Uncanny Tales of Crush and Pound 8

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  The tartan warrior stood at the perimeter of the cave lit up only by torchlight, and he surveyed the ongoing work of the slaves digging into the mountain. Bored out of his mind and on the verge of drifting off to sleep on the job, he grabbed the whip from its clasp on his belt, and he unraveled the coil to the ground. Then he snapped it once with great force, and the leather smacked an echo through the cave. The slaves were jolted from their work at first and then spurred on by the all too familiar sound of the slave driver with the whip, and the guard snickered for a moment at his own ruthless gesture. He licked his lips as sweat poured down into his mouth, and then he spat out a mouthful of blood as he realized that the whip had caught his own forehead in its return motion. The blood had run down his nose and into his mouth without him feeling so much as a tickle. Cursing under his breath at his own mistake, he lashed the whip out again to strike one of the workers in the back as she toiled in the muddy pit below, and he laughed at her pain as she fell to the ground.

  “Get up and dig harder, you lazy worm!” he belted out in a terrible fit of anger, and she pushed herself up onto her knees with the pick and swung the tool into the hard, wet ground once more. A thunderous clap rang out through the cave with the strike of the pick, and the slaves and the guard were all thrown to the ground with the concussive force of the resulting explosion. Dust flew through the air and filled the cavern with a thick fog of powder and dirt, and the guard coughed as he lay sprawled out on the ground. The strange thing was that his cough sounded muffled, as if he had a set of earplugs inserted into his ears, and he could not understand why he was prostrate on his back. He brought his hands up before his face and rubbed the dirt from his eyelids. He could see his fingers and hands through the dusty atmosphere, and when he clapped his hands together, he could perceive the dust flying off in rivulets with the motion of the air. Yet he could hear nothing. Standing to his feet, he found that his balance was askew, and he quickly grabbed hold of the wall to balance himself until the room stopped moving. Then his ears started popping, and as he opened and closed his mouth, he began to hear the sounds of dirt falling from between the supports in the ceiling.

  “What’s happened?!” he cried out, but the words were only muffled vibrations to his ears as he staggered down the steps to the rubble where the slaves had been digging only seconds before. Rocks were strewn in every direction, large chunks of cave wall were mixed in with smaller chunks of metal and gold and intertwined in an amalgamation of variegated ore. In the center of room where he had struck the girl slave with the whip, a light originated from the ground and pierced through the powdery air in the location she had been quarrying. Brushing the unconscious girl aside with his boot, the guard bent down to push the pebbles of ore away from the light, and to his astonishment, he found that the bright light originated from a single stone. Then he touched the stone with his hands, and the light dimmed ever so slowly until it merely glowed a dim light in the cave. Curious at the discovery, the guard raised a nearby pick and began to dig out from around the glowing stone, and the deeper he dug, the larger the stone became. Subsequently, the stone began to take shape, to anthropomorphize, until the guard had removed all of the excess dirt that had sealed the stone away for untold centuries. The guard raised the miniature glowing statue from the ground with his hands, and he cradled it in his arms as he walked it up the steps to the entrance of the cavern. He had uncovered the Soul that had been searched for by the slaves for so long, and he embraced it with a longing that he could have never imagined feeling. Small pebbles fell on him as he walked up the steps, and he brushed them aside with little care except for what he felt toward the glowing stone that he now cradled in his arms. The ceiling could fall in on him for all he cared; the baby was his to hold.

  Then the toe of his shoe caught a crack in the floor, and he tripped forward to the ground, dropping the carven baby of stone and falling flat onto his face. The Soul rolled through the doorway, and he cried as he lost his child in the darkness of the cavern. Larger rocks began to fall in on him, and though he was deaf and still could not hear the sounds of the stones as they bounced on his arms and head, he could feel the pain of the loss of his child and of the heavy stones that crushed his legs as he lay on the uneven floor. As the glowing baby of stone disappeared on the other side of the door, the ceiling fell through on the guard, and darkness was his last memory.

  The Soul of the Mountain had been found and liberated from the tomb where it had been encased for a millennia. The Queenmother would soon have her prize.

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  Boulder’s eyes opened suddenly from his prison cell within the giant’s castle, and he sensed that there was a change in the air. The world that he had known for his near infinite existence would be forever changed. The child had been found.