Friday Flash: The Last Buffalo

My usual source of writing prompts is up to something, and this week he only asked us to provide an exactly three word title. I did that, and then picked one to use for my own. This one is courtesy of Samuel Huddleston. It's 904 words, and seems to have been infiltrated by a favorite character from some of Jemima Pett's flash fiction.

The Last Buffalo

The hunters were having a wonderful time. The herds had been vast and the shooting good. They feasted on buffalo tongue and skinned out the best of the animals, leaving it to Caleb to tan them. Caleb got stuck with most of the scut work around camp, but this time it was of necessity. The man—really, more of a half-grown boy—was the only one who could tan a hide properly.

Caleb watched the other hunters while he went about his work. They were getting drunk, as usual. Carruthers was the leader, and he liked his drink. He wasn’t even really a hunter. He called himself an archaeologist, but what Caleb thought was that he was just an adventurer, and one who thought himself better than most other people.

They’d chase away the herds, noisy as they were. That wouldn’t break Caleb’s heart. There was a good chance they’d bring the Indians down on them, too. Most of them, like Carruthers and his best pal Jones, thought they were more than a match for a few Indians. Others thought that the Indians had been fully tamed in this region.

Tamed. Caleb snorted, not that anyone heard him. Starved, more like. But while hunger could make the fighters less able, it certainly didn’t make them any less angry. Caleb thought that pretty soon the hunters would be shut up for good.

Caleb was a half-breed, the despised offspring of a white trapper and a Lakota woman, which was why the hunters treated him like dirt. Never mind that his parents had been faithful to one another, and had known more about living on this land than these Great White Hunters would ever learn. Caleb was of mixed blood, and so was deserving of contempt. Carruthers was the worst. He called Caleb “boy” and ordered him to bring tea. Caleb poured coffee and made sure to spill some on the leader.

Caleb staked out the last hide, and began scraping it as he’d learned from both his mother and father. The early trappers in this area had had more in common with the Indians than with most of the whites who were coming into the country now. They had trapped too many beaver, because they were greedy, but at least they knew how to preserve the skins, and they ate as much as they could of any animals that were edible.

Caleb had to admit that these hunters also ate as much as they could. But even twenty big, loud men couldn’t make a dent in the meat of 50 or 100 buffalo in a single night, and they had been killing at that rate for a week. They were supposed to be doing it for the hides, which were valuable enough back east. But no one could save and tan that many hides, and when they went wild with the killing most of the animals were left on the ground untouched.

Only Caleb had noticed that many of the abandoned carcasses were butchered out overnight. Somewhere nearby a Sioux camp was smoking and drying meat in unheard-of quantities, and still they couldn’t save a tenth of what had been killed.

When he was done with the final hide, Caleb slipped off into the darkness. Carruthers was calling for him, to come do some camp chore or other, but the boy was finished. He picked up a pair of the fully-tanned hides, as much as he could carry, and disappeared into the night.

The hides helped ensure his welcome at the Indian camp. The news he brought did more, as did the rifle he hadn’t set aside when he picked up the heavy buffalo robes.

“They are drinking heavily,” he told the men. “Tonight would be a good night to stop the killing of the buffalo.” He indicated the well-tanned hides he had brought. “There are dozens more of these, and rifles, and coffee.”

The Indians didn’t seem to care about the coffee. That was a white man’s taste that Caleb had learned from his father, before that wandering man had wandered into the path of a buffalo stampede. It was his father’s death that had made Caleb join the buffalo hunters. Killing the animals had seemed like the way to avenge the old trapper, but Caleb had learned the hard way that revenge is seldom sweet, and never when taken on an animal. Now he felt only a soul-sickness at the thought of their butchery.

He had unleashed these men on the herds. Caleb, to his shame, had guided the hunters to the buffalo when they might otherwise have wandered in the grasslands until they died of starvation, never more than a few miles from abundant game. The white men were not hunters, but only killers. They couldn’t find their prey.

Now Caleb would set the balance right once more. Caleb led the Sioux warriors back through the darkness to where twenty drunken men lay carelessly asleep about the dying embers of a fire, surrounded by hundreds of dead buffalo.

