Legends of Belariath

Roquai

A Candle For Your Soul

Day 1

“I need an axe.”

The voice was filled with impudence. The Half-elf’s harmless and purely customary question had riled the Troll’s sense of significance. ‘I would have gotten to that bit. Don’t be pushy, you little worm, or I’ll snap your slimy neck,’ thought the Troll to himself in a bit of self-assuring inner monologue. Like so many things, these words never made it past his lips. What did emit from his throat was a grunt of displeasure; a puff of hot, heady air aimed for the wee-one’s face. When the cloud of steamed breath hit the clerk he blinked as if someone has spit in his eyes. His face had gone slack and bloodless.

“Dual-bladed. Big.” Roquai held out his hand for emphasis and to show off his stupendous grip. He could easily crush the clerk’s throat right now. The half-elf must have noticed that same terrifyingly perilous fact because he hurried for the rear of the Weapon’s shop as if his life may depend on it. He disappeared into the door leading to a storage area to look for an ax at least as large as the Mountain Troll had thinly specified.

After a minute spent listening to the Half-elf scrounge through old stock and rearrange piles of old armor, looking for the one item that may indeed save his life in the next few minutes, Roquai looked expectantly at the doorway to see the clerk reemerge. He had his back facing the counter. The haft of a gargantuan double-bladed iron ax was being clutched by two sets of white knuckles. The pointed head was dragging over the floor, making two long rivets of chipped wood flakes in its wake. The size and weight and shape were exactly what Roquai had had in his mind when he placed his order a moment ago. The elf’s keen salesman’s sense had shown through. Still, Roquai’s lone satisfaction would never become words to express themselves. His face remained an emotionless lid on a cauldron of slow-churning, smoldering anger. The Half-elf had succeeded in dragging the weighted ax to the service desk and leaned the end of the handle that his tentative grasp was on against the edge.

The exertion must have driven some of the fear out of him. The half-breed glared defiantly upwards at the towering, muscle-bound monstrosity. His newfound courage is based solely on the matter that the Troll tricked him into dragging that heavy and accursed weapon all the way out of it’s locked cubby, where it SHOULD have stayed forever, and that the Troll did it through such a novel trick as fright.

Roquai’s unchanging and eerily absent gaze sucked the clerk’s sudden boldness in and spit it out in the same breath.

A docile voice, balanced between panic and choking and taking on a subtle shaky quality, said, “F-fifty mehrials sir.”

Thick fingers move with swiftness and much practice at untying the coin pouch from his waistband. Roquai pulled the tightly wadded baggie of money from its drawstrings and dropped it onto the hollow wooden desk in front of the Half-elf with a resounding thunk. Some of the electrum coinage slipped out of the opening on top of the smallish leather sack and did lazy wheels around the wide oak span between the hulk and the tamed store clerk. To the clerk, the desk could not be wide enough. ‘Not for a second in a thousand millennia,’ the Half-elf would say if his jaw were not frozen in place.

The Mountain Troll uses his freakishly long and strong arm to anchor his hand to the haft of the ax and hoist it off of the Weapons Shop’s scarred floor. He does this with the ease and familiarity of a lifetime lumberjack, with the muscle physique to match.

It’s truly a weapon to be feared. The balance is high and the grip is strong, being specifically tailored to the overly large races. He hefts the blade with ease so that it rests on the cushiony muscles of his right shoulder with his palm on the pommel to keep it from tilting back.

The Mountain Troll walks to the doorway, yanks it’s handle so that it flings wide enough for his broad body to go through, and dips his neck to avoid clipping his forehead. The head of the ax, however, takes a large chunk of the upper doorframe as a souvenir, catching the wood on the tapered corner and tearing out a fist-sized portion along with curling peels of the wood’s grain.

A shudder of unease wracks the half-breed’s body at the retching sound. He now holds the bag of mehrials to his chest, and estimates that it holds an amount of pay slightly less then what was asked for. There was little chance that the clerk would report this minor fraud to his superiors.

Day 3

The precipice that yawned one step in front of Roquai was so large that the distance of the bottom, plainly visible in the high-noon sunlight, was uncertain. The slope of huge drop was so slight, only a few degrees from being completely vertical, that the human eye had no tools that could judge the size or expanse of the ground immediately below without falling down to it. One could only know for certain that a fall would be fatal – you’d probably be dead before you hit the ground.

