The Mintle Moor: A History Volume I

The shadow mines of Mintle Moor are queer in their very special ore.  Where dwarves in other halls sought the light of the earth hidden beneath in darkness, the dwarves of Low Mintle sought the shadows deep within the glittering crystals that made the land such a beautiful place.  The crystals, despite their size and fluorescent color were by and large worthless, at least to anyone within a few hundred miles of the mines.  They shone and glittered, but because of their prodigious number, most anyone who wanted one or two for their backyard already had one.  The crystals possessed no magical, medicinal, or mechanical properties that most anything else wasn't useful for, and despite the great craftsmanship of the dwarves, they were unshapable, breaking down into dull shards instead of smaller pretty-things.

Inside these Crystals, beneath the pink and the turquise and the yellow that were so common, was the object that the dwarves really mined.  Deep down were the sun was only reflected off the walls and had dimmed from repeated bounces, were deposits of shadow.  To most men, a shadow would seem in no way more valuable than a shining piece of rock, but most shadows were not quite so malleable as these.  Like water, when they were cracked out from the center of the stone, they would run down through the cracks, pooling in places but mostly seeping down deep into the earth.  Men who were rich enough to even buy the substance told tales of the horrible chill it brought, slipping through your fingers like a shell-less snail.  It absorbed light, flat black to the eye at high noon for as long as it didn't evaporate.  As a gas, it was like the thickest fog, letting neither sound nor sight pass through.

Only the elves, living in their crystalline houses were skilled enough to turn it solid though.  Some say they used moonlight and dark rituals, others speculated that blood was mixed into the darkness to coagulate it into a goo.  The only thing most knew for sure was that the elves were fond of making cloaks of the stuff and sneaking up on anyone and anything that crept past their walls.

Needless to say, on the Mintle Moor there was more high tension trade secrecy than in most other places of the world.  The dwarves would go on strike for mining, and the elves would rough up the distribution lines in the night.  The trading posts dotting the land would hire guards and travel only at night, but wake in the morning to notes scrawled in blood.  Or perhaps it was another cycle where the dwarves or trading caravans finally got fed up with the elvish monopoly and hired spies and wizards to find the shadow's secret, leading to dead bodies in the ditches.  It would go in cycles of who had the upper hand, always with a rhythm through the decades since dwarves first mined deep enough.

It was not for a long while before the dwarves mined too deep.

Saint

Just a drop of blood and the mountain let out a fearful roar.  That was all it took.  One small stone to nick the man's cheek, pulling at flash to rend a gash shorter than a fingernail.  His hand touched it, felt the drop of wetness on it, and for an instant, thought nothing of it.  Then the air moved, pushed out of its calm doldrums by the creatures of the deep, those who dealt in gold and bones, those who dealt in fire and claw.

He was running, fully terrified of the passageways that he so carefully had walked down in the day earlier.  A glint in the darkness, a wet wall shimmering in the lamplight, jerked his eyes and stumbled his legs.  The third scare was the one that ate him, devoured him whole along with the lamp, licking its lips of the blood oozed off its teeth that were as black as the tunnels it lived in.  Its brothers and sisters were too late, showing up to lick at the walls and floor the man's sweat, blood, and tears fell upon.

Once woken, they hungered.  Each belly that had lain dormant for decades in the darkness rumbled out a demand for meat and metal, for bone and blood.  A rumble in their stomachs that inched up through their neck and mouth and rumbled the whole mountain so hard a volcano might have been ashamed.  They poured from the summit like a cloud of smoke, a legion of wyrms that ranged from the size of a cow to its barn.

Many eyes were drawn to the moon that night, most in terror, some in confusion before the legends of old woke in their hearts.  One man and one man only smiled.  A grim smile surely, but a smile nonetheless.  In his steel skin he watched the sky and stood atop a rocky hill, propped up upon his lance.  He would be of use this night more than any other night in his life, he knew.  There were too few bandits and wars in this land, too few enemies that could be met with a sword.  The royal palace fought its wars in ink and compliments and secret meetings in back rooms.  He had moldered there these last few years and now, when he had set himself out upon a journey of discovery, he had found a battle to fight.

The first descended upon him as he stood, lone and broad of wing.  It overshot its dive in anticipation of his flight.  The tip of his lance raked its belly, drawing sparks off the hardened scales of melted metal, reforged in dragonfire from within.  On its second pass, its eyeball found the lance.  Through the brain and out the back of the skull, it still shone silver in the moonlight.  The man had made his first kill.

