The Price of Achievement

Image "Bell tower peak" by Arcipello over at Deviantart

A chain of mountains ran through the ocean. Originally they had been land-mountains, but the land had broken apart, and the seas had risen, and that big hurricane had come, and now they were sea mountains that had not been worn away yet. Not many people lived there, but a few did. Carwin was just passing through with her gull, Lanny. Lanny is a bit of a silly name, but for a gull, it is not a bad one. 

When they passed through areas so close to the sea, Lanny liked to spend some time with the other gulls, but he always came back. Or maybe some other gull took his tern entertaining the wanderer. It was hard to tell, for she was quite charming, Lanny did not speak, and gulls were mostly the same, given any particular set of circumstances. Even when endowed with the gift of intelligence, which Lanny was when he was near, they tended to act pretty much the same. Jays also stayed the same, but hawks and owls were different. Carwin didn't particularly care for owls or hawks though, and she spent so much time on the sea that it would have had to be an osprey or a sea owl or an eagle anyway, and that REALLY wasn't her thing (great big talons, liked nests, beaks for ripping into scales, no thank you,) so she stuck with a gull. Good for soaring, good for scouting. Shit in a fight but who did she need to fight? And when she did, Carwin had a well-kept but very old crossbow and a sort of bent metal something that some blacksmith had messed up which was somewhere between a machete and a short sword and not much use for either purpose, but was far superior to nothing at both purposes. Unfortunately she seldom needed a sword or a machete. 

Actually that was probably fortunate, but Carwin was not a woman of semantics . She preferred clever tricks. Not the sorts of clever tricks that juking, snare traps, and Molotov cocktails are, more the sort like moss tending to grow north, making a sundial out of a stick and some loose sand, tracking tricks for snow or sand, or knowing that, no matter what the medicine men up north said about cold and toxins, a pack of warm water kept several folks she knew from death or sickness after a bad hit from a ray. There were some magic tricks too, and they worked too, but they were not particularly interesting. Ways to stretch the current's strength and get the most out of a bowl of soup that were clever and didn't require much power, and everyone who needed to know them knew them, and thought nothing of it, and everyone who didn't know them thought they were amazing. 

Carwin visited the little mountain islands because of the shrine, far up it. A travel god was prominent in the pantheon that world worshiped, and being real,  he granted those who visited his shrines favor, often in the form of ability or luck, and often recursive ability or luck. People who got to one shrine were more likely to get to a more difficult shrine. They thought he was real, anyway, but the way people develop magic in some places, you can't really tell and it's best to just say they probably know better than you and let him be real. If he's causing miracles no reason to argue. It's when he stops the miracles that you have to worry. 

In any case Carwin believed in him, and she had a long way to fly to get up. Now usually elves don't fly, but Carwin, as I'm sure you've heard before, about other main characters, was special. Whether the story followed her because she was special, or the story endowed her with specialness because she was its favorite was unclear, as it often is. After visiting one shrine, Carwin had grown wings, and that's all there was to it. She attributed it to the travel god but, to be fair, she was always visiting one of those shrines and it could have just as easily been inborn or a blessing from another god who thought she was interesting, or a result of some magical territory she had passed through. Perhaps the shrines were even magical. It wasn't clear, it simply was not. 

She was planning her flight, looking for places she could stop, standing in the middle of the beach with the sun beating down on her shoulders, wings, and face, when a small girl came up to her, and asked her what she was doing. "You see that little building?"

"Uh-huh. The shrine? My brother and father go there sometimes."

How curious, sedentary people visiting the shrine of a travel god. "Ah. What have they told you about it?" Carwin had no interest in angering the girl's family. If the shrine was important to them she would not tell the girl the truth. Only some are fit to follow, in any case. 

"It's for travel. And since our island is always traveling, it came with us."

"Always traveling?"

"Yes! A hundred years ago, we were part of the mainland. Now you can't even see the mainland. We get by on fish and kelp and some vegetables that mother keeps in the garden. If things are going quite well, and father is feeling spry and he and Nardor are both in good enough shape, they go bring down a boar some years, and we have meat for a long time. Mostly though when they get adventurous they get a rabbit or two each year. Not much lives here. Meat is ever so good. Do you like meat?"

Carwin looked back to the ledge. The girl seemed quite intelligent, and to know quite a bit besides. The idea of the island being a traveler had not occurred to Carwin. Perhaps Carwin could make a temple to carry with her. She was unsure of whether an idol or symbol would work. It seemed to defeat the purpose, carrying the shrines with you. If you did that, how were you motivated to travel? She would do it anyway, of course, but really the best disciples were those who would prefer to be still. Buy a farm, find a wife or a man, start a weaving business maybe, or make chain mail. There were plenty of things for sedentary people to do. If she did not gain her immortality at one of these shrines, she planned to write once her bones wore out. After thinking a while, she pulled a piece of dried meat from her backpack. "It's not fresh," she said, "but it's what I have right now. Since I'm from somewhere else, if I get to the shrine, my god will reward me. I am a Traveler."

"I know," the little girl replied, tasting the meat, and being pleasantly surprised. Carwin's method was better than her father's. "I'll help you get up there if you teach me how to make meat like this."

Carwin raised an eyebrow. The little girl did not seem to be lying, but curing meat was not an instant process. Her flight-climb would take her the better part of three days, and if they could find the meat, she could usually get the process done in a day. It would mean finding and killing an animal in one day, but she liked her chances better even of killing a boar than against the flight-climb she had anticipated. 

"How are you going to help me? I'll fly up, a little at a time."

The girl eyed her quizzically. "Rests will be hard, and dangerous. The winds up there make it unsafe for flying. Uncle Pentro is a flyer. Plus there's a staircase that just goes straight up." Her bright eyes shone true, so Carwin assumed the girl was an accomplished liar. She had seen no staircase. 

"I didn't see any staircase, and I looked very well."

"Well of course not silly! It's hidden in the center! You have to go swimming. I'll take you after you show me."

Carwin sighed. "Alright, let's go." The two walked off to find a rabbit. 

"The Price of Achievement" Flash Fiction © Ben Clardy V

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.