Caleb heard the wolves howling, as they did every night. Wolves liked to kill their own meat, but they weren’t stupid enough to pass up a fresh corpse.

Tonight they’d have a new kind of meat, he thought, and shuddered.

He took a deep breath and led the others into the camp. These men had killed their last buffalo.

So had Caleb.

###

Of course, they aren't buffalo at all. They're bison. Buffalo don't live in the Western Hemisphere.

Friday Flash: Return to the Valley of Baleful Stones

With no prompt from Chuck Wendig this week, I rooted through various old prompts, stared blankly for a long time at a page with a glorious title (which I still hope to use, if the story ever comes to me), and concluded that I would return with pleasure to Gorg Trollheim. Gorg has starred in a number of stories, something of a serial, which you can find here. That's a list of all my short stories; scroll to the bottom for the Gorg Saga. I made it exactly 1000 words this time (though that's mostly luck).

Return to the Valley of Baleful Stones

Gorg Trollheim was angry. A careful observer could have seen this wrath, which was great enough to be just visible even on his stone features. A wise observer, seeing this, would have stayed well out of his way. Gorg was large, even for a troll, and a seasoned fighter.

As far as Gorg could tell, there were no observers, wise or foolish, as he strode across the Iron Desert toward the Valley of Baleful Stones. Nor did anyone impede his path.

It was spring, and even the Iron Desert bloomed. Tiny golden flowers misted the flats, and in the cracks and nooks on the edges, flashes of red and blue disclosed larger flowers. It was beautiful in its own way, and Gorg didn’t care. It all looked red through the rage that filled him.

Duke Bale the Artichoke Hearted had trapped him again, and Gorg was beyond fed up. He’d slept through most of the winter and into the spring, under a spell put on him by Bale’s latest pet mage. Had it been Katerina of the Vale of Kale? She had imprisoned him in Bale’s tower, but when last seen appeared to have thought better of her employment and gone elsewhere.

No, the sorcerer who had trapped him in the cave, and whose grey magic had made him sleep for weeks (or months? Gorg had no way of knowing) had been male. Gorg could still hear the villain’s laugh echoing in his ears.

That was odd, come to think of it.

Gorg struggled to think of it. Even in the spring sun, the desert warmth wasn’t enough to thaw and speed his brains enough for this conundrum. He took a sip from the flask at his belt, and his thoughts accelerated. The potion had been meant to confuse, but the inventor had tested it only on humans. Troll brains were different. Now Gorg could work things out.

How had Bale gotten a new sorcerer in place so soon after the last had left him? And so soon after he’d died? For surely Bale had died—again—when Gorg collapsed his tower on him.

Gorg found a rare loose pebble on the desert floor, picked it up, and crunched it in his teeth, the chewing and the flavor helping him think.

Answer: Bale couldn’t have hired the sorcerer after Katerina left. That left two possibilities. Either Bale had anticipated him and had an extra sorcerer lined up in advance, or someone else wanted Gorg dead.

Gorg Trollheim thought about it some more. Or not dead, but delayed? After all, trapping a troll in a cave wasn’t apt to be fatal, nor had the long sleep seemed to harm him in any way. So why would Bale switch from killing him to merely delaying him? Had Bale had this extra—and very powerful—sorcerer all along? Was that how he kept returning from the dead?

If the new sorcerer wasn’t Bale’s man, did that mean Bale might have stayed dead this time? And to whom did he answer, if not Bale?

It was most confusing. Gorg took another sip of the potion. His mind, already whirling through the possibilities, raced from idea to idea until he was dizzy. He sat down on a rock and waited for clarity.

Gorg had reached the edge of the desert, and the entrance to Bale’s valley. He sat and waited for his ideas to sort themselves out and his thoughts to slow enough for him to focus on one at a time. Gradually, patterns emerged in his brain and he worked out one key point.

The wielder of the grey magic couldn’t have known, when he first enchanted Gorg, what had become of Bale.

That led to other thoughts, but they all came back to: either Grey worked for Bale, or he didn’t.

Either Bale was still dead, or he wasn’t.

At least one of those questions would be answered by entering the Valley of Baleful Stones.

Gorg entered the valley.

