[Written for the Fool's Duel Challenge o' the week, Fantasy Fools usergroup.]
Once, Hallah knew, this village had thrived in the shadow of the mountain. Ore was wrung from its belly and processed into swords and armor that now rusted, useless without men to bear them. Valuable furs and rare woods had been extracted from the woods that clothed it with the blessing of the forest gods, and beneath the trees food and forage was abundant. Belem Mountain was an entity in its own right, standing hundreds of rods taller than the loftiest peaks in the range that circumscribed it. The people of Sjever revered Belem as they did a king.
But the human king in those days, a man whose name was lost from history – literacy was a scarce commodity in these parts, and oral history could not pass down a word that the Tellers refused to speak – was a fool. He scoffed at the old traditions of bartering with the mountain; his men raped its mineral veins and ripped gold and silver from its heart. The lower woods were felled, and not replaced. In order to supply for his lavish feasts, the King’s hunters were forced to overhunt; deer vanished, and as the years passed, the other forest creatures dwindled. And all the while, the King’s coffers filled.
The gods, needless to say, were not pleased.
Hallah hesitated at the edge of the village, pushing the fur-lined hood back from her face. No one from the village had come out to meet her like they would have in her grandmother’s day; the chances of finding someone bold enough to greet a stranger in these dangerous parts were few enough without the exacerbation of a diminished population. Men were few since Kalum, and the women and children shy as wild beasts.
She glanced once more at the imposing face of Belem, and turned back to the empty village. “I am going now,” she said, her voice ringing oddly amongst muddy roads and thatched roofs, the wilting trees and decrepit sheds. A face flickered in the window of a nearby house, and evaporated as quickly.
No one acknowledged her farewell. She hadn’t expected them to.
“I will come back,” she whispered. Cold air bit at her tongue as she licked her lips, a chilling flair of foreboding. By the Twelve, any attempt at scaling Belem was suicide! Attempting to do so before the spring thaw...
But the snow is my friend, she counseled herself as she checked the straps on her snowshoes and pulled her hood back over mussed brown hair. The snow and the ice; they will protect me and scout for me, and provide me with sustenance. They will make the servant drowsy and torpid.
Her certainty and faith in her own logic kept her steady throughout that day, and the next; but when on the third day her supply dwindled to a bit of dried fruit, and the snow had begun to fall thick and fast, even the most confident of souls would have curled up, weeping despairingly, in a cave.
When the flow of tears to her aching eyes subsided, Hallah sat up and wiped her face clean with a handful of snow. On a whim, she pulled off her fur-lined gloves and washed her hands in it, as well, remembering mornings spent in her grandmother’s home, folding malleable dough over berries soaked in sugar-water. As she traced the lines in her palm with a cold, wet finger, she tried to imagine herself there again, with a woman who no longer lived.
Tell me, Grandmother, she’d say. Tell me again about Belem.
Her grandmother would smile and glance over at Hallah without breaking her steady rhythm; she kneaded the dough like she was beating a headless drum, silent and steady. Again, wy’Hallah? Haven’t you tired of that story yet? No answer would come; no answer was necessary. Grandmother would smile again. When finally the forest gods knew what the men of Sjever knew – that the King would not stop for any force short of the divine, and even then would fight for the gold he had acquired – they called upon their kinsmen for help. Together, the Twelve crafted a terrible beast. He cleft the skies like a fish does rivers; his movements were fluid and fast and beyond mortal ken. His skin was set with an armor of mountain-stone and he belched fire. They called this beast...
She would trail off, slyly glancing at her entranced granddaughter. Kalum, Hallah would supply as she always had, breathlessly and fairly tingling with anticipation.
Yes, Kalum. The servant. From there the story would progress, following familiar plotlines, told in the same words it had been told in since Hallah’s grandmother learned the story from her own father. There would follow a description of the destruction Kalum wrought – the adjectives tempered or enhanced as the age of the listener dictated – and the ensuing madness of the King. A battle would be fought again in the auditors’ imaginations: flying arrows and flaming winds, screaming horses and the squeal of war machines as the people of Sjever sought to fight off Kalum. But he was divinely created, and not deterred so easily.
Sjever was brought to its knees by this servant of the Nine, and the nameless King swallowed by Kalum’s fire. More men had died in that three day battle than during any years-long war the Tellers could recall.
And Sjever was cursed.
In that chilled pocket on Belem, Hallah repeated her grandmother’s words: no King for Sjever, until one came forth and proved himself to the forest gods, and tamed Kalum’s fire.
Youths from all over Sjever and the surrounding countries flocked to Belem over the next generations. Hallah’s great-grandfather was among the few survivors of Kalum’s original wrath, and stood at the village limits pleading with the men to turn back. Most were full of visions of grandeur and had been fed stories of great heroes since infancy; one old man could not deter them. A few heeded the villager’s warnings and left; the others were never seen again. Eventually, her great-grandfather left the village with his wife and daughters; the destitution of the capital was welcomed after the despair at the foot of Belem.
And now, Hallah thought, now I am here. The wind sang past the mouth of a cave, making a hollow noise; she shivered. Belem was warning her, she was sure.
