by Cody Loewen
“Quickly! Climb into the cellar, Lykara!” He yells in a panic. He runs to the table, grabbing his sword in its scabbard, along with my practice sword. He hands his sword down to me in the cellar. “Here, take my sword and don’t make a sound until I tell you to come out. These monsters won’t spare you because you are a girl.”
“Father, you need to hide down here with me! We will both be safe that way. If you stay, they may kill you.”
“If I come down with you, and the house is empty when they come in, they will look for hiding places and will find both of us,” he explains, shaking his head. “We don’t have much time left before they are here, Lykara. Stay there. And no matter what, stay quiet. I will let you know when it is safe to come back up.”
As he closes the wooden hatch above my head, the cellar goes dark, with only tiny slivers of light shining through the cracks in the wood. I hear the soft sliding of the rug as my father covers up the hatch. The loud scraping of the table being slid on top of the rug follows. Seconds after the scraping stops, I hear a thunderous crash as the front door of our home is thrown off its frame. I can’t see anything through the cracks in the hatch, but I can hear several pairs of boots stomping through the what I imagine is an open hole where our front door is.
The image of those huge, vicious monsters in the same room as my father makes my heart thump so hard that I’m scared they will hear me below their feet. My instincts tell me to hide as far back in the cellar as possible, but I want to hear what is happening, so I stand right underneath the hatch.
“Hello, puny human,” A deep, gravelly voice roars above my head. I imagine the huge, muscular troll with all the tattoos. “I am Kromm, warlord of trolls. You give trolls weapons and food for army. You give for army, or Kromm kill you.”
I hear boots shifting and moving, forming a circle above me. Dust filters down through the cracks, falling into my eyes. The slight scrape of a sword sliding through a scabbard sends my heart racing faster. I can’t tell if it was my father, or one of the trolls, but my father is horribly outnumbered. No matter how good of a swordsman he is, he stands no chance against an entire group of these beasts in such tight quarters. I want to burst out of the cellar and help him, but I will never be able to push through the rug and table before I am cut down. I must trust in him to make it out of this terrifying situation.
“I will not give you anything,” I hear my father declare defiantly. “We beat you back into your holes once, we will do it again.”
What is he doing? I think to myself. He is going to make them angry. I hear what sounds like a snarl, from one of the trolls, I assume.
“You give Kromm weapons and food or Kromm kill you!” Tears of frustration well in my eyes. I just want to be up there fighting by his side.
“You must not have heard me,” I hear my father say in defiance. I want to scream. I am helpless and useless hiding in this hole. I hear my father yell above me, and then a cry of pain from a voice I haven’t heard yet. My father must have struck one of the trolls.
“Stupid human. You die now.” the troll warlord declares as the circle of boots widen above me. The tears filling my eyes spill down my cheeks in terror for my father.
Maybe he can defeat the warlord in combat, I think to myself, hoping that it is true.
“You filthy troll. I will cut you down like I did so many of your smelly kind in the last war,” My father says. He yells again, and I imagine him striking at the huge troll. I have seen his prowess with a sword so many times during our sparring matches, I have to have faith in him.
He made it through the last war with the trolls, he can make it through this too, I reassure myself. Metal rings on metal above me, and I envision the huge troll blocking my father’s strike with his own massive great sword. The swords scrape against each other, the two warriors locked in a deadly embrace. I hear choking, which can only be my father.
“Stupid, puny human. You die now!” The deep voice proclaims, to the grunts and cheers of his minions. I hear the sickening squelch of a sword sliding into flesh, followed by the thud of a body hitting the floor. The trolls cheer in their deep, throaty voices. I have to cover my mouth with my hands to stop myself from screaming out loud. I sink to my knees as the tears roll down my face unchecked. I grip my father’s sword so tightly that my knuckles turn white as I collapse to the ground in grief. The stomping and grunting of the trolls above me mask the sounds of my sobs.