If man's blood had stirred the beasts to wake and hunger, dragon blood stirred them to rage and revenge.  Like a swarm of locusts, they descended on that hill, belching their flames and gnashing their teeth.  Some took one stab of the lance, others took two or three.  A large one that lagged behind took four stabs to the chest and flapped away to survive the night.  The man himself was scorched and scratched, torched and torn.  His metal skin was rent in one pass and melted down in another.  When two or three passed by his eyes, six more approached from the darkness.  It was never fated that he might survive the night, not alone and not against such numbers.

As the morning light peered out across the land that still smoldered in the dragon's wake, a small child climbed the hill.  His house was gone, as were his parents and their brothers and sisters and their parents too.  The nine black corpses that lay bleeding on rocks and dirt were a sight of wonder.  They fell in a circle around the peak where a single silver lance lay stuck in the charred ground.  Legends would spread of an agent of God that had descended there, leaving behind a mark to show mankind the way.  Much would come of that story, but for all the wars and heroes it would spread, it lies founded on this one.

Two bearded men arguing in a semi-tidy living room.

Most wizards, despite popular belief, do not actually break the laws of the universe, Mr. Batig.  That you have done so where countless others have dabbled is in itself something impressive.

I, uh, don't know what you're talking about.  This is all perfectly normal.  No tears in the fabric of reality or anything here, nope.  Just, uh, this curtain which-

Look, Mr. Batig, as a custodian of this plane of being, it is my job to fix things like this.  You are very much in trouble, but that doesn't mean that my intervention is bad for you.  On the contrary, I am set up to turn a trouble of your well being in the presence of highly unstable magical energies to merely a bureaucratic imposition that can be calmly discussed as gentlemen.

...I don't much like bureaucracy.

And I don't much like gaping cuts into the void.  The curtain is pretty much see-through, you know, and that's without the fact that I could peer through it on the astral layer.  Now would you please, Mr. Batig, be so kind as to let me patch that up before it gets more out of hand?

Look, this is perfectly under control, mostly, and I was going to sew it back up in a few minutes.  I don't really trust you. . .whoever you are messing with it.  This thing is very carefully crafted and relies on a few theories that I put together myself, so its not really in the normal magical form, you see, and-

Then would you just close it now, or attempt to, if you were planning on doing so anyway?

Sure, fine, its even easier to do than the last one since I left more of the border on this one intact.  I'm only doing it because you asked nicely.

. . .last one.  Dear God, there's more of these out there?  Have you been leaving a trail of these that I somehow missed?

No, no, of course not, I'm not stupid.

. . .

I'm not!  I fixed each one up before I moved on.  Wouldn't do to be leaving things open.

You missed a spot there.  A gap under your left hand.

Oh, so I did.  Fancy that.

Perhaps you missed other spots on the previous rifts?

Hah, I double check these.  Also, it wouldn't matter if I did, they self-seal as time goes on.

Yes, Mr. Batig, but only if they are not left to fester.  If they were, say just a bit open and some bit of void got caught in the opening it would grow and

Look, I was careful, Put a whole lot of stitches in them, like I'm doing now, and then I covered them, like I am about to, with some of this here paste.  It's made of tree blood.

You mean sap.

No, tree blood.  Some wizards prefer to call it magical phlegm.

Which doesn't come from trees, it is produced from magical auras of sentient lifeforms, which by the way makes it illegal to harvest in most countries on this planet.

Only one type of it, trust me, this is my life's research.

Very well, we will go over this later, once you have stitched up that tear in the fabric of-

THERE IT IS!

What?  Beg pardon?  There wh-  WHY WOULD YOU STICK YOUR ARM THROUGH!

Just a little closer, come on now. . .

Mr. Batig, please tell me why you would be so insane as to have your arm through that tear in reality.  That is a very quick way to get yourself killed, and me along with you, so if you would please PLEASE remove it from the portal-

GOT IT!

Got what, exactly?  Is that some sort of twig, some form of void-creation?  Put it back, sir!

No.  No no no, this is just a wand of mine.  See, I sort of dropped it out there a year or so ago on accident, so naturally I couldn't just leave it floating out there, and I had to reverse engineer the way to open these things in the first place, which was really quite diff-

Mr. Batig, you are telling me you have been opening these rifts because you dropped a small stick and wanted it back?

Well, yes?  Its a rather nice stick, don't you think?

. . .I fail to see its charm.  Why not just get another one instead of mucking with the cosmic balance of the universe?

