Young Writers Society

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He was at the end of the world.

          A gigantic wall of mountains rose before him like a row of fangs. Icy wind blew down the slopes from the white-blue sky, howling across the plain. Ymgardiel staggered relentlessly forward, fighting it with every step, holding his bearskin cloak around himself as if gripping his very life.

          His foot struck a rock and he teetered on the edge of falling. He barely regained his balance. Grunting, he slammed his foot down and persisted. His parched mouth yearned water, his cold flesh a fire, and his heart home. But still he marched onward. If he did not reach the cave, Illisitair would die.

          An ancient path was carved into the mountain slope ahead of him. Struggling past a rocky outcrop on the border of the tundra, he scrambled onto it, hauling himself up the smooth steps on all fours. His muscles screamed with stress, but he ignored them. The purpose that had drove him beyond the edge of the known and into the murk of oblivion pounded in his brain. He would not let himself stop.

          He was panting, but he could not hear that. His boots scraped on the stone, but neither did that sound reach his ears. The howls of the emaciated mountain wolves converging on him pierced the sky, yet this too evaded him. The greedy wind seized all these sounds them and hurled them away.

          Now he could perceive a ledge up ahead, half-obscuring a black opening in the mountainside. He was halfway there. A secret store of energy suffused him, and with renewed vigour he pressed on, now almost bounding from step to step, although on several occasions he slipped and narrowly avoided striking his face.

          Suddenly, the wind lulled. One moment there had been the all-pervading wail; next there was a strange silence. Ymgardiel did not stop to appreciate it: he leapt up the steps faster than he had with the wind buffeting him.

          Yet one sound suddenly cleaved the deep quiet. A howl. He heard it all too clearly. And then there were others: six in all, from all around him, and a sudden fear urged him on with its crude whip. He spared a glance over his shoulder. One of the beasts followed him along the stair, a pitiful thing covered in matted grey fur, starved and slavering.

          He had some intuition that the others were all around him.

          Ymgardiel cursed and stretched his recent burst of energy to its limits. Barely sixty feet now lay between himself and the ledge, but he could feel his strength waning. Even if he reached it, what hope could he have of defending himself?

          The distance closed. His sole visible hunter hung back, waiting for its kin. In his mind’s eye, Ymgardiel could see them darting through the trees, a circle of them, staring at the slab of walking meat—

          They were on him. Two weights smashed against his back, teeth and claws tearing into the cloak that enveloped him. Ymgardiel fell onto his hands, and the wolf behind him sunk its teeth into his boot. He could feel the tips of its fangs pressing against his flesh.

          But they were light, hardly able to find prey in the freezing desolation of the north. Rage, primal and hot, shot through him; a hateful defiance of the idea he should come so far only to be killed when his prize was so near. With a roar he thrust himself forward and to the side, slamming one of the wolves against the wall of the crevice. It yelped and fell uselessly to the ground.

          His fist collided with the jaw of the other, clamped to the nape of his neck. At first it held fast, but with several blows the wolf cried out and fell away. The one at his heel he shook off and kicked until it relented.

          Then he raced up the stair. Now they were all behind him, flooding up the crevice like a ravenous wave, save for the one he had crushed against the rock. He mounted the ledge. A stray branch lay at the top, and he seized it, whirling on his pursuit.

          They came to an abrupt halt just before the ledge. Terror glimmered in their rapacious eyes. They approached no further. Ymgardiel noticed their gaze went beyond him and towards the maw of the cave behind him.

          He risked a look over his shoulder.

          An entanglement of ropes and bones dangled from the ceiling just within the mouth of the cave. He saw a human skull, arms, and ribcage…but after this was the body of a spider; a great empty carapace and curled legs hung there, a long-dead shell.

          The branch clattered on the ledge. Ymgardiel’s mouth dropped open.

          He began to wonder what exactly he was doing.

          Though only for a moment. Seeing that the wolves were well cowed by the skeleton, or possibly by the place itself, Ymgardiel mustered his courage. He removed a small oil lamp from the backpack that had been concealed by his cloak and lit it, then ventured into the cavern. He walked along the wall in order to maintain as large a gap as possible from the old skeleton.

          After a short stretch of darkness he found that his light was unnecessary. Magnificent luminous crystals, few at first but then appearing in large clusters sprang out of the ceiling and walls. They shone with an eldritch interior light, from pink to burgundy, teal to ultramarine and dozens of others. They illuminated the tunnel.

          The tunnel then opened up into a vast cavern, carved deep into the mountain. His path became nothing but a narrow walkway hanging above an abyss. Ahead, it became a staircase that coiled around a stone pillar.

          With a sigh he mounted the rise and started toward the top. During the climb he noticed symbols marked on the wall in crimson and black, inexplicable designs that were gathered around the light of the crystals. Their presence somehow unnerved him.

          Finally, he made the summit. The surface at the top of the pillar was broad and flat, and set into it in the centre was a black dome that looked like glass.