“None can defeat Kromm! Kromm too strong for any little human!” That terrible voice. The voice of my father’s murderer. “Take anything we use for army, then burn it down.”
My silent sobs turn into gasps of terror, as I imagine burning alive in the cellar of my home.
The fire can’t get through the stone floor, and there is nothing in the cellar that would burn. The door must be thick enough to protect me, I tell myself. I don’t know if I believe it, but I must hope. I can’t die in this hole.
The stomping and clanging above me continues as the trolls pillage our home. What seems like hours later—even though only minutes have passed—the thumping of boots recedes and deathly quiet descends. I want to scream. I want to keep screaming until my lungs burn and my throat feels scratchy and bruised from the inside, but I am afraid they will hear me. So, I scream in silence. Minutes go by and that silence deepens, crushing me like a vise. Finally, I can wait no longer. I rush to the hatch and put my hands on the underside of the wood to lift it, but I feel the heat immediately.
They already set the house on fire! I fall back to the floor and scoot myself as far from the wooden hatch, the portal to a fiery death, as possible. Smoke begins to seep through the cracks around the hatch above me, and the unmistakable crackle of flames break the silence that surrounds me. As I begin to choke on the thick air, I begin to panic. This can’t be the way I die. I won’t be suffocated in my own home.
As I back further into the corner, my hand hits the damp surface of the barrel we use to store rainwater. Frantically, I grope around for anything I can use to soak in the water until my hands find smooth cloth. My father’s apron. I snatch it up and douse it in the water before tying it around my face, hoping it will block the smoke.
As I begin to breathe easier, the sobs return. I cry for a long, long time alone in the dark. When the tears finally stop falling, and the smoke has dissipated enough for me to remove my makeshift mask, I creep back to the stairs and tentatively reach out my hand to feel the heat. The hatch is cool to the touch, so I carefully push it open. I expect resistance from the rug or table that were on top of the door. But nothing hinders me as the door falls back onto the floor, throwing up a cloud of ash.
I grip my father’s sword as I walk up the stairs into what’s left of the house I’ve lived in my entire life. I look up to the stars above me, nothing between me and the sky. What’s left of the walls still smolder, pieces falling to the blanket of ash covering the ground.
“No!” I scream, seeing the white of a bone underneath a piece of burning wall that has fallen in. I run to the wall, pushing against it to lift the wood off of my father’s body. His open eyes stare into nothing. The still burning wood scorches my hands, and I pull away, wincing. The smoke and ash rising from the floor burns my lungs, and I begin to cough uncontrollably. I can’t breathe. I run toward the opening that used to be the door of the smoldering ruins. My eyes squeezed shut from the painful smoke, I trip on the remains of the doorframe, and go sprawling outside. Climbing back to my feet, I turn in a circle, taking in the extent of the destruction around me. Fires burn everywhere I look. Not a single house is left standing.
Chapter 2
I stand at what used to be the entrance to my home, completely still. My vision darkens around the edges, until I can only see a small circle in front of me, blurry from the tears covering my eyes. The colors of the fires are so similar to the bright colors of the sunrise marking the start of a new day behind them. I can’t pull my eyes away from a lone flame, travelling along a piece of a fallen
wall on a nearby house. Through my blurry vision, I see a flicker of movement within the flames. I blink rapidly to clear my eyes, and I think I can make out a shadow moving among the blaze.
Someone is still alive, I think, hope creeping into the pit in my stomach that has been growing since my father shut the cellar hatch on me last night. There must be survivors like me.
Dropping the sword on the scorched grass, I take off at a sprint. I reach the village circle, the flowers, once full of beauty and color, now blackened and dead. Dry stems crunch under my boots as I reach the other side, headed for the remains of a house I knew was home to four people, including two children. The skeletal remains of the front door are still in place on the house, and I throw my shoulder against the wood. The frame gives underneath the blow, and I land in a heap on top of the splintered door inside the house. Black smoke immediately fills my lungs, and I begin to cough. Squinting, I frantically search the chaos of the burning house for the source of the movement. With only one room, there aren’t many places to look, but the burning smoke limits my vision to right in front of my face, and I am already running out of air.