The Mountain Troll didn’t bother to look down. His instincts were set and did not question themselves. He wasn’t a human. Although he did not decipher the exact facts like a mage or a curious scholar, he could tell the approximate altitude, the grade of the slope, and the distance from this point to any within his field of view, just by tasting the breeze.

Cartography is not this Troll’s mission. On his back is an axe as tall and as heavy as a fully-grown elf. A whetstone has recently scrapped the rust off of its dual edges and lent it a cruel, glinting sharpness. Roquai shades his sunken eyes with both hands as he stares outward, off of this cliff, and into the distance.

He doesn’t need to look far to find his objective. Before him stretches miles of untilled farmland that have gone badly to seed for perhaps the last four decades. Nestled between the immense gray rock cliff and the continuation of old growth forest are miles of grass and weeds. All around this rocky monolith is forest, except for the front side that he looks over now. The placement of this field seems to be closely connected with this watching post atop this stone hill.

The slab of stone that Roquai stands on juts out of the earth at a right angle. The cliff face he is above is the end of the giant formation. At his back is a mile of reclining rock face, jagged and hilly with countless millennia of weathering, that spans from here into the luscious green wood. It began as a slight rise in the soil that was covered in the same usual growth as the surrounding countryside, the eroded stone succumbing to the plant life and acting as a loose but gently sloping foundation. The dirt and flora began to give way to empty patches of the rock after forty minutes into Roquai’s uphill hike. Gradually, the forest canopy fell behind and gave into the clear blue sky completely. The dirt stocking that covered the base of the colossal cledge shard pulled back and revealed the bedrock. The landscape that he had treaded on for the remainder of his walk was blasted and bleak. The only physical change made to this toppled mountain (because it seemed logical to him that this was once a tall and unforgiving shard of rock that thrust at the sky and was knocked over at time point for a reason beyond his understanding) was that of the wind and rain. There could have been an entire city tucked on top of this platform, safe from invasion and sneak attacks of any sort, but there was nothing. This would be, for Roquai, a perfect home. The earth’s crust at this altitude was untouched by any humanoid hand or foot.

The forest below, which he could see when his winding uphill path took his near the sides of the gigantic stone, fell farther and farther away. It was like climbing up the back of a petrified sand whale, beached in a forest that, could only be sustained by a dream.

Reaching the top had shown him more blessings then he knew how to be thankful for.

Long, diagonal swaths of trees dissect the farmland between where he stands up above the land and the continuation of the forest about a half-mile from his point of view. Between the light green dissector swaths of trees were fields of vibrant green grasses. Soft trunks and lighter loads, Roquai thinks when he regards the patches of trees, probably planted by the deceased farmers when these lands weren’t barren and fallow. Absolutely perfect.

He turned around and began to backtrack to the bottom of the monolith.

Day 4

Sundown to sunup, Roquai sweat blood as he toiled and ate the little produce he brought with him, and whatever animal was dumb enough to wander close by. The mechanics of his work are the most simple of physical labor. He used his ax to fell the long bands of trees and drag them to the center of one large section of field. He picked one of the mats of ancient farmland, covered in green grasses and weeds, one that was visible from the rock peak he spied from earlier, and began to chop down the hardwoods that separated it from the other sections of cleared land.

His only company or consort was the insane squawking of the fleeing birds and the crashing of lumber to the earth. Roquai’s grip was so strong and acuity with the axe so true that as one treetop crashed into the ground another was already falling. As the nights wore on and the blade grew dull for the first leg of this working phase, Roquai felt hunger ripping into his guts like a savage beast, and an ache begin to slowly seize the muscles from his neck to his hips. He thanked the pain to allow him to drive until morning. When the sun came up and his concentration began to wan with the dreadful light stabbing his eyes he retreated to camp.

A lapse or pause mid-swing would be the most fatal of errors. Some of the trees, in order to be dragged, had to be bisected and their limbs chopped off, which added to the strenuous cutting and chopping. During any of this time, if he stopped to think about something other then the angle and speed of his blade, a single error could make the entire trip for naught. A glancing blow against a tree stump would twist the blade and throw the haft from his hands but, at the velocity and terrible speed at which the Troll towed his axe, not before shattering one or both of his wrists. Worse yet was the possibility of the blade slipping or cleaving through a rotten branch where, again due to the power behind the blows, his ankles stood a fifty-fifty chance of being split wide open, or his shins smashed in, which would leave him stranded and wounded. Traveling alone has its hazards.

