Lore/Story The Beast Beneath the Mount

This was my submission for the Realm of Uz writing contest. People liked it, so I'm putting it here as well.
Other than the fact that it was a contest for a guild, this short story is not Wynn related.​

The Beast Beneath the Mount​

Off the southern end of the great Wall lies a peak by the name of Fang. ‘Tis one of the largest that I’ve ever seen, rivaled only by those few exemplars near the Maw and the worlds onto themselves that ring the Great Plateau.


Certainly, 'tis one of the loneliest! It lies some six hours’ flight off from the foothills that end the mighty prominence of The Wall in truth, and there lie no other mountains within even the same order of magnitude for another week of travel. Its loneliness can be compared to that of the Horn, the spire that my father makes his home underneath, but even there the foothills are not entirely gone before meeting the mountain.


‘Twas underneath the watchful gaze of the Fang that I was first told this story. It seemed a fable, and I certainly heard none of the so-called telltale signs of its presence while I was there.


The merchant who told me the tale is known as Avakenz, an occasionally-seen friend of mine. She runs a small caravan route from the cities of Amarkad to Shrustry-upon-Kis and back once more, as she has for the last twenty-seven years.


On this specific night, I met her camped by the Grand Cliff: A great river at the border between two countries that she must ford on her route. Her caravan had stopped for the night on account of a massive dust storm sweeping in from the east.


Oh, what a terrible sight I must have made, approaching the camp during the height of a storm! I confess that my - horribly ragged, mind you - appearance may have scared the younger ones, and quite a few of those older, but my merchant friend quickly sorted everything out. I joined the edge of the small circle of safety that the caravan’s sage had been so graciously providing.


We spoke at length about the caravan’s travels, and of mine, and at one point a stray strike of lightning miles off revealed the striking silhouette of the Fang itself, watching us over the horizon. I’d had no idea it was so close, and relayed as such to the rest of the folk in the camp.


The mountain had none of the famously brutish anger characteristic of, say, the Horn -- the mountain that I had grown up underneath. It instead had an air of loneliness, even melancholy about it. I confess my folly as a storyteller here. T’was certainly a dreary and lonely night for me to see it! Perhaps that has colored my recollection.


It was as the conversation meandered towards the Fang that my merchant friend chose to tell a famous folk take in the region: the story of the Beast Beneath the Mount, which I will now without further preamble relay.

_____________________________________________​

We begin when Hawal was new, and fewer legends walked the earth. What legends that did exist in this mythic time stand all the higher for it.


Before all others, the Kingdom of Atya stood on the banks of the Grand Cliff River. Its people lived on the very edges of where the lush lowlands of Jobbawocky gave way to the dry, blazing steppes of Iironan. The mighty weight of the Mountain Fang was like an idol of protection, and within its aegis the people thrived. Yes, It was a peaceful kingdom, and for centuries a prosperous one as well.


However, that was all to come to an end. Irblis, a titanic serpent, one day invaded from the steppes. The great beast laid waste to the Kingdom and its greatest cities. The noble king Richard managed to build an army and grievously injure it, driving it back into the steppes. Still, it was too little, too late. The damage had been done, and it would take years for the Kingdom of Ayta to return to its former glory.


The next year, the Serpent returned.


Again, the King raised an army. Again, was the Serpent repulsed. The people of Atya had seen it before, and they could fight it better. Yes, many still died, but the damage was not nearly as high as its devastating first attack. The people took solace in the fact that their kingdom would never be hurt as badly again.


The King, however, knew better. He had desperately raised a host of twenty thousand orcs during the first invasion, and about a fifth had died to the murderous gaze and whipcrack tail of the Serpent. With his people more prepared this time around, he had been able to double the number of his host.


But a fifth had still died. And Atya was not a mighty kingdom. Less than a million souls lived in the country around the river. They could not survive losing nearly ten thousand able-bodied men and women every year. Irblis, the mighty serpent, was weaker than the kingdom outright, yes. But it would kill them with a thousand cuts.


After the fourth year of the Serpent’s attacks, the King put together a party of great hunters to range into the steppes, to find where Irblis hid while it healed and to slay it in its weakness.


Half the hunters found nothing, and half the hunters never returned. The aging King would never call another hunt.


It was in the ninth year of the Beast’s attacks that a young man by the name of Lloyd became large and strong enough that he could be called up in the yearly host against Irblis. But each household only needed a single member of good health to answer the call, and his parents forbade him.


He was young, they said. Full of potential. He should focus on finding someone to marry such that he could start a household of his own. Maybe then, he could go off and fight in war, but until then he should leave the possibility of death to his elders.


That year, his mother did not return. His father, consumed by grief, did not return in the next.


Lloyd would never start that household. He remembered that the King had sent out a ranging party when he was young, and in his grief reasoned that if he became a great hunter that he on his lonesome could succeed where the mightiest warriors of the Kingdom had failed.


From then on, he devoted his life to his hunt. Yes, it may have been futile, but by the twilight of his youth he had transformed himself into a mighty warrior indeed.


