1.1 CLIFFHANGER

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Tasked with fetching stinky mushrooms from an even stinkier hole in the ground, Glim knelt in the wet snow and wondered how to make everyone pay for this outrage. He stared at the cleft in the side of the mountain for the eight-and-a-halfth time, one look for each of his years, more scared to go in with each peek. Behind him, down the trail, the dark granite spires of Wohn-Grab fortress rose from a line of skeletal trees. The watchfires gleamed like embers.

That’s exactly where Glim should be. By a toasty fire. Not out among these frigid mountains, where he’d more than likely die of exposure.

Glim looked out over the endless expanse of gray and white peaks undulating into the distance, their unfathomably deep valleys obscured by clouds.

Yes. He’d definitely die of cold.

His imagination piqued, Glim practiced his final utterance, with puffs of frost highlighting his most dramatic efforts. A strangled cry? Classic, but not very believable. Perhaps a simple exhale and eye roll at the end?

Glim distracted himself with visions. Sobbing townspeople would reveal their long-held (but naturally, unvoiced) admiration for the little scamp who had perished, far too young, face down in the snow.

“You can do better than that,” Glim said, to no one in particular.

They’d sprinkle flower petals over his broken body as they mourned.

“Almost there,” Glim encouraged himself.

His sworn enemy, Gyda, would toss herself off a tower in remorse, professing a secret love for Glim. “If only I’d gone instead,” Gyda would moan, “perhaps poor Glim might have lived.”

“Perfect.”

But the sound of his own voice and daydreams of revenge could only bolster Glim for so long. Chill ground seeped the warmth from his hands, which were too tiny to retain much heat. The wind seemed particularly grumpy today. It whistled angrily, snapping at the woolen cloak belted around his waist. It murmured discouragement any time his hood shifted.

Turn back now and I won’t fling you over the edge, the wind whispered. Turn back before I drain the life out of you.

“Cut that out,” Glim said.

What did I do? You seem melancholic. I’m just trying to be supportive.

“Try harder.”

His task seemed simple enough: “Fetch sixteen drams of muscheron chicane,” the Mage-at-Arms had demanded, “and be quick about it.”

He’d searched the usual places and found nothing. Less resourceful spore-hunters would give up and return in shame, empty handed. Fortunately, Glim knew this secret spot that no one else could get to. Perhaps not even him, now that he’d grown a bit. Studying the dark sliver of a cave, Glim wondered: could he fit inside? The ancient split in the mountainside barely widened enough to admit his skull. Only a kid’s skull could fit. And among the kids, Glim had the smallest.

The crevasse he peered into wasn’t as dark as one would expect. It had two important sources of light.

A slightly warmer wind blew from the crevasse, indicating the first source of light. Glim could not see the end of the cave, for it had none. The rift in the mountainside ran diagonally downward into the ground; less like a cave and more like a really wide crack in the granite that had no bottom. Blue sky and clouds winked at him from the other end, drawing warmer air from below like a chimney.

The second source of light, which he could see even from here, was a scatter of dimly glowing dots halfway down. Muscheron chicane. His elusive goal.

Glim double checked his gear. His father had given him a short sword for the trip, and smiled when he handed it over. Glim took that to mean “here is a dagger that to you seems sword-sized.” In other words, his father did not view this trip as much of a threat. If the guardsmen he commanded left Wohn-Grab unarmed, he’d have their hides. Father thought of this more like the front porch.

Strictly speaking, there were guards posted along the trail. And the fortified cliffs on either side were quite the deterrent. But they didn’t count. A hinterjack could still sneak through and pounce on Glim, far too late for his cries to reach the guards’ unconcerned ears.

The hinterjack would start with his liver. That’s probably the tastiest part.

His father’s dagger gave him a small measure of comfort. From inside his tunic, he took out the only thing his mother had ever given him: a silver vial on a fine chain with an ornate symbol etched the surface. Perhaps a curved triangle, with some wavy lines. Between the age of the vial and the fineness of the lines, the symbol had all but erased itself over the generations.

Glim unscrewed the vial and inhaled deeply. The complex, nuanced scent he’d come to know so well tickled his nose. The perfume had dried up long ago and only the ghost of a scent remained.

“Now or never,” he sighed, and lay himself down. He resolutely inched towards the rift, glancing over his shoulder one last time. Swirls of snow speckled the air, which faded into gray as the outline of the trail grew dim in the waning afternoon light. He’d have barely enough time to collect the slimy mushrooms that Master Willow required and get back before the sunlight failed.