The Baleful vale looked just as when he had seen it for the first time, not the last time. Steaming vents in the walls leaked reeking fumes, and the castle tower stood as though it had been there a thousand years and would stand a thousand more.

And the valley was dotted with statues of trolls. Statues which Gorg knew to be his friends and relations, returned to the stone from which they were born. That they had been brought here to die could mean only one thing: Bale was alive, and was taunting him.

Gorg’s wrath boiled over.

He would not look at the trolls. He didn’t want to know who had suffered Bale’s wrath. He stormed past the frozen trolls to the base of the tower, where a lone figure stood, grey-caped and hooded, a faceless wizard guarding the evil man within.

“Leave at once, Gorg Trollheim, and never return, and I will let you live,” the sorcerer said, his voice both stern and yet somehow enticing.

In his wrath, Gorg was impervious to enchanting words. He spoke his own: “Bring the trolls to life, and you may live when I slay your master.” His potion still guided his tongue.

The sorcerer laughed. “Why should I do that? You won’t live long enough to harm either me or Bale.”

Gorg’s stone fist crashed down on the grey hood in a killing blow, and passed though, meeting nothing.

The sorcerer’s words, in a mystic tongue that gave them power, echoed from the valley walls.

They faded to silence, and still Gorg stood.

Troll and the image of the mage gazed at one another.

“You are powerful,” Gorg said. “ Why work for Bale?”

The only answer was a laugh that echoed off the hillsides as the spell had done. Gorg pushed past the grey cloak and hood and entered the tower. He would crush Bale himself this time.

The empty grey robe did not stop him.

###

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2016  

    Left off the other stuff: Don't forget to enter the GR Giveaway for  Death By Trombone, released today!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Death By Trombone

by Rebecca Douglass

Giveaway ends January 31, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Friday Flash Fiction: Gorg in Winter, Part 2

Still no Wendig Challenges, so I'll move right on to the next part of Gorg's story, continuing the episode I began last week.

Gorg at Midwinter, Part 2

Gorg stood by the base of the tower from which he’d just escaped, and let the wind batter icy snow crystals against his stone face. He was cold to his stone core, and far from home, but he was back on the ground and he was free.

And he had a job to do.

Gorg looked back up at the tower. Had Duke Bale the Artichoke Hearted really believed that prison could hold him? Or was it a trick? Gorg pulled a small flask from his belt and took a swig of the Tongue-Knotter. It had been devised to render a person incapable of coherent speech or thought, and it did. It had the opposite effect on trolls.

Gorg felt his thought processes accelerating as he moved away from the tower and into the blinding, swirling snow. If Bale was as smart as Gorg had to believe he was, the latest pet sorcerer would be waiting for him. This sorcerer had been powerful enough to magically lift the stone-fleshed Gorg and imprison him in a sealed tower room.

Mind whirling under the influence of the potion, Gorg ducked his head, turned, and plowed through the storm back toward the castle. The sorcerer would be waiting just beyond the buildings, where the rocks formed a natural shelter. That was the obvious place for Gorg to go when he escaped, so he didn’t go there.

A minute later, in the lee of the castle, Gorg decided he should have taken an extra swig from the flask. There, waiting for him with a look of business-like determination, was the sorcerer.

“I though this would be the night,” the wizard said. “You didn’t really think we failed to notice how you were enlarging the window, did you?”

Gorg looked at the sorcerer. This one was different from Bale’s last two henchmen, with whom Gorg had dealt rather permanently. This one—how had he failed to see it before?—was a henchwoman.

“You can’t stop me,” Gorg said as bluntly as if it were true.

“I could turn you into stone without even lifting a finger,” she said. “As it happens, Bale has merely asked me to relocate you. To one of the sulfur vents.” It would be warm there. Warm enough to melt even a troll.

“But you won’t,” he said.

“Why not? It’s what Bale paid me to do. He seems to be rather fed up with you.”

“As am I with him. I have prevented him from taking over the country, and put the fear of trolls into his soul. And you are willing to let him make you a murderer for a few bits precious metals?”

“Is there a better reason?”

