Category: Flash Fiction

Writing challenges from the internets

Cold Blood

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Chuck’s challenge this week: The four-part story, part 1. That means it’s time to buckle up, because I’ll be taking on stories started by other authors and extending them in my own twisted ways, and they’ll be taking my creations into new and exciting directions of their own.

It was a bunch of fun last time it happened, so I’ve got high hopes this time, too!

So, how do you go about writing the beginning of a story that you won’t be able to write the ending to? Lots of unanswered questions, lots of plants (no, not that kind of plant), lots of hints at what might have come before, but not a lot of concrete. At least, I think that’s a good way to go about it. At any rate, that’s what I’ve tried to do here.

Enjoy, and if you’re here from the challenge and thinking of using this story stem, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

 

Cold Blood

Cold.

The weather reports had called for cold, but that was the first thing Lem could process, and the only thing, for that matter. Despite the sleeping bag her legs were snarled in, the stocking cap smushing down her short hair, and the two hoodies she had layered up the night before, the cold had seeped into her toes and her fingers in the night, and she could barely feel them.

She sat up, and a crack of thunder sounded in her skull. Too much whiskey the night before; yes, that had been a mistake. And not a drop of water around before bed, either. All the water in their flasks had frozen. Was still frozen, she discovered, turning a heavy flask over. It would have been funny, if her head hadn’t felt like it was tearing into two halves down the middle. She poked Mark to wake him up.

But Mark wasn’t there.

His sleeping bag had been right next to hers when she passed out, but now it was rolled up and neatly secured with paracord in the corner of the tent. Next to it sat Mark’s pack, which was also arranged and collected and ready to depart. But no Mark.

She peeked her head out of the tent — sucking in a sharp icy breath, because god help her, it was even colder outside — and looked around. There, the ring of stones around the pile of ash from last night’s fire. There, the funny little outcropping of trees that Mark had said looked like a bunch of aliens dancing around a maypole. There, the dusty trail leading off into the woods. In the distance, the burbling sounds of the river. But no Mark.

Lem cleared her throat, sending another shockwave through her pounding head, and stumbled out into the grey morning. She tried to call for Mark, but her voice was hoarse and tiny in the predawn mist. It wasn’t unlike him to go for a little explore before she was awake, but something felt off. The sleeping bag, his pack. He hadn’t lit a fire. And he’d had as much to drink as she had, if not more. By rights, he should be the one sprawling on the ground in the tent, unable to shake the fog out of his head. She called out once more, Mark’s name issuing out in a great cloud of vapor. Three crows exploded out of a nearby bush and went flapping off into the sky, cawing at one another and at her pitilessly as the grey swallowed them up.

An hour later, Lem had built a fire and thrown a few sausages in the pan, figuring that when Mark returned she could have a bit of breakfast ready. She’d thawed out a canteen and chugged a good quart of water, and that had helped, too. But the hour had come and gone: she had gathered kindling, listened to the thick sizzle of the gristly meat, and then devoured them herself, all without seeing or hearing any sign of Mark. It was only when she was cleaning up from the meager meal that she started to get uneasy.

Not at the thought of being alone in the wild; she carried a gun and was well-trained in its use. That had been her father’s insistence when she took up hiking, and she dutifully loaded it before every expedition, even though she had never had cause to use it. Nor was she uneasy at Mark’s absence; he liked the solitude of the woods even more than she did, and he would be back soon enough with some clumsy excuse about forgetting to leave a note, and they’d kiss and laugh over it and that would be the end. It was the cold, she realized. The sun was up now, casting long, skeletal shadows through the trees, but it was getting colder. Unseasonable was not the word. The chill was unnatural.

She chuckled at herself as she thought it, and went to pack away her mess kit back in her pack, and that was when she spotted it. It was frozen solid but unmistakable, dark crimson in the dust, glittering with the scattered sunshine; A tiny disk of blood that looked like it might have frozen before it hit the ground.