Having honed his body over the course of years, he had turned every muscle and every twitch of his into a finely-honed arbiter of death. He had not forgotten his people, and his time as a ranger for his village had saved countless lives.


But he had not forgotten his family either. Lloyd had trained for a greater purpose. As the grip of frost receded and the flowers began to bloom, heralding the eighth spring since his father had left and never returned, the King’s men came riding into his village and requested any warriors, rangers, and mages for a new hunting party of the Great Serpent.


Old King Richard had died, and his son wished to renew the hunt.


Some sixty adventurers came for the great ranging alongside him. He and these brave men and women of the Kingdom were to be separated into ten groups of six, as to let them move quick and hidden. This year Lloyd was amongst their number and he knew deep in his heart that here and now was where he was destined to kill the serpent.


He was wrong, of course. A month into their expedition a dust storm had swept in from parts unknown. Every member of his party save for him had died quickly. But Lloyd was not to be granted that mercy.


He spent days slowly fading in the blazing steppes. The dust had cut him a thousand times, and though he had survived the onslaught during its attack he had not done so hale. Lloyd wandered blind, starved, and half mad before finally collapsing after who knows how long in sight of the Fang.


The capital of Atya, fifty thousand souls that could save him, lay at the foot of the Fang. It was right there! But alas, he could not reach it.


It was in his dying fever that Lloyd dreamt of his mother standing aside. She disappeared when he blinked, and always remained at the edge of his vision, and so what scraps of wit he had left knew that he was mad and delirious.


The rest of Lloyd did not. He spoke at length to the mirage of a woman, cursing the world for its indifference in the face of his mission. The Serpent had to die, no matter what. Did she not understand that?


And the woman asked him what the difference was between the anger of hate and the anger of justice.


And Lloyd told her to go and eat her own arm. Philosophy was well and good, but within his burning heart those two angers were the same! His hate was made all the more potent, for it was just. He could not die, not here. Irblis yet lived.


And the woman laughed, and told him that she had not yet heard such an answer. It was good, she said, and perhaps if the might of his body had matched the might of his convictions then he may not have fallen to a mere storm of dust.


When Lloyd next blinked, the spirit - for that must have been what it was - was gone. The words of the sage were all well and good, he thought, but Lloyd in this moment was to die without once setting his eyes upon the beast which had so defined his life. Whether or not he could accept his death was immaterial, and as the Guide swept in he closed his eyes.


When he opened them once more, the Hunter was whole again. Perhaps his equipment still felt the ravages of the storm, but he did not.


No, he felt strong.


In his hands he held a horn. He knew not how he knew, but he knew that he was tasked with blowing into it at the foot of the Fang.


And, hours later, when he did, he within moments saw on the horizon a titan of black scales whipping across the earth towards him. Entire swaths of the ground were torn asunder as the Flayer of Kingdoms treated the hardest of stones as sand underneath its writhing body.


It contorted itself this way and that at speeds its size should not have allowed. Its entire coiled body continuously sprung its way across the earth. Its face was hardly visible from within its tangled mass, but Lloyd sensed nonetheless that it was contorted in rage.


Irblis, Great Serpent, knew not who had found his lost tooth, nor why they had fashioned it into a horn. It only knew that it had been insulted.


And as the Hunter saw the creature, whose jaw was the size that it would not even need to stretch to fit a carriage, he knew that however he had survived the steppes that he would now face death.


Irblis, in his rage, had emerged early. It was not fully healed. Lloyd could still see its battered and wounded scales, and knew that the armies would fight it easier this year. But the armies were not prepared yet. The capital sat right on the other side of the mountain.


If Irblis passed him, it would be a bloodbath beyond imagination.


So it was there at the foot of the Fang that Lloyd came to clash with the terrible Irblis. And knowing the stakes he did not falter in the face of the Thousand-Foot Snake. And it was then that the Hunter came to understand that he had indeed died on the steppes, and that he had been returned to the land of the living by the Stalwart herself to do battle with the snake.


Irblis raged against his sword and knife, but Lloyd’s body had grown to match his resolve, and though the whipcrack tail of that which had slain a thousand men could make even the earth come asunder, the Hunter did not budge an inch.


Instead, the Hunter plunged his sword into the ground, and muttered a prayer.


He pleaded for recognition of his conviction and deeds by the Stalwart, but the Goddess had already answered his pleas. Apart from a thrum of approval, he would receive nothing more.


With little else to address but the world itself he turned his prayers to the mountain. He pleaded for the deadrock above him, young and strong, to awaken its sense of justice.


The Fang heard his call, and knew that it could fashion a prison of its bones. But it also knew that Irblis was too strong to be kept forever by mere stone, and that to trap the serpent would mean to also trap the brave Hunter locked in a death struggle with it.


Lloyd did not hesitate. The mission of his life had been to avenge his father, yes, but he finally understood the sacrifice his father had made. What was one more, if it meant that Irblis would never again threaten the people of Ayta? Countless numbers of his people could live in peace forevermore, if only this overgrown snake could never threaten them again.


And so the Fang swallowed them both. They fight to this day, and when the wind carries just right you can still hear the mighty clash of blade and scale underneath the mountain.

 

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