Vignette 4
Friday April 24, 2009
The path that they took led up through the high passes of Melnidrae, where the air grew thin and the ice mephits played. They were tired, hungry, sore and afraid. At any moment, the ljosalfar legions could sweep down onto them; none who had seen the Melnidrae ljos had lived to tell the tale of it. Only the second-hand tales told by the alfar who traded with them betrayed their existence.
It was said they were beautiful, with skin thin like parchment, a network of blue veins crisscrossing their bodies like a map. Their hair floated on the breeze, light, thin and silver. Their long limbs moved with an alien grace and beauty. The Melnidrae were legendary, even among the alfar, for their beauty, and their ferocity.
The pass became a road once more, a sinewy thing that weaved its way around the mountain in seeming haphazard starts and stops. Mikal said that it had once been nothing more than a goat trail, that the dopkalfar had paved it generations ago to ease trade. The bricks were simply lain, side by side with no art. The paving was uneven and occasionally sloppy; either the bricklayers had not cared, or it had been a long time since any repairs had come.
The road turned suddenly from northward to east; the view opened here, the road hugging the top of a cliff-face that fell hundreds of feet to a jumble of rock and gravel below. On the next mountain over, a similar face looked back at them, this marred by the shape of a huge keep. Flat and utilitarian, the keep was unadorned and looked as though it had been abandoned for years. Huge walls grew out of the rock, leading to parapetted towers. If there was a courtyard, it was dug into the rock itself. Windows were sparse, but large. They could afford to be. The place seemed unassailable. The only narrow trail that lead up to the great keep was walled. With its single point of access so small, defending the keep would be a simple task; storming it would result in thousands of deaths.
“What is that place?” Hordan asked in awe.
“That’s Olypslatt,” Mikal said. “The dopkalfar’s Keep of the Light.”
“Who lives there?” Hordan asked Bjavard.
“Ghosts,” he replied. “An Age ago, something took hold of the people there, and they killed one another. The children died first.”
They did not speak again until the keep was well out of sight.
Picture stolen, again, from Paper Tissue. Some damned pretty pictures over that way. I still have writer’s block, at least in the sense of a larger project. These vignettes are fun, but they’re not really doing me any good in the long-run. I have an idea in my head (in which I straight jack Stephanie Meyer’s story and make some crazy wish-fulfillment romance story and make a bazillion dollars from it), but it doesn’t sound like me at all. Then again, the above doesn’t really sound like me either. I try to stay away from genre fiction if I can; I love it, but I want to avoid genrefication for a while if I can.
