2020-08-02 21:16:37 ¶ ●

## Chapter 15: Humanity’s Smallness

https://archiveofourown.org/works/20857010/chapters/62327356

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Once upon a time, there was a great mountain.

The mountain was a wonder, cutting the wide berth of the sky in twain and dominating the landscape with majesty and power. Those that lived in its shadow considered themselves blessed, by the bounty of food and game that grew and thrived so well upon its slopes; they feared not the fire that poured from its peak on dire occasion, its height so great that the molten rock never reached their villages.

The lake that gathered the rain and glacial runoff on the mountain’s south side provided fish and fresh water; the vast forest surrounding its feet and climbing its side supplied wood and endless other bounty. The villages gathered at its base never feared attack, protected by the mountain’s reaching embrace and its curving paths and its many, many caves.

They called the mountain mother, and worshiped her as she deserved, both man and monster.

Monsterkind was the first to explore her caverns, running deep and hallowed through her insides; they carved from the stone a city indomitable, unmoved by time and weathering, and put there to rest the ashes of their heroes, human and monster alike, to be immortalized in her grand halls, protected by her unflinching facade. They painted the walls with their proud history, their friendship with humans and their love of the stars, and blessed every stone they touched with the magic of their being.

War came to the people of the world. Jealousy, hatred, and misunderstanding divided men and monsters, and unfathomable numbers perished, lost to blind anger and the call of battle and the words of those that had started it all. Few remained that recalled what had kindled the fire that burned the land to cinders… but in its wake, the monsters lay defeated and sentenced to eternal imprisonment within the mountain they had loved so dearly, their children sacrificed for the magic of their souls in the creation of a cruel, immovable barrier to keep them within.

The mountain was never the same, after the monsters vanished beneath it. The magic was gone from the world, sealed within with no chance to escape, and the lands about her feet suffered greatly. The soil dried, the trees thinned and the glacier began to melt, seeping with hidden poisons. The flames of her eruptions wreaked unholy damage to all that dared settle too close, and the animals, once peaceful, became rabid and violent.

Humanity forgot the monsters, as the world turned and grew darker with each passing day, and grew instead to hate themselves, each other and the world they lived in and the mountain that had once given so much so freely, now a pallid, hateful mark on the horizon.

Man cursed its name, mother and giver no longer, and turned away, never to return.

Legends began to come into being. Legends that told of brave adventurers attempting to scale the mountain, to delve into its caverns seeking riches… to solve the mystery of its broken majesty. They never returned, those brave souls, and many said it was because of the monstrous people that dwelled within it, shadowy beings of hatred and fire and malice towards mankind.

Demons that had settled within it and driven humanity away, to keep its bounty for themselves.

When a large hunting party disappeared without a trace, the government of the city miles away from the closest hill declared it a hazard and fenced it off, putting out of service the nearby refuse dump and forbidding its citizens to approach it, lest more lives be lost to collapsed mines or hungering animals or harsh climes, whatever it was that caused so many to vanish without a trace.

They couldn’t know the truth, had put the knowledge away long ago, in their ignorance and anger and mistrust. They couldn’t know that every human that disappeared from the face of the mountain found their way within to where monsterkind dwelt, alive despite the centuries that had passed and confined them within the unmoving, unforgiving stone.

Many perished, the fall into the caverns fatal to all but the youngest, the children that still held magic in their hearts and hope for the world about them.

They were not better off for their survival, though.

Monsterkind held hatred in their souls as well, the war and their slain children and the nightmare of their banishment heavy on their minds, and knew of only one way to escape their eternal prison… and that it would cost the innocent the most.

The great mountain, once so beloved, had become cursed with the spilled blood of those that deserved life, with the hatred for one another that soured the earth and staled the air, and should nothing change, should hearts and souls never be moved to compassion and forgiveness, would remain so.

Change would come, though.

Change spread its wings with the falling of another child into the deep and the dark, into the world of monsters and shadows and broken trust. The child was a being of mercy and friendship, hope and benevolence, and with her unending determination, her sacrifice and her pure love, she changed the heart of every monster beneath the mountain, giving them hope for the first time in a millenia.

She spoke to them of freedom, of a way to end their long imprisonment, and they believed her.

It was not meant to be, though. There was one beneath the mountain that no longer possessed a soul to move, a selfish being twisted by greed and loneliness and anger, that desired more than freedom, that desired the power that none should ever possess, and destroyed what little hope the monsters now had, corrupting the world itself even further with his very existence.

The selfish creature broke reality to achieve his designs, and broke the rest of the monsters too.

The mountain, without, hadn’t changed at all. But within, there now lived and breathed a true curse, a disease that would end every life on the surface of the earth should it be given the chance, and there was now only one that could combat it.

The merciful human’s daughter, set on a path by fate far greater than she could ever know, to the mother mountain, wondrous and terrible.