Rocks

In Kaeseriel’s three centuries of life, she had never once seen a humanoid child alone.

The girl stood about twenty feet from her, partially hidden behind the trunk of a leaning black spruce. She wore wolfskin clothes to fend off the biting cold that looked to be oversized, judging by the many thin leather straps cinching the baggy covering to her arms and legs. A few strands of black hair long enough to frame her curious face drifted free of the hood, which was pulled tight into a circular porthole. She had orcish heritage of some measure, which Kaeseriel surmised from the girl’s faint gray complexion and the tiniest tips of two tusks peeking out from below a trembling lower lip. This made sense to Kaeseriel – it meant she had finally entered Valdas, the eastern reaches of which were the ancestral lands of the orcs, who had long since woven their blood and history with that of humans. What didn’t make sense to her was the girl’s apparent solitude.

Kaeseriel looked beyond the girl in a wide sweep to the left and right. She had lived among humanoids for much of her life, hidden in their likeness, and the sight of a child had always preceded that of a doting – if not harried – mother, a piqued but protective father, or a wild rabble of like-sized children play-fighting with weapons of branch and bramble. In the visible vicinity, however, all she saw were falling flakes of crystal snow, filtered without sound through countless needles evergreen.

She lowered her own hood, one of thick white bearskin which had hidden an inky river of hair and viridian eyes that cut like glass. The girl’s large gray eyes, tinged with red and wet with tears, widened. Kaeseriel thought grimly to herself that if the little girl had known her true form, she would have run screaming. Or, if she had known her true form and been smart enough, she would have hidden fully behind the leaning spruce and waited with held breath for the mysterious figure to pass. If she had somehow known that the true form of the woman walking westward down the Frostvold Mountains, cloaked in the pale fur of a predator unknown to this side of the peaks, was not one of soft flesh and flowing hair but of shadowed wings and cut-stone claws and scales as black as winter’s night, her storm cloud eyes would have emptied their warm rain upon the frigid earth and been right to do so. But she did not know, and she did not scream, or hide, or weep; she simply stared.

Kaeseriel looked the half-orc girl up and down. She was tall enough to pass for four or five years old, but in the soft roundness of her face the truth was apparent – she was no older than three.

“Where is your family?” Kaeseriel asked.

The small girl said nothing. She wiped her nose, and the motion caused a leather satchel much too large for her to slip from her grasp. A hard hunk of cheese and harder chunk of bread spilled from it. She quickly gathered them back into the bag, and in response to Kaeseriel’s question, pointed north along the mountain range.

“Well, I suggest you return to them.” And she left, continuing westward down the mountain.

____________________________________________________

After an hour of walking, Kaeseriel noticed that the girl was following her. The first sign was a quiet sniffling that slid frictionless across the slope-smooth snow and slithered up into her ears. She ignored it and kept moving. Then she heard a sneeze, closer this time and as loud as lightning’s silence broken by thunderclap. Kaeseriel shook her head and huffed but walked on. Finally, after half a mile of listening to little leather boots crunching through snow not thirty feet behind her, Kaeseriel heard the unmistakable yelp and subsequent muted thud of a tottering half-orc girl tripping and falling into the soft snow. She sighed and turned to look back as the small gray face in its furry hooded porthole popped up out of the powder.

“Are you alright?” Kaeseriel called out.

The girl nodded as she stood up and brushed off her wobbly legs.

“Good, now stop following me.”

She waved the girl off and turned back around, continuing on her way. After a moment she heard the girl keeping pace behind her once more. She wheeled to face her, and the girl froze in place.

“I can hear you! You need to stop following me and go back to your family. I’m not someone a child should be with. Go.” Kaeseriel waved the girl off with more force, motioning back up the mountain and toward the north. The girl stood completely still with her eyes locked downward on her feet. Kaeseriel took a few steps toward her.

“Back to your family! Go!”

The girl hunched her shoulders but otherwise remained unmoved. Kaeseriel stopped a few paces from her and threw up her hands. She searched the surroundings for help and found none between the mute trees and withdrawing sun.

“Insanity. Rocks are less stubborn than you. I’m not going any further until you go back.” She said, crossing her arms.

____________________________________________________

Blackened wood spat red-orange sparks between a fuming Kaeseriel and the half-orc girl. Kaeseriel twisted twigs apart in her hand and cast the ripped slivers into the fire. The girl gnawed in vain at her stale chunk of bread.

