Ice-Beard

How did the ice-man get his ice-beard?

It is like this.

Once, he had an ordinary beard, of hair and love. (These are the standard components of beards.)

But then the war came!

The terrifying Cacodemon King, ruling with his many-tiered hierarchy of henchmen, descended upon the peaceful land wherein which the ice-man lived. He sought to perpetrate tyrannies unheard of, tyrannies too terrible to describe here - but with him came his foes. The space pirates and space elves and space pirate space elves all followed the Cacodemon King, leading a grass-roots opposition with heavy funding from special interest groups opposed to being ruled by a giant floating demon-head.

But for all their resources, the Resistance had a number of problems! First was the fact that they were fighting an immense horde of demons. They figured they could probably handle this with enough money. But the second problem was the Cacodemon King's greatest weapon - hypervomit! Unlike regular vomit, it possessed strange and deadly properties - digesting its victims alive. The Resistance was powerless against it!

But, after a series of extremely painful defeats, they formed a plan. They found the ice-man, deep within a secluded valley, and recruited him to their cause. (This took some doing.) A conclave of wizards, druids, and warlocks chanted a great spell, turning the ice-man's beard to ice. Now immune to the effects of the hypervomit, the ice-man marched at the head of the Resistance's armies, his ice-beard shielding him from all harm hurled his way. With a single spear of ice, he slew the Cacodemon King - but this victory was not without harm. In his dying breath, the Cacodemon King burbled a curse - that the ice-man must be frozen in place, never to move again from the banks of the stream where the last battle was fought. And so it rests to this day.

Rational thinkers might explain it otherwise - dismissing talk of Cacodemons and space-pirates, they would instead attribute the ice-beard to some kind of cycle of freezing and re-freezing that eventually forms stalagtites in the shape of a beard.

But no one likes rationality*!

So that is the end of our tale.

*er um maybe? In a sense.