Well, uh, that would have taken quite a bit of time and effort, plus I don't generally like the local yew suppliers that much. . .

Would it have taken, lets say, a year worth of study and travel time, plus another year of questioning and detainment by the council of magic?

. . .well. . .

Because you are most certainly getting written up for this.

Aww, c'mon, this was mostly harmless.  Those chickens will be fine in a few generations.

The town of Klel's chicken population is one of the least worrying points about your whole endeavor.

The last time something like this happened, caused by not less than a fallen demigod, not some country wizard, it managed to cause a countrywide panic and minor entropic invasion.  Deaths on the scale of thousands.

Oh, really?  That sounds horrible.

Quite.

So, uh, the entropy things, they came through portals like this?

Yes, Mr. Batig, they did.

Would they happen to be kind of blueish, but more colored checkered than feeling like cherry?

. . .That is a fairly accurate description, yes.  Have you perhaps heard of them before?

No, not really, but I think one just winked at me.

Monster

Andrew had an aura of twitchy, baited breath around him on Monday night.  It had been like this every Monday night since Victoria had started working at the Seven-Eleven on the corner of Third street, taking over the night shift for John Halderson two months ago.  For all of the times Andrew had said to himself that he just didn't like people, he had to admit that he enjoyed the few minutes when the shift would turn over and he could engage in the smallest of talks with Victoria before he headed back the two blocks to his apartment.  He had wound himself up for the small questions, the innocuous emotions that might pass between them.  Despite his perfect view of the street and the sky, he might start with "how's the weather?" or something like that.  In the last half hour, he gave each of the five customers who came in the wrong change.  Only two of them noticed, more in a hurry to get back home through the glow of the streetlamps.

Victoria's entry with entourage chimed the door, yanking his head around.  She was wearing a grey sweatshirt he noticed, one he hadn't seen before.  He had the words in his mouth to say something to her, anything, but her friends just talked and talked as they followed her towards the back room, passing the counter.  He didn't want to be rude and interrupt, not because he had any respect for Victoria's friends, but because Victoria might think he was a worse person than he was if he did.  He didn't like tall Jenny and smiling Lucy, in great part because he felt jealousy bubble within him when he saw them hanging around Victoria.  They twittered, glancing his way once or twice while Victoria changed into her uniform and clocked her time-sheet.  Then Victoria was at the counter, and Andrew almost had hope she would say something to him, but she just kept talking to her friends.  

Endless gossip.  Something about a tv show.  He didn't watch tv, and so he ignored it as he tore himself away from Victoria's presence and clocked out.  Her sweatshirt was in a pile on the back room table, shoved up against a small mirror, and he had an urge to touch it.  Nobody would know.  He didn't anyway.  Slipping off the nametag and the overshirt, he scrawled the time in pen and walked out.  An old lady had come in, buying an automotive magazine and a snickers, so Victoria was still busy, and so he could only continue walking.  Her two friends stood off to the side, keeping the conversation alive like an ember for when Victoria could participate again.  He heard the familiar sound of the bell ring one last time that night as he walked out the door.  Weeks earlier, when Victoria's friends first started joining her for her shift, he had stayed a few minutes, poking through the racks of magazines and candy while he waited for a chance to say something to her.  There hadn't been a chance.  Lucy just kept talking and giggling and Jenny would get a remark in seamlessly, glancing conspiratorially at both her friends, as Lucy stopped to breathe.  Victoria talked less, and the fact that Andrew didn't even get a chance to hear much of her voice made the noise even more dreadful.  He liked how she would laugh though, every once in a while a smile bloomed on her face and pure, joyful sound would reach his ears.  He thought it was a perfect laugh, and only disliked her friends more when they made fun of her for it.

Tonight though, he had given up on a conversation.  Maybe tomorrow, he thought, though he knew that her friends would follow her on Tuesday night as well.  He was frowning the whole three blocks he walked to get to his apartment.  He lay down on the rumpled sheets of his bed that was pushed up into one corner.  From his view, he scanned the room searching for something.  The TV that he never used, the refrigerator he stocked with root beer, the pile of ramen wrappers, pizza boxes and pistachio shells that formed a ring around his overflowing trashcan: all of these things couldn't hold his attention.  The ceiling was almost comforting in its blankness, less of a reminder of his life than anything else.  The bubbling of jealousy that had filled him was leaking out leaving an emptiness that made him heavier instead of light.  Closing his eyes and blindly tossing his clothes in the direction of the closet, he slumbered.

