Darius Chapter 30

As they went further west, the Continent became more mountainous, colder, and very sparsely populated. When they had first reached the fringes of the Tralmont Mountains, Peskimir stopped and sat down on the icy rocks, waiting for Heldrus to catch up. They stayed within sight of each other, but gradually drifted apart as they day-dreamed the kilometers away. The horses sometimes slowed down to walk side by side, but today they each were happy to go at their own pace. When he arrived, she stood up and stretched.

“So. Here we are. I don’t know why we’re here, but do you want to keep going? It’s been nice not dealing with people for a while.”

The Tralmont Mountains signaled the edge of conveniently hospitable places for human life. The rocky plateaus further south weren’t comfortable, but there was sufficient food for a reasonable number of people – if you knew where to look. The mountains, on the other hand, froze almost all the plants that tried to grow, and the animal life was essentially a chain of carnivores, increasing in size while decreasing in number. There were also rumors of life similar in intelligence and personality to the Trenks, but far better suited to the harsh conditions. Here, it was more likely for them to become food rather than find food.

Heldrus wasn’t deterred.

“Well, I don’t want to go back. Do you? Not to Erinstone obviously, but perhaps to somewhere else...Barringvale maybe.”

“Ha! You couldn't stand living there. You’d go from a fancy young captain to a wandering mercenary playing some shitty role in the army.”

Heldrus opened his mouth to retort, but realized she was right.

“I think that just about settles it then. We keep going? Call ourselves adventurers?”

“Fine by me, I hope your cloak is thick enough.”

Heldrus pulled his thick woolen cloak further around his body and tucked the cowl over his head. It had taken a beating over the last week that he’d been sleeping in it, but it would service him well. The mountains were immediately steep, requiring the horses to be led up treachorous tracks and along thin ledges. Peskimir’s horse, Bingo, stood with shaky legs when they got to their first ravine.

“Come on, Bingo, good boy, come on!”

Heldrus stood on the other side, waiting. Visibility had severely decreased as soon as they stepped foot onto the frozen mountain.

“Barratog’s beard just pull the stupid beast! He’ll get the message. He’s lucky we’re here in spring. Could’ve left a few weeks earlier and he would’ve been under six foot of snow, eh?”

Peskimir yanked the shaking horse across a thin path in the ice, jumping over the blue chasm below them where it ran down the mountain, like a world split in two. This first trial took half an hour and brought them only a few hundred meters along the slopes. Turning around, Peskimir could see the patch they’d stopped in before. Perhaps this hadn’t been a great idea.

Traversing the ice and rock became easier once they reached the immense, sprawling surrounds of the Tralmont Mountains. They were in the thick of it, but the near-vertical mountain ahead of them dwarfed any upward progress they’d made so far. It was a beautiful scene, despite the cold. As far forward as the eye could see, a blanket of crystal blue ice and vestiges of snow lay on the gradual uphill to the mountain. Peskimir caught up to Heldrus, who was hunched over, investigating something on the ground.

“Heyo, cold already? I’m not a huge hugger, so you’ll have to find a bear.”

“No, look at this.”

Peskimir rode up close on her horse and peered down.

“No, like, get off and look.”

She sighed and dismounted. She preferred to stay in the saddle for as much of the day as possible, just to avoid the creaking and croaking of her knees and hips when she hopped off. They’d spent so long in the saddle over the past week that she was convinced she’d have bowed legs.

“Watcha got, some animal shit? That’d excite you, wouldn’t it.”

Heldrus didn’t acknowledge her. He was looking at a flower that, against the odds, was blooming through the snow.

“It’s warm, feel the heat just from being near it?”

Peskimir brought her hands close and cupped them around the plant. He was right, heat emanated from the purple and red flower like a smoldering tangle of tinder. It was beautiful, but unnatural.

“What’s that in the center there, oops!”

She meant to squeeze the small bud clasped by the petals, but instead a little red orb popped out, sticking to her fingers. The warmth started to spread up her arm, which was quite comfortable in the glacial temperatures. Then it got hotter. And hotter.

“Agh! Heldrus, get it off! Gods it’s burning! Off!”

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She flung her hand around in the snow, swiping the ground and leaving a trail of melted snow and steam wherever the orb went. It was scalding her now, and a strange substance was seeping into her fingers, leaving a red mark like inflamed veins creeping under her skin.

“Keep steady! Stop!”

Heldrus pulled a dagger from Peskimir’s waist, pinned her arm and hand on the snow and stabbed the end into the fiery bulb. It squealed as it popped, like air escaping a pig gut. The molten swirls inside dissipated and darkened. When it finally popped off Peskimir’s skin, it was wrinkly and soft, like a prune.

Peskimir extended her hand before her. The burning heat had crept back to the tips of her two exposed fingers, but there was still a dull warmth up to her shoulder. She sunk her hand into the snow, but it didn’t cool down. She showed Heldrus her affected hand.

“Note taken, don’t touch strange plants. Can you feel that? It’s like, permanently hot, right?”

Heldrus shied away from her veiny hands, looking around them.