The wind probably wasn’t going to kill him, no matter what it claimed. The wind said a lot of silly things. The rift? That, he wasn’t so sure about. He could jam his shoulders through this gash in the ground and shimmy down the crevasse. But what if it narrowed so much that he couldn’t turn around? What if he couldn’t lift himself back out?

Glim pictured himself withered away in the crevasse, eating nothing but dirt. He’d die right here in this slimy coffin. The ravens would peck out his mismatched eyeballs--one dark, one silver--fly them back to Wohn-Grab, and drop them into his father’s soup.

“NO!” he’d cry, far too late to save Glim’s rotting, mushroom covered body.

Quit stalling or go home, the wind said.

Glim wedged his head sideways and wriggled his way into a dank void that smelled like wet moss and the sharp tang of cracked stone. Moisture seeped into his clothes as he inched forward. Slimy ick smeared his cheek as his ribs squirmed through the rock.

Relief came as soon as the crack widened some. He let out a long breath and felt optimistic for the first time. Glim stared downward and gauged the rift, now wide enough for him to comfortably brace his back against. He tested it, straining as hard as he could. It did not budge, as one might expect from a billion-year-old slab of granite. He started crawling his way down. Just like one of the snow crabs who sometimes climbed the fortress walls during a blizzard.

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Glim found a rhythm.

Shove. Brace! Scoot.

Shove. Brace! Scoot.

He kept his eyes fixed on his goal. The muscheron chicane advertised itself on the wind with a pungent putrescence and a faint, sickly glow that stained the rocks with wan light. Beyond that, the sky opened to fall away over the Hiemal Peaks. Staring at it made him dizzy.

Although falling snow blotted out the sun at the peaks, sunlight still dappled the vast valleys below. Glim saw a meandering squiggle of dots which he knew to be abandoned fortress towers, each the size of an entire homestead. From here, he could barely make out their shapes. Although the sky engulfing the edges of his vision sickened his stomach, Glim couldn’t help but be fascinated by the awesome spectacle of sunlight and shadow racing across the landscape. The impossibility of anyone else managing to squirm their way in meant this view was his, and his alone. He felt powerful, like he’d been included in a secret known only to the rocks and the wind. Glim saw the overall pattern playing out, like a mountain god.

He smiled in satisfaction then began scooting again. Hard granite dug into his palms and knees, and jutted into his back. But he’d almost reached the stinky mushrooms that Master Willow had demanded him to fetch. He turned his mantra into a song, humming notes in his mind as he shimmied deeper into the cleft of the mountain:

Shove, brace, scoot!

Shove, brace! Scoot.

Master Willow is a brute.

Shove, brace …

This time, when he braced his shoulders against the mountain, nothing met his back. The rift had widened behind him. The certainty of his thrust against what had suddenly become nothingness sent Glim careening headlong down the crevasse. His stomach clenched in cold panic as the last few paces of cliff face rushed by. Wet rocks slithered under his hands, hastening his descent. The slash of sky that had provided such a compelling view moments ago now rushed to consume him.

Glim was going to fall over the edge. His churning stomach and tipped sense of balance told him that much. He screamed, willing the slime to run out, or the rift to narrow again, but knew that those things would not happen.

In desperation, he clawed his fingers into the rock and flung his feet wide, which saved him. Glim’s left hand caught in a crack, wrenching him around. The world spun as his feet came to rest on tiny nubs of stone. His dagger nearly slipped from the rope at his waist.

Panting, not daring to move even a hair’s breadth, Glim surveyed everything his eyes could see without moving his head. That included the gaping maw of the sky inches below his feet. Ravens drifted above the clouds below, too far away for their caws to reach his ears.

When Glim rolled his eyes upwards, the expanse of granite that pressed against his cheek obscured his view. The acrid putrescence of the muscheron chicane had been roused by his scrambling descent; it clogged his nostrils and dulled his thoughts. Glim tried not to think about what its raw, unrefined essentiæ was doing to his mind. He hadn’t learned that yet. Master Willow didn’t teach such things to eight-and-a-half-year-olds.

Glim tried to wrest his thoughts away from that fear, but his brain churned out grotesque imagery in spite. His mind would be reduced to gibberish, with only a dull gaze to remind his father of the little boy he once had. Or maybe Glim would crawl his way back to Wohn-Grab with a raging fever that infected the whole fortress, sending the other children to their graves by the dozens.

