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FINISH THE STORY!

Use a minimum of 250 and a maximum of 300 words, and if you can, try to get into the tone of the traditional fairy tale.

THE PROPHECY

There was a king there long ago, and he was very rich and powerful, and the only thing that was troubling himself and his wife, the queen, was that they had no children. Well, at long last there was a child coming, and the king was in a great fuss about it, he had priests and bishops and wise men and doctors and nurses all ready. And just before the child was born, it was in the middle of the night, he brought all the wise men up to the top of the castle, and told them to read the stars and tell him about the child's future. And there was one of the wise men that could read the stars and make prophecies from them, and he told the child's future.

"The child will be a boy," said the wise man, "and he will grow up strong and handsome and clever. There is no son of a king in the whole world that will be his equal," said the wise man, reading the stars all the time. "But what is this? Ochón, the bad story! It is written in the stars that when the son of the king is twenty one years of age he is to be killed by a flash of lightning." And the wise man wrote down the message on paper and handed it to the king, that twenty one years exactly from the day he was born, the son of the king would be hit by lightning and killed.

The child was born the same night, a fine boy. And he grew up just as the wise man prophesied; there was not a king's son in the world that was his equal in handsomeness or in learning or in strength or in courage, and the people of the kingdom would do anything for him. And the old king never told a single person about the prophecy, and he warned the wise man to say nothing about it either, or it would be the worse for him. The king was greatly frightened and troubled by the prophecy, but he did not want to be putting trouble and sorrow on his son and on the queen and on all the people, and that is why he kept it to himself.

But when the son of the king was coming to about nineteen years old he noticed his father directing a great big crowd of masons and workmen putting up a great big fortification of some sort on the side of a hill about a mile away from the king's castle, and the old king would not let him into the fortification or even tell him what it was or what it was for. The masons knew but as little, but they only knew they were to build a wall here and a door there and a window somewhere else according as the king direc¬ted them, until the building was all finished.

And the day before his twenty-first birth¬day, the king took his son to one side and showed him the paper and told him all about the prophecy. "And now," said the king, "I am going to put