“At first light I’m taking you back up the mountain.” Kaeseriel said without looking at the girl. “If the wolves don’t take you in the night.” She punctuated the statement by tossing a final infinitesimal nub into the hungry flames. The girl said nothing, but began biting at the bread from a new angle. Kaeseriel rubbed her temples as the toothy scraping continued. And continued. And continued.

“Give me that!” Kaeseriel finally snapped.

The girl froze mid-bite. Cautiously, she handed the stone-like loaf over. Kaeseriel snatched it and threw it into the fire. For a moment, the only sound between them was the crackle of firewood and firebread. Then, the girl reached into her satchel and pulled out a second loaf, which she proceeded to gnaw on anew.

Kaeseriel cursed violently and reached into her own pack. She pulled out six strips of stringy salted meat and marched over to the girl, ripping the bread out of her hands and replacing it with three of the strips.

“Eat these if you’re so damned hungry.” She said with a stab. She turned and threw the bread as hard as she could. Somewhere far beyond the circle of firelight it collided with a tree, echoing back to them with a sharp crack! as Kaeseriel sat down. She tore off bites of her strips with forced restraint. The girl happily chewed hers, open-mouthed.

Kaeseriel thought darkly for a moment of ending a century of sustained human form, transforming here and now into obsidian dread and chewing the girl open-mouthed to teach her a lesson in etiquette. Instead, she rolled over to sleep, as her heart was not in it.

____________________________________________________

When she awoke at first light, Kaeseriel noticed that the girl had closed the distance between them in the night. She laid against her now, curled and simultaneously contorted into a shape that made Kaeseriel’s spine ache by seeing it. Beneath the girl’s eyes, which were covered by a draped arm, her miniature mouth was open in a perfect circle of soft snores sneaking past petite tusks. Kaeseriel let her sleep a bit longer.

After a light breakfast, during which the still-groggy girl had offered Kaeseriel a piece of milky-green cheese and she’d eaten it against her better judgement, the pair prepared to leave. As Kaeseriel hoisted her pack over fur-cloaked shoulders and turned to head back up the mountain, she called behind her.

“Come on, let’s get you home.”

She began walking, but after a few paces noticed the girl was not following. She turned around and saw the girl was staring at her. Then, with a tiny mittened hand, she pointed west, down the mountain.

“You said your family was this way.” Kaeseriel pointed east and north.

The girl nodded.

“Then we’re going this way.”

The girl shook her head and pointed down, westward again.

“No. This way, and that’s final.”

Kaeseriel strode over to the girl and picked her up, throwing her easily over a shoulder and carrying her east up the mountain. The girl began to scream and thrash, which caused her to drop her satchel. This turned her screams into wails and her thrashes into full-body flailing. Kaeseriel endured the high-pitched tirade for a score of steps before relenting and dropping the girl. The tantrum ceased, and with streaks of stoppered tears she crawled back to her oversized satchel and sat with it in the snow, clutched to her chest.

“I don’t know what you want!” Kaeseriel yelled.

The girl scowled at her with all the ferocity of a growling wolf. For a third time she pointed.

“Down.” She asserted, maintaining her glower through the roundness of the word.

They went down.

____________________________________________________

Rocks was much more agreeable after Kaeseriel stopped fighting her. She took to calling the stubborn child this out of spite, but was irritated to discover that the name didn’t bother her. When Kaeseriel tried to teach Rocks her name in return, the girl had trouble with it.

“Kaeseriel.”

“Kayseweeaw.”

“Kaeseriel.”

“Kay . . . seweeaw?”

“That was the same. Kaeseriel.”

“Kaysewyaw.”

“Just call me Kae, you’ve got that part right.”

Rocks and Kaeseriel trekked down the mountain for five days. Rocks said very little during this time, and Kaeseriel tended the silence with an equally green thumb. She could have made the same trip in half the time on her own, but their pace was slowed by Rocks’s short legs and limited stamina, which Kaeseriel tried not to hold against her.

On the fifth day they crossed into the foothills of the western side of the Frostvold Mountains, and the terrain became less severe and easier to traverse. When they made camp that night, they did so in view of a winding river valley and a small settlement along it, nestled between two low hills in the distance. As the sun set behind those hills and washed the snow-caked valley in gradient waves of pink and orange and blue, Kaeseriel thought to herself that she didn’t take enough time to appreciate the change in perspective briefly offered each day by the birth and death of its light.

