didn’t just know he was gone—I felt it. It was as if the world around me shifted, suddenly quieter, as if someone had turned down the volume. The house that once flooded with warmth and laughter felt cold and empty. The floors, which used to sing, now creaked instead. It was a loss I couldn’t understand, but one I felt in my bones. Later on, i would realize there was a reason i felt the world dim.

  The funeral was brief, almost too quick to comprehend. I didn’t fully grasp what was happening then, but I remember staring at his casket, trying to reconcile the man I knew with the cold, lifeless figure before me. Everyone kept calling him Grandpa, but that wasn’t him. Not really. I thought maybe they were wrong, maybe they were lying—until I studied his face. It was him, but it wasn’t. And then they lowered him into the ground, and that was the hardest moment of all. It was the final goodbye, the end of everything I had known. What stayed with me, though, wasn’t the grief—it was the silence that followed. A silence I didn’t know how to fill.

  My grandfather had always been a storyteller. It didn’t matter what time of day it was—whether it was late at night or in the middle of the afternoon—he’d pull me close and tell me about another world. A world far beyond any map, a place of magic and adventure, where he had once been a knight sworn to protect the kingdom. He’d speak of battles fought, monsters slain, and a royal family he had once served. His eyes would grow distant, as though remembering a place he could never return to. I never understood why he left that world behind, but I knew he missed it deeply. Even as a child, I could sense the sadness in his words, the ache of something lost.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  While i adored our time together my father always dismissed these stories, calling them nothing more than fantasies. He’d tell me not to believe them, that Grandpa’s mind was just playing tricks on him. He would get mad at his father for filling his son's mind of nothing but lies and false stories. But I believed. I believed every word, every tale of heroism and magic. His stories became my dreams, my escape. Every night in bed I imagined myself as the hero, the knight who would save the world just as my grandfather had. I hoped to visit the place he loved almost as much as he loved me. His home land had become just as much a part of me as it was him.

  After his passing though when he was gone, all I had left were memories and a pair of rings he had passed onto me. They were relics of the old world he had told me at some point. He had always intended them to be mine, something about my father not believing or needed them.

  They were worn but beautiful, the rings were made of steel that had seen better days, connected by a chain. The larger ring was engraved with the image of a creature—a fox, part lion, with an orange jewel set into its head that sparkled like the sunset. The chain twisted like a tail, linking the rings together in an elegant curve. As breathtaking as they were, I couldn’t bring myself to wear them properly. It was his, a reminder of that other world he had spoken of, and I couldn’t overwrite those memories. Instead, I kept it close, hanging from a chain around my neck, a constant connection to the man I had lost.

  I had no idea then just how much those rings would come to mean, or how it would shape the course of my life. The memory of my grandfather, his stories, his warmth, and the legacy he left behind—these would become the driving forces that pushed me forward into a world I could never have imagined. In one sense, my father had been right. My grandfather was a liar, just not in the way he expected.