One day, a farmer was tilling the fields outside of his house. He was a good farmer, and he always seemed to have a stroke of luck. His barley plants were always higher, his vegetables were nearly always bigger than any others in the area, and he always had far more than enough to feed his family. He was always quite happy, until that day.
While tilling, he uncovered something glowing. He stopped, intrigued. He continued to uncover the glowing thing, revealing an intricate and calligraphic circle of runes. He wasn't an educated man, his wisdom quite limited, but even he knew a magic circle when he saw one. This was bad.
He started to enter a panic. He knew that magic was hated in the kingdom. Could he be accused of being a Wizard, of enhancing his own crops? No, no, he was known as a loyal supporter of the King. They would give him the benefit of the doubt, he thought, but why risk it? I'll just destroy this silly spell and be on my way. He plaintively wondered what it did. Maybe it helped his plants grow?
No, come to think of it, the crops over there always came out a little more poorly. It must have been some kind of a curse, put upon him from an angry Wizard, an evil scheming madman who wanted to starve the loyal subjects of the King. Only his superb farming had prevented it from claiming all his crops, and he has managed to even thrive despite it. Quite the accomplishment!
He set about trying to rub out the inscription. He didn't want to touch it, so he found a small trowel. The dirt inside the circle seemed to have set, almost like stone. He tried to destroy the circle with the trowel, but it too had set like stone. Unsatisfied, he tried digging around it. The dirt moved freely, and he had quickly dug a small trench. He went and fetched some gloves, and tried lifting the circle. It seemed rooted, or inordinately heavy, he couldn't budge it an inch.
Desperate, he grabbed a shovel, and widened and dug out his little trench into a hole large enough to stand in, completely circling the spell circle. He ruined a bit of his barley this way, no matter, he had plenty where that came from. He then dug underneath the circle, finding the dirt just as easy to move as ever. In the end, he was left with a puzzling situation, a disk of dirt, surrounding the circle, which was floating in the air.
The farmer was intrigued and amazed and terrified. He hit the floating disk with his shovel, but it bounced right off with a loud clang. He carefully extricated himself from his hole, and tried to balance himself on the strange dirt disk. It held his weight, and didn't budge an inch. He was baffled. He filled in the hole most of the way, and puzzled on what to do next.
Well, the words inside the circle, maybe they were written in in ink, he thought. So he grabbed a bucket of water to wash away the ink. He threw the water on to the disk, but it was repelled and fell off. The water splashed with no effect on to the dirt below. He tried filling in and covering the words with dirt and clay and even ink, but everything was repelled and fell away.
The farmer went out, and lead his ox over, a powerful and stalwart beast. He tied a rope around the strange disk as best he could, but none of the knots would stick, until he created a knot so complex it was nearly a harness, and the farmer could never hope to replicate it again. He commanded the beast to pull, and it pulled with all its might, harder and harder, but absolutely nothing came of it. The ox was stuck in place for a long time, a seeming eternity. Eventually, he saw the ox start to move slowly, and then the rope slackened, and he looked at the disk. It was still there, the rope had frayed and broken, and the ox was so exhausted it couldn't move for hours.
Now, the farmer was desperate, and worried. How did he have such an eldritch artifact? Why was this his? What had he done to deserve such a curse, and how could he rid himself of it? He gathered together as much spare wood as he could find, and made a pyre for the strange magical disk. He burnt the entire pyre, which surrounded the disk, until only ashes remained. Ashes, and a strange disk of dirt, completely unperturbed by being in the fiery inferno.
By this point, the farmer was quite exhausted, and desperate, and he leaned his hand on the strange magical disk without realizing it. He was thinking to himself rather loudly. “I wish this thing were gone,” he thought. Now the magic was old, and worn, and despite the farmers complete lack of magical talent, it was enough to begin to unravel the spell. The spell circle was breached, and gravity and time and force began to apply, and the runes began to fade, and the farmer almost tripped as the magical disk crumbled into as much dirt and left him with no support.
The farmer was quite happy with himself, having finally destroyed the evil magic circle once and for all. He skipped about his merry way, happy he had finally rid himself from the darkness it had brought upon him. That year, and early frost killed half his crops, and he nearly didn't make it through the winter.
Many many years ago, when the farmer was just a boy, his father, also a farmer, had secretly saved a Wizard and helped him escape. In exchange, the Wizard had enchanted a powerful rune in the soil under the farm. He covered it up under the dirt, and told the father that it would grant his crops warmth and growth and good luck for a hundred years. The farmer smiled, hoping his farm would be a great inheritance to his young boy, and sustain him for the years to come.
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