Flash Fiction Friday: Cliffhanger, Part II

So last week, I wrote half a story, and left Gorg the Troll on the side of a cliff.  Finishing that one is someone else's job now.  To be specific, it's Jemima Pett's job.  Pop over and see how she finished it.  I'll probably post my own finish next week, unless I like hers so much better I dump mine.  And I, meanwhile, have finished her story (it wasn't necessarily supposed to work out that way, but I liked her story and she named the main character Rebecca and took her hiking, and. . . well, I just had to).

Here's the link to the Chuck Wendig post explaining it all.

And here's Jemima's story from last week, Girl on a Ledge. You'll probably want to read that first if you haven't already.

And I think I've only brought us to another turn in the story.  Back over to you, Jemima!

Girl on a Ledge, Part II

Rebecca tried to convince herself that anything was better than being stuck on that cliff back on Earth.  Falling into an orange sky at low gravity?  She could handle it.

Back on Earth?

No, she couldn’t handle it.  She opened her mouth to scream.

Then she closed it.  No, really, she could handle this.  She wasn’t falling, she was floating.  Rebecca closed her eyes for a moment to enjoy the sensation.  If she spread out her arms would she soar like a hawk?  She opened her eyes and tried it, and realized that she was no longer falling toward an orange sky, but gliding above an orange landscape.

Clearly a dream, she thought.  I always wanted to dream of flying.  The thought comforted her, though the thought of the worm niggled at her mind.  She knew that worm.  If she could only remember where from.  Then she decided she was thinking of the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, which wasn’t at all helpful.  At least, it hadn’t been for Alice.  And there was no worm here.

At last Rebecca drifted down to the billowing orange surface she’d taken for sky.  She sank into it a little, then stabilized.  She could stand on it, whatever it was.  Maybe clouds?  It was like nothing she’d ever seen before, but a glimpse of the worm disappearing over a hill of the stuff started her off at a trot.  The surface gave beneath her feet, springing back to make running a joy.  She crested the rise and there was no sign of the worm.  She stopped, and knelt to feel the “ground.”  It was the same stuff as the non-rock that had formed the luge-course that had brought her here.  Wherever “here” was. 

With a mental shrug, Rebecca started walking again.  A long time later, bored silly, she said aloud, “This isn’t much of a dream.”

“You think this is a dream?”  The high-pitched voice that had lured her off the nice, solid, Earthly cliff was back in her ear.

“It has to be.  I don’t climb cliffs.  And I don’t fall through wormholes into alternative realities, or whatever this is meant to be.”

“I see.”  The voice, which she was beginning to believe was that of the worm, continued to sound all around, so she couldn’t spot the speaker.  It made her cranky.

“And I don’t like orange,” Rebecca announced loudly.

“I do apologize,” the voice said.  “I thought—your hair—”  It seemed to be having trouble saying it.

“My hair is NOT orange,” Rebecca grumbled.  “It is red.  Copper, if you want, but never, ever orange.  I do not like orange,” she repeated.  The sense of overwhelming reality that had come over her when clinging to the cliff face was long gone, and it seemed both reasonable and very odd to be arguing over the color of the ground, if ground it was.  The only reason now to doubt she was dreaming was that she’d never in her life had dreams like this.  Not even the time she’d eaten an entire anchovy pizza, washed down by three pints of root beer.  Of course, that had given her no dreams at all, because she’d been sick all night.

“Oh, very well,” grumbled the voice—the worm?  The surface under Rebecca’s feet shifted and swirled, and came up the color of a new-minted penny.  “Is that better?”

“Why does it have to match my hair?” Rebecca asked cautiously.

A sound like a mosquito buzzing in her ear was the only answer, and with a sigh she walked on.  Did this strange place have water?  She wanted a drink.

A long time later Rebecca had another idea.  She stopped walking, and lay down.  The strange springy surface made a surprisingly comfortable bed.  She stretched out, closed her eyes, and slept.

Panic.  She was trapped in something simultaneously soft and unyielding, and if she didn’t break loose she would die.  Rebecca awoke with a gasp and sat up.  Rather, she tried to sit up.  She was trapped in an orange cocoon, unable to free herself.  Thrashing in increasing terror, she struggled until one hand came free and she could push the hood off of her face.  Drawing a deep breath, trying to still her racing pulse and generate a rational thought, she fumbled for the zipper on the sleeping bag.  Pushing it down until she could move freely, she collapsed on the scrunched-up jacket that served as a pillow and took several calming breaths. 

That had been a weird dream.  No wonder, with the sleeping bag so completely fastened up over her face.  “I hate mummy bags,” she muttered.  But at least the dream was over.  No cliffs, no weird land, no elusive worm.

Then she opened her eyes.

A large, hairy face peered down at her from where the roof of the tent should have been.  Its breath was foul, and the teeth sharp.

She closed her eyes again and thought about the worm and the cloud-land.  Cautiously, she opened her eyes, keeping fingers and toes crossed. 

The tent, the sleeping bag, and the bear were gone.  She was lying on a coppery cloud.  The now-familiar voice squeaked, “Are you ready now?  There isn’t a lot of time.”

“Tell me what I have to do,” Rebecca answered with a sigh.  “I don't like cliffs and I don't like bears, so I guess I must be ready.”

