high fantasy – The Light of Day

Doste peered anxiously out the window. The moon was high, and there were a scant few clouds to hide its light. There was no one about at this time of night, but he remained nervous all the same. He drummed his fingers on the windowsill.

“Is this truly necessary?” he asked over his shoulder. His wife, Brynn, sat by the fireplace with their guest, and his eyes focused on their reflection in the glass. “We could think this over another night.”

The cloaked figure sat hunched opposite Brynn, poring over items in a deep wicker basket, and paused, silently looking first to Doste then to his wife.

“We have thought on this,” said Brynn, her voice soothing and warm. “We have thought and spoken and prayed, but this will be our chance.”

Doste felt himself frown slightly and a breath hissed from his nostrils, but he didn’t offer further protest. He joined them by the fire, and his gaze fell to the cloaked figure who had begun arranging items from the basket onto a small, whittled tray and grinding them with a mortar and pestle. Some of the reagents he recognized – whiteleaf powder, blackroot stems, Kingfoil moss – but some of the others being ground made his stomach uneasy.

“Yes, well,” he muttered, “I had imagined the help of a medicine woman in more of a…traditional sense.”

The figure cackled, and what little light from the fire reached into her hood briefly showed a face with unsettling features. “What I bring you,” laughed the hag, “is stronger than any medicine or faith you will find.” There was the smell of swamp water when she spoke, and her voice cracked against the ear like broken branches. She mixed the last of her components and brushed these into a separate bowl of liquid, viscous as blood.

Doste looked to his wife, but Brynn met his eyes easily with a smile, undisturbed by the creature’s presence. Her warmth never ceased, and he took such comfort in that. He allowed himself a deep breath, and together they waited for the hag to finish her concoction. When she had, she set the bowl between them and reached out with a gnarled hand, palm up.

“My payment,” she said simply.

“Oh, of course,” said Brynn, almost embarrassed. She reached into the folds of her dress and came away with a folded piece of cloth, which she handed to the hag. The hag looked it over quickly by the light of the fire and, seemingly content, stowed it within her cloak. Doste wore his confusion on his face, but Brynn discreetly shook her head at him.

“Place it beneath your bed, leaving it undisturbed for one week,” instructed the hag. “After your next bleeding, have your husband take you. Then, you will bring the bowl into the wilderness to the north and empty its contents onto the roots of an oak which bears a scar in its bark. When this is done, well…” Though her face was hidden in the darkness of her hood, the two could hear lips sliding back over wet teeth in the way of a grin. “Enjoy motherhood,” she concluded.

Brynn nodded solemnly, though she softly quaked with an inner excitement. She searched her thoughts for a few moments, struggling for words. “Thank you,” she said finally, the start of tears shimmering in her eyes.

They exchanged nods, the hag collected her things, and had opened the door when Doste stood.

“What if it doesn’t work?” he asked.

She paused in the doorway, the quiet howl of wind behind her, and she turned to face him. Still behind the darkness of her hood, he could feel her eyes on him. She gently cackled. “Then I’d suggest you visit an herbalist, Doste,” she laughed. “Because the problem then would lie not with my aid nor your wife’s womb.”

In the time it took for his cheeks to flush and for him to blink, the doorway was empty and the two were left alone, the hag’s laughter echoing hauntingly on the nighttime breeze. Doste turned to Brynn.

“What did you give her?” he asked.

“All she wanted was a poem on something of my mother’s,” she said. “So, I wrote her an old nursery rhyme I remembered from when I was young onto a piece of her wedding gown.” Brynn shrugged. “Cunning women are strange. But what’s more,” she strode over to her husband and embraced him, “is that we’ll soon have a family, Doste.”

END

This was another character origin I wrote up for someone’s D&D campaign. The first half of it, at least. It goes on to be for a warlock who’s part hag, essentially, but I never finished that bit (gave the notes to him to complete…I think. It was a few years ago.), so the first half is more neatly wrapped up than I otherwise left it.

Anyhoo, more stuff on the way. Hope your days are treating you well. 🙂

The foothills of the Nettiri Mountains are silent, eternal, and still, but for a howling wind. A roll of thunder rumbles its way across the moonless sky, and the clouds, pregnant with the coming rain, begin to loose their storm on the earth below.

“Aaaauuungh!” Yasha screams. Her breathing is harried, and hair clings to her face heavy with sweat. A woman beside her, Ritu, clasps one hand tightly with her own, and with the other holds Yasha’s face by her chin.

“Shh,” she soothes, “you are strong. Like earth- like the mountain, you are strong.” She moves the hair from Yasha’s eyes. “Now, again. Push. He is almost here.”

