This digital collage art was made by me using a variety of CC license sources for the LMAC Round 122 competition.
N.B. This is my first attempt to link the fantastic LMAC (let's make a collage) digital art competition with a fantasy fiction short story that I wrote specifically for @theinkwell community which I helped build and love to see thriving with so much amazing fiction. I have written short fiction additions to my LMAC posts before, but with this story coming in at just over 2000 words I thought that it was a perfect way to link the two creative disciplines, as the final draft and re-write of this story were inspired massively by the digital art I created in my LMAC post The Inn at the End of the World - (LMAC) Round 122. I have edited my LMAC post to include links to this story and have included links to the digital art post above. Thanks.
The Curse of Athelstrand
The ancient warrior placed boot before boot as bitter rain flayed his skin. As his armour pinched and leather greaves clung to his skin soaked by the icy downpour, he remembered past battles; the song of sword and axe reverberating down the ages, the thrum of battle lust and that strange tinge at the back of the throat, the taste of the slaughter. He smiled, you were never defeated old man, even time can’t take that away.
But as the years passed, his thirst for blood lessened until a weariness set in, and a malaise ate away at him like a canker.
He’d spoken to seers who could give him no answers, yet asked for a pretty penny in silver. He’d consulted with alchemists, drinking a multitude of potions to heal his soul. None had worked. All he found were more questions without answers.
Until one day, he happened upon a blind child begging by the road.
A strange softness awoke in his heart, tempered like steel in the heat of battle. Perhaps he grew soft in his dotage. He tossed a gold coin in the boy’s pewter mug. The boy bit down on the coin and gasped as the warrior turned to leave.
“Sir, wait a moment. I can feel the cold of a curse weighing upon you, but you have blessed me with gold enough to feed me and Ma for a month.” The warrior turned, curious in spite of himself.
“What do you know of this boy?” He barked.
“I have the gift of sight, sir knight.” He paused for a second, head tilted to the side with those dead milky eyes fixed solidly around the warrior’s chest. “Yes, I see it now you were a knight in duke Evalry’s cavalry, a killer of men. The first dragoon in the Eagle’s claw feared above all else in the war of Calddon.”
The warrior stared at him dumbfounded.
“The answers you seek lie at the far side of the Bloodstorm Mountains where the eternal rainbow holds up the sky, sir knight.”
The boy fumbled the gold coin from finger to finger as he spoke.
“Seek an ancient sorcerer at world’s end and he shall free you of your malady.”
The warrior snorted, “I am old is all, age and death catch up to us all eventually boy. What are you about? Arranging an ambush for a company of bandits? Or maybe you think I’m just stupid? You speak riddles, as if legends are real and that the knowledge of the dead is fact. Sorcerers, Griffins, the pillar of the world, the great rainbow that balances the world between light and darkness, they are all lies boy. Fairy tales for maids and children.”
He grabbed the boy by his shirt and lifted him, coming face to face with those dead white eyes. Those milky orbs flashed a sudden brilliant blue.
The warrior shivered, letting the boy drop to the ground as he doubled over in pain.
“I swear what I say is the truth, good knight. On my honour, what little that might mean to you, I swear what I see is the truth. Magic is as real as the air we breathe.”
The warrior straightened as his guts unknotted and stared in shock at the swirling dust where the boy had sat.
He tarried only a day in the town of Geldensberg to buy supplies for the long journey, jerk meats and smoked fish. Hardtack bread that would last ages and a sack of potatoes that could lend ballast to any stew. He had wandered the wilds long enough to forage herbs from the hedges and bring down the occasional doe with a throw of his axe. Mountains were just mountains, despite any legend. He did not fear legend or the scrawling of ancient scribes from a long-dead past. Yet those flashing eyes pierced him still whenever he pictured them. Any chance of regaining his full vigour was worth a chance, otherwise, he might as well just take his dagger to his throat and be done with it.
With the spring wind at his back set off into the foothills of the Bloodstorm Mountains.
Fifty days and fifty nights passed as he laboured his way through valley and peak, along treacherous ledges, and across a boulder-strewn plateau until he reached a final set of mountains. Taller than all he’d seen before, they seemed like the pillars of the world, but a lush valley of golden trees marched down the knee of the second of the three peaks.
Crystalline drops of rain spotted his face as he climbed, and he heard a strange trumpeting sound from the depths of the valley.
After a day and a night of struggling through brush and briar at the base of the wooded valley, he emerged into a clearing of flattened grass and briar. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as he surveyed the scene. Either a large herd of cattle or something singular, yet massive, had stampeded this area flat. But he could see there was no path leading out from the space as a herd of hardy mountain cattle might leave, and he doubted any such animals could survive this high in the boulder-strewn wastelands.
Dark trees lined the northern edge of the clearing, sloping in the mountain's direction where he had heard the strange trumpeting the night before. He strode forward toward the dark of bough and bur when a sudden wind whistled at his back and he half turned as a giant shadow descended on him, blacking out the sky with its bulk. He fell backwards into a roll, instincts of a thousand battles taking over as a massive beak crashed into the earth where he had stood.
