Troll
The troll, a massive dripping, sagging pillar of oily black carapaced flesh covered in dozens of snarling maws and crude approximations of grasping, bladed limbs, grew from a central, hateful little seed, buried deep within its shapeless body and rooted to the walking surface of the bridge snow spotted stone bridge spanning the chasm. That hadn’t stopped it from spilling over the sides, though–the thing’s wriggling body descended maybe twenty feet into the misty pit formed by the space between the two mountain peaks towering overhead.
It had probably been there for ten, maybe fifteen years. Last time I’d taken that route–the only road cutting through the aptly named “Endless Mountains,” and that road’s only bridge between these two peaks, the troll had already been large enough to block passage. I’d stared at it for two hours, hoping by some act of known-to-be-spiteful gods the bastard thing would be annihilated by lightning, before turning around and starting the half-year long trek through the winding, dangerous and poorly maintained low roads that crisscrossed the narrow valleys between the mountains. By the time I’d made it to Land’s Crescent on the range’s other side–nine months after I’d been expected–the temperamental and heavily reactive dyes I’d been contracted to transport had long since curdled and turned to unattractive brown-green slime. The merchant waiting for me hadn’t even bothered to punish me himself; as soon as he heard I had made it to town, he hired some local roughs to take my left ear.
Probably hadn’t helped that the bastard disliked me already. Unmarried, sounded like a man but wore charcoal around my eyes (I thought it looked nice, personally), trotted around in a long peasant’s skirt and frilly shirt but begrudgingly prayed at the temples reserved for men in the religious quarter wherever I stopped. Not my fault the stars I was born to, the god to which I was pledged from birth, not my fault they hadn’t looked long into my future and thought long and hard about who I’d be.
The dye shipment job was supposed to be my big break, supposed to have paid me a decent bit of money so I could settle down somewhere. Since then I’d made my way from town to town, working for odd people in exchange for odds and ends and little in the way of decent payment. Last big break, and it broke me, because for years all I’d been able to think about was the goddamn troll.
They’re everywhere, now. They’ve been around for centuries, but some thirty years ago a wind from the far north, where old and wretched things are frozen in ice, brought thousands of troll seeds that latched to roads, bridges, sometimes homes. Normally took a damn company of soldiers and engineers to remove them safely; if you managed to get past the razor bladed arms and fangs on the surface, dig through the leathery carapace, and burrow through the flesh and bones inside, destroying or separating the seed from the troll’s body would quickly–a matter of seconds–turn all the troll flesh to chalky stone. Only thing that prevents the petrification is very hot fire, the sort that tends to spread fast and easily. Since killing trolls generally results in crushing, melting, or otherwise level ling whatever they grow from, those involved normally opt to give up and, when they can afford it, build a replacement.
I unrolled my swiftly packed bag of supplies I’d purchased in town with the last of my money–I didn’t fare well, sticking around busy towns like that. Most folks were, if not nice, fine, but that doesn’t help when it tends to be the big, nasty and mean ones who aren’t.
In front of me, comprising the bulk of my remaining worldly goods, was a collection of tools I bought to help me kill the goddamn troll swaying in the wind fifteen yards in front of me. My company of soldiers and engineers, I thought to myself reluctantly.
A sword. Not very sharp–it didn’t cut through my leather bag–but sharper than my teeth. A knife, a little sharper and meaner, that I’ve owned since the first time someone big, nasty and mean tried to break my skull. Two scrolls of magic, helpfully labelled “repair of flesh” and “immolation of repugnance”– not that I’d ever done magic before. The scroll did most of the work once you started reading it, and I’d heard that it’s easy enough once you get the hang of it. I’d also heard that getting the hang of it normally involves pissing yourself at least once. But, I figured, maybe I was special.
I’m probably not special, I thought.
I had bought a hymnal from a priestess in the women’s religious district at Pickman’s Ferry a few miles back, a last minute addition. She’d seemed kind, didn’t mind offering it to me after I flashed one of my remaining coins. I wasn’t entirely sure what it would do, but the narrow, almost fan-like codex with off-blue parchment brought me some measure of reassurance. I’d like to have been a priestess, I think, had the stars turned differently. The same woman had also given me, after I’d told her what I was planning, a flask of sour-smelling holy water.
Otherwise, my provisions were mundane and purchased more on the basis of “available” rather than “useful.” A little wooden case of long, copper nails; a pouch of rock salt, from a coastal village; a tin of sardines; a pair of solid lamellar surfaced mittens I shamelessly stole from a roadside corpse a week ago.
The best item, the one that really made my heart glow a little despite the cold wind blowing off the snowy peaks, was one I was wearing: new fur-lined and hobnailed boots with solid oak toe caps, the wood carved with swirling runes the cobbler-mage who’d sold them said made them extra durable. I think he was a liar and a crook, but still. “Yer toes ‘ll break a’fore these do, lass!” he’d said, making me grin for multiple reasons. They were very nice boots.
