The Blade At My Throat - Part 1
A short story by the self titled Master of the Multiverse
Part 2 is now available!
Note: Though I have done a little voice acting in my not too distant youth, that was around two decades ago, and I certainly have never read out a story like this before. I know I slipped up a few times, but hopefully it’s good enough for a first attempt and I definitely enjoyed doing it. I may need to practice some distinct accents though…
A branch slips along my cheek leaving a burning streak across it. I leap over a root, stumble and catch myself on a sharp rock that seems put there to impale me. With my momentum gone, I take a second to look around.
There’s a small stream running under one of the enormous roots, the evening sun paints the ancient woods in strange colours and long shadows, and in the distance I can hear them still looking for me. I stumble to the stream, my knees trembling weakly as they thud into the mud, and I splash cool water on my face.
The water burns into the line on my cheek as I drink deeply and try to think. I ran east from the village which means I’m headed still further from the only civilization I know. There are mountains that way, I saw them on a map once, but they were as far from here as I am from home now. The other details of the map are a blur, there might have been a river ahead, but maybe I passed it already… I just can’t remember.
A dog barks, far too close for comfort, followed swiftly by the sound of a gruff local accent.
Time to keep running. Again.
I decide to follow the stream, splashing through it, hoping my tracks will be less obvious but the stones in the stream are slippery, my feet going numb from the cold and I give up after a few minutes. I put the setting sun to my back again and keep running until I reach a cliff.
It’s not a huge cliff, five or six times my height at most, but it might as well be scraping the clouds for all that it matters. My arms are limp, my legs lost what little sensation remained some time ago and my lungs have been replaced with a fire pit. I don’t see any easy handholds so climbing this would be a little tricky if I was freshly rested and knew what I was doing.
Attempting the climb now would be pointless, and it’s not like I can blast the cliff out of my way, even if I knew how to draw out the cold that’s been the bane of my existence. What would I do anyway? Throw a cool breeze at it? Freeze the cliff? I shake my head and look around but the cliffs stretch in either direction with no sign of a way up within sight.
The dogs have been following steadily. I think they must have them leashed because the voices are always with them. I pick a direction and stumble on, too exhausted to run, but too afraid to stop. The voices draw closer. The barking sounds like it’s just behind the treeline and I risk a glance back just as one of my legs suddenly isn’t where it’s meant to be and a cry bounces off the cliff and smacks into the treeline as I fall to the ground, hitting my head on a stone.
One part of my mind complains that dirt isn’t supposed to move that way just as another part of my mind screams about the pain lancing through my leg and a third part warns me far too late of the impending re-appearance of my lunch. Gasping through a burning throat I try to turn over and push myself upright but the world suddenly shifts, my lungs empty and I feel like I’m falling sideways.
“I have him! He’s over here!” A voice I don’t recognise calls out repeatedly and a horn sounds nearby.
The dogs are close now. I try to look around but moving my head at all makes the world move strangely. I’ll just have to content myself with the blurry sight of the worn boots and dirty green trousers of the man who’s foot is on my chest.
Another voice comes closer after a few minutes and complains about the cold. They want to drag me back to the village to face the elders. Other voices claim they should just save everyone the effort and slit my throat now.
It always ends up like this, you know. I arrive somewhere quiet, a small village or out of the way town, I find work, offering to work for room and board if necessary, and a few weeks later someone has a bad day and picks on the new guy.
If I’m lucky I have a day's head start before anyone finds their body, or bodies in one case. This time it was a woman. She had decided that I was trying to corrupt her daughter when all I had done was tell her she should stand up for herself after witnessing her mother beating her during one of my deliveries.
The mother showed up at my inn while I was eating the slop they called lunch, stormed over and started shouting. I stayed quiet, tried to avoid eye contact and apologised for whatever it was she claimed I had done, but she had come armed with a rolling pin and started hitting me. Just once at first, on my arm. When I recoiled and didn’t fight back, she grew bolder. All I did was push her away so I could get up and leave but she flailed, fell and screamed bloody murder.
It wasn’t a very popular inn; One drunk at the bar who hadn’t even looked up at the sound of someone getting beaten, and a barman picking his nose and watching with a total lack of interest. Outside though, enough people heard that they rushed in, saw my burst lip and fading bruises from a month old beating, the woman on the floor screaming and of course, they assumed the worst.
One pulled out a hand axe and said something that was probably pulled straight from a bard's tale, and charged. He charged a complete stranger in an empty inn with a lethal weapon and was surprised when I fought back. His friends poured in a second later and one was clearly a travelling cleric of some kind. He called out a prayer and a soft light started to glow around his outstretched hand.
He stood behind the axe man as I used what was left of my chair to fend him off. A moment later, it all went wrong. He ducked under the chair, aiming to cut at my leg and I panicked. I don’t know how I did it, but a chunk of ice grew around my leg, soaking up the force of his strike.
“What was that?!” he shouted as he stood up, looking offended as though I had been the one at fault for not wanting my leg chopped off.
If that had been the end of it, it would have been fine but when it starts, I can’t stop it. I shouted for them to run as my body started to shiver and ice grew all over me. They ran only once the man’s axe got stuck in the ice growing around my body and a few seconds after they disappeared through the door, the ice reformed into spikes the length of my arm and about as thick and shot out in all directions.
Remember that vicious mother that started this whole mess? She didn’t run. She was still there when my curse, the bane of my existence, ended her existence with a scream and a few seconds of wet gurgling before the ice froze her lungs.
