Ardyn was running.
The forest was heavy around her, impossibly thick. She moved too quickly to focus on anything beyond the brows and greens of the earth. The trees grabbed at her, but she knew when to duck and when to slide to one side or the other. Heavy, constant footsteps followed behind her. Thin beams of light pierced the canopy, pointing to a sunny sky somewhere above. Below, the forest was at twilight.
He was close. Not far ahead, she knew there was a clearing where she could ready her knife and brace herself against him. Ardyn was certain, though she had never been here before. This wasn't home. Home was far away, an open land of straw-colored grass, not this country of unending green.
The air chilled her face, and she shivered as she ran. Even so, her chest burned despite the cold. The footsteps continued, sharper and closer. Everything began to look the same. Ardyn felt disoriented. The forest choked her It had to be just ahead. The knife that was tied to her belt bounced against her leg.
The trees vanished, and she almost tripped over herself as she burst into the clearing. The sudden sunlight was blinding, but she stumbled forward and turned back around. She was ready to face him, and she grabbed for her knife. Her hand clutched at noting. As her vision focused in the glare, she looked down at her empty belt. The knife had slipped off, or one of the branches had snatched it away from her.
His footsteps came from every direction at once. They echoed in the clearing, as if her single pursuer had been joined by a mob. The light began to drain from the sky, unnaturally fast, like a black cloud was passing over the sun.
A clear, starless night quickly overcame the light of day. She lost focus again, and now her vision blurred in the darkness. The trees that encircled her shifted into shadows that fell apart whenever she tried to focus on them. The footsteps cracked like wood striking wood. From somewhere in the dancing shadows, something called her name.
Her arms and legs were heavy. Sight and touch went numb as the shadows spun around her. As she fell into the darkness, all she could sense was the pounding of the footsteps.
"Ardyn!"
She sat up quickly.
Her bedroom was gray, with dim light coming in through opaque windows on either side of her bed. The early morning chill hung over her, and the forest and its foreign landscape slipped miles and years away. One last time, she heard the footsteps. Her now conscious mind knew that it was the sound of her father knocking at her bedroom door, a sound she remembered every morning but hadn't actually heard in months.
Ardyn clung tightly to her wool blanket and blinked. Her lips were cracking from the cold.
"I won't say it again," she thought she heard him say. "Up with you."
Ardyn said nothing. There was nobody to say anything to. The knocking at the door stopped, and her father's voice faded back into her memory. The house, empty except for her, creaked as it settled into the hill, making a popping sound that reminded her of her father's stunted but deliberate gait. For a moment, she let herself imagine that he was walking across the common room to stoke the fire under the soup pot. The breeze picked up outside and blew in through breaks in the old bricks, reminding Ardyn of the way he sighed every morning when he tried to wake her for the morning feeding.
It was the same dream, more or less, every night since he had gone on to the other world. This was not the first time the house had mimicked his shuffling or spoken to her with his voice.
Ardyn swung her legs to the side of the bed and let her bare feet drop to the cold stone. Her eyes were dry, and for a moment, she struggled to keep them open. The first frost had already come a week before, and though it had thawed quickly, the air was still cold. Another frost would come soon. Autumn was drawing to a close, quicker than expected.
She stood and walked to the door, using her foot to push aside the small rock that kept her door shut. A new scratch in the stone floor joined all the others. The door swung inward, following the path set for it by the house’s uneven foundation. Every year, the little home her father had rebuilt in his youth settled deeper into the hill.
The common room was draftier than her bedroom. Ardyn grabbed a few gray khwan logs from the pile near the front door and set them in the hearth, under the soup pot. She took a handful a dried grass from a small basket and nestled it under the logs, and then picked up the fire striker and struck until a flame was lit.
A pair of walking boots waited for her by the front door. The leather was worn and rough against her feet, but it was strong against the cold. She grabbed her shawl to wrap over her sleeping tunic, opened the front door, and walked out into the chilly morning.
Outside, the sun was just beginning to show over the horizon. A few stars lingered in the far west. Her sheep bleated at her from her pen.
“I know you’re thirsty,” Ardyn said.
The little sheep sniffed and stared, waiting.
“And cold. And hungry. Me too.”
Ardyn picked up a bucket by the pen and opened the gate at the east edge of the hill. She made her way down the steep, winding path to the river at the bottom. To the east, Dun Kyrion was still sleeping, but she could see fires lit in its watchtower. As she walked down the hill, she watched smoke from the tower’s chimneys rise up over the hills. Even though they had been there almost as long as her father had been gone, Ardyn was still unaccustomed to the striking crimson banners that hung from the tower’s windows. Not for the first time, she gazed at them with shame.
Back at the top of the hill, with her bucket full of river water, she filled the trough inside the pen. While the sheep lapped up the icy water, Ardyn set the bucket down and scratched the creature’s wooly back. She opened the pen to leave her free to graze.
Inside the house, Ardyn poured the rest of the water into the soup pot. She scooped out a handful for herself and drank. The common room was already warming up. Before long, she would have to start keeping the fire burning through the night. She sat down near the hearth and waited for the water to begin bubbling. In her old life, she would have shared these responsibilities. She looked at the door to her father’s empty bedroom. A cane leaned up against it, untouched since spring.
He would still be trying to drag her out of bed at this point, were he still around, but ever since he had gone to the other world, Ardyn had no trouble waking up at dawn.