She bent to examine it, the vapor of her breath seeming to melt its surface just a little, tiny droplets condensing on the angry red ice. Now that she’d spotted this tiny pool, the next one seemed to catch light at the edge of her vision. She rose and walked toward the new spot, and then she saw the next patch of ice… and the next, leading toward that strange snarled copse of trees.

For a fleeting moment, she thought of her gun. Her tent was only thirty feet away, just as far from her now as the weird interwoven trees that had caught Mark’s fancy the night before. It would take only a moment to retrieve it. Then came a sound that made ice of the blood suddenly surging through her veins. The cracking of a twig underfoot, but not under her foot. Under another foot entirely, just beyond the edge of the trees encircling the clearing.

The Crater Devil

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Chuck’s challenge this week: The Subgenre Blender. I drew Cryptozoology and the Wild West.

We kind of laugh nowadays at the stories of monsters often glimpsed but never seen, of creatures that seem to defy nature and terrorize people and animals in the dwindling remote parts of the world. But there was a time (before the internet) when stories like these might have been taken much more seriously. People still believe in Bigfoot, not because the evidence is so compelling and widespread, but because nobody was around to debunk it on a widespread scale before the myth could take hold in people’s minds and hearts.

Imagine what it would have been like in the old west, when there was no internet and barely any newspapers, and you could come to a town and hear stories — believed by an entire town — of a mythical monster that lives out in the mountains.

You might believe it. You might even be willing to spend a lot of money to get famous proving it.

Here’s “The Crater Devil”.

 

 

The Crater Devil

“The Crater Devil?” Luke spoke through a bushy mustache in a voice like honey poured over gravel. “Sure, I’ve heard of it.”

The barkeep set down two shotglasses of whiskey in front of the unlikely pair. The mahogany liquid steamed as it sloshed over onto the lacquered bar. Luke tossed his shot back in one great gulp.

Leonard sipped at his whiskey, wincing mightily at every taste. The liquor made him sweat, though the afternoon was quite cool. “Heard of it, of course. But you’ve never seen it.”

“I don’t think anybody around these parts has seen it.” Luke chuckled. “But we know the stories. And I’ve heard it. That was enough.”

Everybody had heard the stories. Way off in the mountains, past parts unreachable by wagon and only barely traversible on foot, in a great crater two miles wide if it was a foot, was a lake filled with crystal blue water. Nothing green grew for miles around the crater, no animals would drink from its waters. And in that crater, lurking in those waters or prowling the peaks all around, was the Devil. Elverton MacLeod had set out to explore the crater decades ago, and was widely spoken of as the first human victim of the beast.

Depending on who was doing the telling, the Devil looked something like a man, but stood three times as tall, all red-skinned and covered with coarse black hair. Or it had the body of a man and the head of a bull. Or it was a great lizard with legs thick as tree trunks and razor sharp teeth. Or it was an albino coyote with haunting red eyes that howled like a starving child. Nobody telling stories about the Crater Devil seemed to be particularly reliable, so the details were always changing as the stories got passed from one ear to the next. What didn’t change, though, were the Devil’s horrible, piercing, bone-chilling red eyes. The devil could fix you with its gaze from two hundred yards away, and once you were caught, you were stuck. Couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out, couldn’t even think until the Devil either took you or left you. Those who were left would stumble back into town days later, delirious and panicked; hence the varying reports on the creature’s appearance. Those who were taken were never seen again.

Leonard licked his lips and leaned in to whisper in Luke’s ear, too low to be overheard by anybody eavesdropping — which nobody was — “I’m going to find it.”

Luke measured Leonard with a pass of his heavily lidded brown eyes. The man was thinner than a railway line, with an eager face and an untidy mass of blonde hair pulled back and tied with twine. He might have been the nuttiest son of a bitch Luke had ever laid eyes on. A scientist, he claimed. “And you want me to … do what, exactly?”

