It troubles me to admit, but it took me several hours to come up with and write that inscription. It’s hard enough deciding what to etch into stone for time immemorial, signed in your name. It is harder still to do so in a language you only just codified and whose grammatical rules were still being worked out.
Still, I left the large earthen pillar behind and sat on the mountainside, taking in the view. I’d chosen a location that seemed less likely to be prone to landslides and erosion by air and ice, and it just happened to also have a brilliant view.
The mountain air was chilly but refreshing. I breathed it in, took out my map, and put the finishing touches on its northern edges. I also took out a separate piece of hide, and began marking another, more focused map of the immediate surroundings. This area could easily become a sort of forward base or outpost for future explorations into the mountains. I still wanted to come back and venture forth, passing through the mountains and onto the other side at some point.
The piece of charcoal crumbled in my hands. Grumbling, I set about making another campfire. I’d run out of charcoal. It would also give me the opportunity to cook up a piece of meat. There wasn’t a lot of wood up here, but I would be able to restock once I returned to the small, narrow valleys between some of the smaller peaks, although I was dreading having to cross over the glaciers again. My eyes surveyed the surroundings as I finished up my last piece of charcoal and began drawing up the map.
My hand froze, hovering over the hide, charcoal cracking under the pressure. I squinted. There was something. Something in the distance. A flashing light. Nothing strange, I reckoned. A piece of ice or a shiny rock reflecting the sunlight. I’d seen many such strange lights over the course of my journey.
But there was something about this light. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was, but it felt strange. I racked my brains, but the answer eluded me. Why did I think this light was strange and why did I want to walk up to it and check it out? Curiosity? Pure curiosity? Doubtful. But perhaps.
I rolled up my map and gathered my belongings. I was still staring at the light, trying to figure out what it was. The light was still flashing. Was it really sunlight? I frowned. I had to take a closer look. I climbed down the mountain and cautiously kept an eye out for any strange monsters or signs of the immortals. But as I grew closer and closer to the light, my worries faded and were replaced by something far, far worse.
Questions.
Lots of questions.
I rushed forward, a fleeting feeling in my heart. A feeling of happiness, of joy and celebration of good fortune, quickly crushed and ground down into sorrow and fruitless, directionless anger. I ran the last bit, all the way from when my eyes took in the strange sight in its totality to when my brain made sense of it and my feet brought me to the piles of disturbed ice, barren rock, and strewn pieces of clothes and supplies.
I dropped to my knees, grabbed an outstretched neck, and felt it for a pulse. Finding none, I moved to the next motionless, lifeless, haunting corpse, and repeated my actions.
This one wasn’t breathing.
Nor this one.
This one had been dead for a while.
I went through the entire party of doomed travelers and slumped to the ground, crushing an impulsively grabbed piece of ice within my palm. How could my luck be so terrible? Why was fate presenting something like this to me? Was it the work of an immortal? But why? What could they possibly achieve? I did not understand. It made no sense. It raised so many questions. So, so many questions. And chief among them was the question I had absolutely no way of figuring out:
Who were these people?
No, no, that wasn’t it. That wasn’t the biggest question. The biggest question I had was:
What were these people?
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They didn’t have the long ears and sharp features of the elves, nor did they have the rounder ears and duller features of the humans. These people had angular ears and angular facial features, as if their faces had been commissioned to a modern artist. Perhaps not as extreme as Picasso, but Pablo would’ve probably liked the look of them, I figured.
And then there was the tail. Poking out of the back of each of their behinds, shriveled, possibly by hunger or dehydration, a few bits broken off by frostbite, but certainly a tail. Long, pointy black tails, not unlike the kinds drawn on cartoon devils. The sight might have been comical, if it wasn’t for the pile of emaciated and horrifying bodies laid out in front of me.
A new type of sentient being. This world already had elves and humans, and I guess immortals probably counted as a separate kind of being too, so why was it so strange to find another group like this one? Fitting with the fantastical setting, I figured I might as well call them demons. They had the tails, after all.
I took a deep breath. Which was a bad idea because of the putrid stench that only now penetrated the fog of confusion and questions that had been shielding me so far. I pinched my nose and took a few steps back. The corpses weren’t decaying as fast as they might have in a warmer climate, but they weren’t that far up, so I didn’t expect them to last too long here. I could tell these poor souls had died because of a lack of food, water, and the sort of medical care needed to combat frostbite and pneumonia.
I began making a large grave. But then two things rushed to the front of my mind. First, I should look these corpses over more closely, and second, I did not come here because I’d seen the bodies. Where was the light?
I glanced at the bodies again. There was something odd. Their clothes. They were wearing large, thick furs, which made sense for the weather, but underneath their furs, they did not have hide or leather. No, their underclothes were strange but familiar. They were stitched. A type of fabric, but not cotton or wool. Something native to this world.
Strewn about were tools. Things to help them climb, maybe a few to help them gather resources or light a fire. I crouched down and rubbed the dirt off of one of the tools and my eyes widened. Iron. It was an iron tool. The iron may not have been smelted properly, and there were blemishes in the design, but it was unmistakably iron.
I saw something in the corner of my eyes. A light. Right, it was what I had been looking for. I crept around the rock, spells at the ready, and saw it. No, her.
A sprawling figure, laid out on the ground, eyes partly open, chest moving only slightly. I think she saw me, but couldn’t move her lips to say anything. In fact, she began to close her eyes as soon as she saw me, and I was only shaken out of my frozen state when her eyes closed and her feebly moving chest began to seem even weaker.
I rushed forward and saw the light. A glass oil lamp, clasped tightly in the demon woman’s hands. The oil was about to run out, but it kept shining resolutely and brightly, right up until its flame sputtered on the final drops of oil.
I bit my lips. She didn’t look in good shape. I lit a fire beside her, but with no tinder, all I could do was waste a ton of energy burning a fire above my hand. The woman still had some consciousness, but her body looked emaciated, her lips thin and cracked. I conjured up some water and slipped it into her mouth. I held her head gently up, not even realizing when I had fallen to the ground beside her.
Her throat moved. My eyes widened. I poured some more water into her mouth and she drank. Her gulps were getting stronger, more desperate. She coughed a little and sputtered. I grabbed some of the food that I hadn’t finished and mushed up some of it in water. I then poured the whole thing into her mouth and watched her slowly swallow.
I nursed her for a little while longer, using my fire magic to heat up her body. But I was restless. I didn’t have a lot of food and I wouldn’t be able to keep a fire going all day every day, especially without a reliable source of food. I had to make a difficult choice. Stay here and try to bring her back to full health, or try to return to a more suitable location while she was still in such a terrible, and dangerous condition.
I stared at the oil lamp. She was still holding on to it, just like she was clinging so desperately to her life. I took a deep breath. I couldn’t waste any energy on a grave so the demon corpses would have to stay where they were. I, on the other hand, had to grab the sickly demon woman and gently lift her up. She barely weighed a thing, which was a morbid silver lining.
I glanced one last time at the horrible sight, realized the oil lamp was still in the demon woman’s hands and pressing against my back, and sighed.
This was going to be a rough return.