          Ymgardiel looked back the way he had come. The stairs dwindled into the gloom, and the walkway he had travelled was now a distant thread running through an ocean of darkness. He turned away from it quickly.

          He set his backpack down on the pillar and approached the dome. He had taken but two steps when a dark shape flickered above it like a wraith. It quickly materialized into the image of a human.

          The apparition was tall and dark-skinned, wearing naught but a black silk loincloth. An interwoven lacework of golden tattoos covered its entire body. Its build was sinuous and voluptuous but muscular, both feminine and masculine; for the first time Ymgardiel understood the word “androgyne.” Its face was as perfect as a sculpture, carved to a precise beauty that shattered Ymgardiel’s perceptions. Thick obsidian hair tumbled to its heels. He found himself simultaneously lusting for and loathing it, and through this found himself unable to speak.

          “Welcome,” it said, its voice chiming with countless male and female echoes. The noise harassed his mind like an itch. Still he remained silent.

          It stepped forward from the black dome and toward him, towering over him by several feet. Ymgardiel felt both the urge to strike it in horror and to submit his body to it. At last he remembered his purpose, and drove both impulses away.

          “You are the djinn?” he asked. It nodded and licked its lips. He sucked in breath apprehensively.

          It cupped his chin, supple fingers rubbing his jaw. “It has been many years since man or woman has come to my distant abode.” Then it leaned down, pressing its plump lips against his ear:

          “I yearn.”

          With a force of will he stepped back from the creature. Anger flashed across its face.

          “I did not come here for your pleasure,” Ymgardiel said. “Legend holds you serve mankind with your power.”

          “Thus I am bound,” it whispered passionately.

          “I demand that boon,” Ymgardiel said. The djinn made a faint sound in its mouth like a moan and smiled.

          “You demand it,” it said excitedly. “Shall you not demand more? Surely I have more to offer.” It trailed long fingers down its chest.

          Ymgardiel flinched. “Curse you, djinn. A life hangs in the balance. I do not have the time to play games with you.”

          “Oh,” it said, feigning regret. It pouted. Then a malicious smirk appeared on its lips. “Had I but known that human lives were matters of such import.”

          Ymgardiel scowled, an expression rare upon his face. “Grant me my wish, djinn.”

          “That is your desire?” it teased. It stroked itself once more, slowly and suggestively; once delving beneath the loin cloth. Despite himself Ymgardiel’s eyes were unable to stray from its roving hands.

          “Yes,” he croaked. Then, more firmly: “Yes, blast you!”

          It sighed, curling a tress of hair around one of its fingers petulantly, yet as with all its actions it maintained an erotic undercurrent. Ymgardiel forced his gaze from its physique, both sensuous and virile. He balled his fists.

          “A plague lays waste to my people,” he said. “Even I, whose healing is unmatched, have found no way to cure it. This is my wish: that I be given the power to cure all diseases with but a touch.”

          “An ambitious desire,” it said. It licked its fingers. “Very ambitious.”

          “You are required to grant it,” Ymgardiel boomed, his knuckles turning white.

          “And so I shall. But first, my due,” it declared.

          “What? You—” Ymgardiel began, but before he could finish the sentence the djinn’s firm hands clasped his cheeks, a touch that evoked carnal desire that shattered his sanity, and at the same time a dread that silenced all thought. The djinn leaned down to him and kissed him on the mouth; an in those few seconds he experienced both the bliss of heaven and the torment of hell. He could have relished the moment forever in unfathomable revulsion.

          Then the djinn broke away. It was an experience Ymgardiel would never forget; one that until his death would evoke the deepest lust and strongest abhorrence he would ever feel.

          “Now your wish,” it said to the stunned Ymgardiel. The room seemed to shimmer with a blue haze, the crystals grew brighter, and the symbols on the wall pulsed with a sudden life.

          “Aszu I’ya vitoya viyatoy, liopa xinepu, amul. Henceforth shall you possesses this craft, Ymgardiel Rulkado Alatanien, Man of Viusta: that when skin of another meets yours, so shall their sicknesses vanish.”

          Ymgardiel had recovered some of his rational thought, and was about to speak when the djinn continued—

          “But also shall this touch provoke in them a great repulsion, and a hatred for you that surpasses all reason, and so for every man, woman or child you cure so another person on this earth shall hate you for your gift. And all the makings of man that you touch shall wither and rot upon contact, and so you shall be shunned by all; for gold and wood and stone and fur manipulated by man shall become as a foul and reproachable thing; turned sour and decayed.

          “Thus is your wish granted, and with it the curse of the djinn.”

          A terrible hatred seized Ymgardiel. With a great roar he leapt forward, but the djinn leapt back beyond his grasp, and before he could approach further it stepped upon the glassy dome and disappeared.

          Ymgardiel howled with anger and grief at the walls, his voice echoing throughout the great cavern, mocking him. For a while he fumed and attacked the dome as he could, attempting to destroy it, but it proved invulnerable.