“Look at me,” Leonard said. “I’m a scientist, not a frontiersman. I wouldn’t last the night out there by myself. You, on the other hand… Besides. Your friends told me you’d know where to find it.”

Sucking his teeth and eyeing the bottom of his empty glass, Luke blew out a heavy sigh. Leonard signaled the barkeep for another round. In silence, Luke pondered while the portly man brought the drinks around. Then he lifted his glass and eyed Leonard over its gleaming rim. “And what’s in it for me?”

This time it was Leonard, a grin splitting his face, who threw back his shot of whiskey. In him, it caused a terrible fit of coughing and wheezing. Finally he gave his response in a hoarse whisper. “If we can document the Devil, we’ll both be rich beyond our wildest dreams.”

Luke sneered and showed Leonard his back, so Leonard added in a noncommittal voice, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars in advance.”

******

Elverton MacLeod turned his face skyward, letting the cooling drizzle smear the grime embedded in the deep crevices of his forehead and cheeks. Full moon coming on behind the clouds. Monster hunters and fame seekers would be out and about. Time to hitch up the wagon.

******

The horses had been abandoned when they started tugging against their harnesses halfway up an unnamed trail that cut between two mountains. The trail itself tapered off to bare rocks and weeds not a hundred yards on, so Luke and Leonard trudged up the craggy face of the mountain one behind the other. Leonard kept tossing nervous glances at the cliff faces around them while Luke chuckled, his broad shoulders trembling silently.

“Nothing to be afraid of ’round these parts,” he said. “‘Cept the Devil, of course.”

On the ridge off to their left was an outcropping of rock that jutted toward the sky like a great angry finger. A darkness under one of its stones seemed to shrink with sudden movement.

“Did you see that?” Leonard said, pointing wildly. He produced a dusty pair of binoculars and mashed them against his face.

Luke shook his head and kept churning his legs. They were traversing the face sideways now, and the footing was too uncertain to be looking at every little thing the weird little scientist jumped at.

The binoculars fogged over almost immediately in the cool mist that was falling, but Leonard was almost certain there was a dark shape behind the rocks that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

******

The two specks were picking their way across the south face of the mountain, making slow but steady progress. They’d reach the crater in a few hours. Then the smaller speck stopped and looked in his direction. Elverton shrunk backwards against the rock face, melding with its shadow. He wouldn’t be seen, but he’d lose time while the man kept his eyes turned toward the rocks. The hides had to be secured to the wagons, the lamps had to be lit…

As he watched, the man’s backward glances grew less and less frequent, until the two specks disappeared around a bend in the crags. With unnatural grace, Elverton scrambled away along his secret path back to the crater.

******

In the twilight, the crater exploded with color. The still water of its surface caught the jagged peaks of the ridge opposite, inverted them and flung them back skyward again over the sickly grey sky. The drizzle had grown into a light rain and turned the stones underfoot into slick little traps, hungry to turn their ankles as they picked their way down toward the crater. The far face of the basin was covered in shadow, and the rock faces that curved down toward the crater’s edge were striated with darkness.

Even in the growing darkness, the scientist’s eyes were alight with fervor. A faint, reverent whisper escaped from him: “This is it!” They had reached the level ground at the bottom of the basin, not fifty feet from the water’s edge. “Keep watch,” he told Luke, as Leonard unshouldered his pack and began to set up a camera on a tripod, unfolding its spindly legs and trying to make it stand level on the loose stones.

Dutifully, Luke swiveled his eyes across the lake, wondering how long the funny little man was going to keep him waiting out here.

******

The two men had stopped in the perfect place. The darkness would hide him until he was almost upon them. Elverton threw the stitched sheet of red-painted leathers over his head, hoisted his trundle, and wheeled it slowly toward them.