“I can’t.”

“You will.”

“I can’t,” she screams again, agony drawing out the word. The whisper of the hut’s deerskin curtain breaks the steadily drumming rain for a moment, revealing a mountainous man in the entrance. The tattoos on his bare chest glisten against the modest firelight within the hut. He huffs out a single excited breath.

“Has he come?” he asks.

“Soon,” says Ritu. “Come, hold her hand. She needs you now.”

The wind gains and hours pass, the screams of childbirth bleed into the howling of the storm outside. Then, of a sudden, the tempest dies and the cry of a newborn boy takes its place. His father, Korg, holds him, the pride clear on his face, but the expression soon sours.

“His foot,” he rumbles. The goliath holds the tender infant gently, the aberrant shrunken foot held aloft on two fingers, displayed like a withered leaf on a healthy vine. “What is wrong with his foot?”

Ritu smiles and shrugs a shoulder. “What is wrong with his foot?”

“How will he run?”

She brushes aside his long hair, revealing half an ear with a large bite mark. “You can still listen.” She smiles again. “At times.”

Korg barks a short laugh, which leaves behind fierce grin. He turns to the boy’s mother and kneels. “What do we call him?”

Yasha beholds her son for a long moment.

“Ardhan,” she whispers at last. “After your grandfather.” She holds his leg and beams brightly. “Ardhan Brokenfoot. A name to give him strength.” She then gestures weakly for a box near her bedside, and Ritu nods. The old woman brings the wooden box, and Yasha draws from it a talisman on an invisibly thin silver chain. The talisman itself is a chip of dark stone, but as the light catches its surface, faintly iridescent markings of an unknown script shine against it. The wind outside begins to swell, and Yasha holds the boy’s forehead to her own before slipping the necklace over his head. “You will have a good life, Ardhan. This will help you find it.”

As Ardhan grew, he would come to know the land as well as the corners of his own mind. It was harder for him than most, but that adversity blossomed into a strength few others shared. Nestled within the mountain walls of the Nettiri, it was a land of slate, pine, and storms, but also of voices that came in many shapes. The winds had their song, the village elders had their chants, and even the great pines would drum the air with their crackling boughs. But Ardhan would know more than just these.

In his years walking the mountain forests, he would see figures cloaked in dark mists, eyes dimly aglow beneath ethereal hoods. They never frightened Ardhan, and where they walked more songs would follow. The songs were like a humming melody he could feel in his bones more than he could hear it aloud. He would walk the woods with them, playfully seek them out, and where they ventured he would find strange things like the talisman he’d been given as a baby. He would collect these relics in a light sack and return to show them to his mother and father, though they would pay him no mind.

It was on another day like this that he returned to the village and found a group of strangers speaking to the tribe’s eldest, Grontu. The strangers wore dark mantles and hoods that obscured their faces. When they spoke their hushed whispers to Elder Grontu, his lip curled in disgust. Ardhan didn’t hear very much from his chosen hiding place, but what he did spoke of ancient relics and mystical powers. He held the bag at his side a little more tightly against his body.

“You ask of things you only pretend to know,” Grontu spat angrily. “Heed my warning and depart, or else I-”

Ardhan was pulled suddenly off his feet by his hair, and he landed on his bottom in a small cloud of dust. His mother loomed over him. “What do you think you are doing?” she whispered harshly. “Their words are not for one so small.” Yasha regarded him angrily for a long moment, then held a breath and her face softened. “Head home. Dinner is soon. Go,” she said, giving him a light push. His mother’s eyes were warm, but she was not to be tested on this. So, embarrassed and wiping away tears, the young boy nodded and ran off.

He rounded the last turn and was at the opening to his home when a gentle tremor went through his body. He stopped short, but soon recognized the resonant hum in his bones. Ardhan glanced about and soon saw them – dim, crystal blue eyes glinting at him from the shadows of distant pines. They beckoned him, pulling the at the strings of his spirit with a wordless call as undeniable as gravity. Again he looked about, thought of his mother’s warning, but defiantly tightened the strap of his bag and set off for the woods.

Hours later, the sun hung in the sky, threatening to dip below the horizon and painting the sky in warm hues. The chill wind rushed over him as Ardhan made his way back home to his village. This was not the first time playing with the mountain spirits had kept him from home so long, but this time it was sure to enrage his mother after he’d disregarded her intructions. Though as he came close to home, a feeling of dread settled in his stomach like a heavy stone. It was the dry season, but a mist hung in the air and climbed lazily from the ground like smoke.

There was no one here.