Camp was made at the base of the overlooking cliff, tucked between the rock face and some tall brush that provided cover from the eyes of other living things. More then protection from the elements, privacy, even in the middle of nowhere, made the Mountain Troll comfortable. He would be less at ease in the middle of a fortress surrounded by a moat if he could not personally guard its entrances. He slept clothed and under a layer of thin bed sheet that he brought from his home and snarled in his sleep. The sun would rise up, pass through the sky, and almost sink again before the slumbering Troll would open his eyes.

Day 5

The last day of work.

The muscles he had pulled and tenderized the day before only showed soreness the next dusk. Still, like how a groundhog gets spooked by its own shadow, the Troll looked at the sun and decided to boycott it’s departing display.

He watched the twilight slowly melt under the heat of the brightest stars while drifting back to sleep.

Upon awaking an hour after the sun has fully set, his injuries are nearly healed. A small breakfast and a short walk brought him to the child of his destruction. Displayed in the middle of the field is a pyramid of logs about one story in height, nearly twenty yards at it’s thickest radius, stacked loosely and hap hazardously. A sudden gust of wind or shift in weight could bring the pile sloughing off to one side and burry everything it a barrage of diced lumber, or so it seemed. It wouldn’t matter tomorrow. A full period of rest was needed before the event could be underway. There would be a time where Roquai could enjoy the fruits of his labor with no distractions, or he would make sure that others would suffer along with him.

This was important. Not only for his health and sanity but so he would not dispense undue wrath of those friends and enemies he kept closest. His motives were self-invested ones. It also happened that the lives of a few others might depend on tomorrow’s weather. Life is strange that way, isn’t it?

The axe followed him the remainder of this night as well, whistling through the air or dangling at his side, always in motion. It seemed to become another addition to his deadlier appendages. The stumps of the trees he had cut, jagged and torn and crying up from their clawing roots, were chopped into kindling. To a nymph, kindling would be preferable death, as leaving the living stumps to rot gave them almost no chance of regrowth, letting them to die slow deaths and wither under a blind sun. To Roquai, this was poetic as well as cruel. No doubt that the suffering made here would attract a few fae or nature spirits to the holocaust. The Mountain Troll prayed that it would.

Blocks and strips and an assortment of leftover wood get scattered all about the log pyramid. The twin ribbons of thin forest that once separated three fields are sloppily cut down and managed in the center of the clearing. All that separates the unused farmland now are two ugly, spotted strokes along the landscape like gangrenous scars. Again, to Roquai, this was a definite improvement.

Once the master art was finished around three hours after midnight, the great Troll retired. Covered in sweat, he laid his ax down besides his dirt bedding, draped his body in the sheet, and slept like a stone slab until the next dusk.

Day 6

It was the sixth night and he had finally hewn all of his reasons to wait. He brought a grimy flask of lantern oil, flint and a striking stone, and dry kindling sticks that he had gathered from the nearby bushes around his campsite to the pile of logs. Dry things to burn were plentiful in all this boundless forest, except on the gargantuan stone monolith and the fallow fields. That’s exactly how he had planned it.

The kindling sticks were arranged in a poor mimicry of the larger pyramid of trees. He set the tiny fire in a nook between two fat logs of undistinguishable sort at the foot of the wooden hill using the flint and a spot of oil for a quick ignition. The sparks caught and the drop of oil enflamed and sputtered outward in a minute explosives display, flecking bits of fire onto the grass and around one side of the stick pile. Roquai then uncorked the bottle of oil. The stripped logs on either side of the little smoker were given splashes of the fluid for when the diminutive flames started to lick at their flanks. The remainder of the bottle’s contents, and the bottle itself, was thrown on top of the pile and left to fall between the crags and crannies of the unorganized structure. Roquai no longer had any need for the fuel, so he’d best donate it to the essence of this bonfire. With that, he turned his back to the wisps of rising smoke and plodded back through the blighted field.

He went to his camp and gathered his things inside of a backpack, slung it over one shoulder, and continued his way. The trail he had carved earlier had grown in with renewed vegetation, so he made another one that was easy to follow and more direct then the last. Roquai trekked around the base of the rock structure along the side that his path had skirted a few days earlier. His goal was to reach the top of the bluff in no set amount of time. He had all of the night to work within.

