And the Hero Arrived

By Oliver Hickman

And the Hero arrived, galloping through the gates on a golden-maned mare. It was a dark place he entered, snuffed torches reaching out at the one he carried, begging to blaze once more. Another gate waited before him, then another after that. They were all buckled inwards, their timbers cracked by great rams. Their upper hinges hung high above him, clutching onto what splinters they could save. The ceiling of the hall was much taller than was warranted—at least for human heights. His horse whinnied; impatient or uneasy, he could not tell. He made a click with his tongue, and the loyal beast bore him onwards.

Stonework was coated with dust, and the low light of his torch did little to resurrect the place. The walls were made of sturdier stuff than the gates, bearing hardly a chip or a scratch, even at the finer edges. After the second gate, though, the damage was unmistakeable. Not a battle, but a brawl had happened in there, with strength to rend stone. Great maces had left craters, swords chasms, each arrow embedded and unretrievable. The opponents—lesser by almost every reckoning—left only scrapes for their part. No, the humans who fought there had been sorely outmatched, but the Hero went on to the third gate, where sheer numbers had won out. It was at the third gate the human army once poured through; the massed forces of every nation. It was there the giants realized their power was all too singular, and there they found themselves few against those beyond counting.

The Hero remembered that day well. Back then, his hair was not as gray, and his eyes were not as dimmed by the years. His name was Calyx, champion of a hundred nations, bravest of all heroes. He was a slayer of creatures titanic in power and scale, whose javelins had tasted all manner of monster and saved countless innocents from their slavering jaws. But he was not always a Hero. Once, Calyx was a boy of meagre means. He was a prospector, and not a lucky one at that. When his family’s land was seized by the heartless king of Comnoch, he set out alone to find his fortunes under cold stone. That fortune, he did one day find at the foot of a mountain where humans dared not tread.

Through the third and last gate Calyx’s horse sauntered. Out from the great wall around the giants’ land he came, into the enclave where titans once ruled. The walls were massive and sprawling, ringed around an area which disappeared over the horizon. In some places were fields of wheat and barley, long untended. In others were huts made from chopped-up boulders and other slabs of earth. And there, in the centre of the giants’ claim, Mount Arkon cast its shadow over the Hero.

He remembered when he first set eyes on that great, black mountain, back when there were no great gates, no signs of wars once waged, no walls built out of necessity. In that bygone time, Mount Arkon was a much-avoided mountain rise with untilled fields surrounding it. When he first set eyes on Arkon, Calyx was keen not to rouse the mountain’s inhabitants. He plodded around the outskirts, pecking at rocks with his pick or scraping with his spade, crowding his body around his tools to dullen the noise they made. As a prospector, he was not overly hopeful. He knew there were long odds of him stumbling across silver, gold, or jewels, but he held out hope for something more common: copper, perhaps, or iron.

Calyx spent days in the sweltering heat, the sun watching, unblinking, as he came up with nothing, only leaving for the moon to glower at him while he rested. Then his luck changed. He came across a great pit, and in it, he saw the glint of something not quite stone, something that, if his instincts were right, was precious. But Calyx had spent too many days in the heat and the uncertainty. For too long had he flinched at shadows, fearing that some towering being was looming over him. Desperation had set in, and it made him unfriendly to caution.

Down into the pit he went, with no thought as to how he would get back out. And on his way down, predictably, his haste unbalanced him. He stumbled, rolling head-first, then feet-first, tumbling into the deep hole that had mere moments ago seemed so very promising. His feet landed at odd angles. Immediately, one of his ankles bent sideways; the impact on his other foot was carried up his leg. A terrible crack could be heard, and Calyx fell forward, suddenly unable to stand. Pain pulsed through him like ripples in a once-calm pool, until shock numbed his entire body.

He slipped in and out of consciousness for hours. His situation was hopeless. The pit did not hide a secret vein of ore, it seemed, but instead his grave. A dark shadow veiled him from the judging sun, and he was sure it was death, come to claim him. Calyx struggled to sit up, not to resist what was approaching, but to ask for one last favour. He wanted to ask death how close he had gotten; how near he had been to his family’s woes being over before he failed them. But before he asked the question, a voice, not of death, spoke to him.

“Be still, little one,” she said.