          At last he decided to leave. There was Illisitair to return to, and to heal.

          Ymgardiel picked up his pack. But no sooner had it lifted from the ground than it fell from his hands, a stinking rotten sack; leaving nothing but a tattered strip of fabric in his hands. Then he noticed that his cloak had become blackened and decayed, a massive filthy epidermis, and when he parted it he saw too that all his clothes had become old and rotten as if having sat for decades in a swamp.

          He bellowed his ire at the empty cavern.

                                                               EPILOGUE

Ymgardiel clambered into the small cave that he had left Illisitiar sheltered in several days before. His face was red and numb, as were his hands and feet. His rotten clothes provided little shelter against the fog.

          Illisitair too looked horrible. Her bronze skin had paled, and her auburn hair hung lank and lusterless. Her skin was clammy and she wheezed with every breath. Yet to him she was still beautiful, and even then despite the frostbite gnawing at him and the anger still burning in him like old coals he felt love again; the indomitable love that had been forged between them on their journey north.

          He knelt down beside her, not noticing the large patches of rot appearing on her cloak. Now he noticed small blue-black marks on her face, signs of the plague. With a sigh he touched her face.

          There was a hiss of indrawn breath. He drew his hand back worriedly, and saw that her skin now had reclaimed its vital tanned hue. The sores had vanished.

          She had been completely healed.

          Her eyes fluttered, first quickly and then more ponderously, until she opened them completely and looked up at him. Her eyes lit up and she beamed. Ymgardiel stirred with a passion that not even the djinn could muster in him.

          “Ymgardiel,” she sighed. “I was prepared to die.”

          “Everything is fine now,” he smiled.

          “I had the worst feeling before being woken. It was…terrible.” She frowned, and so did Ymgardiel, feeling a sudden shudder of anxiety within him. She looked down at his garb.

          “Your cloak, your clothes—Ymgardiel, what happened to them?”

          “It’s nothing,” he said quietly. “I have done what I came for, and now you are healed. We can return to Viusta, where I will cure the others and we can live happily.”

           Illisitair breathed in deeply, touched her face and sat up. A look of wonder appeared on her features. She stared at him wide-eyed.

          “You healed me,” she said in awe-struck tones. “You did it!” She cried with joy and threw herself upon him. But before he could even lift his arms to hug her she recoiled, shrieking, and threw herself against the wall, staring at him with her face so twisted with horror that even he could not find beauty in it.

          Please, god, no, he thought despairingly. No!

          “Illisitair,” he said desperately.

          She screamed again, and clutched at her face, and at the rest of her body, as if she had been soiled beyond reckoning. Then she looked at him again with more loathing and disgust he could have thought possible.

          Ymgardiel reached out to touch her, to comfort her, but she screamed again, louder this time, and curled against the wall.

          “Don’t touch me!” she screeched, now shaking and weeping. He tried once more and she howled even louder.

          Ymgardiel fled the cave and ran into the wilderness. He never saw her again.

                                                                    NOTES

                                                                OF YMGARDIEL:

Ymgardiel was a healer from Viusta, a small village in the more northern regions of the world. He was known within a wide area for his skill, and few cases of disease or injury rose above his skills.

     In the 493rd year of the Miuraean Calendar, however, a plague appeared not only in his village but all across the northern rim of civilization. Ymgardiel had often heard from a wise man of the djinns, powerful beings of arcane nature who would grant one wish in a lifetime per human. He was told in ancient times they were held secret by the powerful and used in dire circumstances.

     Thus Ymgardiel embarked for the one still known of, far off in the northern wastes beyond the limits of all living knowledge. With him came Illisitair, a friend of Ymgardiel, whose own children had died of the plague.

     Along the journey they fell in love, however Illisitair soon showed late-appearing signs of the plague. Ymgardiel was forced to leave her a day’s travel away from the mountains.

     *The wolves that appeared at the beginning were later deterred by Ymgardiel’s curse.

                                                               OF DJINNS:

Djinns were indeed coveted and secreted by the powerful in ancient times. They provided djinns the favours they desired in turn for their power, although the limit of one wish per person per lifetime remained. This was often overcome by forcing others to make wishes they desired.

     However, over time their knew keepers were less liberal, and denied the djinns their pleasures, and thus these beings grew resentful of humanity and over time added worse and worse curses to their wishes.

     Soon, the djinns were banished to far corners of the world, for it was not known how they could be destroyed or removed. There they were bound forever, sealed in their abodes by powerful symbols on the walls of their lairs (as Ymgardiel saw).

     There the djinns still wait, doing what they can to revenge themselves against the world.

     *The curse is always equal (in the djinn’s reckoning) to the wish.

     **The skeleton that Ymgardiel sees at the mouth of the cave was probably set there as a warning against those who would otherwise wish to enter. The djinn, having not the power to leave its pillar, would have been unable to remove it.

                                                              _______

Short story I whipped up. Any comments?