----------------------------------------
There's a long winding road. It connects several towns through a massive forest filled with impossible trees. They're impossible because they're too big, too round, too thick around the tunk and too high. They have reddish-orange bark covering up the flesh that is quite orange underneath. The trees smell sharp like the needles that grow far up in the sky. The needles fall to the loamy ground to turn as orange as the flesh they're born from.
Along this long and winding road rides a man on a horse. His name is Velici but nobody in this part of the world calls him that. In fact, very few people use that name at all. Many of the people who know him by that name like to pretend he doesn't exist. Some even fantasize that he's died somehow. Alone in a ditch. Stabbed in a bar fight. The victim of someone else he's swindled.
He's heard that one of these little towns on this long road has a monster problem. One of the things he does now is solve monster problems for money.
On his saddle, there is a sword, a small axe, camping supplies and some other crap he carries around. There's nothing to indicate who this guy is or where he came from or who cares about him. As far as he's concerned nobody, anywhere cares about him, because all his friends are dead or wished he was.
The people in the towns he visits don't care much for him, either. They expect him to be some kind of saint who dispels magical beasts out of the kindness of his heart. They're usually pretty pissed when he demands payment, though he's upfront about that. He also has a habit of leaving things worse off than they were before he arrived, even with the monster dead. He rarely returns to the towns he's cleared. He doesn't ever see the ramifications of his actions, nor does he care.
Under the spiny canopy of star-reaching pines, he sings a song about a woman. This woman goes from town to town meeting men and luring them to watery deaths. It's jauntier than you'd expect and one of those songs anybody can sing because it doesn't have much of a tune. Every once in a while he'll roll into a town that has its own verse, an excuse a man's family gives for his drowning. Velici likes to add these to his personal aria. It's pretty long now. Nice way to pass the time.
The town he's on his way to has an issue with what the rumours call a "tall man." That's all Velici knows about it when he rides up to the big two-storey inn. Some ambitious entrepreneurs built the inn in the middle of the road. Or a road builder made sure the road led to the inn.
"Tall man lives in the cave out near the waterfall." Velici's told by the fat guy with the dirty apron behind the bar. Not the innkeeper but someone whose dream in life is to run this bar, clean this mug, be here now.
Velici's had one question since he heard about this tall man. He's had to practice asking it so as not to laugh in the face of the person who answers:
How tall we talkin', exactly?
The not-the-innkeep frowns, looks off to the side, has an epiphany. He lumbers out from behind the bar and pulls at Velici's shoulder to follow him to the front of the inn. The inn's door is propped open because it's summer. He points to the fountain in the middle of the road and says "Bout that tall."
The top of the fountain is twenty feet from the ground.
You've seen him?
No, but that's what they say.
Who says?
Innkeeper points again to a cluster of dirty-faced working men piled on an outdoor table with mugs of beer. It's first thing in the morning. They all stare right at him with pure hatred.
Tall man's a friend of theirs, huh?
Innkeeper grunts a "yeh"
Velici waves at the friends of the man he's going to kill.
They agree on a price and Velici sets out right away. The cave with the waterfall is only an hour or so's ride from the town, follow the stream. The trees are high enough and spaced far enough apart and bare enough that it never gets dark in the forest. But it never gets bright either. It's not sunny, but more of a white greyness that makes it easy to see things up close. Anything beyond twenty metres gets all samey due to the denseness of the trees.
Velici picks up the song at his favourite part:
Well he wandered in
Followin' his sin
And the glassy twilight took him in
After forty minutes or so he's sure someone is following him. He turns his horse crosswise and swings his one leg over so he's sitting on it like it's a big breathing bench and waits.
A kid come out of the fuzziness walking in a half-crouch like he was trying to be sneaky. He's pretty stunned that he's been heard.
What do you want? Velici asks, chewing on a piece of cheese that served as advance payment.
Kid says nothing. Maybe he thinks he'll be able to skulk back to town. He doesn't move either.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
I'm not gonna pretend I don't see you.
The kid takes a step forward. Takes his hand off the trunk of the tree he'd been hiding behind. Steps into the empty space covered in pine needles between them so now there's nothing separating them.
"It's my da." The kid says and his voice makes him sound older than he looks, recently cracked but still knock-kneed.
The tall man?
Kid nods.
He's your pop huh?
Kid nods.
What happened to him?
Kid shrugs. "He come back from work angry one day."
Where's he work?
Cuttin' wood. We're woodcutters.
Kid seems proud of that but all Velici tosses him is a "no shit" and a repeat of "What happened to him?"
Said he found something. Something in the woods.
Something in the cave?
Kid shrugs. Eloquent lad.
I'm gonna kill him.
This was why Velici had stopped in the first place. He knew why the tall man was tall, he knew how this had happened. He'd seen it before. If he'd needed more info he would have asked the angry workmen at the table—and not the angry teen son of a mutated idiot who stuck his nose in a glowing cave.
What Velici needed to know was if this kin of the monster was possessed of some notion that Velici was a healer. Someone like Si, who could bring the man out of the monster. He wasn't. He couldn't. He'd been stabbed in the back enough times—speaking of Si—to know grief and anger rode the same horse.
That gonna be a problem?
Velici drops the cheese wrapper in front of the hilt of his sword so the kid can see it shiny in the light.
The kid's head drops. Maybe he had been thinking about killing him but hadn't thought it through. He looks like he's going to say something. He doesn't.
Velici clicks his teeth and swings his leg back round the horse and sets off into the woods. When he passes the next tree he spares a look over his shoulder and the kid is still there. Staring at the fallen needles.
