"The Nether-Goddess" - Fantasy/Sword&Sorcery

The draft of a prologue for a new fantasy story. Its a collaboration with my GF, who came up with the basic idea and plot. Hopefully it gets you hyped for more. I always welcome reviews

Corric withdrew deeper into his faded robes. A cold wind was breaking east-to-west over the coast at his back before skirting across grasslands to his front. It would be turned south by the ever present Giant’s Crest, a mountain range so vast that no matter where one went in the northlands you could look over your shoulder and see its snow-capped peaks. Winter was taking its final breath and snow still lay in scattered heaps. Slowly it was releasing the tight grip it held for six moons, and a vicious winter it had been. Corric had witnessed cattle frozen in the fields, villagers huddling three to four families in one home or crowding the inns where hearths were plenty. Snow drifts piled up taller than two men and when the stores ran low cats and dogs were heartlessly skinned and roasted.

Corric, a travelling scholar in the employ of Rotis Castle’s royal family, luckily had spent the bitter nights huddled in the recesses of Rotis with monks and servants. He winced at that and knew lucky had not been the right word. The elderly monks smelled horrid due to their ascetic vows against washing, many had teeth rotting to black and more still wore the tattered robes given to them when they first began their service to the Gods. They often rapped their canes on the floor before telling agonizing stories of the brutal winters of their youth. A vegetable soup was served once daily that Corric was sure had been made with the servant’s bathwater, he gladly went hungry on most nights.

The Lord Amundsen had sent for him when winter was beginning to break, and Corric likened the summons to salvation.

“A bird from Shallow Cove came four nights past,” The Lord had muttered in the cold of Rotis’s throne room. Amund Amundsen was a bear of a man with a single grey eye and a square jaw. His long silver hair, which he kept bound in a leather cord, was receding above his brow. The stories went he lost his eye while hunting and was set upon by wolves. The Lord returned four pelts richer that day, but one eye poorer.

He was an intense man to say the least and Corric had shied away when a rolled parchment was stuck out his way. When he took it, and opened it, his shaking hands had nearly knocked over a sputtering candle. He read it while a slow frown crept across his face. It was an edict for full authority being given to Corric in an investigation regarding suspicious deaths in the distant town of Shallow Cove. The village was the furthest a man could go north and still be in friendly lands. Per his scholarly duties, he knew that Shallow Cove brought in a steady flow of Clearwater Trout, which were prized in the northlands and sold even to the Lords’ kitchens.

“I’m not sure what this means, my lord,” Corris spoke up finally.

“Bah-ha-ha!” Amund’s wide mouth wailed and Corric jumped at the outburst. “It requires no thought, Scholar Corric. I was told you are a man familiar with a physician’s work.”

“Yes, ser, but-” Corric was interrupted, by the Lord’s upraised hand.

“Go to Shallow Cove and investigate the deaths. Report to me. I am sending Oli Tergr and Gad Hagansen with you. They’ll see that no harm befalls you.”

With that the Lord retreated into the depths of the keep, his boots tapping loudly on the dark stone and his boisterous laugh echoing.

That was the first time and last Corric met the Lord employing him. Two days ago he left out in a wagon laden with casks of dried vegetables, meats, sacks of corn and grain, even a barrel of mead. It was drawn by a team of draft horses whose withers were above his eye. One of them flicked its head with a snort and the other nervously hoofed the cold, hard-packed earth. With Gad at the reins, they had left sight of Rotis Castle by dusk and only stopped when the fear of the horses turning an ankle or tripping in the dark was at its greatest. Corric tried not to complain, but leaning on the hard railing had dug a knot in his back and laying down to sleep in the wagon was impossible. Oli incessantly sharpened his broadsword or sang crude versions of bards’ tunes, like Red Rugan and the Maidens Three or The Giant’s Lament, to the tap of his boot.