******

Leonard was dancing around like an unstrung marionette, looking through the camera, testing the flash powder, holding his hands up to frame various aspects of the landscape. A waste, Luke thought. He wouldn’t see a damned thing out here as it was, and the shadows were only getting deeper. Luke found a stone big enough to park his butt and parked it, absently rolling a cigarette.

Then the canyon exploded in noise.

It sounded as if an ox had been shot through the throat and was gurgling and groaning its life out, but loud enough to shake the walls of the basin and reverberate in their bones. Leonard fell over, sending stones clattering. Luke’s cigarette fell from his lip and he froze.

Swaying toward them, a hundred yards off, were a pair of searing orange orbs, bright and terrible against the dark. Leonard had recovered and ran for his camera, but the terrible howl broke loose once more and he crashed into the tripod, pulling it over with him.

“Luke?” Leonard shouted, his voice two octaves higher than normal. “Get your gun!”

The legs of the tripod had tangled in his coat and Leonard kept tripping and stumbling, getting halfway to his feet before thumping to the ground again. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw the Crater Demon lurching toward them, the details of its appearance only suggested in its silhouette; it was the size of a large horse but it moved like a lizard, its crimson hide the color of blood behind its burning eyes. The sudden moisture at Leonard’s thigh did not come from the rain-soaked stones he kept stumbling on.

“Luke?!”

The Demon was no longer looking at Leonard. It had turned its attention fully on Luke, who still sat, motionless, his hand still curled toward his lip as if he were still holding his cigarette. His eyes were wide and sightless, his face wet with tears, but he did not stir as the beast slithered toward him.

“LUKE!”

Then the Demon howled again and Leonard’s reason fled faster than he did. He abandoned his camera and his binoculars and bag and ran as fast as his legs could carry him back up the path out of the canyon, and he did not stop running until he was back in the town, dehydrated, delirious, and babbling about a horrible red beast that had devoured his partner whole on the spot.

******

“Shit, Elvy.” Luke shoved the mass of hides off him, and Elverton collapsed next to him in a cackling fit. He spun the little wooden crank and the beast’s howl echoed from the tiny box, but disconnected from the amplifying horn, it sounded hollow and tiny. “You coulda gone easy when you knocked me off the rock. Damn near twisted my ankle.” Grabbing one of the lanterns off of the mask of the beast, Luke got to his feet and began picking through Leonard’s bag. The binoculars were intact, and there were a handful of gizmos in there whose purpose he could only guess at. More interesting to Luke was the wad of cash at the bottom.

“Did you see his face?” Elverton hooted.

Luke shook his head. He wondered if Elvy wasn’t losing his mind a little bit after all these years living in the wilderness, but the payoff more than made up for it. “Over four hundred dollars in here, man.”

“And that camera’s got to be worth a few hundred more,” Elverton said. “Think he’ll come back?”

Luke shook his head. “He pissed himself. He ain’t coming back. Neither should I, after the stories he’s gonna tell. Not for a while.”

“Next town over?”

Luke grinned. There was a pretty waitress at the saloon in Huskerville. Time to go fishing again. “Next town over.”

Page-Turner

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Chuck’s challenge this week: Must Contain 3 Things. My three things: Library, Survival, War.

Ever gotten totally lost in a really good book? So did Elloree. Her story is below.

Page-Turner

In the flickering light of her dying candle, Elloree resembled nothing so much as a praying mantis in smudged plaid and oversized glasses. Her spindly fingers tracked like machines across the typeface, barreling toward the bottom of the page, then flicked it over with robotic efficiency. Her radiant eyes bounced from side to side as they drank in the words like so much water down the throat of a man dying of thirst. Her papery lips alternately pursed with puzzlement or curled up with satisfaction or opened just slightly to gasp with surprise. In a matter of moments, she had finished the book and tossed it on the pile of its brethren; another stripped-down carcass added to a growing pile of bones.