A couple of hours later, Roquai was hiking up to the peak of the rock brae. He would be able to see the last traces of his camp from the ledge, he knew, but that didn’t interest him any further then a passing thought he had on the last leg of his journey. The Mountain Troll had been patient, more patient then most people would ever believe, while completing this task. It was something he didn’t need to do and that few would ever know about, and something that naturally carried potentially fatal risks with it. Who’s soul is he trying to guide with this ludicrous tradition? Someone would question the Troll and says that it is his own sense of self that he is trying to preserve and not that of his significant others. And Roquai would almost believe them.

From here, he could swear that the roaring of the fire that he could not yet see was emitting from his heart. It deafened his ears.

The top of the cliff was bathed in the faintly dancing orange light given off by the holocaust. There are no words to describe a blaze like this. It matches proportions that are totally within the limit of imagination. The fire itself was nothing magic or spectacular. However, the power it radiated that could only be seen and tasted by a select few was something that did not belong to this world. Roquai stood in a silent awe in that which was the final phase of his labor.

A modern day fireworks display could not have captivated him better. The air was aglow with a light that did not come from the heat or the fire. The forest was alive with illumination made by no fairy except perhaps the ones that have been dead for ages past. Embers that were flung into the sky by updrafts of heat were much more then embers. Spirits of the trees, little blazing stars of red, whipped and coiled around a black serpent that stretched impossibly high into the sky. It was so black that the midnight behind and around it were blotted out, and for a minute, Roquai thought that it may never come back. The windless night made sure that the heated column of smoke went undisturbed in the most direct path into the heavens. Like sprites, the orange flacks of hot ash swirled in and about this huge ghostly mass. It might appear to be a wicked tendril rising to snatch the moon to someone observing from a distance, but Roquai knew it’s single purpose, because he had crafted it out of generations of shamanistic practice.

Standing at the lip of the crag with a tiny speck below his feet – the abandoned camp, just a break in the bush and a black scar of a campfire – he began to chant. The words aren’t important. Neither he nor I know what they all mean, but their combined meaning, when they collide with the raw spirits focused in this place, is one of depth, that can only be felt and understood and never spoken aloud.

His throat singing rang out into the bloodied night, over the gray-shimmering trees, and collided with the roaring of the fire to be overwhelmed and carried upward with the smoke. Beyond the tingling in his neck and chest, his guttural incantation only complimented the power of this flame, this tiny candle set on the skin of Belariath.

The radiation of the bonfire, granted the means to shine both here and the world of the dead and point them to the ‘beyond’ places, would attract many, the living and the dead respectively. Roquai only cared about one. The extravagance of this ceremony would surely accomplish at least ONE thing that Roquai needed more then any other. That’s all that mattered to him.

The pale light of the moon was turned back. In the Troll’s eyes, as he looked to the floating disc that watched over these proceedings like a mother, it reflected the crimson haze so that it shone a dull orange, like an amber trapped in the firmament above. It made him think of a moth attracted to a flame. No other ideas seemed more appropriate as he serenaded the night.

Even at the strength of the inferno now, the observant would notice that the fire has not yet covered the entire top of the wooden pile below, and that these flames were rising off of the very surface of the top log layer. The night was not over, nor would it be after the sun had risen, and it might possibly continue until the sun sets and heralds the next night. It didn’t matter how long it would last to Roquai. This was his place, where he most belonged in the world, until the last of the fire’s power had waned and died under his meticulous supervision. And it WAS super-vision. The forest within a half-mile was glowing, yes, but to Roquai it was much more. His lidded eyes were unseeing yet had domain over everything that was touched by the queer shade of light. The way ‘how’ can’t be explained either. He was looking through the aura, trying to find someone or something hiding inside of it that no one else could see. As you might have guessed, the glow was a gathering of spirits, and Roquai knew that his one was among them.

So as the Mountain Troll sung and hummed to the fire and a flock of wandering ghosts, no joke about it, gathered harmlessly about, only an invisible few breaking the tree line and throwing themselves into the inferno to be carried upward with the destruction of the flora, and as he tried to sift through their signatures like drawing names out of a hat, the bonfire raged on.

By the end of its life, two days from now, the last of the wandering souls would find itself in another plane completely separated from this one except by the trail of black smoke. Roquai prayed that his one would be among them.

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