Bones creaking, he forced his body to spring the momentum of the roll upwards onto his feet, yet old as he was, he landed unbalanced in a crouch, with only a second to assess his foe.
Facing him was the stuff of legends. It had the head and wings of an eagle, yet the body was an odd furred serpentine cylinder with short powerful legs of a feline, perfect for springing. Its tail tapered into an arrow-shaped bony flesh spear, curling above its head like a scorpion’s tail weaving back and forth.
The creature sprang as fast as that silver flash had in the beggar boy’s eyes, and it was all he could do to get his wide axe head up in time to thrust it forward between the gaping beak. The creature danced back, ripping the axe from the warrior’s hands as he rolled once, twice, and a third time through sheer instinct. Each time, that cruel tail smashed the ground inches from his ears. The warrior sprinted toward the tree line, his only safety, thinking of a place to hide and perhaps fashion a crude weapon. As he glanced backwards, the Grinsten followed, now slower and obviously in pain, shaking its head and shrieking, trying to dislodge the warrior’s axe.
The warrior had lived through so many battles where the odds seemed stacked against him that he recognised the single opportunity presented here. There was always a fulcrum, a point where you had to put your life on one side of the scales, risking almost certain death at just the right moment to swing the scales the other way.
He pivoted in his sprint and dove into a roll to increase his momentum, springing from the roll into a leap just underneath a swipe of that tail which dripped some acrid solution straight toward that gaping maw. His shoulder slammed into the metal head of the axe as he grabbed the haft and handle with his hands, holding on for dear life as he felt the axe bite deeper into the fleshy throat of this monster and it thrashed its head. He clung on, knowing to let go was certain death.
The tail caught him a graze along his side, but his trusty mail turned the spike of the arrow-like tail, leaving a slight burning smell which confirmed what the warrior had heard about this mythical creature. Even now a sticky acid would be slowly working through his mail toward the skin and ribs below. Yet, he held on as the creature’s lifeblood flowed over him and with one great screech which nearly dislodged him and rendered him deaf to the raging wind; the Grinsten reared up and fell upon the warrior in its death throws, grinding him into the mud beneath its bulk.
Blackness descended, as he felt breath lessen, and finally before unconsciousness took him the screech of the Grinsten silenced.
The warrior awoke to a sweet smell of clover, cowslip, and poppies.
He raised his bruised body on elbows that felt as brittle as deadfall to behold a meadow of wildflowers surrounded by trees that shone in the morning dew.
A homely inn sat near the edge of a cliff and a cacophonous trumpeting shocked him out of his reverie. He leapt to his feet, axe pulled from its backstrap as old instincts took over.
Above him, on the slope of the mountain, he beheld the strangest creature.
Ten feet tall, made up of cut crystal, yet its skin rippled as the sun burst through the rain, arching a rainbow from its upheld trunk. He had heard of such creatures in faraway lands, but the tales told of creatures of flesh like giant cows with an arm for a nose.
A burst of sonorous laughter echoed across the high pass as an ancient man emerged from the building and greeted him by name.
“Athelstrand Fletcher, would you attack your saviour? This creature plucked you from beneath a beast that has plagued these mountains for a millennium and washed you in mountain streams before licking clean the acid blood that surely would have finished you. Is this how you greet your new companion, the great king of Elintphants?”
The old man’s eyes glinted silver for just a moment in the light of that valley before he smiled and held up an arm to beckon the warrior forward.
“I have waited for you for a long time.”
He spread his arms wide and spoke words of power, guttural and strange to Athelstrand’s ears as the old warrior approached. Yet, as the incantation continued, he understood is if born to this language.
upon thy weary frame,
Athelstrand who dealt in death,
maimed for plunder and acclaim.
Your bones will creak, stretch
and pop until at last you tower,
to guard the gates of Eldermere
that the dead pass in their hour.
But ye shall not die,
yet linger in this place,
renewed with vigour each day
by the crystal rainbow’s grace.
Athelstrand bellowed in pain as the incantation ended, feeling his blood course through his veins as if in a battle rage. The pain beat a crescendo as his body melted and reformed, absorbing prisms of light from the perpetual rainbow that arched over the valley.
All went black, for how long he could not guess.
As the pain receded, he opened his eyes and looked down at the tiny Inn and the nodding wizard, smug as a rat-tailed thief of Clrinstar port.
He raised his foot to squash this daemon in human form, realising his trickery, but the wizard held up one palm, toppling Athelstrand with a mountain-shaking crash into the valley grass. The crystal elephant cantered over to slap his new gargantuan friend playfully with that crystal trunk.
Athelstrand got to his feet, staring out at the misty plain beyond the mountains and the dark pool of Eldermere. Endless lines of the shades of the dead spiralled in a slow walk into those dark waters.
“You will find immortality not so bad Athelstrand” the wizard intoned with bitter sarcasm.
“This seems a fitting fate for such a dealer in death.”
The wizard muttered as he leaned on his staff walking back into the inn, “we get few visitors here except the dead. Maybe more of the living will visit now you have destroyed the Grinsten.”
The End.
Thanks for reading 🙂
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