Haador had offered to come up and stay with her during the first few months, but she wouldn’t let him. Her father had taught her enough, anyway, even if she didn’t always do her share of the work. When she finally had to take on his entire routine, she was surprised at how much she had actually learned. Maybe he would still be here if she had always done her part.
Vapor started to rise from the water, and Ardyn grabbed one of the crates under the table. It, like all the others, was full of dried roots and mushrooms from the garden. She took a few handfuls and dropped them into the soup pot. The water turned murky, and a damp, earthy smell filled the room. Ardyn sighed as the odor brought to mind the unappealing flavors that would sustain her in the coming months. It was going to be a long winter.
Her father would already be at the templehouse by now. He was nothing if not pious. Ardyn snapped off a branch from the khwan pile and lit it, then carried the makeshift torch out into the cold to the shrine at the other side of the hilltop. She grabbed the key, always tied to her belt, and unlocked the heavy door. The templehouse was a small, round hut of pale red brick, as unremarkable on the inside as it was on the outside. Its single room was barely big enough for Ardyn and her father to fit inside, but without him it felt cavernous.
She lit the candles and snuffed out the torch on the dirt floor. With the candles burning, she had taken the first steps in awakening the god. Ardyn looked up at the idol on its pedestal among the candles. The size of a small child, it was in the shape of a man standing with his arms stretched out in front of him. The core was steel, but its outer layer was gold.
The god stood faceless before Ardyn, wrapped in his relic, which was little more than a rotting piece of fabric. In his mortal life, he had settled Dun Kyrion, and Ardyn’s family had cared for him for all the generations since.
As the god stirred, the room grew crowded, and Ardyn became aware of his presence. She felt the idol’s nonexistent eyes take notice of her, and she cast her gaze down at the dirt. Whenever she was in his presence, she didn’t have the strength to push the shame away.
The liturgy progressed. Ardyn offered the usual gifts. Devotion, attention, praise. Her acts of worship would be to the god as the root soup would be to her, sustaining him in the other world, keeping him alive and divine. But she was only one person, and she imagined the flavor of her solitary worship couldn’t be much better than the murky soup.
She offered prayers on Haador’s behalf, but nobody from Dun Kyrion ever came up for the feedings. There were bigger gods in the March these days, with more impressive templehouses, and they commanded the worship of many villages. They had come down from beyond the River Saren during the war, before Ardyn was born. For all of her life, her god had been weak and starving. Even when her father was priest, the villagers had largely stopped coming to worship their own god. They had also stopped tithing, and that hurt in far more worldly ways.
Ardyn finished the feeding and sat in meditation. She tried to stay focused, but her mind wandered. She was back in the forest from her dreams, a place she had never been. A sound like the knocking at her door brought her back. She looked up at the god. Was that him? His disappointment was tangible, as always. A lifetime of preparation hadn’t been enough for her. She quickly muttered the closing words. When she blew out the candle, she was alone again.
She had tried, so many times, to put herself in his place. He was all but forgotten, clinging to the last bits of his divinity in the other world. Ardyn kept him alive, but he was slowly dying. The idol, the relic, and Ardyn were his only remaining
connections to existence. Her father’s sudden death had alerted Ardyn to the god’s plight and to mortal vulnerability when subjected to the death throes of a bitter deity.
Outside, the sun was rising higher. Dun Kyrion was waking up. The market would be open, but Ardyn doubted that anybody from the fields would bother coming to town at this point in the season. Soon, the village too would close up for winter. “I think it’s time for my breakfast too,” Ardyn said to the sheep as she watched her graze, and she went inside to fetch a bowl of soup.
She spent the rest of the day with her father’s books, making careful copies of the text. His failing eyesight had made it impossible for him in his final years, and she had always promised that she would take up the work for him. Like most of her promises to him, she found herself scrambling to fulfill them all too late. They were books of history and prayer, and though she struggled to read the archaic language, their preservation was an important part of her responsibilities as caretaker to the god.
As Ardyn worked, her thoughts drifted to Haador, alone at the mill. During the busier, warmer seasons, Ardyn would be sent down to the mill to help the old man with his work. Her father had bought the mill years ago to help compensate for the loss of tithes, and he quickly learned that Ardyn’s mood was much better when she was allowed to spend a few hours away from the hill, working and listening to Haador tell his stories.
Ardyn missed him, and she felt another pang of guilt. She hadn’t visited him in so long, too preoccupied with her work. She had made quite a bit of progress on the texts lately, and the shorter days would give her less natural light to work with. She could take a day off and visit the mill. Surely the god would recognize that as an act of charity for a lonely old man. She could even bring him some of the sheep cheese she had made, and maybe he would tell her a story, if he had any left to tell.
She pushed that last selfish thought out of her head. That’s not why I would visit him, she told herself and the god.
Her eyes were beginning to strain, and her hand was cramping from all the careful copying. The sun was beginning to set. Another day, drained away by the monotony of routine.
Ardyn went back outside to deliver the evening feeding. The sheep bleated as she walked by, but not at her.
“What is it now?” she asked. She turned to the direction the sheep was looking in and froze.
A tall man stood at the gate, casting an even taller shadow in the failing light. He wore a heavy coat and a pack was slung over his shoulder. His black beard and hair were trimmed short. The man looked at Ardyn with his mother’s eyes, the same eyes she had inherited, and he carried her mother’s dark complexion.
It was her uncle.
This is a story I've been kicking around in my head for a while now. If you're interested in reading more, don't hesitate to let me know!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Photo by Richard Croft