She rose, dusted her knees, and ghosted her way through the aisles. They towered over her diminutive frame like guardians, shielding her from the crimson light streaming through the windows, the streaked and scorched sunlight invading her fortress as it did for only a few times every day. She floated through fiction, bandied around the biographies, and reveled past the reference section, landing at last in her favorite section: Romance. She picked out a thick volume with a strapping bare-chested man on its cover and hummed dreamily to herself as she carried it back to her nest.

******

Rast’s shrill whistle pierced the evening, and Nell lifted her gaze from her bedraggled footsteps.

“Up ahead,” Rast whispered, as if afraid of breaking the dusty silence. “See it?”

She did. And as it always did when they approached another town, her throat tightened. Most likely it was just full of more of the same: smoldering corpses, shattered buildings, the haunting echoes of an entire community’s tortured final moments lingering in the air like poison. Occasionally, despite all the festering death, there would be some supplies. It had to be risked.

Nell straightened her pack on her shoulders, brushed an errant strand of soot-smeared hair from her face. “Let’s go.”

******

The sun was almost down, but Elloree hardly noticed. She never did, as the sunset looked the same as sunrise and much of the rest of the day. With the never-breaking columns of acrid black clouds streaming overhead, only an occasional ray of burning light would streak through, and then only briefly. The rest was darkness and smoke, and her candle was guttering. She lit another and continued her story.

******

The extermination here had been methodical and absolute. The roads were pulverized and difficult to walk on; Rast and Nell found their footing much more easily several feet off the road in the mud and weeds. The buildings were hollowed and skeletal, their shells weird misshapen silhouettes against the fading red light. No food. No survivors. Nothing left.

“Sun’s down soon,” Nell said. “Time to go.” She hated making camp in towns; you never knew when a sentry would pass over. They were better off when they could find a copse of trees or a rampant untended cornfield. But Rast wasn’t listening. He was squinting against the fading light, his three-fingered hand needlessly visoring out the sun. “There’s a light.”

“Don’t be stupid. I don’t want to get caught out here.”

“Nell. That building. Over there. It’s intact.” he pointed with his five-fingered hand. “And there’s a light in its window.”

Nell sighed and humored Rast with a look. He was daft as a post, but loyal, and he tried to help, bless him. He was also absolutely right.

The Septids razed every building they declared “tactically useful,” which included food storage, weapons repositories, residences, schools, churches, and offices. Occasionally you’d find a squat untouched, a shed or a low-slung warehouse. This building was small — probably too small to hold anything useful — but it was also definitely illuminated from within. Not by much. A light too faint to be mistaken for anything other than the reflected glow from the scorched sun burned at one window at the nearest corner. But that one window glowed while the others were dark. Rast’s sharp eyes had picked out something useful after all.

She turned to him and nodded, drawing her pistol. “Quietly.”

******

The cracked and smoke-stained door opened soundlessly as Rast leaned into it, and on practiced, stealthy footsteps, they stole into the wide open space.

A library.

For a moment, Nell simply gaped. She couldn’t believe the building was so intact, but it didn’t take long to figure out why. Books had long ago gone obsolete. They’d been digitized and collected into virtual storage, which was easier to police and took up less space. Most libraries had been decommissioned, but in some outlying towns it hadn’t been finished before the overthrow. And here they were, in a library.

With somebody else. At the end of the room, a shuffling of feet, a clatter of books. They edged around the shelves and aimed their guns at the tiny girl hunched over a novel in front of a ludicrous pile of books. Her eyes peered at them curiously through the thick lenses of her glasses.

She blinked at them, and they at her, for a few tense moments.

“How are you alive?” Nell finally asked.

Elloree shrugged.

“How long have you been here?”

She shrugged again.

The girl seemed so carefree, so unimpressed by them. Nell felt foolish. “How did you survive the war?” She demanded, her voice growing shrill.

“The war?”

Rast giggled foolishly. Nell scowled. “The war,” she explained, “that wiped out most of humanity. The war,” she continued, “that destroyed this town. The war,” she finished, “that somehow left you untouched. You didn’t know?!”

