The Forest and the Mountain (Vale)

Another in Vale's chain of nightmares. I do actually have a plot in mind for these, they're not mere subconscious worries of a batshit crazy mind -- I might even get around to putting it into play someday! This particular one takes place last night. Thoughts, questions, and suggestions always very welcome.

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The Forest and the Mountain

The moon glinted new and slender above the forest, casting a weak silvery light over the towering pines. A storm had howled among the trees throughout the night hours, driving snow before it with the fury a wolf pack on the hunt, leaving great white drifts piled against the ancient bark and against the rough-hewn logs of the small dwelling. Inside, Vale slept, a ragged fur cloak sheltering her from the fingers of cold that crept underneath the door; the wailing wind was the only lullaby she had ever needed, the only one she had ever known.

'Open the door,' came the whisper from the forest, and Vale stirred, a sleep-laden murmur falling from her lips as she drew closer to the warmth of the slumbering figure beside her.

'Come to us,' drifted the whisper, 'to those who know who you are.'

And then, though these were not her woods, the voices on the wind were the voices of her blood, filled with the ache of the grave and of cold that had no ending. Vale awoke, and shivering, she climbed from beneath the furs, away from the comfort of the man who had slept at her side, and crossed to kneel beside the ash-banked hearth. There was no glow of embers; she had covered the few remaining coals to hide them for the morning, but she could feel the faint warmth as she stretched out a hand in the enveloping darkness. There was life beneath the ashes, a few soft red coals that would spark when she uncovered them and breathed heart into them anew, driving back the cold that held the forest in its clawlike grasp...

'Valerias Caan, daughter of the plagued wood.' The whispers were rising now, insistent, the voices swelling and tangling, some rasping with anger, some pleading; some of them she knew, had she allowed herself to put names to them. 'Come to us, open the door.'

She leaned over the hearth, the loose wool of the dress that draped around her suddenly no protection against the ice that slid across her spine. She reached for a pine log, to stir the embers into wakefulness– 'No,' whispered Vale.

The door burst open, the scream of the wind flinging snow through the gaping entrance. A figure stood there, silhouetted against the ghost-pale light of the snow beneath a new moon.

'I was...safe...' she started, lurching to her feet with her hand closed around the length of wood, but no sound seemed to rise from her throat.

'We're ne'er safe,' said the figure, moving toward her. There was too little light to see his face, but she knew the voice. It was one she had once stirred at the sound of: a voice at which she had shouted, sometimes derided, but loved as one loves the promise of life itself; she had loved it because she had had nothing else. She had never heard it sound as it did now.

'Not you,' Vale whispered, finding her own voice at last, though it was as hoarse and cracked as a stranger's. Hoarse with cold, the same cold that had broken through the doorway. She could no longer feel her fingers around the pine log.

'Did ye really believe ye could run, Vale? There's na mountain t'climb tha's gonna save ye. There's na escape from wha' ye are. There's na escape from us.'

Though she couldn't see his face, she could see the naked sword in his hand; yet even in the full glow of the watery moonlight, no sheen of steel came from it. It was only the shadow of a sword, and yet suddenly it was all she could do to stand her ground.

'I know wha' I am, an' I'm sa much more than our blood. Ye... ye know tha'.' Her voice was fading, as if her words had begun to freeze. There was no warmth at the hearth now, no glow of sparks waiting for the kiss of life; there had been none since the wind had howled through the door.

'Oh yeh, I know wha' ye are. Yer a killer wit' a coward's heart.' The figure took a step forward, the weak light rippling over the black leather he wore. 'Ye can 'ide behin' yer silks an' yer words, but ye know. Ye've always known, 'aven' ye?'

Vale could no longer feel her feet, though before the cold stone of the floor had been like needles to her skin. The thought dimly reached her that she could no longer move at all, but it seemed to matter little. 'Ye... ne'er mocked me,' she whispered, though she didn't know if her lips made any sound. 'All those years... ye ne'er...'

And then Ledgic Caan threw back his head so that the light at last caught his pale face and the illuminated the scar that ran jagged across his eye. He raised the black blade, reaching out to seize her, and there was nothing Vale could do to keep herself from it: she screamed.

**

What was either moments or lifetimes later, Vale lay sprawled in a heavy drift of snow. She struggled to her knees, her arms and legs numb, though it was not the spectral cold that had stolen through her in the cabin. She fought for breath, the scene replaying in her mind: Ledgic, of all her kin... Ledgic's words, the black sword, his face as he had swung for her in the dark.

She looked down and saw that the snow around her was covered with blood, and both hands went to her chest. Her fingers came away sticky, and as she looked down, there was a vast hole opened in her skin; surely her ribcage must have been cleaved apart, and yet she wasn't dead. She wasn't even dying. Slowly, a tremor in her numb hand, she slid a finger through the wet blood: and there, the visceral warmth of an organ. The rise and fall of a heartbeat, the regular movement of her pulse there beneath her finger, and yet she wasn't feeling it through a vein, she was touching the heart itself.

Vale slumped forward on her hands, bile rising in her throat, and only then did she look up. She was at the foot of a mountain, though it was no mountain she had ever seen. The forest was the same; the staunch and ancient pines, arrayed in the garments of perpetual snow. Yet as the white slopes rose before her, it seemed that the mountain was something else altogether: snow-encrusted to be sure, but the pines fell away where the land began to rise, and great cliffs reared their heads in the distance, surrounded by crags and glaciers. It was a mountain as sharp as if it had been chiselled by a sculptor's hand. It seemed ancient, and yet age had not softened the rock and the ice.

And then she knew: it was her mountain. She had to climb it, even if it was necessary to travel the passes blind and in the dark, or die during the ascent. Vale dug her fingers painfully into the snow, pushing against the cover of ice beneath and rising. This was her climb, her struggle for escape, and yet not only hers–

'Garthen!' she shouted, the sound reverberating through her torn lungs as she turned her head to look down the slopes behind her, where the pines fell away down into the frosty glens of the valley. She shouted again, and then, clutching a hand over the hole in her chest, she looked up at the peaks before her. He was supposed to be here, and yet he was not: and she knew – as she had known when Ledgic had walked through the door and he had not been the Ledgic that she thought she had loved – that she was alone.

Slowly, the muscles of her numbed leg suddenly aching, Vale took her first step toward the mountain.

As I said before, very well writen and descriptive nightmare. And the magus is naturally not there, he is halfway up already drinking himself silly as always. Moar plox!