Only after I have searched every corner of the single, crumbling room do I finally admit defeat, stumble out of the house and collapse on the ground. My throat burns from the acrid smoke, and I’m so light-headed that when I try to stand, I stumble back to the ground. Pushing myself shakily back to my feet, I rub my eyes clear of ash, so I can see again, and catch my breath.
There must be someone else who made it, I tell myself again. I can’t accept that I am the only survivor of this horror. Frantically I run from house to house, searching as best I can in the rubble that is still standing. Nothing. Not one person. Not even a body. I don’t know if somehow the fire erased everything, but there are no signs of death in any house but my own. I remember the horror stories my father used to tell of the dreadful fates of the humans the trolls took as prisoners in the last war. Suddenly, I can’t decide whether I would have rather found bodies in the homes.
Defeated, I walk back to the pile of char that used to be my house and slump to the ground next to my father’s sword.
No. My sword.
My father taught me how to fight, and when to fight. He taught me to defend those in need, and to always fight evil, whatever form it may appear in.
I sit there in the grass for a long time, remembering my father and his many lessons. I think about our playful fighting sessions at dinner time, and tears begin to fall again. I don’t have a home here anymore; I think to myself. The weight of that fact sits on my shoulders like an iron weight. In this place I have never left, I am utterly alone.
As the smoke begins to clear, the devastation that surrounds me becomes even more stark. I can’t stay here in this ruin that I will never again call home. My silent river of tears make ashy tracks down my cheeks as despair threatens to crush me. What will I do without my father? My father… I remember stories my father used to tell of his travels when he was younger, of all the places he had visited. One of his favorite places was a village many miles to the east, called Willowdale. He had traveled there years ago to bring back a new type of berry for us to grow. The black berries were bigger than what we grew, and the plants were much more durable in colder weather.
Willowdale. It is as good a place as any to try to start over. It must be a little farming village, like this one. I can help tend to the fields and carry on the work my father raised me to do, feeding my friends and neighbors. I take a deep breath and walk one last time into the ruins of my house, looking for anything to take with me. As soon as I cross the threshold, I know that anything we had would be burned and destroyed, and immediately make my way down into the cellar once more, hoping to find something of use in the space that I know was protected from the blaze.
As I descend the stone stairs into the dusty room, my eyes settle on a simple wooden chest placed near the bottom of the stairs, and I feel tears well up, threatening to break free and flow once more. The chest is where my father kept any items he brought home from his time in the army. I sniffle, trying to push back to rising emotions, and lift the lid of the chest, revealing a black coat, embroidered with red stitching of the Reavers, the elite fighting unit that my father was a part of during the war. I don’t remember any stories specifically associated with the coat, but it serves as another way to remember the man who raised me from before I can remember. I take the coat in one arm and rifle through the rest of the items in the chest before closing the lid, not find anything else of interest to me.
Besides the chest, and the empty crates in the cellar where we kept our food stores, nothing worth looking at survived the blaze. I methodically move to each house, now reduced to a light smolder, scavenging for any supplies that might be useful on my journey. I scrounge up an empty waterskin that looks like it will still hold water and a hunting knife from a storage chest behind Bacchus’ house. I stare out at our carefully tended fields, now nothing but burnt ground, and suddenly remember the discarded buckets of food that we had abandoned in the field before the raid. My stomach growls just thinking about fresh fruit. I haven’t eaten in nearly a full day.