Elloree shrugged, looking a little sheepish. “It’s just… well… I’ve been reading.”

Rast began cackling. “Bookworm read right through the end of the world!”

“It’s just,” Elloree said, “that they were really good books.”

Cold Fury

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This week’s Flash Fiction Challenge: Literary Mash-Up.

There’s no sense pretending on this one. I loved (no, let’s not even hide it, love, present tense) Frozen. So when my random selection gave me a mash-up of The Avengers and Frozen, it felt like Christmas coming around again.

I took the mash-up a little bit more literally than perhaps the challenge is meant to be taken, but I don’t care. I had more fun writing this than anything I’ve written in recent months.

Here’s Cold Fury, in 960 words.

 

 

 

Cold Fury

Get out of the ice business, they said. Market’s crashing, they said.

But what the hell was I supposed to do? I’m just an ice jockey from the sticks. No formal education, no particular skillset to speak of, outside of chopping ice, shaping it, transporting it, preserving it. Who am I kidding? It’s not like you couldn’t teach a rock troll to do what I do. The reindeer can practically do the job without me; he just can’t hold the icepick with his hooves. But that’s hardly the point.

Point is, the world is getting way too strange for somebody like me to make sense of it. I mean, one day I’m hauling a load of prime-cut crystal down from the peaks, and BANG, like magic, there’s this freak snowstorm out of nowhere. To say it’s a few months early is to overstate the obvious. Granted, weather can get weird up in the mountains, but this stuff settles in. Goes on thick, like marshmallow paste, and heavy, like reindeer dung; it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, and I might as well be dragging a sledful of sunlight in the summer behind me for all the good this ice is gonna do me. Pity, too. It’s a beautiful haul, but off it goes down the mountainside; no sense tiring out the reindeer. And I’m wondering what I’m going to do with myself for the foreseeable future when I remember there’s this shack back down the mountainside a stitch. Maybe I can ponder my troubles with a mug in my hand, away from the cackling of the jerks back in town.

I’m within sight of the shack when this guy steps out from behind a tree. Out-of-towner. Whatever he was doing out there is anybody’s guess, but I wasn’t gonna ask him. He’s got this leathery coat flapping like mad around his knees in the mountain wind, and a gleaming bald black head atop these massive, don’t-mess-with-me shoulders, and he’s staring hard at me like I stole his lunch money twenty years ago and he’s here to pay me back. Or maybe he’s just looking at me, and it’s the eyepatch that makes him look all ominous.

He tells me he needs me. That there’s this girl coming up the mountain, and she’s in trouble. That I should look out for her, help her find her sister. That he needs me to help “bring the sister in,” whatever that means. I ask him what’s in it for me, and he asks if I’ve ever wanted to be a prince. And I’m about to tell him to take a flying leap off the bluffs over there — seven hundred feet straight down. Then I stop. It’s not like I have anything better going on. Endless blizzard and all.

Looking back on it now, I don’t even know if he was real. All I know is, I turned to ask what he was gonna do for my reindeer, you know, to sweeten the deal, and when I looked back, he was gone… and behind him, in the distance, I see this girl lurching up the mountainside toward the shack. Tiny. Frail. Freezing. Then it gets worse. I follow her in, and she turns out to be gorgeous. Weird thing going on with her hair, this pale streak mixed in with all the red, but a face that’s cute like about a dozen baby reindeer and… well. I try to play it cool, but my brain is doing backflips trying to figure out how that angry eyepatch guy knew about her.

