Part 1

It had only taken four long years of saving, studying and undergraduate grunt-work to get here, but it had finally happened. Max Haddock was standing on a large rock in the middle of the ocean.

All the other archaeology students and professors on this trip were completely unaware of the personal significance of this particular rock. To them, it was just another ancient Viking settlement to unearth, just another bunch of artifacts to catalogue, just another run-of-the-mill dig.

Max, on the other hand, knew the old myths. He knew them like he knew how to breathe. For centuries, the tales had been passed down through the Haddock line, generation to generation, until finally, they came to him. He still remembered the nights as a boy when his father would sit by his bed and tell him wonderful, exciting stories about Viking heroes that flew through the sky on the backs of dragons. More often than not, Max would beg to hear them again and again until he fell asleep.

He had never told anyone about these precious tales, as per Haddock family tradition. And why should he? They were now his to keep and protect until he had a child of his own to give them to. No one else would understand. No one else would believe that such creatures as dragons had really existed so long ago on this very island.

The island and the first remains of the Viking village were discovered decades before he was born. Max, of course, learned about them much later while flipping through a National Geographic magazine one evening. The photos of the jutting sea stacks and the high craggy cliffs speckled with green seemed to pull him back through time until he could feel the salty mist, hear the cries of sea birds, see the long ships on the horizon…

It hit him like a punch in the gut, then. He knew this place. He had never seen it before, but there it was, the same bit of land that had been described to him almost every evening of his childhood. Max decided right there that he was going to view it with his own eyes someday, smell it, walk on it, discover for himself if the legends were true.

Years later, as he stood on a ledge facing a cutting wind, the sentiment was still the same. He was strangely at home and in a way, it had almost been eerie watching the old village rise up from a long, undisturbed slumber under the layers of time. The people who had lived here were his ancient forefathers, his family. They were brave, intelligent and adventurous people who eventually island-hopped their way across the vast ocean to populate the New World they found on the other side.

And now here he was, completing the circle.