Back atop his horse, brooding over the aftermath, Calyx looked down at the pit. Since then, the giants must have found something of worth down there; the pit was far wider and deeper, and boasted a crane at its upper brim which reached down into the depths with a thick iron chain. Calyx felt a mix of emotions, looking down into that bleak hole. He felt an odd tinge of satisfaction that left a bitter aftertaste. As he looked, the Hero could almost swear he saw a body down there, laying motionless in the dark. The more he stared, the less he could focus on it—until it was gone.

Steering his mount clockwise around the mountain, Calyx next came upon a set of stairs. Each step was as high as his knees, and they went on until winding around the mountain’s curvature, out of sight. His horse showed no interest in such a tedious climb, so Calyx dismounted from his mare and started to climb. When his legs started to complain, he put it out of his mind. When it was unbearable, he left his shield behind; then his helmet; then all but his sword, his javelins, and what he wore beneath his armour.

In his memories, the climb was far different. When he first made his way up Mount Arkon, there were no stairs, and he did not tire from the strain so easily, because Calyx did not do the walking. It was as if he spent the journey half-asleep. Delirium set in after he had been taken from the pit. The pain from his injuries gave way to blissful madness. He would look down and see himself rising up the mountain’s slope, floating like the windward seed of a dandelion. Calyx put no effort in convincing himself whether he was alive or dead, content to simply bide his time and see what was next in store for him. There was a warmth in his body, radiating from a point: his back. Yes, he was being carried—that much he could figure out. Someone was carrying him—someone warm.

In the half-dream, he drifted on, minutes slipping away. Then he felt the sun abruptly take its leave. He felt the cool embrace of shade, and then of a surface. Calyx was laid onto a smooth slab of marble by his saviour. Hardly in control of his senses, he groaned, already missing the warmth and tenderness he felt while being carried. But then, at last, his exhaustion caught up with him, and he drifted to sleep.

“You will be safe here,” she said.

Without his armour, Calyx was able to quicken his pace, soon coming to a crossroads in the giant stairs. To one side was a great forge: at the other, a temple. Just before the temple steps was a pair of wooden doors, like the kind that belong to a cellar. One door was slightly open, and he saw crudely carved stairs chipped into the stone, leading to a room filled with things almost human in size.

Before Calyx’s eyes could adjust any more, he snapped his gaze away. He took a deep breath, but it failed to suppress a shudder. When Calyx breathed out, the breath only came through his nose. His lips were pursed tight, wrestling something in him that wanted to get out. But it took him only a few seconds more before regaining his composure. I am the Hero, Calyx! I have fought behemoths— what plagues me now is nothing in comparison, he repeated in his head until he once again believed it himself. He must have murmured a part of that mantra aloud, because something reacted to the noise.

Calyx turned—sword drawn—ready to challenge whatever stalked his movements. It was a crane, its long neck held almost straight, and its head cocked slightly to the side, puzzling over him. Once, it must have been a giant’s pet, judging by the bronze ring it wore around one ankle. Calyx looked to the east, past the giant wall. A wetland gave the landscape a splotch of green. He turned back, returning its stare. There was no reason for it to come back to the mountain. The wetland was likely its home, and far more hospitable for a bird of its type. The reason it must have been there—the only reason—was out of habit. It must have remembered when it was someone else’s, cared for by someone…

The crane flapped its wings and flew away, back to the wetlands, to where it belonged. Calyx could see the ring on its ankle glinting in the moonlight, long after its wings disappeared into the night’s dark. The ring was not a perfect fit. The crane could have taken the ring off if it wanted to, but it was not so easy. Then Calyx looked back down the steps, to the path that would take him back from whence he came. He wheeled around, looking up. A deathly quiet surrounded him, smothering even his heartbeat as his sight narrowed in on the mountain’s peak. It was high—twice as high as the distance he had already covered—but he climbed the next step.

The mountain was rougher up high than below. The stairs turned jagged, and the finely chiseled architecture of the giants became rarer. Not much work had been done to beautify the place. Stonework was ages old, left there by giants of earlier eras. No doubt, the giants of latter years could have restored the upper heights and made them more presentable, but those old rocks and boulders, stood on-end or stacked high by ancestors faded from memory, were symbolic of the giants themselves. They were always an enduring people, but even mountains become sand.