We talk. She needs a ride; I could use the money she offers me for giving her a ride. Next thing I know, it’s talking snowmen and imperial guards and a chase back down the same damn mountain we just climbed up. Oh, and her sister? Yeah, turns out she’s some sort of witch or something, and she’s all icicles and snow and eternal cold and… look, I’m not the guy to ask about everything that went down, all right? To be honest, the talking snowman gave me the screaming willies, and now he’s got his own room in the castle and he’s somehow still a snowman despite the fact that summer has come and gone six or seven times now. Ice Witch, right? Anyway. Sister and I get married, do the happily-ever-after thing, and the Snow Queen or whatever you call her rules in grace and splendor and all that good stuff. And then it hits me like an avalanche.

Eyepatch was right. I’m a prince now.

It’s too good to be true, right? Me, the ice-chucker from nowhere marries into the royal family. For years I don’t say anything — don’t look a gift reindeer in the mouth, right? — until one day I’m heading down for breakfast in the lower dining hall and I hear that voice. I go running in and see the guy, eyepatch and shiny head and all, sitting down talking with the queen. And he’s spouting all this stuff about parallel dimensions and ancient artifacts of untold power and how the world — no, the universe — needs her. Before I can even get my wife out of bed (she sleeps like a yeti, that one) the queen goes and gets on this — what can I call it? Like a boat, but made of steel, and flying, just floating over the ground like a hummingbird, if you can believe that — and leaves with the guy. And I try to explain, but my girl just goes into this… this FURY, you know?

Anyway, my wife and I rule the kingdom now while her sister, the Frost Fairy or whatever, is off fighting the evils of the universe, or something. And that’s how I became King of Arendelle.

 

 

Smoke Rings

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Chuck’s challenge this week: “Who the F*** is my D&D character?” The challenge links to a character generator that rolls up ludicrous characters with a mouthful of abuse. Good fun. I lucked into “a halfling wizard from a company of sellswords who doesn’t believe in magic, EVER.” (Profanity redacted.)

As I was writing this, my wife pointed out how rather much like fan fiction this topic was. I argued at first, but ultimately I can’t help but agree. Fantasy is not really my schtick, but I’ve always loved the Lord of the Rings and I felt compelled to press on with this topic anyway. For a first challenge of the year, it was good fun. It ran a little long, but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut any more.

Here, then, is “Smoke Rings.”

 

Smoke Rings

“Did I ever tell you about the time your uncle, Glorfindel, and I fought off the goblin hordes?” Klobo puffed absently at a pipe, then blew out a fantastic ring of cloying purplish smoke.

Kludu coughed but didn’t wave the smoke away. Klobo had told the story many times, but Kludu loved to hear his granddad spin a yarn. “Tell me again?”

“Your uncle and I were coming back from a grand old adventure. Elves and orcs and all that. Treasure in hand, we were making our way back through the Mirthless Marshes of Misander –”

“I thought it was the forest out back of the Vale,” Kludu broke in. And indeed it had been, at the last telling.

“No, it was the Marshes, I remember it distinctly.” Puff, puff. “The rest of our company had gone their separate ways the night before, of course, so it was just old Glorf and me, toting our haul down the Marsh path.”

“Don’t you mean …”

“Don’t tell me what I mean, thank you. Now, it’s unusual to see goblins that far south, but we were holed up in an abandoned guard tower, and we saw them coming out of the woods.”

“Last time, they came from the Marshes.”

“For pity’s sake, Kludu. We were in the Marshes, the goblins came from the woods. I was there, after all.”

It was getting to the good bit, so Kludu left it alone.

“There were fifty of them, if there were five. Have you ever seen a goblin up close, my boy?”

Kludu bit his lip and shook his head, his shaggy hair flopping furiously.

“Of course not. No reason to, at your age. See to it that you avoid them, if you can. Horrible creatures. Tiny daggers for teeth. Greenish grey skin, like the fog off the hills at twilight. Breath like rotten pumpkins.” Klobo shuddered, but his eye twinkled and he winked. “We were in the tower, your uncle and I. Nowhere to go. And Glorf — fool of a Pikelander as he was — sneezes. Can you imagine? Sneezes! Goblins can hear a mouse break wind at a hundred yards, you know, so of course they knew exactly where we were.”