After they had eaten their dinner of three salted strips and cold mountain water, they sat next to each other and watched the fire. Kaeseriel broke the silence.

“We’ll reach that village by midday tomorrow, I think.”

Rocks nodded.

“Do you know anyone there?”

Rocks shook her head.

“We’ll figure something out.”

The weeds of silence grew between them again. This time, Rocks uprooted it.

“Can you teww me a stowy?"

“Tell you a story?” Kaeseriel asked back. Rocks nodded her head.

“Uhh . . . I’m not really good at that.”

“Pwease?” Rocks looked at her with eyes as full as the moon.

Kaeseriel looked into the saucer-sized orbs and sighed. “Alright . . . let me think of one.”

"About a pwincess."

"Any more requests?"

Rocks thought about it. "No."

"Good, then shut up and let me think."

Kaeseriel contemplated for a minute and almost started twice. She thought some more, and then began.

“There once was a . . . dragon princess . . . that lived far in the east. Her father was a wicked dragon king that had died before she hatched in the freezing Helníf Desert across these mountains, and she was protected by people that had worshipped her evil father in a faraway land and secreted away her egg. But there were other people in the desert, nomads whose ancestors had been hurt by dragons long ago and wanted to kill the dragon princess before she could hurt them too. The dragon princess didn’t want to hurt the nomads, but her fangs frightened them, and her wings and scales stood out against the snow, so she learned special magic to hide them. She learned to walk on two legs and give herself pretty skin and hair that she liked. The nomads weren't afraid of her anymore, and before long she liked being a human more than being a dragon.

But the people who protected her, the ones who had worshipped her wicked father, wanted her to be a dragon again, so they found a new land east of the Helníf Desert where no one else lived. They built a city there, and found a cave for her to sleep in and hoard treasure and eat the people they were angry with. But she didn’t like sleeping all the time, or care about gold very much, or want to eat people. When she was alone, and she was almost always alone in that cave, she would change back to her human form and daydream of snow dunes and nomads and open sky.

The dragon princess told her worshippers that she was lonely in her cave, and they said that, one day, when she was very old and very strong, their descendants’ descendants would help her take back her father’s kingdom and rule the world. They told her she was a god, that she was above all other creatures like her father before her. But she didn't feel like a god. She hadn’t known her father, and she didn’t care about his kingdom or understand why these people did when they wouldn’t live long enough to see it again. She decided they would all be better off without her. So, when she was only a little old and a little strong, she left those people that had raised her and worshipped her and made her feel so lonely, and she went back into the Helníf Desert to be a human.

She lived there peacefully for many years, playing in the snow and hunting with the nomads and staring at the open sky. For a while, she forgot all about being a dragon princess. But people didn’t live very long, and dragons did, and she couldn't change what she was, only how she looked. So . . . she wandered, and wandered some more, and she realized she would always be lonely.”

Kaeseriel paused for a long moment. She noticed Rocks’s head was on her lap.

“Sorry, it’s not much of an ending. I told you I wasn’t good at this.”

Rocks was asleep.

____________________________________________________

The steady iron clang of River Forge’s namesake reverberated with Kaeseriel’s footsteps as she led Rocks through the small settlement of frozen dirt and timber structures. It seemed to her, given the number of longbows, metal traps, and pelts she saw, that the village catered mostly to hunters and trappers. She hoped there would be a someone among them that knew where Rocks had come from.

Kaeseriel spoke first to the tavern keep, an older, balding man with a belly big enough to hold his laugh. He gave her four names to call after, men he claimed were most familiar with the mountain heights. The first three of these were tight-lipped trappers that gave Kaeseriel the impression they assumed she was using Rocks as a lure to fish out their favored hunting grounds. She had better luck with the fourth: a cheery, if a bit hungover, half-orc hunter named Longjaw.

They found his single-room cabin on the forested edge of town. The barrel-chested man filled the roughly hewn doorway to his home and squinted off the afternoon sun as Kaeseriel inquired about his knowledge of the area. His voice resonated with the dryness of sun-soaked parchment.

“Aye, I’m familiar with the upper range. From there, actually. Well, a ways to the south, but, I know these parts too, pretty well I’d say. What’dya need to know?”

Relief melted across Kaeseriel’s face. She ruffled Rocks’s hair.