“I don’t exactly want to find out but, look! Those plants are everywhere, the base of Tralmont looks like a field of poppies! How didn’t we see this before? And look up higher, I thought they were boulders but there’s bushy trees up there – I wonder if those plants heat the soil and let things grow?”

Peskimir was slightly hurt by his apparent unconcerned approach to her pain. She looked around, noting they would have to dismount and lead their horses through a maze of fire plants if they wanted to continue. At this point, the horses were just there to carry their packs, not them.

“Let’s get going, maybe it thins out once we get past Tralmont.”

“Aye aye, Cap’n Avongold.”

They forged on, creeping around the demonic plants. Heldrus’s horse was the issue this time, refusing to be pushed around and led in anything other than a straight line. Heldrus tried to speak reason with it, highlighting the fact that he wouldn’t be able to remove the bulb if it got stuck to the horse’s leg, but it didn’t seem to care.

“I think we might need to leave the horses if this gets much worse.”

They’d both been thinking it for a while, but until Peskimir said it, it hadn’t been true. Their silent pact to kick the issue down the snowy white road was broken.

“Yeah...but where? And why? If we have to abandon the horses, we may as well just go somewhere else. There’s no point being an adventurer if you’re dead.”

“Spoken like a true noble.”

“Shut up.”

They decided to give the mountain a wide berth, following around the perimeter where the plants weren’t as dense. Heldrus observed the landscape as they walked, measuring the distance between each flower. He started taking comically large steps and counting out loud.

“Twelve, thirteen, fourteen...Have you noticed that in each ring of plants, they’re all the same distance apart? It’s like they’re converging in on something at the center of the mountain. I’m not sure I want to check it out, though.”

“Me neither. Let’s just go north and skirt around the edge. I don’t think I’m quite ready for a hike up Tralmont Mountain. There should be some small villages over the other side, right?”

Heldrus laughed at her sudden change of heart.

“What happened to enjoying not seeing people? Scared of a little burn?”

“It’s not really little.”

Peskimir walked up next to him and pulled up her sleeve. The wriggling, veiny mass had extended to the midst of her palm in just two hours. Heldrus went pale when he saw how constricted and dry her skin had become. The tips of her fingers were turning crimson.

“Oh, shit. Does it still burn? That looks like some kind of poison.”

“It doesn’t feel great, no. The two fingers I touched it with are losing feeling, but my palm is really burning now.”

She couldn’t help but glance at Heldrus’s saddlebag, where his sword was hidden. Heldrus noticed.

“Woahhh there, we aren’t at that stage just yet. You’ve got a long while to go before we’re chopping anything off, okay? You’re going to be fine. But let’s hurry.”

They went north until they were met with the windy andesite cliffs bordering the mountains. There were no flowers here, but there was still a good layer of snow that had accumulated and remained due to the sea spray rising from the violent waves below. They could mount their horses again and ride in a relatively straight line, leading the mountain behind them by the time the sun started to fall. Six miserable hours in and out of the saddle, but as they came down onto the damp plains, it was like being in a different realm.

The Continent was divided into two sets of civilizations. In the east lay Erinstone and Barringvale, the two capitals, and between them were a handful of villages of varying sizes that attempted their own, quieter way of life. In the west, the norms of villages and capitals and ruling classes were not abided by. Each individual, family, or group of families just set themselves up wherever suited them, and lived an isolated life, each living in a very meagre way. Their tools were mostly crude, and their ways of life had remained unchanged for generations, steeped in culture and tradition, rather than technological advancement.

The first people they came across were a young couple living in a tent next to one of the many rivers extending down from Tralmont Mountain. Peskimir and Heldrus approached the man, who sat with his feet in the lake, painting a canvas on his lap. Heldrus called out to him.

“Hi there. How are you?”

“Bluddy ‘ell! Thought my wife had ‘er balls drop or somethin! Haven’t heard a low voice like that in months! Where the hell did you lot come from? Not over Tralmont, I hope.”

Heldrus snorted and choked on his spit at the man’s coarse description.

“You’re righ...ahem...you’re right, we came through – or around – Tralmont. And it sucked. Peskimir here touched some kind of poisonous plant while we were getting through. Do you know how to help her?”

A woman came out of the tent with a green poultice stuck to her fingers. She appeared to be making paints for her husband.

“You touched one? You haven’t touched anyone else, have you? We had a sheep get lost and when we found it, one of its legs was dark red and scaly. It touched two other sheep before we separated them in a pen, but one morning we came out and they were just gone. Broke through the pen and we never saw them again.

Peskimir was not feeling reassured. The burning sensation hadn’t moved past her arm, but it hadn’t lessened, either.

“Haven’t touched anything, no, and I’ll stay away. So I assume you don’t know how to fix it?”

The man looked back at his painting and barked a short reply.

“Cut it off.”

Heldrus looked back at the woman, who just shrugged. They moved on. Even from their high vantage point, there were no other houses or huts visible below them. A rolling mist settled in a ring about a kilometer down, so they mounted up again, complimented the man’s painting, and went on their way.

Peskimir’s infection spread.