Red's CD Project Story 2: Part 2 – Stoneheart

Note: I've had this about 2/3 of the way wrote for the last week and haven't had time to finish it up till today. It strays a little from where I started, but I think it's turning out to be a nicely twisted tale. Enjoy and there's more to come. 

Disc 1
Track 2: Asleep on the Trail of Tears – The Louie’s

“He was made by God to make the playing field level”

A girl old enough for her bosoms to only start to blossom wailed at the name and ran off to the group of tents kept well away from the flames. She likely sought consolation of her mother’s tit. While many of Oan’s contemporaries would not believe it of the man they referred to as 'Stoneheart,' a part of him very much wanted to run and hide as well.

Fear was a foreign entity in Oan’s veins. When he was boy, four season cycles into life, he had made the same error in judgment that Nestor had by entering the icy waters of the Belnor. Since then, his blood flowed slow and cold and his skin sealed wounds before they could grow and infect and his heart was solid, heavy like a stone. It was truth he kept secret, but it was evident in his boldness and bravery. He did not fear.

His decision to enter the Belnor had been guided by a child’s ignorance and want for a toy boat that had escaped his grasp and started a voyage in the current while he was playing along the banks of the great river. Oan gave chase, his small legs pumping well away from his home village, from his mother and toward the end of his young life.

His boy legs burned trying to keep pace with the toy as it sped along. Tears and snot streaked his face as he trailed behind. Far away he heard a voice calling, but he could not afford a backward glance.

The knee-length grass was wet and clung to his bare skin. The weight of emotion was bearing down on his shoulders and his will to continue lagged. As he slowed, the boat skimmed off a log half submerged in the river with the other half buried deep into the bank. The boat spun in the current but away from the middle of the river. Instead, it made route to a still pool blocked from the current by a harbor of sort made by the bank jutting out. It stopped in the middle, but well away from his reach.

The old ones said that spirits dwelled in the murky waters and, on that day, the boy found those old tales to be true. As he extended his arm out trying in vain to grab the toy, he heard their voices calling to him, begging him to join them. At first he clapped his ears shut with both hands to block out the noise, but that did not stop the screeching, yet seductive voices.

He extended his am out once more in an half-hearted attempt. His attention was more on the ripples of the pool and how each sparkled as each lazy wave pushed out from the center. The voices sang out in unison, the words unintelligible to his ears, but his heart understood them perfectly. The spoke the old language, he would find out much later, but that day he knew only one word. It reverberated in his bones, his blood, his heart – “Come.”

And he did.

Head first into the pool with a little splash and a thousands prickles of pains stabbing into skin, he came to the voices. He re-emerged once to find the sky had turned red then dropped below the water level once more. The spirits attacked his ears in a million voices in a hundred languages. The only other noise he remembered was the thump of his heart, but then that went silent and all went dark.

Then there was only darkness and falling.

He remembered nothing more till he awoke in the arms of the witch.

Oan shuddered by the fire remembering her icy grip and her shining green eyes. From many worlds, she claimed to be from. Once she told him that in another world, she was called the Witch of the Weeping Woods and that her son was a Dragon slayer. In Oan’s world, she was Madra the Lurking Witch.

Oan had lost himself in the flames, when he looked up to see Nestor with his one-eyed stare. A memory tickled from that day as a boy in the waters of the Belnor. It came just before his heart beat for the last time. All the voices stopped all at once and rang out in one terrible screech of a name.

That name had been on Nestor’s lips when Oan pulled him from the water. Now again, by the fire, the stranger uttered the name again.

“Salama.” The cursed name of old, the name that haunted Oan’s dreams since that day he fell in the waters of the Belnor. Not even the witch could stop his nightmares. Now they had come to life.

Oan seized a spear lying next him and charged Nestor.