by Travis Perry
MEDIEVAL MARS:
The Anthology
edited by Travis Perry
© 2015 Bear Publications, LLC
All Rights Reserved
ISBN-13: 978-1514885567
ISBN-10: 1514885565
To all those who dream of worlds being other than what they are.
Table of Contents
MAPS:
Mars World Map 1
Mars World Map 2
Mars World Map 3
Mars World Map 4
STORIES:
The Power From the Past by Kat Heckenbach
The War Between the Mons by Travis Perry
Golden by Allison Rohan
Lynessa’s Curse by Adam David Collings
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Liar’s Paradox by Jill Domschot
Search for Eden by Mark Venturini
The Dragon’s Bane by Cindy Koepp
Flight by Kristen Stieffel
Sam and the Dragon by Donna McFarland
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
The Power from the Past
by Kat Heckenbach
Diego clutched the object to his chest, ignoring the cold that seeped into his back from the cave wall he leaned against. The small alcove served as a bedroom, with a stone wall separating it from the main area. His thin legs were pulled up in front of him so Father would not see the object if he walked in. Not that Diego wouldn’t have time to hide it—he could always hear Father coming. Father’s cough was almost constant these days, echoing throughout the cave day and night, worsening when he walked. If only he’d listen to reason and put their fire closer to the cave opening so the smoke wouldn’t be trapped inside. Like Diego was.
But Father’s fears were too strong. The fire must be lit deep inside the cave so there was no chance of it being seen by travelers. As though there were ever travelers in these mountains. Diego had seen all of two people besides Father in his twelve years of life, both of them men who had wandered near their cave, lost, freezing, and starving. Neither had even noticed the opening because of its placement on the mountain. Which was why Father had chosen it. Hidden from view, the cavern was adjacent to a flat outcropping onto which a small waterfall flowed. The area flourished with plant life and animals that were scarce elsewhere at this altitude.
Diego had cried when those men had come near, as Father held him in the shadows inside the cave, watching the men, refusing to help. He’d known they would die during the night as the temperatures plummeted. Even if Father had let them warm up by the fire and given them directions back to the mountain pass, they still would have had little chance—but that brought no solace to Diego. Father had chosen to seal their fate out of fear. They were from out there, and out there was where people believed the Time of Magic had been a good thing.
But the Time of Magic was the Time of Evil in Father’s mind.
Diego pushed the thoughts away. He looked down at the object in his hands. The shape was unnaturally perfect. Rectangular, straight, and seamless. It fit in the palm of his hand, and was so thin he could slide it easily under his wool-stuffed mattress and not the slightest bump showed. One side seemed to be made of a strange type of glass, but was too perfect—the flame in the lantern on the wooden stand beside him was reflected in the surface as if in a mirror. Diego turned the object this way and that, and the reflection stayed true. Not a single flaw. The other side was made from a material Diego could not identify. Not glass, not wood, not metal. Smooth, black, and shiny, it felt like polished stone, but the sound was wrong for stone when Diego tapped on it.
It had to be from the Time of Magic.
He knew only bits and pieces about the Time of Magic, the information Father gave now and then after drinking too much of his homemade ale, when his tongue was looser than normal. Although, it always came in the form of warnings.
“Diego, it’s no good what’s become of this world! People never learn! ‘Twas the Time of Magic that brought our near destruction! It’ll be the return of Magic that brings it completely!”
That, of course, was the source of Father’s fear. And somehow he believed that keeping Diego and himself hidden away in a mountain cavern would keep them from destruction.
But how could Magic such as this be so bad?
Diego stroked the edges of the object, remembering the day, weeks ago, when he’d found it. It made no sense at all how it had gotten into the scrubby bush where Diego had been searching for berries—a bush he’d checked only days before. But there it lay, dusty but unharmed beneath the branches Diego had pushed aside. He’d tucked it inside his boot before Father walked over, and had quickly slipped it beneath his mattress when they returned. Every night he held it, wondering what it was for. Who had owned it. How it had gotten in their isolated patch on the mountain. Why he’d been the one to find it, rather than Father with his keen eyes and constant patrolling.
A cough sounded suddenly, and Diego nearly let the object slip from his hands. Father was close. Diego stuffed the object under his mattress, and grabbed the linen shirt he had been sent in here to mend.
Father appeared in the pale light just as Diego pulled the first stitch.
“I thought you’d be finished by now, boy,” his father said with a voice filled with gravel. “Never mind. Put it down for now. The dragon’s gone and we can hunt again.”
Diego nodded and obeyed, happy to get out of the stuffy cave and into the fresh air. They wouldn’t have much time, as night and its deathly cold were approaching, but it was better than nothing. Diego’s only regret was that he had not yet gotten to glimpse the dragon that stalked their area. A remnant from the Time of Magic, it had wings, placed there, as Father had told him, by the men of Magic years ago.
“It looks just like that,” Father had once said, pointing to a small lizard perched on a rock, “but large enough to swallow you without chewing, boy. Best to keep inside when she’s around.”
