Weekly Writing – December 14 2024

The man was ready for it this time, of course. He danced his horse deftly to one side of the first blow, and it obeyed him, despite the stone shrapnel exploding around its hocks. And even as the echo of that blow rolled out to take thunder’s place in the sky, he spurred the horse on, driving it past the guardian and up the slick, narrowing path towards the summit.
She had only that moment, only craning her neck as the guardian passed, to see it properly. Yet, in that moment, she felt what the manor would have forever shielded her from – lightning after thunder, a flash of recognition. So whole and clear and radiant, she couldn’t have denied it any more than she could have the rain lashing against her face.
There you are.
The horse charged recklessly up the path, blowing rain from its nostrils as the man’s breath surged hot against her neck. He had hunched over her to make himself less of a target for their pursuer or an obstacle to speed, and her stomach roiled sour at the memory of him breathing against her bare skin.
Here I am.
The guardian charged after them, shaking the mountain under its steps. A cold stone cage for a soul, standing as tall as three horses, its feet almost too wide for the path. Yet it was swift, so terribly, thrillingly swift, more so than the man must have guessed. More so than it might have been if anyone but she had been riding up the path – in its own blind stone way, it had seen her as well, and it knew.
A housemaid without a soul was useful. A stone guardian without a soul was just a statue. Running an orderly household was just a matter of putting every resource where it would be most efficient and least troublesome.
The path narrowed to a sliver ahead. The horse could barely sidestep along it, thirty feet with the abyss just a breath away on its left, but a broad flat bowl of a clearing and victory opened ahead. And the guardian, the man must have been sure, wouldn’t be able to follow. He reined the horse to a halt in that clearing, nothing above but the churning grey sky, nothing ahead but the gaunt black spire of a gravestone carved from the mountain itself.
He breathed relief against her neck, and the guardian leapt from the last sure step it could take on the path behind.
It sailed like a landslide through the storm, like the storm itself, its axe raised over its head. And as it landed, with all the momentum of the mountain itself making graves, it swung its axe forward through the heaving flank of the horse.
She was the only one who didn’t scream. The storm bucked and whirled around her, she was in flight herself, sailing on the rain, and then she was lying sprawled in a puddle of frigid aches on the stone. The rope around her wrists had slipped free of the pommel after all – the horse floundered on its side several feet away, screaming in mortal agony, and the man had pushed himself up on his elbow, holding the dagger that had once frightened her, but one of his legs seemed to trail farther and looser away from his body than it should have.
Over them all, dwarfing even the grave it had defended, stood the guardian. A shadow in the rain, the roar of the mountain, a terror and abomination and freedom and power she could never have conceived of longing for.
A cold and lonely cage for a soul. Yet the echo and epilogue of that loneliness was this – her looking at herself, the part she’d never realized had been ripped away from her, and knowing it at a glance. Knowing herself.
The man looked from it to her, with pleading understanding in his eyes. She remembered his hands pretending only tender selfishness on her skin, and her heart grew as cold as the cage where her soul had so long lived.
The guardian brought down its axe again. Blood sprayed over her where she lay, its warmth running away in rivulets of swift grey rain.
She looked at the ruins of a man and horse on the stone without any of the horror she’d imagined she must be capable of. The guardian fitted its axe to the indent that served as a harness on its back, a deep, double-edged spine, and stooped to one grinding knee before her.
Without the pommel to hold the rope taut, she slithered her wrists free of it easily. Her legs were unsteady with the long ride and the shock of being thrown from it so suddenly, but with the guardian’s knee for support, she pulled herself up to stand.
Its face was nothing like hers. Rain carved deep tear tracks in it, worn and grim with its long watch. Perhaps it, too, had tried to make up stories about people and places far away, to take itself away from its lonely life.
“I missed you,” she whispered. Without even realizing it, she always had.
It opened a stone hand to her with the tenderness it had shown no one before, and she sat onto the rain-slick curve of its palm. It lifted her to its chest, straightening back to its tremendous height, and she nestled snug in the cradle of its palm.
Her mistress would expect her to come home. She might only have let her be stolen in the first place because she had known it would lead the thief to a terrible end. But what if they walked the other way? The guardian could climb down paths from the summit that would kill any man. It could carry her even if her feet tried to tell her she should be running in the other direction.
Even if she did fall limp as a doll once too far from her mistress’s will, empty as a cloth puppet, it could carry her on. The art of moving souls about didn’t belong to their mistress alone. Even if it had to carry her for tireless years, it would find someone who could bind the two of them together again.
Someone who could make them whole. She stroked a hand down the stone armour carved into its chest, the cold, still place where a heart should be. The guardian looked down at her with its cold, still face, carved in eternal sternness, but she could feel the soul burning in it, stoked with hope and stories and love for her – the love no one else had given either of them.
It strode past the grave that meant nothing to either of them anymore. A story and treasure for someone else to plunder. Holding her closer, safe from any jarring fall, it dropped from the far edge of that plateau to the ridges and valleys and unknown countries below.