And now, Elric had told three lies. The first concerned his cousin, Yyrkoon. The second concerned the Black Sword. The third concerned Cymoril. And upon those three lies was Elric's destiny to be built, for it is only about things which concern us most profoundly that we lie clearly and with profound conviction.
Last descendant of a mighty line, Elric is keenly aware of his weakness. He hasn't the magical prowess of his forbears and his blood is deficient and leaves him bed-ridden without constant support from herbs and potions, or the magical vigor afforded him by his demonic sword.
Perhaps his most thorough betrayal of his fearsome ancestors, though, is his doubt of his own peoples' righteous superiority.
This doubt leads Elric to abandon his people, place his traitorous cousin upon the throne, and eventually to the accidental slaying of his lover and the destruction of the empire. In his quest to understand what is good, he makes a pact with evil, and thus is doomed to ever be a stranger to what is good, even when he finds it.
Feels like a story for our current day, where we seem to be sitting amidst the fast-crumbling ruins of mighty things our ancestors built, with more power at our fingertips than the mightiest emperors once wielded, and are yet so helpless to defend our freedom and humanity.
This is high fantasy, so don't expect much of the Game of Thrones kind of knightly duelling. This is a story of sword and sorcery and mostly Elric being waylaid by supernatural creatures whom he manages to defeat through a combination of spells and brute force.
A note for the reader: the Elric stories were first published in the fantasy magazine Science Fantasy and only later collected into the novels you are most likely to encounter now. And so there's a bit of discontinuity between each of the stories in this book. Don't expect a seamless running of chapters that pick up directly where the last one left off. Treat each adventure as an almost separate story of the feats of this man, Elric.