Andrew woke to a pressing under his left eyelid.  The light was still on, heating his face.  He recalled a similar feeling when he had put in colored contacts for a Halloween costume years ago; a vampire costume with red eyes that he had almost gone trick-or-treating in.  His eyelid pushed open, but he still couldn't see.  Blinded by the pressure that climbed from inside his eye to his face, then dripping down onto his chest.  He smelled raw eggs as he opened his right eye, looking across the bridge of his nose at the weight.  Blue and black filled his sight, mixing like paint swirling on a canvas.  It was small, billowing bigger like smoke, a face like a chicken with the body of a stub-tailed, six legged lizard.  It paced down his chest, growing to the size of a cat before it was completely free of his eye.  It looked back at him, reflective pools of empty glass that saw nothing and held everything.  The beast scampered down, through the window and off into the night. Andrew lay there, feeling the moist trail drying on his skin where it had passed, wondering when he would wake up.  He drifted back to sleep hours later.

In the morning, he woke to a feeling of puffiness, his left eye heavy in his head.  In the bathroom mirror his eye looked glassy and empty, a faint glint of yellow caught deep inside.  Andrew's bathroom light flickered on and off, a loose bulb, giving him only moments to inspect himself.  It must have been a trick of the light.  He felt normal, just a little puffy eyed as if he had cried in his sleep.  His pillow was lightly moist, smelling faintly of raw eggs.

By four, Andrew began his shift, selling candy and magazines, stocking shelves, counting change.  Instead of the slow building of excitement to closing time, and Victoria, Andrew thought of his dream, the absurdity of it.  Andrew had dreamed that his light had been left on, he thought.  It was off when he woke up, and he certainly would not have been able to sleep with it roasting him.  The creature disgusted him, he decided.  It was repulsive with its slimy skin and its many legs.  He disliked the audacity it displayed, venturing out into the light of his room.  What kept him on the idea of the creature was its emergence from his eye.  He disliked the idea that it had been a growth off of him, that it had been part of him.  He disliked more the idea that the creature might have somehow gone into his eye from somewhere else, invading him before leaving.

The sun set before he even realized it, night dragging itself into the streets.  Andrew barely had half an hour to agonize about what he might begin to say to Victoria when she arrived, her friends following her.  Jenny lagged behind, listening as Lucy prattled on, and a strange thing happened.  As Victoria passed the register and Lucy trailed behind her, Jenny actually stopped and looked at him.  "What's up?" she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.  Lucy and Victoria didn't even notice.  Andrew shifted uncomfortably behind the counter.

"Lovely weather tonight, isn't it? he replied.  The line he had been crafting for Victoria if he could ever get a word in.  But it wasn't her, it was one of the other ones, one of the ones he secretly despised.  He cursed the fact that he had let the words slip out to Jenny, that she would have the benefit of such a bland monument of his interest.

Jenny leaned forward on the counter as she spoke, a twitch of a smile gaining her lips.  "Kinda shitty, I think.  Been cloudy the whole day, not that I've been out today much anyway."  Then she waited.  On him.  Andrew had not prepared anything else to say, he had only had half an hour to worry and think, and all of the words and the phrases that he had thought up others days fled to the darker recesses of his mind.  "C'mon 'drew, what's up?" she reiterated.

"I thought you'd be talking to Lucy" was all he could think to say.

"I can't talk to you?  My friend?" Jenny asked.  She pursed her lips in pretty disappointment.

"You aren't my friend," Andrew thought, then said, the motion of the thought continuing out his mouth.  "I don't like you."  An afterthought.  Jenny turned and ran.  The door chimed; he had heard it so many times, but it seemed to echo this time.  Victoria came out, work-shirt on, and started talking to Lucy.  She didn't seem like she had even noticed the absence.  Lucy, for her part, glanced at the door between phrases, then over at him.  She had a look of worry, of confusion, scrunching up her blonde eyebrows.  She didn't say anything.