Gorg thought about that. One part of his mind was working on the basic goal of keeping her talking, which would keep her from dunking him into the steam vents. Another part of his mind was working on a good reason why she shouldn’t do Bale’s bidding.

“Are you aware of what happened to Bale’s last two pet sorcerers?”

“Well, yes. And I know that you were responsible for that. So that would give me an extra reason to take care of you, wouldn’t it?”

“Why? Were they kin of yours? The way most of Bale’s victims in the troll world were kin of mine? Why avenge those fellows? They were lousy people and worse sorcerers.”

His words seemed to be making some inroads into her mind, which unlike his was not stone, though it might have been near to ice by this time. That would even matters a bit. Gorg eased a little closer to the castle wall, where it felt almost warm by comparison with the wind-swept valley beyond.

“Don’t come any closer, Gorg.”

“Just getting warmer,” Gorg answered, trying to read her face. That was asking too much. Trolls’ stone faces gave very little away, and that meant a troll wasn’t really equipped to read human faces. “Do you have a name?”

“I am Katerina of The Vale of Kale. What’s it to you?”

Gorg sighed. “Just trying to keep things friendly. Are you going to try to take me, Katerina of Kale? That might force me to do something we would both regret.”

It was a mostly empty threat, but he would certainly make the effort. Could a reverted troll—one who had been returned to the stone from which they all sprung—regret anything? Idly, he let his fingers explore the stones beside him. If he could just get one loose…

All Gorg was thinking of was pulling out a stone to throw at the sorceress, as he had no other weapon. But as his fingers insinuated themselves into the gaps between the hastily-laid stones, he began to smile.

As the smile grew on Gorg’s face, one faded from Katerina’s. She looked long and hard at the hand which seemed to have become a part of the castle wall, and turned pale. If she moved him now, a big chunk of the castle would go along.

“I can still turn you to stone,” she pointed out.

“And when I fall over, because I’m holding myself up with living muscles, not stone, I will take the castle with me.” Gorg didn’t know if it was true, but it felt right. His fingers had insinuated themselves deep into the structure of the wall. “Is there anyone inside besides Bale?” Gorg needed to know.

“No. No one will work for him anymore. He is supposed to be dead.”

“No one but you,” Gorg pointed out.

“Not any more,” said Katarina of Kale, and vanished. Gorg hoped she had relocated herself to the Vale of Kale, and that the wind there was not blowing ice in anyone’s face.

Gorg looked thoughtfully at the wall, where his fingers twined in and through the stones. Then he began to lumber away, letting go of nothing.

###

©Rebecca M. Douglass

Did you enjoy this story? Do you like fantasy? Load your eReader with my latest book, Halitor the Hero, a fantasy for 10-year-olds of all ages! Use the Smashwords code AV66V to get it at 40% off! Just click on the cover image:

Friday Flash Fiction: Gorg in the Castle of King Celery the Halfwit

Yes!  Flash Fiction Friday has migrated all the way to Sunday!  I was very busy this week, but I did manage to squeeze out a little time to continue the on-going story of Gorg the Troll.  For earlier segments of his story, see here, here, here, here, and here.  It's not necessary to read them first, but it's probably more fun to let the story develop.  This offering is just under 1100 words.

In the Castle of King Celery the Halfwit

Five trolls moved heavily (the only way trolls can move) through the City of Celestial Celery in the direction of the castle of King Celery the Halfwit.  In one of the thousand rooms in that castle their greatest enemy lounged in the lap of luxury.  Had King Celery only the wit to know it, the man was also his greatest enemy, but Celery was not called The Halfwit for nothing.  Bale played the madman and plotted the overthrow of the man who fed and housed him.

Trolls are not noted for their brains, but it must be said that the five who approached the castle had far more than the king, even individually--a low standard, but one they easily beat.  The five trolls--five friends, to the pleased surprise of Gorg Trollheim, who had been a loner so long he didn't know there was any other choice--had created what they hoped was a plan.  They knew the steps they needed: enter the castle, find Duke Bale the Artichoke Hearted, and reduce him to dust.  The details, however, were a bit vague. 

A good fourth step to have planned would have been “escape alive,” as King Celery considered the Duke to be hopelessly insane and thus harmless and worthy of protection.  The leap from "insane" to "harmless" was a perfect example of his hopeless stupidity.  Bale might have been insane, but he was by no means harmless.