Corric looked up from his ruminations to see Oli pulling out his whetstone to begin another session. Oli, an aging sergeant in the Rotis Guard, was a full faced man and built like a farmer, with large hands and thick shoulders. Dark hair flecked with grey, hidden by a padded coif, matched dark eyes and a dense, wiry coal colored beard that hid most of his jaw and mouth. Under a thick travel cloak, he wore a shirt of scale mail over a thickly woven gambeson with patches of every color Corric could name sewn into it. He had propped one booted leg on the wagon while the other hung loosely from the back, as though he were ready to leap out at any moment. He suddenly looked up at Corric, “Somethin’ a matter, Scholar Corric?”

The scholar simply shook his head and dug his face back into the scarf bound about his neck then watched the guardsman examine his sword for nicks and rust. He noticed a faint etching on the blade, just above the thick crossguard: the runed forgehammer of Ymus, patron God of Blacksmiths and the Fire that raged in their forges. Corric knew Ymus was a living God, a Nether-being who walked the land in full view of its worshippers. The scholar found himself wondering how such a blade, blessed by Ymus, may have gotten into the hands of a lowly castle guardsman.

“Never seen a winter like this one,” Oli hawked and spat off the wagon’s end.

“Eh!?” Gad called over the clip-clop of the horses. Gad was a gaunt man, thin as a spear haft and even more nervous than the skittish team of horses he led. Corric had only seen the man’s face in passing and his ice blue eyes darted every which way when he talked, while his mouth ran faster than a charging destrier. He wore the deep green cloak of Rotis’s scout legion and a thick woolen cap covered his ears. Gad never laughed or grunted or spit or sang so far as Corric heard.

“Me ma once said when she was a lass they had to kill the dog to eat ‘cause the cattle had froze. She said she never cried so hard. Didn’t think I’d ever see a winter get that bad,” Oli drug his stone across the blade with a sharp hiss.

Gad glanced back, “Eh?”

“Mind the road, you fool, ‘fore you break one o’ the wheels in a hole,” Oli stroked the stone down again, “’Sides I was talkin’ to the Scholar.”

“I suppose,” Corric murmured through his scarf.

Oli stopped sharping his blade and waited as if Corric would say more.

But Gad spoke up first, “Aye, we’ll make it ‘fore noon, likely. Maybe sooner.”

“Damned fool…” Oli grinned dryly and shook his head, “Where are you from, Scholar?”

“Why do you ask?” Corric never much liked being personable with others. As a scholar, he happily kept his own life separate and devoted his knowledge to the tasks at hand.

“Makin’ the time go by,” Oli’s blade sang again, “I’m no Northman meself, and you don’t strike me as one neither…”

“My father was a Telham man,” Corric offered. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth.

“Aye?” Oli nodded as though impressed, and ran the stone down the opposite side of the blade.

“Must you do that? Surely the weapon is sharp enough,” Corric wiggled a finger in his ear to show his irritation.

“Never too sharp, Scholar Corric,” Oli gave that same stomach-turning grin, and suddenly the scholar sensed that blade had seen its fair share of blood and bone.

“Oi!” Gad abruptly barked.

Oli instantly perked up with the blade held out ready for a fight.

Corric twisted his head in every direction looking for the trouble. He couldn’t stop the images in his mind of a bandit in matted furs running him through with a rusted spear or opening his throat with a dull dagger. Outlaws were not as common here as they were in the south, but Corric still had no desire to meet one. Tales of the butchery discovered at Fallen Rock, a small farming town far south-by-west, wracked his memory. Children hung up from the trees, women left naked and sprawled in the dirt, men cut from groin to chin. Savagery, Corric thought, man was capable of terrible and great things.

“West, Oli,” Gad slapped the reins and the wagon’s pace quickened.

Corric looked west to where a dense patch of evergreens and pines swallowed the foothills of the Giant’s Crest. Oli turned and squinted into the distance. Corric saw nothing but the blinding sun as it raised itself higher and higher over the Crest. He put his hand to his brow to shield his eyes.

