Today’s flash fiction was big in scope. Once I realized that, I played specifically with making such a short format seem huge and mythic. I like the result.

THE MOUNTAIN RISES

The mountain shook, rolled and stood up. The people whose village rested at his feet had hoped to never see him, but he was here now. Awake. They prayed he would have strength.

His face shone like the sun, his limbs were the green of forests and his armor was the blue of mountains in the far distance. His cloak was the gray of granite and morning dreams. As he crossed the land, the animals were filled with strange powers and the harvest suddenly came ready. There was no sleep where he passed, but neither was their fatigue. Thousands of birds filled the air in his wake, their constantly shifting formations announcing things that could never be expressed in word or thought.

He paused at the coast and drew his sword. As he did, every unborn child in the land jumped in the womb. Its blade had been forged outside of time, where there was no death, and was so real and so alive that it could not be looked upon with mortal eye.

The ocean grew blacker than night and swallowed every ship on its waves. The storm clouds above grew so thick and solid they seemed to be water and the raging ocean to be cloud. The lightening made it brighter than day and set the surface of the sea on fire, and this is when the demon rose.

Like the mountain-god, the demon was formed of the earth, but an ancient chaotic earth, an earth where there was no living thing. It’s eyes reflected the void before existence, its tail was made of sickness and its teeth and claws were the nightmares of the strange beasts that had populated the earth long before humanity was born.

When the titans collided, it shook the pillars of the foundations of the earth.

The air itself shuddered and fled the spot in great roaring winds. The demon’s sword was made of poison and madness, and every time it collided with the earth-god’s the sound made the thunders like whispers. At their feet, every living thing died, was reborn and died again, over and over. They spoke, but the sounds they made could only be interpreted as the grinding of continents and the shrieking of meteors through the skies.

Their battle lasted for decades, and finally the demon was pierced through. Its blood was magma, and it melted the oceans at its feet. The steam rose in enormous roiling plumes and filled the skies over the whole earth and it was night for a year and a day. The crops grew only by the light of the mountain-god’s face.

Finally the sun rose and the earth stopped shuddering. People emerged from the places where they had hidden themselves and new generations were born.

The mountain stayed on the shore, where the calm seas lapped gently at its feet. To this day barren women can conceive on its slopes, and it will still stand long after the end of the age.