This will teach you, Master Willow. This will teach you not to set me this vile task. When the other children are burning in giant piles, maybe then you’ll regret what you’ve done.

These fantasies distracted him for mere seconds, but allowed him to regain some measure of control. Glim peered around, intent on finding a handhold. It took far longer than he’d hoped to find one, and a sob caught in his throat when he did.

That will never work, he thought in a panic.

A tiny protrusion poked out between two streams of dimly glowing goo. No way to climb to it. He’d have to leap. And if he missed, nothing in the whole of Æronthrall would save him a second time.

The wind rallied around him, contrite for yelling at him earlier, and offered its support.

Focus, the wind whispered. You can make it. A gale whistled below him, pushing at his back.

Glim slowed his breathing and concentrated. He let the sky beneath his feet and the gash of fading light above him vanish from his consciousness. The handhold became his world. It grew larger in his mind’s eye until it loomed like a harvest moon on the horizon. The tenuous purchase of his feet became anchors.

Glim put aside his worry about where his feet would go after he jumped. Because if he did nothing, his trembling fingertips would give out and it wouldn’t matter anyway. With that realization, Glim leapt. Instinct took over and his hands clenched tight around his salvation. His feet scrambled for an agonizing second but each found a hold. He did not wait to see if his perch would last, but leapt again in an ironic mockery of the rhythm he’d had coming down.

Leap! Panic. Scramble.

Leap, panic! Scramble.

Eventually, the angle of the rock shifted and he felt solid granite at his back again. Shaking with reaction, Glim paused to scrape glowing goo from his sleeves into the vial Master Willow had provided. As soon as he’d filled it to the line the Mage-at-arms had etched, Glim stuffed the vial back inside his tunic and resumed his ascent.

His disheveled face emerged from the rift in the ground, followed by scuffed shoulders. The rest of him flopped out. Glim lay in the snow, arms and legs numb and trembling from strain. He thought nothing. Was nothing. Only hot ache, adrenaline, and twitching limbs.

Sobs overtook him. He cried as his body curled in the snow. Not the sobs of the melodramatic child who had entered the rift, but the gut wrenching cries of one who has faced his own mortality and barely clung onto life. He hadn’t actually expected to actually die in there. His revenge fantasies evaporated, now that actual death had shown him its face.

When his trembling finally ebbed and the ache in his back became a dull, throbbing pain, Glim forced himself onto his knees to throw up in the snow. A spiral of steam rose into the air from the heat of his bile.

He trudged back home. Dark rocks and stunted trees along the trail watched in silent witness. His fantasies from before became mere memories, erased by the cold fear clenched around his heart.

Finally, the embers in the distance became the light of watch fires along a crumbling wall. Glim walked into Wohn-Grab, grateful for the flagstone beneath his feet.

The small room he called home was in a tower along the outer wall. But he headed instead for the only untarnished building in Wohn-Grab; a sleek, dark tower amid huts with brown grass roofs and mortared walls.

Master Willow’s tower.

Glim stood outside it for a long while, frozen with trepidation as he grasped the vial of fungus. He tugged a silken cord next to the door. Hurried footsteps drew near. The door flung open and light spilled onto the gray snow. As usual, he stood face to face with Master Willow’s belly button, and had to crane his neck up to see the disapproving face with its meticulously trimmed brown beard.

He held up the vial. The Mage-at-Arms snatched it from his hand and held it to the light.

“This is all you could manage? Disappointing, but it’ll do. Come by in the morning. But take a bath first. You positively reek.”

“I almost died, Master Willow! Getting the muscheron chicane. I almost fell off the cliff.”

Master Willow pursed his lips. “I’m sure it seems overwhelming. But if you can’t walk down a ramp and fetch a vial of fungus, how can you expect to become a plyer?”

Become a plyer? Who said anything about that? Master Willow assumed that everyone wanted his stupid life with his stinky mushrooms. Glim wasn’t that desperate. His father captained the guard of Wohn-Grab, and one day he’d join them.

Master Willow’s attitude angered Glim. A sob threatened to overtake him but he stifled it. Master Willow saw his discomfort and his face softened a smidge.

“Take a bath. Relax. I’m certain this will all seem better in morning’s light.”

He turned away and closed the door.