“Put your hand down, little brother,” Gad snapped over his shoulder and Corric obeyed, still looking confused. What had made Gad so jumpy? He wondered, glancing at Oli.

“They’re standing with the sun at their backs, clever dogs. Hidin’ in the trees’ shadow and blindin’ us at the same time,” The rough guardsman answered Corric’s thoughts and dropped himself back to his original seat.

“They?” The Scholar’s stomach knotted a dozen times.

“Aye, Scholar,” Oli let his leg fall over the back of the wagon, “I reckon no more’n six, a bad idea to run with more’n a few up here with food bein’ so scarce. When you’re hungry, even another man is just a sack of meat.”

“Bandits?” Corric whispered as though the watchers might hear.

“Aye,” Oli chuckled, “A sharp sword don’t sound so bad now, eh?”

“I can no’ go any faster,” Gad looked over his shoulder, “We may have’ta fight…”

Oli produced a long dagger from his belt, “Here, lad.” Corric took with a trembling hand, fumbling it onto the wagon’s bed with a resounding clatter. “Calm y’self...” Oli put the dagger into his hand again, “If you have to kill, don’t stick ‘im in the gut, he might be wearing mail. Go for his neck and he’ll bleed out before he can think of swingin’ his own blade.”

Corric had never killed, in the name of Tor he’d never used a dagger or sword in anger before. He learned to shoot a bow long ago, but he doubt he could draw one now. Working as a scholar didn’t grant him the strength normally afforded to one who used weapons on a regular basis like Oli and Gad. He shut his eyes so hard his cheeks scrunched up and his mind raced back through all the decisions that brought him here. He thought of his years building a reputation with Nobles, villages and towns throughout the Northlands. Travelling scholars began blanketing the north recently, and a man couldn’t show up at a Lord’s castle expecting to be given lease to do his work without a good name to back him up.

He recalled his first debacle working for the Ramshorn village mayor, an aging man named Stefan Ritter. Corric traced the mayor’s family lineage through dusty, worn out parchments, half ruined notes and books falling from their spines. He scoffed quietly to himself, the thrice-damned things were hardly legible. The old man claimed day and night his family had once been great knights. He had proudly showed off a golden ring emblazoned with a stag’s head and an eightfold star which he said were his family’s arms, but the Lord Amundsen needed documents if he were to make the man’s claim legitimate. Two weeks work to discover the man’s ancestors were sheepherders. Sheepherders! And the ring was later revealed to be costume jewelry left behind by a company of minstrels who had performed The Ring of Arthur for the village’s harvest celebration.

His first true commission was in the previous year’s spring at Ardenhall Castle with Dardan Ulfan, King of the North. That had been perfect work for a travelling scholar; helping teach new scribes to write and record, schooling young pages in knight orders and the great and lesser houses, composing messages and writs for knights and nobles who went before the king. Although he had been officially given license within the castle and its town by the King, he never worked for the royal family, nor did he ever enter the keep estate where the King and his family resided. After a full spring, summer and fall at Ardenhall he took his leave without much celebration and made his way further north to the vassalage of Lord Amundsen in Rotis.

“Ho, Shallow Cove!” Gad exclaimed and laughed.

“By Ymus, I can smell the dung burnin’ even now…” Oli laughed and slammed his broadsword back in its scabbard with an audible snap.

Corric threw open his eyes and sucked in air when he realized he’d held his breath. The air faintly stunk of burning wood and dung. A telltale sign of a nearby village, or people at the very least. Corric looked back down the road and shuddered as a troop of six horses raced out of the tree line. They were breaking south, away from the wagon, skirting the farthest edge of the village and following the Crest back towards Rotis and civilization. Corric could see they were swaddled in furs and their faces were wrapped in scarves with fur caps flapping lazily as they bounced in the saddle.

“That’ll not be the last we see o’ them,” Gad uttered darkly.