Andrew clocked out.  Victoria's grey sweatshirt was sitting on the table again.  Had she worn that when she walked in, Andrew wondered.  He walked out, slowly, taking glances at Victoria, trying to find an explanation.  It was in her eyes, a tiny sliver of emptiness where the color was hollowed out.  She ignored him and continued to talk to Lucy.  He blinked and nothing seemed to be wrong.  Her eyes caught the light and they were impenetrable.  Andrew's walk home took longer than usual.  He turned on the tv, staring at the screen in an effort to free his mind.  The dream was getting to him.  Once he had distracted himself, he might sleep.  The tv was still on when he woke, pressure bursting forth from his eyeball, the dull thump of something jumping off his chest to the floor.  Eggs.  Its back leg disappeared out the window as he oriented himself.  Breathing heavily, he entered the bathroom.  His eyes were perfectly normal.  A nightmare where he didn't completely wake up right away.  No more sleep tonight, Andrew resolved.  He stared at the glassy surface of the tv, playing old Three Stooges skits in between commercials for cleaning supplies.  He needed to take out the trash, his room was starting to smell.  Tomorrow morning, before Andrew went to work, he would take it out.  It slipped back into the room at four in the morning as the commercials went on break.  He remembered the blue-black of its moist skin from last night.  In its beak were bits of string, shiny and luminescent.  They reminded him of laughter.  Pausing on the window sill, the creature swallowed, looking Andrew in the eyes with its glassy orbs.

The creature adroitly leaped to the top of the tv, eyes locked with Andrew's.  Andrew backed away.  It jumped to the light switch, shrouding the room in darkness.  "What are you?" Andrew said.  "Stay back!"  With his back to the corner, Andrew could only watch in fear as the creature walked up to him across his bed.  It climbed him, small claws clinging to his clothing until it arrived at his face.  Andrew pushed at it, fingers slipping off its slick skin, mucus like egg-white running down his fingers.  Then it pressed itself into his left eye, beak first.  The creature oozed its way in.  Andrew got a grasp of its back leg and pulled, his entire head yanked forward.  Inside his skull, he felt a small tearing, as if its claws were anchored inside his flesh.  In pain, he let go, and the last of the leg disappeared behind his eyelid.  It was the same glassy color as before, his eye, and in the mirror more flecks of light shone from within it.

Andrew went to work with an eyepatch on Wednesday.  Victoria came in alone, eyes dulled with specks of emptiness more countless than before.  Andrew seethed.  He had no words, no grasp of what he could do, what he might say.  Andrew had observed the slouch of Victoria's back, the silence that followed her to the back room.  She wouldn't meet his gaze after she had changed.  He went to clock out.

"Vile creature, aren't you?  You strip away her friends, her life.  You make her like me."  He tore the eyepatch off, staring into the wall-mirror.  The scratches that the eyepatch had hidden were faded from the bright red scratches they had been into pink lines that radiated around his eye, which was still glassy, just like the creature's eye.  It all made sense to him, and it sickened him.  He could smell saltiness from the crumpled sweatshirt on the desk.  "I don't want you anymore," Andrew whispered to the empty room.  His stomach was unsettled, and as the image of the creature plagued his thoughts, his revulsion increased.  "I created you, somehow, so how do I destroy you?"  On the table was the timesheet with a cheap bic pen.  Andrew's hand shook as he grasped it.

At the register, Victoria heard the scream, shocked out of the doldrums she was experiencing.  It was a short scream, high pitched.  The store was silent.  Victoria flicked her blonde hair back behind her ear and headed to the back room.  She heard chuckling as she approached.  Andrew leaned over the table.  His left eye had slick blood around it, spattered on his skin just as much as it had upon the floor, the table, her sweatshirt.

"OhmyGod are you okay?  Andrew?"  As he turned his head toward her, she noticed the empty socket behind the blood.  It had stopped pouring out, but his eye was gone.  Had that been under his eyepatch?  How long had he had it?  Andrew was grinning.

"I killed it.  I don't know if I can make it right, but I killed it."  He sounded triumphant, grinning as he said it, gesturing into the puddle of gore on the table.  In the center, the blue-black form, like a lizard the size of an eyeball, twitched.   "Almost."  Stuck into the desk, impaling the lizard, was the pen she had just used to fill out her time card, which was now drenched in blood.

"My nightmare," Victoria murmured.  She stepped into the gory room, moving closer to the creature.  Its glass eyes had clouded over, dark, reflecting the bright red pool.  She reached out to it, to the hole in its chest.  Little golden strings twined up the pen, reaching out the inches between it and her finger.  Victoria brought them close to her face to see the fine threads, and they darted into her eyes, filling the empty vacuum of colorlessness.

Through his one good eye, Andrew watched it all happen.  He did not remember who she was to him, but she was wearing the store uniform, so she must work here.  He smiled.  The bad thing was dying.  Andrew supposed that he had killed it because of how slimy it looked and the faint odor of raw eggs that surrounded it.  With a lightness under his eyelids, he slid back against the wall, and fell asleep.