The trolls were less concerned about protecting the king than they were with exacting their revenge.  In pursuit of his own nefarious ends, Bale had turned several of Gorg's kin back into the stone from which trolls came.  Or rather, because even such a small change required magic--trolls are nearly stone even at their most animated--Bale had directed his pet sorcerer to convert the trolls.

Gorg had dealt with Mergle months before.  He'd also taken care of Stenrect, Bale's next magical assistant.  But Bale himself remained always just out of reach.  While Gorg had battled Stenrect, for example, Bale had floated to freedom in a gas-filled balloon.  The five trolls had vowed to put an end to his escapes, in the most final way.

So, with the night well spent, they moved up the cobbled streets, stopping occasionally to snack on a loose stone.  Up, toward the castle that topped the hill, surrounded by high-walled gardens. The first test came at the outer gates.  The guards were unlikely to admit a single troll, let alone five.  But Gorg and Pulgrum Stonelump had come up with a plan.  They loaded Herg Rockling and Pulgrum's brother, Krump, onto a cart along with the fifth troll, Daisy Basalt.  They dragged the heavy cart slowly up the last blocks to the gate, saluted smartly--Gorg rather overdid it and chips flew from his forehead where his hand struck--and said "Delivery of statues for the King's rock garden, sir!"

The guard, sleepy and stupid in the last hour before dawn, waved them in, only vaguely wondering why the king would want such ugly statues for his garden.  Perhaps he figured they would frighten off the birds that ate the young vegetables.  Gorg would have been surprised to know what the guard was thinking.  He considered young Krump, and especially Daisy, very good looking indeed.  They would add a touch of class to any rock garden.

As soon as they were out of sight of the guard, Pulgrum asked, "Where are the gardens?"  That stumped them until Gorg remembered, "We don't want the gardens.  We want Bale!"  That contented them until they realized they had even less idea where to find Bale than the gardens.

"Then we shall all go be statues after all," Daisy suggested.  "We will sit where we can watch as much of the castle as possible and see who goes where. Inside."

They all became still as . . . stone, thinking about that.  Getting inside the outer walls had been easy,.  Could they pass as convincingly as statuary in the very halls of King Celery's palace?

Gorg could.  He would do anything it took to get to Bale.  He looked at Daisy with ever-increasing admiration.  Beauty and  brains.

By down, five new, rather rough, statues of trolls graced the major corridors of Celery Hall.  They did not move all day.  Trolls are very good at standing as though turned to stone.  If Bale had seen them, he might have guessed.  But Bale was locked in his room, pretending to be a madman while he laid his plots.  No one else in the palace paid any attention.  The decor changed so often, according to the whim of the king.

By night, Gorg knew where they had to go.  He, being unfamiliar with the ways of the city and the palace, had sought a dingier corridor where he felt more at home.  This proved to be the servant's hall, and the servants, he found, gossiped non-stop.  And griped.  Two in particular griped about having to carry food clear to the top of the tower for the crazy man, who not only demanded they return for a different kind of wine, but grabbed their bums every chance he got.

That sounded like Bale, Gorg thought.  He was rude to the servants on whom he depended.  And he was more than rude to trolls, who never forgot or forgave.  Well, they had him now.

At midnight, the new statues were on the move.  First they found each other, then the tower stairs.  There was only one stair up or down.  There would be no escape for Bale now.

There wasn't. 

By dawn, the killer of trolls and plotter against kings was gone.  He had leapt from the tower window rather than face five angry trolls.

The trolls, too, found there was no escape.  They had been cornered in the tower, arrested, and now faced the difficult task of convincing King Celery the Halfwit that they had been protecting him.  Gorg didn't know if it was possible to explain anything to Celery, but he would find out.  He had thought that if he punished Bale he didn't care what followed, but he found he did care. He and his friends would talk their way out of the dungeons.  They must, for the others must not suffer for his revenge.  Especially not Daisy.

Gorg began to marshal his thoughts and prepare his arguments.

###

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.