“They must be scouting the village,” Corric spoke to neither Gad nor Oli in particular, “Do you think there are more?”

“Quiet, lad, don’t spit on the Gods’ favors yet,” Oli watched the horsemen warily between the casks in the wagon, “They’re not strong enough to raid, else the Cove would be cinders right now. They’re biding their time.”

“For what?” Corric fought the shivers clawing up his spine.

“Like it as not, they’re prob’ly gonna wait for us t’leave the Cove and ride us down in the open. Best for us to handle it when it comes, we’ve got a service to do for the Cove, lad.”

Corric didn’t answer and did his best to put it out of his mind. He looked to the task at hand, just as Oli had said. Pulling himself up to peer over the seat next to Gad he got his first look at Shallow Cove. It was a small, quiet village, perched on the front side of a hill that dipped down into the small inlet of waster where it got its name. Perhaps eight or ten large cabins had been built in a seemingly random arrangement with the main road passing between. The cabins were modestly built of heavy lumber from the nearby forest, thatched and rolling smoke from every chimney. Corric could see nothing unique of this place, it looked like many of the villages he’d been in since his arrival in the Northlands. A group had gathered just inside the village on the main road, mostly older men and a few children scurrying about their legs.

Gad threw up his hand in greeting, “Hail, Urgen!”

A man took a step out from the rest, much like the others he was wrapped in thick furs and woolen hose. He shouldered back a thick faded cloak and raised a gloved hand. As they closed in Corric could feel in the air something was amiss. Tension lay thick over the village and the group of men awaiting them. Even Oli had gone quiet. Corric looked back and forth between all the men. Some carried spears and another picked at his fingernails with the point of a knife.

Why had the man said nothing in return?

Gad unexpectedly jerked and his hand went to an arrow shaft stuck in his chest.

Corric screamed while Oli pulled a wheezing Gad down into the cover of the wagon’s loaded bed. Gad still had a tight grip on the reins and as he fell he pulled back on the horses forcing them to halt. “Gad, did you see the archer? Where is he!?” Oli seethed into Gad’s confused face.

Corric felt the breeze of another arrow and the whiz of its flight made him throw himself into the wagon with Oli. He picked up the dagger and held it with both hands, panicking and shuddering from his rapid breathing. His heart beat in his ears. We were supposed to be safe in the village! He screamed in his head. There came the thud of boots and Oli rolled on his side to free his sword. It was in his hands when the first man rounded the end of the wagon. He was not much older than Corric with a dirty face and wearing a grimace that clutched the scholar’s soul with icy fingers.

The villager howled and leapt onto Oli’s steel. The guardsman withdrew his blade and plunged it again, grunting from the effort. A spear appeared then came the villager wielding it and Oli shouted like a cornered beast, “Ymus!” In the next moment he leaped from the wagon on the man before staining his sword with blood. More villagers appeared and the guardsman took them one at a time, leaving them bloody in the snow before facing the next one. They didn’t scream when his blade took off a limb nor did they groan in pain when he wiped a bloody smile across their necks. Corric still clutched at his dagger and gaped at the whirlwind that was Oli dancing between the mad villagers surrounding him.

One of the villagers left his friends to deal with Oli and turned back for Corric in the wagon. It was Urgen, the cloaked villager whom Gad tried to wave down. He was deathly pale with a blank stare that would make even an executioner quake. Urgen drew a hand from inside his furs to reveal a long hunting knife with a stag horn handle. The blade flashed in the sun and the twinkle brought Corric from his shocked trance. “Stay back!” Corric shouted, but his feeble voice barely carried above a whisper. He held up the dagger Oli had given him and Urgen simply shook his head.

In Corric’s next blink Urgen leapt into the wagon and was on the scholar seething as he jabbed the blade. Corric reached out to defend and took the blade through his hand. He bit down hard as fire shot up his arm and blood covered his hand. He lashed out with his own knife and slashed Urgen across the belly, but the furs fumbled most of the attack. Urgen merely grunted and ripped his blade out from Corric’s hand then made to stab again, but the scholar was the quicker. He stepped into his thrust and his dagger stuck into Urgen’s neck with a sickening thunk.

