Icarus's blog: "Somantics"

Rumors.
Hunches.
One child described an "oogy feeling" when the dew came down and a thick mist settled on his mountain.

As if the world shuddered, chilled in its sleep.
As Alorid approached this mountain, the tempo and murmor of travelers and foreign rumor disappeared, after four days of walking, the small villages dotting the road disappeared, first with the loss of peddlers, cryers and bustle, then the children running through the street, and down to the last few woodsmen nodding gruffly heading downhill to their shacks or woodsheds.

The world of man seemed to disintegrate as he drew near. As if the world of the ancients was making tiny, almost invisible comebacks with every step.
There old gods wound around his feet with the slightest signal. A strand of ivy twisted on the underside, a butterfly lit against his cheek, the complete inability to start a fire. Mushrooms moss and rounded stones facing the wrong way.

A coy, but gentle warning.
This is where the gods lay sleeping.
Tread lightly hunter, or we will silence your soul.

On daybreak of the fifth day, the dawn and mist seemed more looming, more present than ever. Mystic and hazey in shade. Faintly hued in the dawn's light. The cloud had come down further from the peak than the days before.

Soon they would collide.
Alorid's hand twitched toward his concealed blade. But it was just another subtle warning from the gods.
They did prefer the company of ancients to that of man...
in his arrogance, in his fire, in his noise industry and war.

He should have been a bit more alarmed at the thousands of butterflies taking flight as he stirred from sleep that morning. So many that he was certain a bright and alien cloud had exploded almost silently around him, their tiny wingbeats and alarm whispering in the wind.
He should have fled in terror at the fifty foot shedding of a great serpeant dangling dead and still moist in a colossal, knobby, vile looking tree only a few steps up the mountain path.
Two distinct edges of a great dragon's moustache protruding from the cheeks.
There was no need to prepare weapons, no need to dart in fear and caution.

The snake was downhill, camoflouged and inching toward the sea, the stench of a man trying to be unnoticed all over this mountain had alerted it days before the molt.

Alorid took the empty skin and began wrapping it around his forearm, as if spinning wool...the way his mother had taught him a near thirty winters ago.
Placing the pearly white, faintly shimmering, faintly pulsing thing in his pack, and dropping every unnecessary, useless, or burdensome thing he could afford to lose.
His blade between his teeth as he tugged on his finely crafted greaves and gauntlets, making certain every stitch in place and snug. Thick but light leather molded and eroded against his body. His breastplate knicked with a few dozen near misses and life savers, and a few muttered IOU's to gods. A blur of blade, fang, dart, and flame.

Tossing his thick brown hair, clumpy with earth and road, behind an iron studded headband. He paused, surveying the path of least resistance, the slope of greatest ease from the peak to the sea.

Could he outrun terror slithering on its belly?

He'd have to.
He couldn't swim worth a damn.