 

 

Flash Fiction yet again

  This week's Chuck Wendig Flash Fiction Challenge involved a random-sentence generator.  I played a few times, and ended up with the sentence, "The novice crawls underneath the doomed mount."  I tweaked it just a bit to make it work.  

User warning: This story is a little grimmer than my usual.

Death of Innocence

When disaster struck, Yonson was a happy-natured novice zergmunt tender, learning to care for the complex beasts from the ground up, as it were.  The disaster, as so often happens, came in the form of human prejudice.  Someone stirred up the people to fear the great, horned, flying creatures, and next thing the zergmunt aerie knew, they were under attack by peasants with pitchforks and torches, denouncing the beasts as demonic invaders.

Within a week, Yonson was handed his riding harness and a bow, and told he was part of the mounted flying corps, ready to pair with a zerg and fight for his new home.  He didn’t mind, since they let him pair with Gorg, the zerg he’d been most drawn to from the beginning.  As a novice, he had tended to the needs of a number of as-yet unpaired zergmunts.  Translated, that meant he’d mucked out the stables.  A vegetarian creature the size of a small cottage produces a lot of by-product, so Yonson had been busy.  But Gorg always acknowledged his presence, and he always took a moment to stroke the zerg’s head.

Rider training usually lasted months as the youngsters learned to harness, fly, and direct the zergs in lifting and hauling.   Then they’d be sent about the country to help build large projects and move freight.  Now Yonson learned as much as he was going to in a week, thanked his stars he already knew how to shoot, and began flying patrols.  The aerie sat atop a high hill, not quite a spire, to give the creatures an edge in launching themselves.  A zerg could launch from flat ground, but it took more effort than most cared to expend.  That one fact had saved them, as the disgruntled peasants couldn’t attack effectively up the near-vertical slopes.  A pair of the alien fliers with armed riders could protect the aerie.  The Zergtenant had sent to the king for help, but no one expected too much.  The unrest seemed to be wide-spread, though no one at the aerie knew who or what had started it.  The king had plenty of problems, bigger than a threat to a minor zerg aerie in a distant province.

So the aerie was safe, but the beasts had to eat.  They had to eat a lot.  And that meant flying to nearby meadows where they could graze, as the villagers would no longer send up hay and oats for them.  Two riders remained in flight to guard while the rest of the herd grazed, their riders lying around in the sun and resting, though still watchful.  Yonson landed Gorg with the rest, and stroked the large, furry head.  Gorg leaned against him a moment, a slight, fleeting pressure that spoke of the unusual bond between them, for the beasts seldom acknowledged their riders when dismounted, though they obeyed willingly in flight.

The zergs had been grazing for some quarter hour when the first one raised its head, gave a mournful gurgle, and toppled over.  Yonson, along with the other riders, stared in horror, then ran to his mount, as the realization came over him: the field had been poisoned, salted with one of the many local plants deadly to the aliens.  Yelling for them all to stop eating, he prayed he was in time, though he believed in no gods.  Gorg had been a little later arriving than the rest.  Surely he had not eaten as much as dead beast had, and would be fine if he could be made to vomit up the poison.

He reached the animal’s side in time to see a half-dozen more zergs topple over, and knew in his heart he was too late.  Still, he tugged at Gorg’s head, reaching an arm fearlessly into the great mouth and down the throat, hoping that zergs, like people, would vomit at that stimulus.  Vomit Gorg did, but it was too late.  One last time Gorg touched his head to Yonson’s shoulder, gave the same gurgle as the others, and sank to his knees.  Before the beast could topple and crush him, the novice rider crawled from beneath his doomed mount and held as much of the head as he could while Gorg died.  By the time the zerg breathed his last, Yonson was a novice no longer.

Slowly he stood and faced the valley.  In their ignorance and superstition, the fools had killed the animals that only served to help them.  Creatures that, for all their size, could not or would not kill.

Yonson was no zerg.  Covered with the vomit of his dying mount, broken with grief, he stood unmoving and made a vow, and as he did so his face hardened and aged.  Those who promoted fear and suspicion of that which was no threat would know the dread and horror of his vengeance.  The death of Gorg had slain the happy-natured boy, and left only a cold, angry man who knew neither love nor mercy.