Urgen, stunned by the blow, dropped his own knife and fell to the wagon’s bed. The man didn’t bother attempting to stem the crimson torrent erupting around the protruding dagger handle. He simply wheezed and rolled his eyes in distant agony.

Corric finally looked up and saw the chaos of Oli’s fight. The guardsman panted in quick ugly breaths while bleeding from what looked to be a dozen wounds, some superficial and others much more grievous. His cloak was in tatters and his mail rent from the villager’s blows. Eight bodies lay utterly still about him as he knelt in the snow. The villagers stood in a circle around him with a dozen spear blades aimed for a quick finish. “Well come on!” Oli cried trying to stand up, he spat a gob of blood. “I haven’t got all bloody day! Do it!”

“Make way!” A voice shouted.

“She’s here!” Another called.

“Make way! Make way!”

Suddenly a crowd of villagers, of every age and sex, enveloped the wagon and Oli. In the midst of them Corric spotted a small form in black robes then came heavy bootsteps and the form of a man in armor. As the crowd parted the two were revealed. A woman, her tall, slender body fully cloaked in the finest black silk embroidered with a deep purple swirl pattern. The robe’s paper thin hood was drawn just enough to shield her from the cold winds sweeping from the coast. Silver hair rivaling pure moonlight cascaded from under the hood and brushed her smooth face. She glanced back at Corric for only a moment to show her curved regal face, high cheek bones, and slender nose with a slight upturn. Her eyes… Corric’s mouth gaped; they were the deepest shade of amethyst, so inviting yet coolly sinister. Corric fell into those eyes for a thousand years and then a thousand more. She winked at the scholar then turned for Oli.

Walking nearly step for step with her was a brute in plate and mail draped in heavy furs. His face was not as kind, but just as sinister. An ugly scar made a lightning like path from the bridge of his nose across his right cheek to his ear. His square face was topped with a mane of pure gold bound in a cord at the nape of his neck while a well-groomed beard wrapped his chin. The moustache covering his wide mouth fell in long braids at the corners and either braid was set with small trinkets. One hand rested on a wide-bladed b*****d sword at his hip while the other stroked the dense beard under his mouth.

“Who in the seven hells are you?” Oli smirked through bloody teeth.

“Ask it of me,” Her voice was the faint stroke of a beautiful chord on a lute, “And you will live, Oli Tergr.”

“I want nothin’ from you, she-witch,” Oli groaned and finally fell the snow, still writhing. “I’ll die like a man, with Ymus and a sword.”

She tsked and turned ever so gracefully to the wagon where Corric still stood agape, shivering from the cold and the sudden release of his bladder. She waved an ivory hand at him and smiled, showing perfectly white teeth, “Come to me, Corric Cannagh.”

Corric felt his legs move unbidden, they carried him to the edge of the wagon and lowered him to the cold earth. The villagers made a path for him, but none of them looked to him. Every single person held their eyes on her, only her accompanying warrior seemed to be watching everything, yet nothing at all. Corric found his way to the center of the villagers, where Oli now lay still. The violet eyed woman blinked slowly and tilted her head a little with another smile.

“Wh-who-uh-” Corric stammered but never managed anything coherent.

“Your hand, poor Corric…” She lifted his wounded palm with the slightest of touches. Corric trembled at her silk-like skin, she warmed him as though he stood before a softly crackling hearth. She covered the injury with her opposite hand and when it was revealed once more, there was no sign that the injury had ever existed. There was an inward draw of breath from every villager; some even fell to the earth to prostrate themselves before her.

“I-” Corric stammered again and found he had trouble catching his breath.

She smiled, still holding his hand, “We have a very important mission, Corric. Will you help us?”

Corric Connagh could only shiver.