That was several hours ago. My curse has taken so many lives by this point and though I don’t want to die it is something of a relief to think that they might just slit my throat so I can never hurt anyone again. The second man quiets the voices though. He claims that they are not murderers, and I try to say something in my defence but my lips and tongue don’t seem to be playing along and all that comes out is a string of drool and some mumbling.
They hoist me between two men, my feet dragging through the dirt and slowly my head clears a little. With the clarity comes pain. My leg feels like it’s on fire, throbbing and pulsing with pain and every stone that bumps my boot causes my muscles to twitch which sends fresh waves of fire through them which in turn causes them to spasm and more pain ensues.
They don’t talk much other than to complain about how heavy I am or to tell me to shut up and eventually I momentarily manage to raise my head enough to see the last rays of the sun disappearing behind the towering roots. A short while later, the boots that held me down earlier show up in my vision, obstructing the path of my bearers.
“We need to move faster, with the dark come the beasts, or worse! We’ll be walking for half the night at this rate!”
“Unless you can heal his leg we gotta carry him, just keep watch, we’ll be back at the village soon enough.”
They argued back and forth for a while until the one that seemed to be in charge walked up and decided they would find a place to rest for the night rather than risk getting ambushed at an inopportune moment by some opportunistic predators.
The one with the boots grunted, turned around and strode off to lead the way. From what I could make out, he was a hunter, and a trusted one it seemed, and I managed to lift my head in time to see his bow and quiver. The pain in my leg made a little more sense now, they probably hadn’t removed the arrow he had likely shot me with.
I tried to look for the arrow that must be there but the angle they had me at meant all I could see was my ill fitting, mud’n’blood smeared shirt dangling loosely, the ground and their boots. I counted seven pairs of boots and two dogs as I slowly turned my head a little, trying not to trigger the nausea I knew would come if I moved too fast.
They set up camp under roots taller than any man and wider than most homes I’d seen. If you hollowed out the roots of this tree you could house a small community, and it wasn’t just the trees! Everything around here seemed to grow big, except the people. I saw some kind of mellon the day I arrived that I could probably have curled up in.
They lit a fire, created a lean to to sleep under while one of the men who had had the foresight to pick berries and the ranger who had caught a brace of rabbits cooked it all over the campfire. Of course, I got nothing more than a bit of water. No point feeding a dead man I suppose.
The hunter, or ranger perhaps, was an impressive man. Not only was he a good shot, but he also had a strong connection with the trees here. He seemed to be able to listen to them, but also talk to them. I got to see it with my own eyes when one of the men held my hands together against the root above my head and the ranger put his hand against the root beside my wrists.
He whispered something, and a pulse ran from his eyes, through his face, down his neck, disappeared under his clothing and the veins in his hand turned green for a second as the pulse travelled to the root. It creaked and he frowned, whispered something and the spectacle repeated. This time though the root under my wrists shifted and grew around them, holding me fast.
He lifted his palm from the root and before he could hide it I saw that his palm had a small cut and blood was rapidly soaking into the root where his hand had been. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, and was more concerned with the arrow still sticking out of my calf. I asked them to remove it and was rewarded with a swift kick to said leg before the leader told them to leave me alone.
The night passed in silence, the men tense and I slipped into a troubled sleep while listening to the wind winding its way through the giant trees. I woke up as the ranger was urging the root to release me, causing me to suddenly drop and jar the arrow painfully. I felt something then, though it was hard to describe. My hands dropped to the arrow and I touched the point where it was poking out of my flesh, noticing but barely registering that its tip was wooden rather than metallic.
It was strange, seeing something sticking out of you like that. The flesh was swollen, clearly infected. If these idiots didn’t kill me out of boredom or their so called justice, the infection would. The strange feeling was from my hands though.
I wasn’t sure why I did it, but I grabbed the arrow and pulled, screaming as it did as much damage on the way out as it had done on the way in. The men nearby came running from wherever they were and stared in horror as blood and puss leaked from my leg.
They backed up as my hand started to glow and I put it on the leg. A cold crept out of my touch, soothing the burning infection in my leg. The blood flowing from the wound slowed, and stopped turning thick with the cold and then freezing, much as everyone watching had done.
The air around me grew colder and… This is hard to describe but you know when someone with a warm hand touches you and you can feel the heat radiating into your flesh? It was like that, except it was cold and rather than my own flesh it was whatever the chill sank into that I could sense. And the colder it was, the more clearly I could sense it.
For example, I could sense a splinter inside the wound, feel a cut on the bone, sense the ragged tear the arrow had made in my flesh. I could also tell that the flesh ached to rejoin, and in an instinctual moment I gave it the cold. I gave it all the cold I had, all I could find and the flesh absorbed it, singing out in a thousand thousand voices, like an army cheering their leader as the charge began.
As amazing as that sounds, it’s completely wrong. I have no idea how to describe it but the flesh and the cold responded. Ice filled the wound. I was stunned. I thought I was about to heal the wound, like I’d seen the clerics do a few times at tournaments when I was a child.
Instead I’d just frozen a chunk of my leg. It didn’t hurt though so I counted that as a win. I looked up at the sound of someone moving quickly towards me, and was just in time to see the butt of an axe handle slamming into my forehead.
I hope you enjoyed part one of The Blade At My Throat. There’s more to come, it’s already written but I need to edit the rest a little more heavily to be inline with some recent decisions about this universe, as well as correcting the numerous errors I make when I’m “in the zone” so it may be a few days, perhaps even a week before the next part comes out.
I have yet to decide if it’ll be two or three parts but I’m leaning towards three given how long this first bit took to edit, record, edit again, record again, and so on.
See you around, folks 👋