SciFi and Fantasy Stories: Mystwalker

“Mystwalker”

Leaves rustled, and nameless footfalls echoed in the evening mist.

“I know you’re out there.”

The footsteps stopped.

“You’d might as well show y’rself.”  Auryn wrapped thick fingers around the iron-handled axe tucked into his belt.  He held his breath and listened to the silence.

The wind moved, and the shadows of leaves danced in the glow of the setting sun.  Unmoving sunbeams glared through the dense fog.

Auryn’s voice quavered with more than age.  “What do you want with me?  I am nothing.  I have nothing of value.”  He took a step, and dried leaves crackled beneath his goatskin boots.

The silence spoke of cold and ending and the coming night, and nothing more.

Auryn drew his axe, gripping it in a brutish hand that had long since stopped pining for the strength of youth.  His nose sifted the breeze for traces of a soul long awaited, a presence he felt in his aging bones.

A voice drifted through the fog: a sexless, inhuman whisper, a ripple in the wind.  “Auryn Mystwalker.”

His gray eyes narrowed, creasing his weathered brow.  “Aye, yes.  No other.”  He waited.  Dried leaves, moistened with evening dew, fell from the trees when the wind blew.  “I am a landless teller of old stories and an herb seller.  Unless you want an herb or a story, you have no business with me.”

The silence stretched.  The wind whistled softly.  The sunlit glow in the mist faded and the fog became an expanse of shadow.  Twilight drew near and the air turned colder.

Auryn mumbled, his words buried in thick whiskers that had once been red as the setting sun.  “So you’ve come at last, and you’re not here for my herbs.  Take a story, then.”

He sat to await the footsteps, and pulled around him the yak-hide cloak that his wife once wore.  His fingers curled into the cloak’s long, course hair, and he tucked the axe beneath its folds.

To the trees and the fog and the owner of the nameless footsteps, Auryn spoke.

“Do you know the story of the winter cat?  It is a sad story.  Not long ago, in days much like these, there lived a cat with silken white fur and eyes blue as the glacier.  She alone survived a litter of kittens, and her parents loved her more than the light of the sun.  As the winter cat grew old enough to hunt, her parents realized she was not like other cats, for she had a heart full of passion, and was cruel in her way, and guileful.

“She disdained her family, though they were not evil folk, and spurned the company of other cats.  The winter cat went into the woods beyond Mount Hyllard, not too far from my own village, where she built for herself a house of wood and dust.  There she lived in moonlit silence, but soon found that it was not mere silence she craved, but the silence of death.”

Auryn breathed, long and slow, and heard nothing but his own heartbeat and a hint of the northern breeze.

“So, as cats are wont to do, the winter cat went into the woods on silent paws, her nose and ears twitching, until she caught the sound of a mouse among the leaves.  She crept nearer to it, ever so quietly, until the small mouse’s heart felt death approaching like an iceberg through the fog.  Then the cat leapt.  The mouse had its mortal moment, its last breath, then there was silence.  The winter cat savored the quiet, the perfect calm after the gasp and the heartbeat cease, but—” a twig snapped, somewhere to the right, and Auryn closed his eyes, “—but the cat was not sated.  She craved the silence of all vermin, then the silence of the birds, then her fellow cats, then all the Earth.  As she grew in strength and displeasure, there came a time when only frozen, moonlit nights brought solace to the cat.

“During the snowy months, in a world of white silence, the cat sang dirges and wrote epics where the hero dies.  Her heart was beautiful and pure, for it dwelt in a world alone with the wind and moon and earth.”

Beneath the yak-hide cloak, Auryn twisted until his weight rested on his goatskin boots.  The axe handle was a comfort to his knotted fingers.  Night had fallen.  The breeze grew crisp, and he smelled another presence in the fog.  Not a man, not quite.

“I know you, Katya.  I know your story—you cann’a sneak up on a storyteller.  And I was never a quiet one—I taint your silence, so you might as well show yourself and kill me if you must.”

A growl, a hiss, not far away, drifted through the wind and shadows.  “You annoy me, old man.”

“We are different spirits, Katya.  Your arts are pure—mine are for and from the hill folk, while yours are from the moon and for yourself alone.  My stories must seem obscene to you, trite as your father’s foolish pride or your dead mother’s love.”

Emerging from the night forest, the hint of a slender figure appeared through the fog.  “How did you know I would kill you tonight, Auryn Mystwalker?”

“You must settle with me.  It is written in both our stories.  I knew you would come, eventually, while I walked in the mist—the fog is the bridge between your world and mine.”

The breeze died for a moment, and the soft voice of Katya became clearer.  Her voice. 

“And you come here always, Mystwalker, to pick your herbs and to wait for me.”  She stepped forward, soundlessly.  Through the veil of mist, Auryn made out her jagged white hair.  She wore a sheath of rabbit pelts around her body, but her pale feet and hands lay naked to the chill.  Though the gloom still shrouded her face, Auryn remembered her blue almond eyes, her fair, sharp features that were so gentle in her childhood when her hair was red like his own.

She halted.  “You wear my mother’s cloak.”

He nodded, slowly.  “I made it for her, from our last yak.  It keeps me warm in her absence.”

“It should have died with her.”

Auryn the Mystwalker swallowed, and his voice shook.  “She tried to love you.  She was afraid, but she did try, up until her last strangled breath.  Even then, I kept trying.  But you ran.”

“Yes.  I went home to the forest and the night, away from you.”

“And away from her blood.  So now I wear her cloak.  You left me little else.”

The wind whistled in the trees.  Dried leaves rustled and fell and their sounds nearly overshadowed her whisper.  “It took her blood for you to know me, to tell my story rightly—to admit that I am not like my father.  Finally your soul hates mine, just as mine hates yours.”

“No, daughter.  A storyteller understands too much.  He cannot hate—”

She shrieked.  The fog parted and Auryn caught a glimpse of her delicate features, beautiful features, torn with the rage of the wronged, and her dark, lurid eyes deadlier than black iron.  He sprang up, but his aged knees gave way.  He felt her fingers under his beard, at his throat, like claws, like talons of steel tearing ruts in the flesh.  He fell back, twisted away, grabbed at her with one heavy hand and failed but the next hand lashed out and the iron handle heaved as something soft gave way beneath the axe head.

A cry blossomed in the mist and all silence fled before it.  The sound rocked the trees and crashed over the hills, and Auryn’s skull rang with fear.  His throat cracked from the force but the howl continued, distantly, as his daughter’s body sank to the earth like a falling feather.  Auryn’s cry faded when his breath ran dry, but the pain hung in the gloom.

The girl’s body convulsed and she gasped once, weakly, and silence flooded the forest again.  Stillness reigned for a long moment.  The moon moved in the sky.  The north wind sighed.

Even as tears froze in his whiskers, Auryn the Mystwalker tugged her bloodstained sheath of rabbit pelts tightly about his body, beneath the yak-hide cloak. 

The sounds of his footfalls echoed as his form melted into the mist.