by Phil Tucker
From somewhere above he heard the sound of great feet on bare stone, something heavy moving closer. He slowed his breathing. The troll had no doubt already palmed another rock large enough to smear him across the cliff.
Was there only one? He allowed his thoughts to sink deep.
There.
Tharok stood and gazed at the troll, its rock raised high over its head, its head swinging from side to side as it searched for him. It was a rangy old male, taller even than Grax had been, potbellied and scrawny, arms as long as branches, claws feral and broken, stone hide colored a sooty green in the depths of which flashed flecks of mica. Great batwing ears were extended from each side of his head, and a thick nose like a lump hung down near to its massively wide slit of a mouth. Eyes like wasp stings glared down at Tharok. The troll tensed his shoulder to throw - and then paused.
And in that moment Tharok knew he had him.
He moved forward, but his thoughts were not his own. There was in his mind a dull and constant beating of alien visions and needs, an urge to dig deep and quarry for the coldest and freshest rock to feast upon, rich with mineral and taste. An urge, too, to sit still in the afternoon sun, one rock amongst many, absorbing the rays into his hide, quiescent, losing his sense of self as he merged with the mountain.
The fire in his belly that the sight of fresh meat could awaken. How good blood tasted as it ran over his knuckles, licked clean with a rasp of his file of a tongue. The endless cycling of sun and moon, the passage of cloud and sky, to be admired while here on the surface, and then lost to thought when he delved deep into the belly of the world, deep into the caverns of the night.
Tharok moved forward, eyes half-lidded. The troll lowered his rock, but did not release it. He turned his head to one side, then back to the other, as if trying to determine what he was looking at. As if he had double images before his eyes.
Tharok approached, some part of him surprised that his legs were not as long as a troll's. When he gained the troll's perch, he bent down to scoop up an oval stone that took both hands to lift. He moved smoothly, without hurry, and brought the rock down with a crack on the troll's head, right between the eyes.
The blow was hard enough to cause sound to echo back to them from the distant cliffs, but it did little to the troll other than cause him to blink. He shook his head and released the rock. Tharok gazed into his dull eyes and felt the reverberation of that greeting deep within his own body. It was how trolls checked the integrity of stone, by hitting it and listening for the texture of the resultant sound; how they greeted each other, by knocking heads and listening to the sound that resulted, checking the depth and purity of their own bodies.
That greeting done, Tharok and the troll gazed at each other for a while, neither of them moving. Tharok met the piss-yellow eyes, feral and primordial, without blinking. He stared deep into the eyes of a predator that had eaten and consumed countless kragh in its time, and then nodded and passed him, continuing his ascent.
Behind him, the troll stood still for a moment longer, then turned to follow.
Tharok encountered five more trolls that day: a young female, then two young males hunting together, and finally, just before it grew too dark for him to go farther, two ancient females so hoary with years that they seemed like sections of the cliff grown animated, barely recognizable as trolls. They trailed him, one and all, and when Tharok finally sat down cross-legged on a small plateau that gazed out over the valleys and smaller mountains below, they arranged themselves in front of him, sinking onto their haunches and growing preternaturally still, ten yellow flecks of light considering him as he considered them in turn.
When Kyrra found them, hours later, none of them had moved. Tharok had spent those hours allowing the sense of troll to sink into his being, allowing his mastery of the sensation to become part of him, slowly working on extricating his own thoughts, his sense of self, of kragh, from that great and encompassing sense of being troll, so that he might think as Tharok and yet hold the identity of troll close to his heart.
Kyrra glided out onto the plateau, and the trolls all shifted to regard her, none of them rising, none of them alarmed. Her gaze could not work on them; they were already carved from the bones of the mountain, more stone than life, and she was seen as a provider of the most delicious rock possible, welcomed amongst their midst.
She undulated between them and arrayed herself behind Tharok. "Well done, little kragh." Her voice was rich with amusement. "I had not thought you capable of this feat."
Tharok did not respond. Her presence set his heart to racing, such that he had to redouble his efforts to think troll and not be a kragh.
The trolls shifted, blinking, growing uneasy without knowing why.
"Does it strain you to hold their thoughts, to be one of them even as you hear my voice?" She lowered her human torso, bringing her head close to his so that the sound of the small serpents around her face grew distractingly close, her breath whispering across his ear.
He took a deep breath and fought to keep his focus on the slow flow of stone, on the erosion of rock, on the deep hollows within the earth.
"Can you hold on to your thoughts if I touch you, little kragh?"
A hand traced the length of his jaw, her talons leaving stinging trails of fire behind that were a pleasure almost indescribable. Another hand reached around and across his chest, the palm and splayed fingers moving across his muscles, down to palm his stomach, to trace the contours of his abdomen. Her cheek was nearly touching his now, and he could picture her lips, her wide and generous mouth, and remember that kiss, how it felt to be immolated within his own private sun.
One of the ancient hag trolls let out a grinding sound from deep within her chest and rose to her feet, casting her craggy head from side to side. Tharok froze, his blood running cold, and with ruthless focus forced his mind to dive down into the core of what it meant to be one with the mountains. He struggled even as the medusa's hands played across his body, tracing spirals and intriguing patterns across his flesh, even as her lips pressed against his cheek and branded him there.
The first troll, the rangy male, also rose to his feet. He grunted and then pounded the ground, his fist impacting the stone with punishing force. He grunted again and also looked about, as if seeking some source of discomfort. His eyes raked once, twice over Tharok, and then locked on him and went still.
Tharok fought to keep his eyes open, to not aid his concentration by going into darkness. He had to maintain eye contact with the trolls. He fought the urge to move, to throw himself away from the medusa, because some part of him knew that to do so would mean death. So he sat there shivering, her lips burning a trail down his neck, her hands caressing him with a knowledge and understanding beyond that of any other kragh he had ever been with, stoking his fire, coaxing his body to betray him.