“What did you do?”

“Well!” Here Klobo leapt to his hairy feet and gave a horrific halfling battle-snarl, brandishing an invisible axe. “There was nothing for it, was there? They climbed the tower, one by one, and one by one, we started lopping off their heads. Whop, whop, whop!” He swung and chopped with his imaginary axe. “But even such exceptional and fearless hobbits as your uncle and I can’t fight forever, and those goblins — a hundred of them! — kept swarming over the walls like ants on one of your grandmother’s sandwiches.”

The goblins had gone from fifty to a hundred in the space of a few minutes, but Kludu was rapt; nobody told a story like his granddad.

“We thought we were finished. They had us surrounded, back to back, just your uncle and I and our bags of dragon-gold.” This was patently ridiculous; Klobo had never faced a dragon. Everybody in town knew it, but there was no stopping him now.

“That was when your uncle bumped into the powder keg. Quick as a flash, I struck a spark off the stones, the powder caught, and … BOOM!” Klobo was ninety, but as spry as any halfling in the Vale. He leapt two feet in the air and spread his hands, and despite having heard the tale dozens of times, Kludu still flinched. “They said it was raining goblin arms and legs for weeks in the Vale after that.”

The Marshes were nowhere near the Vale; the story was ludicrous. But Kludu had just turned thirty-three, and he was feeling adventurous. He didn’t argue about the Marshes (even though the tower in his granddad’s story had been located, without question — blasted top and all — in the forest). He wanted to ask the question all his friends and relations had told him never to bother asking.

“Granddad?”

Klobo, a little winded from the telling, was sitting back in his rocker and puffing again at his pipe. “Yes, my boy?”

“There was no powder keg.”

“Don’t be absurd. Of course there was.”

“Glorf says there wasn’t. And if it happened thirty years ago –”

“It did.”

“Well, there was no powder in these parts back then. Not until the Martinsons took over in Parth and started importing it from the East.”

Klobo huffed out a puff of smoke through his nostrils. “I suppose, then, you’d like to tell me what a barrel of powder was doing on the guard tower in the middle of the forest?”

Again, Kludu let it pass. “Uncle says there never was any powder. That’s why you and he didn’t get blasted to hell along with the goblins. Uncle says you’re a …” He stopped. Klobo’s temper was well documented.

Through a fiery eye, Klobo stared at Kludu. He seemed to be smoking, no longer from his pipe, but rather from the top of his head. “A what?”

“A wizard.” Kludu braced himself, picking up grandmom’s basket of knitting and holding it in front of him as if that might protect him.

Klobo fumed. His breathing intensified and his eyes took on a fierce shade of red. Smoke was very definitely now curling up from his head, and also his fingertips. He seemed to grow a few inches as he crept toward Kludu. “Wizards don’t exist,” he whispered. “Magic is the stuff of children’s stories. It’s not real!” With that, a crackling fire leapt up in the fireplace, and there was a howling from the wind outside. Thunder shook the walls and Kludu dove for cover beneath the armchair, his tiny hairy hands folded over his head.

A moment passed in silence. Feeling rather silly indeed, Kludu crawled out to face his granddad, who seemed to be his normal size again. He wasn’t a wizard. Couldn’t possibly be. There had never been a halfling wizard and there never would be.

“I know there are lots and lots of stories about your old granddad, but don’t believe them.” Klobo was patting his pockets; his pipe had gone out. Kludu leaned his head to the side, stared at the pipe. The leaf within had been ablaze not a moment ago. It seemed such a silly and small thing to…

“OUCH!” Kludu yelped and pressed a hand to his forehead. There had been a great heat there for an instant, almost as if his brain had caught fire.

“Goodness, my boy, what’s wrong?”

“Sorry, I…” but Kludu found it very hard to focus on anything except the suddenly blazing embers of his granddad’s pipe.