Once his leg had healed, Mekra took Calyx to see the giant burial grounds. She taught him what all the carved runes meant, and that once those standing stones were flush with colour from paint since rubbed away by the centuries. The eldest giants, she told him, were of the stone themselves. Every mountain could trace its ancestry to the same point as the giants of today. As she told it, iron was their blood, gold their stomachs, and marble their skin and tissue. And then she gave something to Calyx a giant had never given a human before. From one of the rocks, of a distant all-mother, she took a sliver and looped a gold chain through a hole she gouged. She gave him the necklace and told him on that day that she loved him. Calyx’s eyes fixed on the gold.

With such earthen wealth, he reasoned, Mekra could save his family. And she listened, and she agreed, following young Calyx to his impoverished kin. What she saw shocked her. Such squalor they lived in, such horrid poverty. His family was suffering so greatly, and in ways Mekra had never before seen. Her kind felt no such pangs of hunger, for the giants were content with meagre harvests and muddy homes. Giants were happy to have enough and give away the surplus, but humans were inventive, and they had invented many ways of cheating themselves.

Back to Mount Arkon Mekra and Calyx went, but not for long.

“I will help your people,” she promised.

As Mekra had come to understand, humans had a backwards culture. Because they were small in stature, she reasoned, they felt free to treat each other as if they were vermin. To her, giants were stronger, longer-lived, and wiser than humans; smart enough to know what was best for their smaller, wayward cousins. She was flooded with sympathy for the smaller folk, but her patience for their ways languished in drought. Mekra found herself surprised when Calyx objected to her plans. But Calyx was fragile and rash. For his own good—as she saw it—Mekra chose not to listen.

Mekra summoned her kin from the hills and mountains, a gathering not seen since the world had not yet ripened. Cyclops, ogres; giants borne of cliff, valley, and cloud, all came to heed her call, for she was the keeper of their holiest site: a temple erected from the all-mother’s own earthen flesh. The ground quaked beneath the gathering’s feet, the bones of the world groaning while the titans marched. Seas churned, meadows were flattened to mire, and shaken cities could only watch in awe and terror as the giants cast their shadow over humanity’s great works.

And when the giants of the world were all in attendance, Mekra intimated to them her grand design. She would see the humans’ nations all shattered, for they were each of them failed experiments. She would revoke their kind’s hard-won independence, for in her eyes they had already given it away to those with a rare appetite for cruelty. And those who remained, those whom she rescued, would live in peace under the protection of their betters. Mekra spoke these plans—and more—while paying no heed to Calyx as he listened in. 

“I beg you, rethink this,” he pleaded.

“Do not be afraid, my love,” she would always reply. “I will not fail you. I would move whole continents if it meant we could have but an island of our own. But the world is not so empty anymore. If I cannot halt the tide, then I will tame the sea.” Mekra was not to be dissuaded, and so, ignoring Calyx’s pleas, she and the other giants set upon a great undertaking. Melting pots churned with metal plucked from the earth with bare hands, and great slabs of bronze were shaped into weapons and armour fit for titans. Mekra would tame the sea, even if it meant turning it red with blood. 

She always had Calyx in her thoughts, and she fashioned for him a suit of armour of his own, and weapons for if the worst came to pass. She bestowed him with javelins coursing with lightning, fully expecting her precious love to use them against his own kind if necessary. But then, one night, Calyx slipped away, leaving a bundle of straw in his bed, and made for the nearest kingdom as fast as his legs could carry him.

Still cowering from the giants’ great stampede, the King and his council took Calyx’s message to heart. So, when the giants came down from Mount Arkon and plowed through cities and palaces with swords and spears longer than trees were tall, they found only those unfit to travel. The rest, at Calyx’s insistence, had fled to more distant lands. And then, shortly afterwards, the humans rallied. What came next was to be expected. Giants, as powerful as they were, could not withstand the vengeful onslaught. The giants held on only to a small realm of their own, there with the tens of thousands of people they had rounded up. Victory was small and fleeting for the giants. With an army beyond counting, the humans would be back.