The rangy male took a step forward, then a second. He lowered himself into a crouch so that his brutish face was level with Tharok's. In the light of the moon, every feature seemed unreal, a mask from nightmare, a terror that only a great storytelling shaman would be able to evoke around a dying fire. The troll stared at him, and its gaze promised death.
Tharok felt his control slipping, found his mind whirling and falling under Kyrra's kiss, under the fire that she emblazoned upon his rugged hide, each touch of her lips causing a rose of flame to bloom.
The rangy male reached out with his right hand, fingers opened wide, each one ending in a shard of broken stone, sharp and hard and cruel. He reached out slowly, and placed his palm over Tharok's face, closing the fingers one by one about Tharok's head.
Tharok fought with every part of his being to sit still. Darkness was falling upon him now, and he lost the connection of eyesight, and with it a great part of his control. The fingers began to tighten upon his skull, and he knew without a doubt that should the troll put forth but a modicum of his power, he would crush Tharok's bones without effort.
Tharok could hear the medusa laugh
ing, a low, bubbling sound, and now her serpentine hair was beginning to bite him, tender nips of miniature teeth that began to flood him with a new and heated fever, washing waves of ecstasy through his body. This was how the ancient kragh, those long-gone supplicants, had died, yearning to be engulfed in the medusa's caress and fire, to be consumed utterly by the pleasure that was but a half-turn from the most terrible pain.
Terror seized Tharok as he realized that he had never, at any point in his life, been this close to death.
The troll began to close his grip, bringing awful pressure to bear on Tharok's head. He couldn't breathe; his nose and mouth were stifled by the troll's dusty palm, and still the medusa kissed and bit him, lighting a coruscating bonfire in his core that threatened to consume him before the troll could end his life.
Why fight? Why resist? What could overcome the temptation to release himself from everything, to acquiesce, to accept this death most horrible and beautiful? Tharok realized that he was growling, a raw and primal rumbling deep in his chest. The bones in his head began to crack, and the fire running through his being and across his skin incinerated his sense of self.
Growling, he delved deep. Growling, he fought to find his rage. His growl grew in volume as he plunged deep into that fury that was his birthright, and then even deeper, to the very essence of his rage.
Fury that was his alone to summon when in battle, in danger, when denied, when oppressed. Rage at the world, that it would not bow to his will. That it could resist him. That it could deny his needs. He dove down into it, summoned a fire that was all his own, and armed himself with an iron will that had never failed.
He would not succumb. He would not falter, would not fall. This world would be his. He would make it so! He would not die. This would not be his end.
His growl grew into a low roar. He shook his mind like a dog shaking water from its coat and thrust himself violently away from distraction, from pain, from the amusement of the medusa and the violence being done to him by the troll. He swept up those primal thoughts, raised himself up on high and then dove, throwing his mind deep into the heart of the mountain, deep into that barren sanctuary, that cathedral of stone, that realm of ever-shifting might – clouds of rock that never sat still but always flowed and crashed and rose like the waters of the ocean at a speed only noticeable to the stars and the moon.
He saw cold blue. The granular texture of iron-infused rock. Echoing stillness. Millennial strata. Hallowed darkness that had never been disturbed by the light of fire or sun or star.
Tharok cut himself away from all else and thought of the Dragon's Breath, that massive glacier, grinding its way through eternity, carving a riverbed through the heart of the mountains. Thought of its underbelly, where ice roughed rock into grit. Thought of that movement, that power, that force.
He was the heart of such friction, the heart of such change. There lay the core of what it meant to be a troll; to be of the matter of mountains but be acted upon by time and fire. It was in that conflict that trolls existed; they were the manifestation of that traction and erosion that ground rock into sand. As long as there was life in the world, there would be trolls, reflecting the forces of nature upon living rock. They were the guardians of change, but it was a change so slow that none but themselves could perceive it.
Around him, there was stillness and silence. For Tharok, each breath was the exhalation of an age. He was alive, and each beat of his heart was the upwelling of a mountain, thrust high by the action of molten rock beneath the crust of the earth. His was the ponderous patience of stone, obdurate and unyielding, yet molded in time by the passage of transient forces. From him echoed that sense of permanence and transience, that exchange of eternity for flux.
Finally, at long last, he opened his eyes.
Dawn was upon them, the sun rising at his back, and its faint light illuminated a plateau on which sat dozens of trolls. He allowed his eyes to play over their forms. There must have been forty, no, fifty of them, each squatting and watching him. As he watched, a small bird alighted on a troll's shoulder. It sat still, shivering and fluffing its feathers, then took off again, over the edge of the cliff and down and out of sight and mind.
Tharok rose to his feet. He no longer had to concentrate on the stillness of the mountain, for now it was a part of him. He turned to regard the rising sun and saw Kyrrasthasa, her coils lying still around her, her body angled back, arms crossed over her breasts, chin lowered as she stared at him.
The sun was rising in a glory of refulgent hues, far down and below them, cresting the distant mountains in an awe-inspiring display of grandeur and light.
Tharok met Kyrrasthasa's gaze. She held his, and then, after a minute, nodded once. Gone was the amusement, the sense of play. There was in that nod the sense of a true beginning.
Without a word she rose and glided past him, wending her way around the still forms of the trolls, and then she slipped out of sight behind a great outcropping of rock. Tharok watched her go, then turned back to consider the rising sun.
It was time. Time to ascend to the Five Peaks and change the destiny of his kind forevermore.
Book 3 is coming this September.
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Copyright © 2016 Phil Tucker
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