“But I,” she whispered into the cold darkness of the storm-ravaged cave, “have something they didn’t.”
The storm eventually declined into silence again, and Hallah consumed some snow and the last of her fruit in preparation. The drifts were deep, but her snowshoes were good and her skill, better; she would warm herself by Kalum’s fire this night.
:::
As Hallah struggled up the last incline, the servant of the Nine shifted in his sleep. One long, spaded ear twitched as a breath of cold air infiltrated his winter nest. It curled around the appendage, whispering of footprints in the snow and a heavy pack that had been dropped, of clumsiness brought on by exhaustion and hunger. The breeze circled Kalum’s ear once more and dropped to caress his already fluttering eyelids. Irked, he snapped his jaws; the wind escaped as it always did.
So another had come? He wondered at the audacity of this new foreign princeling, clicked his tongue irritably and wondered how many trained soldiers this one had brought. Well, let them come – after a long and until now undisturbed hibernation, Kalum was hungry.
His yawn made the very stones of the cavern shudder with vibrations; slowly the servant unwound from the position in which he slept, curled ’round and ’round himself like a coil of rope. He stretched once and then dropped his head to the earthen floor once more, ear pressed to the stone. One by one he tracked the interloper’s footsteps until they reached dry stone.
Lips of blackened scale tautened and sneered in a facsimile of a smile, and Kalum waited.
Within minutes, he could see torchlight flickering from behind the last bend; a greedy hiss escaped his throat, and he crouched like a cat ready to pounce. Then came the flame itself, and the oh-so-fragile hand wrapped around its source, and a gasp of shock as firelight glinted of gold –
Kalum opened his jaws, dripping sparks like saliva.
The intruder, who had been slowly advancing towards the heaps of treasure, stopped, turning its shadowed face upward towards the servant’s. One trembling pale hand pulled away the hood to better see the immortal opponent, and –
Kalum’s jaws snapped shut.
A girl. He had never had one of those before, not even during the battle. The gods had been clear: he was only to kill and devour the men bearing arms. But this one had come to him, and the Nine had given him leave to dispose of those seeking greatness as he pleased....
He hissed again, raising his tail and turning it towards her; its very tip flicked against her hood and the fall of brown hair over it. Oh, how she shivered – he would have to be sure not to roast her too long –
“K-Kalum?” the girl spoke. Her whisper reverberated from wall to stone wall, and as she reached for her pack, Kalum noted with rising unease that she carried no weapons.
Listen to her, the mountain beneath his claws insisted. This could be...
His haunches made abrupt contact with the stone floor; the girl’s head whipped up, a look of terror on her face at the thunderous noise. Kalum grinned at her from where he sat. She stared at him aghast for several minutes before reaching back into her bag.
He was not surprised when she then approached, gold glittering from between her fingers. Others had attempted to buy his cooperation before, and the more fools they; what need did the servant have for more riches? They amused him during the long days between challengers, and that was their only purpose. He was a divine tool; the Nine had given him greater motivations than a disgustingly human lust for gold.
The girl-child laid the necklace at his feet. It was a plain thing, without ornamentation or stones; a chain of gold shaped into a vine, a wedding gift like many Kalum had seen before.
“My grandmother wore this on her wedding day,” the girl confirmed the next moment, still speaking a whisper, as she would in a temple. “It was given to her by her father, who had served in the palace before the battle.”
Kalum’s eye moved away from the chain and towards the girl; his long neck snaked forward. She coughed into one hand as a brume of foul-smelling smoke from his black-ringed nostrils wafted towards her, and stumbled backwards a step. Her foot broke through the deteriorating skull of one of her earliest predecessors.
“He was the Lord Steward then, and this was given to him by the nameless one.”
A perse eyelid flickered over a pale amber iris; surprise coursed cold through his veins, and the stone beneath his feet gave an unpleasant lurch which the girl seemed not to feel. Gold from the thief’s coffers!
The girl nudged the necklace forward with her booted toe. “I return to you and your masters Belem’s gold.” She hesitated, then continued. “Sjever has a great need for leadership now. Balfur is massing armies. I am only a kitchen girl in the city, my lord, but I would think that Belem and your trove are not the least of their aims.”
He hissed again; this time, his lips were twisted into a scowl. The girl shuddered at the sight of his anger, but did not run; the stone moved again beneath Kalum’s claws in wordless affirmation, and did not stop. It rolled like waves of earth, and he could not believe she did not feel it, too.
You come with neither sword nor alchemical ice, he projected.
What little color was left in the girl’s cheeks paled to nothing; even without the torch, she would have stood out from the bleak darkness of the cave like a jay among sparrows. “N-no, my Lord. I mean, yes, my Lord.”
Kalum stared at her.
“The curse, my Lord – it did not call for death. Only – only the taming of Kalum’s fire.”
The stone fell suddenly still; a gust of snow-laden wind blasted around them, extinguishing her torch. Kalum drew into himself, shuddering away from the frigid air. When the breeze had died, the only sounds were the husky wheeze of his breath and her frightened gasps....
And then, the servant laughed.
That's just a typo. I originally had more to the sentence - I guess I just forgot to take out the 'and.' I'll revise it directly. Thanks for pointing it out!