Flash Fiction Friday: Cliffhanger

This week and next, Chuck Wendig (usual disclaimer about NSFC) has set up an interesting challenge: write a thousand-words and leave us with a cliffhanger.  Then we hope another writer will pick up on the challenge and write the conclusion.  Not to worry: if they don't, and probably even if they do, I'll be back to finish the story myself.  But next week I'll be finishing someone else's story.

Update: Find Jemima Pett's continuation of Gorg's story here. I'll be back eventually to offer my own completion--though hers might find it's way into a revised version of my version. . .

Gorg In Pursuit of Bale (Part one)

Gorg the Troll stood amidst the sulfurous exhalations of the Valley of Baleful Stones and watched the balloon disappear into the distance.  Aboard was the one human Gorg really wanted to kill, Duke Bale the Artichoke-Hearted.  Now Gorg had no way of reaching him, no way of knowing where he would alight.

Despite the slanderous stereotypes about trolls, Gorg was a peace-loving person, if a troll can be called a person.  Entity.  He was a peaceful entity.  Only, in the last month, he’d killed two sorcerers.  Both had been servants of Duke Bale.  The first had turned several members of Gorg’s family back into stone, at Bale’s command.  The second had been trying to prevent him from reaching Bale to exact the revenge both troll and human tradition demanded.  He hoped Bale would be the third and last.

To kill Bale, he would have to find him.   Gorg turned in the direction of the wind and began walking.

##

Three days later, Gorg had left all signs of sulfurous stones behind, and found the land climbing steadily.  The rock here was different, lighter and more appealing, with a slightly spicy flavor and a good crunch.  The air was better, too.  The balloon was long gone from sight, but Gorg kept following the wind, hoping he would eventually hear word of the Duke. 

Unfortunately, he heard no word of anything, because the lands he traversed lacked inhabitants, at least who could speak.  Gorg tried to talk to the coyotes, but they wouldn’t stop to chat, and he didn’t even know what some of the other creatures were.  The land kept climbing, and he saw more small furry animals, but nothing that could talk to him.

It might have made more sense to go around the mountains, return to the lands of men and wait to hear of Bale.  But Gorg had a simple mind.  He’d set out to follow the winds that had carried his enemy out of reach, and he continued to do so, day after day.  Fortunately for Gorg, it was summer, so he didn’t freeze.  Gorg was a Drylands Troll, adapted to deserts.  Heat didn’t bother him, and trolls didn’t drink except for pleasure, but he had no experience of cold.  Even in midsummer, as he climbed higher he began to find nights a bit uncomfortable. 

If Gorg had been more of a thinker, he might have gone to seek out a representative of the king.  It was the king who had banished Bale to the Valley of Baleful Stones, and it was the king, ultimately, that Bale was after.  King Celery the Half-Wit wasn’t much good, but his ministers did make a point of keeping track of would-be regicides, if only in case they wanted to make use of them.  For the most part, though, the ministers, like most of the denizens of the kingdom, preferred a king who did very little.  They had no wish to allow Bale to succeed.

They would have been happy to help Gorg achieve his goal, had they but known of his single-minded pursuit of the killer.

###
Gorg paused in his pursuit of the long-vanished balloon.  The wind had changed direction.  It no longer led him up the mountains, but now blew along the face.  Even Gorg knew that the balloon was far ahead and probably not following the same winds, even if it were still aloft.  But he had no other guide.  When he pursued the sorcerer Mergle, he’d been guided by a magical trail left for another.  When he crossed the Iron Desert to find the Valley of Baleful Stones, he’d followed a tip from a gnome met in a tavern.  Now he followed the wind.

What he was rapidly learning didn’t make sense was to attempt to traverse the faces of the mountains.  Now, instead of climbing steadily, his route took him constantly up and down, clawing his way up steep slopes and crumbling glacial moraines—though those provided a variety of interesting rocks on which to snack—only to drop again into deep valleys and fathomless gorges.

What’s more, as he went north along the range, the slopes grew steeper and more challenging.  Trolls are made of stone, and climb well because they can cling to that from which they were born.  But even Gorg was beginning to find some of the canyons a bit precarious.  And nearly every one was filled with a roaring stream of milky water, laden with grit and rolling stones.  Gorg was less comfortable with water than stone, though his immense stony weight allowed him to ford streams that would have washed even the boldest human away in seconds.

And still he would not digress from following the wind.

Inevitably, the worst happened.  Gorg was partway down yet another cliff when he looked below for the first time.  In the dark, shaded depths of the canyon, he caught the gleam of water.  He descended a bit further, fingers and toes growing into the tiny cracks in the wall that allowed him to scale cliffs no human could.

Now he could see that the water filled the gorge.  Completely.  Worse, it was not rushing past as the other streams had done.  This water lay still, its dark surface suggesting unknown depths.  Gorg froze.  Only one thing could stop his pursuit of Bale, and now it seemed he had found it: deep water.  No troll could swim.  That would be expecting too much of a being made from stone. 

Unable to more forward, equally unable to grasp the need to go back or around, Gorg froze in place, sending deeper and deeper roots into the stone of the canyon while his mind sought desperately for answers. 

In minutes, he would be too deeply attached to the stone to move again.

###

Yeah, I know.  The whole cliff thing was supposed to be metaphorical. But hey, sometimes I'm just feeling literal. . .  So sue me.