She, Diego had noted, and asked Father if there could be babies nearby.
“Don’t be silly, boy. She’s comes here to perch, to get a better view of the land below, so’s to be able to see her prey.” He’d given Diego a look that said there’d be no more discussion. There was to be no curiosity. He was to stay inside. Safe.
Hunting was good that evening. The bird Father had shot filled both their bellies, and soon Diego was back in his alcove while Father lay on his mattress near the fire. But he could not sleep. He was tired of living in the side of a mountain. He wanted to see beyond this mass of rock, to meet other people. To have a friend his own age. To find out about the world outside of Father’s ranting and rules.
Stay inside. Don’t cross the stream. Don’t go past that scrub over there.
Diego wasn’t a fool. He knew he could never leave. He didn’t know the way to the mountain pass as Father did. He knew how to make a fire for warmth, but there was little to burn beyond their area. He would need much warmer clothing. And where would he find food?
No, it was impossible. He had to accept it.
But if only…
If only he had someone, anyone other than Father.
He slipped his hand be
neath the mattress and pulled out the object, cradling it between his chest and the stone wall as he lay on his side with his back to the alcove’s opening. Squeezing the object, he wished for the presence of another living being. Someone he could talk to, share with, open his heart to. Someone who would listen, unlike his father.
As his thumb pressed against the smooth edge, Diego felt a bump that he’d never noticed before. So slight, he thought he’d imagined it, until he pushed the spot with the very tip of his finger.
A light appeared on the glass side of the object, in a shape Diego had never seen before. Father had taught him letters and words by scratching them into the sand, so he would be prepared. For what, Father would never say. But he knew the image was not a letter or number.
Colors flashed, swirls and other strange designs, and soon the entire glass was alight.
Now there were words, but they were none that Diego recognized. Each was accompanied by an image.
He touched one, and the glass changed, now mostly black, with colored designs and odd shapes, but nothing meant anything to him. More words, but still none Diego recognized. No, one of the images did look like a letter, like a single lowercase “t”—just two simple lines crossed inside a colored square, like a + sign standing on a leg going down taller than the rest.
He touched the image.
The glass flickered, and words in black print against a white background appeared. He could recognize letters, but didn’t know how to put them together in the sounds of words. He rubbed his fingers across the first three groups of letters clustered together, the first three words. In response to his action, the image spoke to him in a tiny little voice, “In the beginning.” Now he knew how to make the letters into sounds.
Diego began to read.
Kat Heckenbach grew up in a small town, where she spent most of her time either drawing or sitting in her “reading tree” with her nose buried in a fantasy novel...except for the hours pretending her back yard was an enchanted forest that could only be reached through the secret passage in her closet.
She never could give up on the idea that maybe she really was magic, mistakenly placed in a world not her own—but as the years passed, and no elves or fairies carted her away, she realized she was just going to have to create the life of her fantasies with words. Just like Diego in “The Power of the Past,” her characters always find a secret world—whether it be real, imaginary, or in the pages of a book.
Enter Kat’s not-so-secret world at www.katheckenbach.com.
The War Between the Mons
by Travis Perry
I’ve heard it said the gods live on Mons Olympus. I had no idea why “they” say that. “They” say some powerfully strange things sometimes. Like, “The early bird catches the worm.”
I remember I asked as a boy, “What’s a worm?”
My old uncle Bobber, who had taken care of me starting at age six when my parents died up until age ten when he also passed away, answered, “Evan, that’s another word for ‘dragon.’”
How in the world could a bird catch a dragon?
Who did for certain live on the mons was the King of Olympus. This is the true account of my Lord Pederson the Govnor of Ascraeus declaring war on the heretic king the cycle that was by Earth calendar the year of our Lord Jesu 3017, written in the present style of today’s bards. Written for your sake, my friends.
The air of the caldera at the center of my lord’s govment of Ascraeus is so thin that a man from the plains would not be able to breathe there. I’ve heard said it’s like the air of a place called Everest. I have no knowledge of where that mons may be, nor do I know why a mountain would be “ever resting.” Except for a time of long suffering spent moving higher and higher over weeks, only those born and raised on the mons are able to breathe its air. I was raised on the plains, raised as a lowlands rider since I lost all my family at ten, so I know exactly the pain I speak of.
The tall walls of our crater made by flowed lava of a long-ago eon form a God-hewn protection for the fields and crops that feed my lord’s settled hands, who in turn feed the riders and their horses who kept his holdings safe. At the bottom of this caldera, surrounded by the natural walls of the rim, the hands raise crops under buildings of a glass constructed in the distant past to conserve the sun’s heat. Wood burned in small amounts, supplied air by bellows to retain warmth and melt the ice that by nature collects in the caldera—this we use for water, sustaining enough life to maintain a govment in this harsh place. We burn the wood sparingly because it’s a rare prize, slow to grow in this high land.