He heard voices, but they were quiet, muffled, like he was hearing them through a thick cloth. Ardhan followed the voices in circles all about the village, but found no one. A chill gripped his heart as he realized something. It was slow to come, and it wasn’t true for all of them, but the truth remained: the voices were saying things he’d heard before.

“Their words are not for one so small,” said one, the voice of his mother.

“Come. Hold her hand. She needs you now,” said another, the cunning woman Ritu.

“You ask of things you only pretend to know,” came yet another, Elder Grontu.

“He has come?” the proud voice of his father, Korg.

Ardhan stood there in the center of his village for minutes, his home now reduced to a hollow land of ghosts and echoes.

Those next hours and what would be the next several years passed over Ardhan like a high wind, staining his memories only as blurred flashes. He remembered seeing the crystal-eyed mountain spirits and running with them to the woods where he found sleep in the hollow of an ancient pine. He remembered a woman with a gentle face and raven hair looking down at him as he woke. She fed him, and gave him hope, a home, and purpose. He didn’t see himself as he grew into a strong, capable Goliath warrior beside her, but he remembered their travels. They traversed the wilds and great cities alike, both harsh lands with terrible beasts and civilized bastions with towering spires were their home.

And through it all, the voices of the mountain spirits of the Nettiri were silent.

“Okay,” said Jaya, tossing a stormy, raven-black lock of hair away from her face. “I’m going inside to inspect the merchandise for our client. This one’s gonna be high profile in the long run, so I want you out here to make sure it can get off on the right foot.” She waited a moment, then snapped her fingers. “Hey, Ardhan. You listening?”

The pair stood in front of a parted curtain obscuring an entryway in a shadowy alley. Between them filed a short line of hunched figures carrying unmarked crates and nondescript sackloth bundles, and across the way on the corner of an intersection of the city’s dusty dirt roads was the colorful storefront of a toy maker. Baubles gleamed, clockwork animals jumped and spun round, and magical lights drew designs on the curved glass of the windows. Ardhan broke off in the middle of a chuckle.

“Mm, yep. No problem, boss,” he said. “Nobody’s getting in without the sign.”

She regarded him skeptically for a few moments, but settled a hand on his massive forearm and squeezed gently. “Good,” she said. “Things are going to be different after today. Stay sharp, big guy.” He reassured her by adjusting the grip on his saw-toothed greatsword and smiling, which she returned with a wink before disappearing behind the curtain.

Ardhan stood watch, and time passed, offering nothing of note. Then something happened which hadn’t in so long he had almost forgotten even the deepest memories of their being: a melody hummed through his bones. Here, he wondered, in the heart of a city so far away? He looked up and down the alleyway, and there at the end stood one of the figures of his childhood, cloaked in darkness and melded with the shadows and the stone. Ardhan regarded the spirit, and a torrent of memories – of his village, of the mountain pines of the Nettiri, the echoed voices of his mother and father – they all assailed his mind at once, and the craving for answers returned, as fierce and as strong as it had been that night.

He followed the spirit, and as he did, he felt almost like a boy again. His muscles forgot their aches, his skin lost its scars, and the weight on his heart he’d forgot was there lifted. He reached the end of the alley where the spirit had been, and saw it now across the populated thoroughfare of one of the city’s main bazaars. It was like one of the games they had used to play when he was a child, the games he’d taken shelter in when he was young. They had made him feel safe through times like…

Like the night his family was taken from him.

A familiar sense of foreboding and dread suddenly fell on him like a leaden sheet. He spun around to see a hunched figure in the distance, exiting the meeting place he’d been meant to guard. Ardhan broke into a sprint, and upon seeing him, the figure darted out of sight. “Jaya!” he called. “Jaya, get out of-”

The world went white.

A wave of force blew him back the way he’d come, sending him flying out of the alleyway altogether. The building which housed the business his friend and mentor Jaya had been overseeing exploded, erupting in gouts of emerald flame and streaks of alabaster lightning. Ardhan tumbled through two market stalls, and panic spread through the crowd. He looked up from the pile of splintered wood and broken pottery, and the last conscious sight he held was of the crystal-eyed mountain spirit standing in the flames of the ruined building, holding Ardhan’s gaze with its own.

Then darkness took him.

END

That was a D&D character origin story I was asked to write for a friend. I was flattered, if not outright honored, as this friend didn’t need help writing a good story in the least bit. He’s grown into a REALLY good DM and could have done better himself. Nonetheless, it was fun to put together.

And in case you missed it: There’s news! Had a couple of publications this summer, firstly over at Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight Magazine is my story “Just like Old Times”, and more recently is my Sci-Fi story “Software” with Third Flatiron’s Offshoots: Humanity Twigged anthology. Check ’em out, let me know what you think, and live well.