The fields are trampled and scorched in places; the garden shed a smoldering ruin. The scythe I had wielded only hours before mocks me from where it has fallen. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a bucket lying on its side, the tomatoes it contained crushed to a pulp in the soft dirt. My despair turns to anger as I lash out at the bucket with my foot, kicking it as far as I can. The clang as it strikes something other than dirt startles me. The other bucket! By some miracle, it has survived intact, filled to the brim with apples and berries. I snatch a shiny, red apple and bite off as big a bite as I can manage, juice running down my chin. I sigh in contentment as the sweetness begins to erase the taste of ashes that still fills my mouth.
I glance back at the scythe, its long, razor sharp blade suddenly looking less like a tool, and more like a weapon as the pain from the violence of the past day sits at the front of my mind. I flash of anger comes over me as I reflect on the tragedies, and I grip my father’s coat tight in an attempt to pull myself back from the swirling depths of pain and grief. I take the coat in both hands, opening it up to take a good look at it. The thick material is much too warm to wear now, but during the cold seasons when my father was off in the army camps or on the battlefield, this coat providing much needed warmth.
I picture my father wearing the black garment, huddled around a fire, waiting for the morning to launch an attack on a group of trolls that was positioned too far from their main host. He had told me many stories of nights just like that, followed by a bloody battle the next day, each one pushing the army a little closer to a victory over the evil trolls. My eyes widen as the connection becomes clear to me, and the anger that I still haven’t been able to push down opens my mind to another path I may take from here.
All I have ever known is farming, and the simple life that I had in this village, but that is all gone now.
How am I going to be able to just move on and start that life over some place else without my father to live it with me? I think to myself. I take another bite of my apple, relishing the sweet flavor as I think about my future. I could never be happy trying to just move on from this without doing anything about it.
I’ll follow in his footsteps; I decide with conviction. That is how I will honor him. I will join the army, just like he did. I will fight the evil forces that rise against us, to prevent this type of tragedy from happening to another village. To stop this pain from being caused to anyone else. Kromm must pay. This is my chance to avenge my father. He would want me to protect innocent people from this same fate, by killing that murderer.
I can’t just join the army though, I reason. Who knows where I will end up if I become just another grunt. I’m going to join the Reavers. Once I am a member of that elite, handpicked group, I will have the best chance to be a part of the force that sweeps over the trolls, and sends them back to t
heir caves, just like my father did. And my blade with strike the blow that sends them back, scared and scattered. The killing blow to this evil Kromm.
Finishing off two more apples, I pack as much of the food as I can into a sack that survived in the ruins of the shed. A shovel, half buried in the rubble, catches my eye. I need to bury my father. As I dig, fashioning his final resting place in the fields he loved, my sadness morphs into anger. I think about the evil monsters who did this to us. I think about my friends who are either dead or wishing they were in the hands of the trolls. And most of all, I think about the huge troll warlord, Kromm. I imagine cutting him down in combat. Watching the life leave his eyes as his blood flows over my sword and hands. I imagine telling him in his last moments, that this was for my father.
By the time I have filled the hole that now contains my father’s body, my path becomes even clearer to me. I must avenge my father. I don’t know how long it will take me to get the chance, but I vow to myself that somehow, someday, I will kill Kromm. I will join the Reavers and use the resources at their disposal to hunt down this group of trolls terrorizing innocent people. The only thing that matters is watching him die at my hand. The food sack slung over my shoulder, the water sack filled from the village well and my newly inherited blade strapped to my hip, I set off, walking away from the sunset and toward my revenge.
As I walk, the small path out of our village becomes a road, and the dirt gives way to flat stone pavers. The mountains that have always been in view in the distance slowly fade to nothing as the miles pass by. When the sun starts its descent in the sky, I stop to eat. I slide the heavy bag off my shoulder and grab another apple. Taking a draw from the waterskin, I scan the horizon. I have already traveled several miles. If my father’s stories about Willowdale are accurate, it shouldn’t be too much farther now. At least I hope that is true. I am tired, and sore, and that sack of fruit seems to be getting heavier as the day drags on, as does my heart.