“I found this one in the forests there, about five days east up the mountains. She said her family was to the north at the time, I tried to take her back there but she wouldn’t go. I think maybe she ran away . . . I agreed to bring her down the mountain, but I’m heading further west and need to leave her with someone that can see she gets back.”

Kaeseriel watched Longjaw’s cheerful smile fade.

“Is something wrong?” She asked.

He knelt down in front of Rocks and met her at eye level. He gingerly touched her arm. “Are you from Frostpeak, little one?”

She shook her head.

“Widow’s Grin, then?”

She nodded lightly.

“Aye. So you are.” He gave her a soft smile and softer squeeze on the arm. He stood up and looked past the two of them.

“What does that mean?” Kaeseriel asked as Longjaw picked at one of his tusks subconsciously.

“I came down the mountains from a hunt a few days back myself.” He told her. “I typically go south first, see old family and friends, but I swing through the villages north a ways on my way back, to trade, bring news, that sort of thing. Didn’t go north this time though . . . heard the plague had set in round Frostpeak and Widow’s Grin. Set in real bad.”

Kaeseriel looked down at Rocks, whose eyes had fallen once more to her boots. Her breath went heavy in her chest, sunken to the depths like stones in a net. She looked at the satchel, the adult's satchel, that Rocks clung to her chest. Her breath sank deeper.

She looked back at Longjaw, who stared at Rocks with the apologetic blankness of one who had no idea what to say.

“I . . .” Kaeseriel faltered. Her thoughts lost their weight. Words became ash. “What should we do?”

Longjaw took wide, laden breath.

“I suppose I could take her to my old village. It'll be close to what she's used to, anyway. I’m sure a family there would take her in. What’s one more, right?” He laughed, but only a little.

Kaeseriel noticed Rocks look up at her but couldn't bring herself to meet the gaze. “I think that would be for the best. She shouldn’t stay with me, I . . . wander.”

He nodded again and scratched his day-old stubble. “Alright, give me some time to pack up my things. No use waiting, this cabin ain't fit for a little lady. Ha!” He left the door open and went inside to splash water on his face and gather scattered provisions into his pack, leaving the two alone.

Kaeseriel walked a few paces away with Rocks to wait. She took off one of her gloves and ruffled the girl's shiny black hair, messing it up. Rocks didn't attempt to fix it. Kaeseriel stared at her for a moment, then slowly began to stroke her hair to smooth it back out.

“You’re not going to throw a fit, are you? Longjaw seems nice enough. And you belong with a family that can take care of you better than we can.”

Rocks sniffled and shook her head.

“No you won’t throw a fit, or no you don’t belong with a family that can take care of you?”

“I won’t thwow a fit.”

“Good . . . that's good.”

Rocks's hair had settled, but Kaeseriel kept running her fingers through it. They stood like that for a spell, side by side: an uneven pair.

"Kae?"

"Yes Rocks?"

"I wanna go wif you."

Kaeseriel clamped her eyes shut and looked away, riding out a long, involuntary wince that she could not control and did not wish to.

"I know, Rocks. I know."

She looked to the sun and the trees for help, but their offerings were the same as ever. She felt a light pressure in her fingers, and glanced down to see a small mittened hand grabbing hers. She squeezed it back.

Longjaw shut the door of his cabin and stood to the side, adjusting the straps of his pack and checking the security of the longbow strung across his chest. He coughed lightly to signal he was ready.

Kaeseriel nodded to herself and knelt down in front of Rocks.

“Be good for Uncle Longjaw, alright? You go where he says.”

Rocks nodded.

“Good Rocks." She hugged the girl softly, and Rocks hugged her back. They pulled apart; green eyes met gray eyes as Kaeseriel held Rocks by the shoulders. She hugged her again, more tightly this time.

"I’m sorry that I . . . yelled at you before."

She broke the embrace and stood up to watch Rocks toddle over to Longjaw. He flashed the girl a broad smile and patted her head as they started toward the mountains. Kaeseriel watched them for a long leaden breath, and then she turned away. She had only taken a few steps when she heard small feet rushing toward her.

“Rocks, please.” She said as she turned. She looked down and saw the half-orc girl reach into her satchel to pull out the hardest looking piece of petrified bread Kaeseriel had yet seen.

“So you don’t get hungwy.” Rocks said. “Or wonewy.”

Then she trundled back to Longjaw, and Kae headed west.