The Hero had nearly reached the top of the mountain, fatigue once again hounding him, but not just that. Every time he failed to banish the thought from his mind, he would turn and look at the walls ringed around the mountain and its foothills. He would see the breaches, the siege weapons broken to splinters, the mounds where they left things too large to be buried. Some of the hills were not hills, some of the walls not walls. And then Calyx jerked his neck back around, looking down at where his feet were landing on the steps, where he could pretend that he was not surrounded. But never did he look up. Never did the Hero have the courage to face what he was now fast approaching. But soon he would have to look. Soon.

The war between humanity and the giants quickly fell into a stalemate. The giants abandoned the lands they could never have held, and the humans snapped at their heels until they overextended themselves. A year into the war, lines were well-defined. The din of battle subsided, and the silence of a prolonged stalemate set in. But during that time when things went undecided, Calyx came of age. The people viewed him as a Hero, and he took up the role like anything given but not asked for. He did as was expected of him, appearing before battles and inspiring the troops, but in battle he came to prove himself.

Inevitably, Calyx was caught amid an unfolding battle and was forced to stand and fight. And with the weapons gifted to him prior, he brought a rare triumph to his kind. From there, his legend travelled from mouth to ear of every soldier and every huddled survivor, until kings and queens took notice and made him into their own instrument. They made sure Calyx was not left idle, and that his presence was known on every major front at one point or another. He did his share of fighting, and of slaying, but never did he feel as if victory in the war was near. In fact, as humanity’s forces grew nearer to Mount Arkon, the heart of the giants’ domain, he felt victory grow even more distant. With every battle won, his outlook worsened.

There were only a couple hundred steps remaining; Calyx had nearly reached the top. Resting in place of the mountain’s peak was a temple, much like the one much further down, but made of black marble and stamped with gold. It was larger, too; big enough to dwarf a castle and its surrounding battlements. Lofty pedestals held up sacred icons, arrayed in two rows flanking the stairs, until the entrance. A black archway, polished to a pearl shine, demarked the temple’s threshold. Inside, it was as black as the stone, but for want of the shine. Calyx hesitated to enter, for he knew of the monster he would have to confront within. 

First to the peak, and to enter the Queen’s throne room, so they said. Nothing could be further from the truth. No; once the soldiers poured in through the breach, the Hero, Calyx found that his feet were like lead. He took not one step further into the giants’ domain, for fear of looking his crimes in the face. When the armies lost all cohesion once they found the first golden idol, smashing and chopping at the thing for every sliver they could pocket, Calyx had already retired from the field, back to his cushy tent and the attendants he had been given. As funeral pyres raged—hotter than molten glass—he turned away, blinding himself from their glow, but the heat still haunted him.

Every step Calyx had taken thus-far had been the furthest he had gone into the giants’ domain since that night. He could recall that night with Mekra with stinging clarity; how she told him of her hopes and dreams of living in peace, and how she smiled just at the thought of being his, and he hers. And he remembered sneaking out, leaving naught but a straw doll in his stead. He agonized over the thought of her waking that morning without her, and Calyx tried, with all the willpower in his form, to tell himself that it had all been for a greater good. But after being in the courtly presence of kings, he could not convince himself of that.

So much had changed since he first lay eyes on that mountain—their mountain. Dreadfully little had stayed untouched by the war, whether it was from the giants’ own fortifications or the humans’ destructive wake. The throne room, however, had been spared. Whether a fell enchantment lay on it, or the humans had been too afraid of such things, it had been left alone. And there, in the very centre of the temple, was the Queen’s throne. On it, unmoving and unmistakeable, was the Queen. Giants do not decay. Their bodies do not turn to bone, then dust. They solidify.

A statue: that is what was left of the Queen, of Mekra. In her stone arms was an object which she, even in death, cradled with care. The straw doll was frayed and brittle—a heavy breeze would turn it to dust. How Mekra had died was unclear, but she bore no wounds, nor the rigours of starvation. She did not suffer; at least, not in that manner.

Calyx collapsed, a flood of tears at long last unfettered. He wept long and hard until his throat could bear it no more. Calyx looked out at the edge of the great wall, where armies once gathered, and rams were readied, and he imagined how she must have felt when the Hero arrived.

Oliver Hickman is an amateur author who has been trying for over a decade to navigate the literary world. His struggles with anxiety and depression from an early age have made fiction his safe haven. Through plenty of mistakes and perseverance, he hopes to someday be counted among the greats.