Into the vertical rock wall towering two kims over the caldera heartland of Ascraeus is cut a sloped ramp spiraling up from the bottom, up to an outpost below the highest part of the rim, where there is a second, higher caldera. Sometimes icy cirrus clouds gather in the upper crater. The outpost is made of hewn black boulders coated with thick ice all cycle round. From this post, twenty of the hardiest hands, rotating out once per month, work every day save the Lord’s day with ice axes to keep the road open from down in the caldera up past the rim and down the mountain. Riders from the heartland caldera stage at this post before crossing over “the hump” and patrolling their circuit below the rim. They also ride circuit on the key approaches around the low slopes that are hundreds of kims down the mons. On the low slopes on most sides, sudden steep cliffs drop down to the plains that form the lowest places of the highland Kingdom of Tharsis. Ascraeus is but one govment of that kingdom.
I had become a rider-errant, and had wandered on missionhood with the Brothers of the Shield to protect the Pilgrim Road from bandits. Our route started from where the road begins at Olympus itself on the west to its dusty meanderings just north of Mons Ascraeus, through the cliffs of Kasei Vallis out to the Chryse Planitia, where men and women had first settled this world, where lays the Gran Templo Bautista of New San Diego at the shores of the Chryse Sea.
Today, weak and barely able to breathe, frost shows in the air every time I exhale. But my sturdy and heavily blanketed mountain horse, its barrel chest holding powerful lungs, sets me out at a slow but steady walk with my lord and the other riders. We ascend from the fortress below the rim with fifty-two riders in total. We are followed by two hundred of the best-equipped hands marching on foot. And a procession of wagons following them. It is said our enemy, the King of Olympus, saddles 700 riders in armor. Not counting the thousands of hands he can put under arms at a moment’s notice.
At our best speed, once we cross the top and begin to move downhill, seven night campments pass while we descend from the height of the mons caldera rim to the seven kim high Tharsis plain just below the mons. 220 horizontal kims pass as we go 12 kims downward toward the north flank of the mountain, where it borders the high plain where the Pilgrim Road passes. The first day and night crawl by as we move down a slippery ramp surrounded by ice carved away by perpetual diligence; our night tents we pitch in snow.
After the first day, the rim behind us is no longer visible. By day three we make much better time as we pass out of the ice country to the main slope of the mons. Which is so large that no man on its side can readily see he is on a single mountain, since his eyes show him no more than endlessly downward-sloping ground. It appears as a tilted plain, crossed with ridges and crevices, still as a rule made of naught more than the hard black rock that Bobber told me had once flowed down the highest mons as liquid lava. All cycle ‘round the highest reaches are covered with snow and ice, but as we descend on this summer day, more and more of this once-flowing rock shows itself. The lava flowed long before men in the Time of Magic, over two hundred cycles ago, had conjured air out of the rocks, giving the sons and daughters of mankind air to breathe in this vastness of lands we call “Mars.” We know air came from the rock because “they” say so—which makes little more sense to me than what “they” say about birds and worms.
Only Olympus itself stands higher than our mountain, our mons, home of our govment. Ascraeus is vaster
than many of the kingdoms that divide up our Mars, but is more barren than most of them. In addition to air, the magic of the past crafted soil from hard rock, so “they” say. Apparently the wizards of that long ago time didn’t see the need to provide for vegetation in the highland slopes, since lichen and sparse scrubby bushes are the only plants to break up the profile of dusty black rock all along our trail of periodic switchbacks, down folded hillsides and through broken lava tubes and rounded rocky draws. The melted moisture of highland ice builds little rivulets that grow deeper and wider as we go lower down. More green lies along these streams, which we allow the horses to briefly graze upon at the fords across the streams. Periodically through each cycle of seasons my lord’s herding hands take flocks of goats though this vegetation to consume what they can, producing most of the milk and meat for his govment. Much along this path has already been eaten, evidence of goat dung commonplace.
Along our route, at the lowest reach of the mons, stands the tower of Ascraeus, my lord’s winter home. A keep of white stone is on a tall column of dark rock at the edge of a steep drop of over three kims to the high plain at the flank of my lord’s Govment of Ascraeus. The tower guards the ramp leading northward to the flatlands. We approach it not long after sunrise, low clouds passing below the tower as higher clouds pass above, a sight of splendor and glory.
At present only five riders and thirty hands occupy this keep, controlling the ramp to the lands below and protecting the main entryway to the Govment of Ascraeus. The chief these riders, Jonthan the Lefthander, comes out to greet us in resplendent steel armor, mounted on his black Marsmorgan, his famed titanium sword strapped to his right hip.
“Is it war then, my Lord?”
The govnor runs a hand over the gray stubble of his strong chin. “It is, Jonthan. I’m afraid I’ll need to take two of your men with me. Your best, please. Other than yourself.” The govnor’s gray horse paces forward, steam ejecting from its nostrils in this early morning cold, only one hour after campment. He reins his mount back as the Lefthander replies:
