Soft cries of fear and terror filled the darkness of the cavern. A huddled group of humans crouched in the very center, dressed in clothes ranging from rags to once-fine apparel. Each human was different, shades of skin varying from blue to black, eyes green to pink. Yet, each one had the same expression of fear on their face – a terror so complete, it seemed as if they had lived their entire lives in its shadow. Indeed, they had. Their fear was as complete and engulfing in their lives as the shadows were in the cavern.
Suddenly, a coil of flame rolled through the room. The humans shrieked, but not only in terror – in some kind of twisted joy. Each and every one opened their arms as wide as possible, standing straight up, as if in anticipation. The fire, with a hungry life of it's own, fell over them in a tidal wave of heat. Every sound, every drip, every single noise in the cavern abruptly vanished, leaving a silence as deep as the night. When the fire finally vanished, instead of nothing but ashes being left, there were soft, wavering, pale forms in the air. Each was as delicate as a line of smoke, but instead of slowly fading in the air as it rose upward, they became more and more defined. Human faces, screaming face, were slowly taking form when a huge shape whistled past, fiery red eyes and fire-blackened teeth snapping at the shadows. As each shadow was devoured, it gave a soundless wail, and then was sucked into the gaping maw. Soon, every shadow was devoured, and the gigantic creature slowly settled to the ground, giving a satisfied rumble.
"Ah, souls are so…delicious".
Faernox sat in his bedroom, head held between his hands, a slow trickle of tears slowly falling from his cheeks onto the bedroom floor, the stone tiles soaking up the salty grief. His mouth opened and closed, over and over again, silently, slowly repeating a single word, the first one that he had ever learned, and the last that he was to ever say in Dragongrief.
"Papa…."
Downstairs, his mother was cooking a batch of soup on the stove; not noticing the way the heat was making her sweat. She, too, was wrapped in the cold shroud of Dragongrief, mourning the husband that had gone for their family, to the dragons. But the sacrifice had to be done every ten years, she reminded herself. Besides, ten people every ten years, one from each walk of life, was not a large price to pay for the complete safety they had here. She remembered her grandmother's tales about the berserk kobolds, and how they ripped through the nascent village each spring, killing nearly 10 people every time. Or the snow demon that marauded through once, taking the first born of every household, in order to appease "his masster". The people, terrified almost beyond reason, had packed up and headed towards a colder climate. Much, much colder. So cold, in fact, that during the trek towards the unknown (but running, terrified, of the snow demon that was hot of their heels), they lost three of their children to the snow, and nearly all of their horses.
Finally, the entire village, nearly dead from exhaustion and the cold, had stopped at the foot of a mountain. Strangely enough, the snow had melted around the edges, leaving more than enough land for living. It was even warm enough for grass, trees, and fruit to be growing. Hardly believing their luck, they had immediately begun to build their village at the base of the cliff. However, it wasn't soon until they discovered the reason for the unknown heat. The cliff was a home for dragons, all under the rule of one single Queen, ________. She, the great red, was the biggest dragon ever known, her age span reaching countless millennia. She came down from the cliff the third day the villagers began to build their homes, and spoke to them from the sky, her body dwarfing the entire village, her shadow falling across the entire mountainside.
"Villagers!" she hissed, with the sound of a thousand serpents slithering against each other. "You have intruded upon my land, Dragon's Peak. For this I should fry each and every one of you at this instant, leaving nothing but your ashes to be remembered. But, I shall be kind. If you will send ten of your number to the top of Dragon's Peak every ten years, sacrificing one from each type of life, I shall spare the remainder of you. But, be warned. You must draw this glyph in blood upon the forehead of each, or their sacrifice will be for nothing, and you will all die." She breathed out a small gout of flame from her nostrils against the mountainside, and another, and another, until, burned into the stone, was the shape of a triangle, elaborate and strange, but impossibly balanced upon it's point.
Then, flying higher and higher into the air, she disappeared about the tip of Dragon's Peak, never to be seen again by the villagers. However, they had taken her warning to heart. They had known what she meant by "walks of life" for that was a line from a very popular piece of bardic poetry, one of the few remembered. Immediately, they chose ten of their scant number, and sent them to the mountain. Indeed, they were forced to. The Snow Demon have followed them, and while it seemed unable to enter the area around the village, it stalked around, ready to snatch any unwary person.
"Ow!" Mourn shrieked as she burned her leg on the edge of the stove. She jumped back, a blister already developing above her knee, but dispelling the memories, at least for the moment. She glanced out the window to look at the sun, and realized that she had been cooking the soup for nearly an hour.
"Faernox! Come…come eat!" Cursing herself mentally for her stuttering, Mourn tried to block out the sadness in her voice, telling herself that she's seen this happen enough times to be unaffected by it, just like the other villagers. But she and her husband had seemed the only ones left to have any grief left when the Dragon took her friends and family, and now, he was gone, too. Closing her eyes, she steadied herself, and called up again, louder this time, and without any weakness in her voice.
Upstairs, Faernox's tears stopped, cut off in mid-flow. He looked up, suddenly angry. "Why!?" he thought to himself. "Why did the Dragon have to take my dad? Why can't he just take some of our horses!?" His childish anger grew stronger and stronger, until he couldn't take it anymore. Containing the scream that wanted to rip from his throat, he slammed his small hand onto the stone tiles. So wrapped up in his grief and rage, he didn't even notice the sudden fissure that appeared in the tiles, or the small spark that flared from his hand…
"FAERNOX! DINNER!"
He jumped, startled at his mother's yell, his childish rage vanishing in sudden astonishment. His mother never yelled. He slowly got to his feet, idly wondering why his hand didn't hurt. Walking downstairs, his wiped at his eyes with the back the tunic sleeve, thinking that the dragon probably wasn't anything but a little lizard, and wished that he could step on it. From that day forth, he never forgot the anger he felt at the Dragon, or the helplessness he felt as his father walked away with the other nine people, each one painted with the strange glyph, blood taken from their own bodies.
"Get 'em Terror!" The nearby boys chanted as Faernox was shoved back by a huge, burly teenager, his mouth contorted in an evil grin. Faernox stumbled, falling onto the soft grass at the foot of the mountain. He looked up at Terror without any visible emotion, and slowly began to get back up to his feet. In response, Terror struck him alongside the face with his heavy boot, crushing his lips against his teeth and knocking him back into the ground. Without a cry or a groan of protest, Faernox began to get back up again, still no emotion visible on his face, though the blood was dripping down his chin.
"C'mon guys" laughed Terror, not even bothering to push Faernox back on to the ground. "It's not worth it to play with this runt. Stupid little weakling." With that, he spit at Faernox, missing badly, and then turned away, walking with a strut and swagger.
"Faernox!" Terra cried, rushing to his side. She was a small girl; only nine winters old, but had a huge crush on the sixteen-year-old Faernox. He knew it, but didn't really care. He didn't really care about anything these days. He had grown up from that time ten years ago, but not grown up much. While he had gotten taller, he had only filled out moderately, and instead of having bulging muscles like Terror, he only had mediocre ones. In fact, some of the younger children could beat him at arm-wrestling, and he was teased endlessly about it. But it seemed that whatever strength he had lost had gone to his looks. He was the most handsome boy in the entire area, and the entire village commented about it endlessly. The village bullies also commented about it endlessly, but in a different, more physical way than the adults. His black hair was long and straight and down to his cheeks, glistening in the sunlight. His nose was straight and true, and his lips, while bloodied, were large and sensuous. He had a finely chiseled face, and for that all that, it still seemed…cold. Perhaps it was his lack of any expression. His eyes were both completely black, much to the apprehension of his mother. They had only turned black after he had his sixth birthday, and she feared the reason for it.
Terra dabbed his lips with the edge of her skirt, wincing as she saw it was nearly cut in half. "You're going to have to see my dad for that" she told him primly. "Why do you let them hit you so much? Why don't you fight back?" She looked at him uncomprehendingly, her bright green little eyes blinking. He shrugged, not able to explain it.
"I just really don't care" he told her. "We're all going to get taken by the Dragon eventually. Anything I do doesn't matter".
"That's not true! You can…you can build stuff, and it'll still stay here. And…and…you can have kids! And maybe someday, lead the people away from this place!"
He laughed shortly, not with any real feeling. "That'll never happen. The snow demon still stalks us, and you should remember that as well as me, since it took little Loathing last week. He was only six years old, remember? Good idea, let's lead the people out of here, to get eaten." He looked at her as he said this. She drew back from him, the bloodstained skirt still in her hands. She began to sniffle, then to wail. Faernox felt a twinge of guilt. He shouldn't have spoken to someone as young as her about things like that.
"Hey…let's go see your dad, okay? I'm sorry about what I said. I'll make it up to you. I'll buy you…. some honey." Immediately, her sniffles stopped, and she looked up at him with eyes brimming with quickly disappearing tears.
"Really? That would be great!" she smiled at him, her previous woes forgotten. Standing, they both walked over to Doctor Tremble's office, Faernox holding his lip together with a hand.
"Mater, I'm home!" Faernox shouted at the top of his lungs as he walked into the house. In the intervening ten years, almost nothing had changed. He still lived in the same house, with the same room, and in the same room. Because his father had been the village spokesman, his family was allowed to keep living in one of the biggest houses in the village.
His mother came slowly down from the stairs, holding onto the railing firmly with one small hand. Over the past years, her constitution had weakened considerably, as if wore down by some interior force. Faernox knew, deep in his heart, that she was only waiting for the day that he was able to live in the world by himself. Then, she would go peaceably to death's door, hoping to meet her husband there. But he never thought about such things, preferring the emotionless safety that he perpetually felt.
He quickly walked over to her, dropping his pack on the ground at the doorway. He helped her get down the remaining stairs, and brought her to sit in the linen, down-filled couch, another luxury that they managed to keep. The sun was low in the sky, filling the room with a soft, golden light, making his mother seem much the way her remembered her when she was young and beautiful. He felt a pang of nostalgia, then quickly quashed it beneath the emotionless hammer that he protected himself with. She was old now, he reminded himself. Yet, still, the feeling was hard to dispel.
"I'm going to make you some ginger-root tea" he told her, gently letting go of her hand. She nodded, looking up at him with those loving-blue eyes, always seeming to appraise him. She slowly lifted her hand, and stroked the side of his young face.
"No…the dragon isn't going to take you, is he Faernox? He's not, is he? No. You're too young, too beautiful, for anyone to have you. You'll be an important man one day, just like your father. He was important, you know. Town spokesman…"
He let her ramble on and on like this for a few minutes. At first, these spells had been rare, her slipping back into her memories of happier days. But recently, they had increased dramatically, until he had to see her like this every day. He supposed it was because the Dragon's Eve was going to appear in a few days. Having lived through the first one, he really didn't care about the approaching one. "It'll get rid of most of the assholes in this village", he thought. What he didn't realize was that the reason most of the villagers were assholes was because of the deep-seated fear in their hearts, a fear that Faernox had never felt.
While in the kitchen, preparing the tea, he thought about little Terra. He couldn't recall a time when he had seen her afraid. Once, when Terror was pummeling him, she had screamed and latched onto his back like a small kitten, biting and scratching ferociously. Terror had screamed, more in surprise than in fear, and tried to get her off. Much to his dismay, he couldn't. The boys and girls in the village had laughed about this for weeks afterward, saying that Faernox had a pet bobcat to protect him. Later that week, Terror had caught him, by himself.
"You don't have that little girl to protect you this time" he taunted. Faernox barely made it to Doctor Tremble's house before falling unconscious at their doorstep. When he awoke, healed, they had asked him what happened. He said it didn't matter.
Shaking his head to clear it of memories, he finished making the tea and brought it to his mother. "A few days", he thought. "Just a few days, and we'll see what happens to this village, again. All the assholes will be gone, and the festivities will begin again." He remembered the huge festival that had taken place after Dragon's Eve last year, when everyone had finished the required three days of Dragongrief. The festival had lasted three days, also, and all that time, Faernox had not left his room, though he could hear the laughter of the children and the adults through his high bedroom window. Unlike most of the people in the village, his mother and himself had been trapped in Dragongrief far longer than anyone else. Finally, it ended for both of them. "We just had different ways of dealing with it", he thought, the bitterness surprising him. His mother had chosen to forget about Dragon's eve, instead believing in her heart that her husband had died trying to fight the snow demon. Faernox himself had covered the pain and grief and rage with a smooth, emotionless blanket. He no longer really cared about anything.
After his mother finished her tea, he helped her back up to her room, wishing that she had let him convert the entranceway into a new bedroom. But she insisted on staying in her old room, saying that Faernox's father had slept with her there. After helping her into the bed, and leaving a cup of water near the bedside in case she needed it, he went to his room, and stretched out of the bed. "Two days…" he thought.
The next day, Faernox jumped out of bed, startled by the sound of something. It was nearly dawn, so he should have awakened anyway, but it sounded as if someone were downstairs. For a single instant, he thought that it might have been his father. Quickly, he quashed that idea from his sleep-drugged mind, knowing that his father had been dead for a long, long time. Still, it was something.
He drew on his clothes, strapped a small dagger to his waist, and headed down the stairs. When he reached the bottom of the staircase, he stopped, astonished. Scratching the entrance of the pantry, trying to get the bolt off, was a three-foot imp. While he was staring, dumbfounded, the imp turned around, and shrieked at him. Faernox jumped a foot, startled.
"Ahh! A humans! A humans! Get away, humans! Away! My food! Mine!! Leave me be's!" The imp jumped and shrieked at him, and Faernox quickly thought that he would have to find a way to quiet the imp, before it woke his mother.
"Listen…little one…I have some food for you, but it's not in that pantry. You can't get in there anyway, see that big lock? What's your name anyway?" Fearnox asked, trying to soothe the rattled imp, who was nearly shivering in excitement at the mention of food.
"Me…feast! Me want to feast!" the imp began to shriek again, bobbing from side to side on its large bat wings.
"All right!" Faernox nearly shouted, then quieted himself. "Then I'll call you…Mephisto. Mephisto, there's some food in that pack by the door over there." He pointed, and immediately, the imp took off towards it. Opening the pack, the imp pulled out two links of sausages, each nearly half his size, then a wax-covered round of cheese, the same size. Inhaling sharply, the imp released a small ball of fire, toasting both sausages nicely. Not even bothering to unwrap the cheese, Mephisto began to feast.
Faernox stood in pure amazement as the imp began to devour the huge meal. The imp's stomach bulged and bulged with the food he ate, until he looked like a barrel with bat wings. Amazingly, he still stayed hovering off the ground. Faernox suppose the imp's innate magic accounted for that. Soon, the imp was done, and belched resoundingly, a small bit of smoke coming from its mouth.
"All done!" it announced. "Thank you! You nice humans! You nice! Thanks! I like you! You feed me more later? I good now." Blinking back his amazement this time, Faernox replied with the first words that came time mind, wanting to get this imp out of the house as quickly as possible, before his mother woke up.
"Maybe…if you leave right now". Before he could blink, the imp was gone, vanished in a puff of smoke. "I suppose I'll regret that later" he thought, then went to the pantry, unlocking it with the key he kept hid under the honey jar, making sure the imp wasn't looking in on him. Somehow, he knew that it wasn't.
After bringing his mother downstairs, and giving her breakfast (they were low on sausage, for some reason), he re-loaded his pack, and sent out. He was supposed to help Doctor Tremble paint and put up a new sign, as the old one had been a short sword. "I don't have to guess whose short sword it was, either," he thought darkly.
The sun was high in the sky; it's fiery brilliance shining down upon the village, brighter than even the dragon's fire, this fair day. In the past thirty years, the village had grown from the first few stragglers that managed to make it down the mountain, despite the Dragon's sacrifice. Nearly every year, at least one child was born, normally four or five. It seemed, because of the fear that was perpetually evident in the village, people tried to have more and more children, to carry on their bloodline. "Soon," he thought, "the area around Dragon's peak won't be enough to support us all. We've already surrounded a third of it." His mother had been the only exception, and not by choice. His birth had been a hard one, and she nearly died from blood loss immediately after. If they hadn't had Doctor Tremble the cleric at hand, she would have most certainly died. The doctor told her afterwards that if she had any more babies, she would die. She replied by saying that she had all she could ever want with the bundle in her arms.
He was knocked out of his reverie literally, as a small shape hit him, careening into his abdomen. He fell on the ground with a "whoof!", unable to move for a moment. When he finally looked down, he was staring into Terra's mischievous green eyes, laughing at him.
"Boo!" she yelled. "I'm a fairy!" Faernox contained a laugh, the first one he felt in a long, long time. He always seemed to be a little bit happier when he was with Terra, and he didn't know why. He thought of her more as a sister than anything else, the sister he never had.
"Are you? I thought that only ghosts went boo," he told her.
"Well… I'm a special fairy! I can say boo if I want to!" she looked at him defiantly, daring him to naysay her.
"Oh, I see. Well, get up off me, fairy, so I can give you a gift."
"A gift? For me!? Oh, Faernox, you shouldn't have!" she imitated a teenage girl perfectly, the tone and voice exact. Faernox contained a laugh again. He knew that she really did want to see the present, and was only acting that way to seem older to him. "Cute" he thought. Waiting until she stood up off of him, he opened his pack and withdrew a small jar.
"Here…bee careful" he said, wondering if she would catch the hint. She did, looking at him, amazed, carefully taking off the lid of the jar. Inside was the most golden, syrupy, delicious looking honey imaginable. There was a small handle stuck to the side of the jar.
"Oh! Honey! Yay!" She grabbed the handle and gently pulled it out. Attached to the handle was a honeycomb, straight from the beehive that Faernox had taken the honey from. Terra popped the entire thing into her mouth, her face melting in pleasure.
"Goom!" she said.
"What?"
"Goom!"
"What's goom?"
She popped the honeycomb out of her mouth. "I said, good! Hee hee. Thank you Faernox!" She hugged him tightly, smearing the honey from her face on his gray tunic. He chuckled and pushed her gently away, walking towards her father's shop. He had to get that sign up before the sunset, and he would have to work fast. She followed, eating the honey as voraciously as Mephisto had eaten the sausages, her brown hair bouncing up and off her shoulders every time she skipped, happy as could be.