Velici finds the stream and follows it and hears the waterfall and sees the cave. Now it is darker here because of the rise the waterfall is falling down and the granite the cave is carved from. His horse starts to worry so he hammers a piton into a tree and ties her to it. He pulls his sword off the horse and the little axe. The axe he puts into a thong on his hip but the sword he keeps in his right hand.
Even from outside he feels cold air pouring out of the cave and it's not the spray of the waterfall either. Despite the temperature the cave is bursting with life. Vines and leaves and wildflowers pour out like Gaia's own mouth. Honest to god butterflies dance in the cold air. It would be idyllic if not for the grotesque mutated monster man who lives in that cave. A father who Velici is going to cut and stab until it bleeds to death.
From here he can see sunlight bouncing off the rocks inside and now he's sure he knows what he'll find in there but he goes in anyway because he's arrogant and bored.
There is a ray of sunlight pouring in through the roof of the cave. Something has punched through the rock and landed there. Something that fell from the sky as these things do. The inside of the cave is as eye-rollingly lush as the outside. A spring pours down from the hole in the roof. Dainty white flowers bloom from viridian moss. There are somehow even more butterflies. Even a few dopey bumblebees bumble along.
Among all the green and white and yellow Velici spies something that doesn't belong. Brown fur feathered into dark spikes by the falling water. He steps closer with no noise as he learned on the rooftops of Revenna.
The bear fur is not rising and falling with breath so Velici reaches out a hand. It's warm despite the wetness but the animal is definitely dead. He takes a closer look, trying to find the head, and finds a milky white bear eye crusted with pus. Under the eye is a mouth wide open and in its jaws is something grey and mottled like a fallen branch. What killed this thing? Did the tall man spear it right down the gullet?
Yeesh, Velici says and the greyness moves. Quivers. His hand is already out. He knows he shouldn't but he touches the greyness and it's warm and elastic like flesh because that's what it is.
Something in the back of the cave shifts and the bear pulls forward. The grey mottled mass uncoils, sleeping like a snake. Joints and tendons pop and echo in the cave. The tall man stands upright in the light and then flattens his body against the walls. It's like he's trying to be sneaky even though he's fucking huge and there's a dead bear attached to his arm.
He is about the height of the fountain.
Getting hit with a bear corpse attached to a giant arm isn't as bad as taking the bare knuckles but it's not great either. Neither is landing on a bed of dead and dying pine needles which are called needles for a reason. Velici lands on his back outside the cave and uses his momentum to somersault backwards into a crouch. Somehow he keeps his sword in his hand because while he is stupid he is also good at not dying.
The tall man steps out of his cave and yes—confirmed—he has a bear corpse jammed onto his left fist. Presumably killed in the act of trying to eat a knuckle sandwich.
Where have I heard that expression before? Velici wonders and honestly can't remember.
The tall man comes at him wild, not trained in any form of combat but having chosen his fighting style as "I have 1000lbs of bear corpse attached to my arm."
He swings the bear corpse high up in the air and it comes down with surprising speed. It slams into the forest floor and a storm of pine needles scatters on impact. Velici has fought giants before, bear fist or no bear fist, and he knows to stay close.
He dives between the tall man's legs. He touches the cutting edge of his sword to the tall man's stretched-out ankle. He deliberately draws the steel around the back of the tall man's ankle as he passes. Velici hears the wet SNAP of the giant's tendon shooting up inside the flesh toward the back of his knee.
The tall man screams a human, if baritone, scream and drops to the one knee. Velici moves fast to sever the other tendon. The tall man is fast too and a big bare foot the size of Velici's whole body slams into him like rushing water. Velici crunches into the granite of the rise. He feels the cool waterfall on his hands and legs which is good because it means he's not paralyzed.
Velici shakes his head to focus and stands to get out of the water. The tall man has worked himself around to face Velici. He sits in an awkward half-lotus about twenty feet from him.
The two of them stare at each and breathe for a moment. The tall man stares dumbly, his brow furrowed. Velici's seen this before: some relic of the mind struggling to make sense of this new reality. Once, up in the mountains, a monster's eyes widened in horror and it threw itself off a cliff.
Velici always waits to see if he's going to get another freebie like that, but so far it's only happened once. Instead, the tall man reaches over and grabs the bear corpse firmly in his other fist. He strips the thing from his hand, pulling flesh and muscle off like ribbon. The tall man reaches back and hurls the bear corpse at him. Velici dives forward and to the right. The bear batters into the rocks of the stream and flips through the air. Velici hears it splash into the waterfall but by then he's close to the tall man again.
He pulls the small axe from his belt and whips it at the tall man's face. The tall man brings up his gore-streaked hand, flesh boiled by stomach acid, to stop the axe from landing in his crazed, bloodshot eye. Instead, it chips off an exposed finger bone.
Another giant yell. This one sounds like ten buffalo yelling "fuck" at the same time. Velici uses the distraction to scramble up the giant's injured leg. (He has to hop over the tall man's floppy mutated dick, by the way). He leaps off the thigh to bury his sword into the tall man's armpit.
The blade catches and Velici feels the hilt rattle in his hand as it scrapes on bone. His legs swing out and he falls on his back. The wind rushes out of his lungs and he rolls to one side to dodge an attack.
But it doesn't come. Arterial blood oozes from the sword wound. The tall man grasps it between thumb and forefinger. He yanks the blade free and thick black blood pours from the hole like the waterfall behind him. He gasps. The tall man makes a half-hearted try at throwing Velici's sword back at him. The blade goes wide and thuds on the forest floor.
Velici breathes heavy. He watches the tall man try to get up, stop the blood flow, and finally try to crawl back into the cave. He's pretty sure he hears it mumble "Momma" but can't be sure. The tall man falls and the blood bubbles and the little flowers on the moss dance as his last breath escapes.
Velici breathes in the silence of the wood as the blood mixes with the water of the stream.