It’s not enough, I thought, this cannot be all that it takes.
While cracking open the last tin of sardines, I looked back up at the troll. Kept looking at it, as I started to chew, feeling the little bones crunch under my teeth. Fuck it. This thing dies today.
I was wrong about how fast the arms moved, and it almost cost me both my life and the sword.
The approach up to the troll was nerve racking, but I managed to stay calm by slowly muttering the hymns from the codex. I don’t know the language, but it’s got the same alphabet as one I know, so I guessed at pronunciations. It did nothing to the troll, though. Maybe if I knew how to say this right there would be lightning right now.
I don’t know how trolls see (on their outsides, anyways), maybe they just go off of smell, but it sure as hellfire knew I was getting closer. The squirming undulations started to look more like a storming sea, and the gasping mouths all along the carapace began gnashing their needle teeth. The arms started moving faster, too, sawing through the arm with their sharp, thorny growths.
One of the arms, apparently slightly longer or maybe just more pissed off than the rest, snapped out at me. I jumped back as the pointed tip of the arm–this one was shaped like a cruel harpoon–rocketed through space and stopped, twitching, an inch from my face.
I was breathing hard, too hard. Short little breaths and gasps, punctuated by the straining, leather-tearing sound the arm made while trying to skewer me. It retracted, coiled, and snapped out again; I jumped back and tripped over my feet, sending me clattering to the ground and knocking the scant air I’d managed to collect in my lungs out to join the howling wind.
Standing up–faster than I should have, almost passed out from the head rush–I swung the sword at the arm while screaming. The sound gets lost to the wind, and the sword’s dull edge and cheap steel don’t cut the arm off like I was hoping. Instead, the blade bent, wrapped a little around the arm diagonally while issuing an awful screech.
Fuck.
“Fuck!”
I stood there panting for a while before pulling myself together enough to remember my other assorted tools. I pulled the flash of holy water out of my bag carefully and opened the corked top with my knife. Smelled even more sour once it was open, like the mountain air heightened the stench.
“Okay, beasty-fuck,” I muttered while pooling some of the water into my cupped hand, “how do you feel about this!”
My throw was off–I slipped a little on the ice–but suddenly the wind was at my back, blowing the spray of holy water wide and directly towards the troll. I was excited, waiting in eager anticipation for the thing’s surface to start boiling, bubbling, burning. I stayed that way for about five minutes, after which it was clear that the troll wasn’t at all bothered.
“Then what the fuck am I supposed to do!” I screamed, up into the sky. “What, I go punch the gods-damned thing? Get a good wind up and crack its crooked elbow till it breaks?”
The gods, as is their want and way, did not answer directly. My screaming was interrupted by–it was potentially the cause–of a small avalanche behind me. Snow and chunks of ice dropped from the peak above and collapsed in a pile on the road I’d come down, blocking any potential exit I might have had. One of the chucks of ice was even hard enough to catch the cobblestone side of the bridge at the right angle to chip and break the stone, sending both ice and masonry into the chasm below. All of which, happily, gave me an idea.
I unloaded everything from my bag into my coat and its various pockets, being careful to make everything reachable with either hand. Then, despite the smarting it caused my mittened hands, I rubbed the sturdy leather bag with the remaining holy water so its surface went hard. Backtracking, I pulled a good sized chunk of ice from the pile of debris left by the avalanche and packed it, along with a decent bit of snow, into the wet and rapidly freezing leather, until I was left with an–admittedly flimsy–flail.
Okay. This is going to work.
It did, but hellsbreath if it wasn’t awful work. One by one, I stalked up to the waiting arms protecting the troll’s bridge-facing side and bait them into trying to skewer me. Whatever muscle sent them propelling outward had a harder time drawing them back, so each thrust from the troll meant I could fling my ice-filled satchel into the arm and bring it down–snap!–onto whatever limb joints I could hit. Each arm took half-dozen tries before I managed to even land a hit that rendered the most dangerous part of each arm ineffective; after that, I moved onto the next limb, working my way back and forth across the bridge, moving slowly closer to the troll.
Three hours later, I’d rendered the exposed face of the troll to a dozen stubby, broken and limp limbs and a final short appendage near the edge of the bridge. The thing had a grisly, nasty looking hook at its tip, and while I probably didn’t need to bother with it, the thought of leaving it behind me, waiting, while I carved into the troll sent my already freezing back shivering.
The strike went wrong almost immediately. I over-swung, sending the weighted end of the satchel sailing over the arm. Only the cinched top of the bag made contact, and it was quickly pierced by the arm’s hook. “Fuck!” I shouted, propelling my weight backwards in hopes of retrieving my flail, only for the arm to lift up–the bag and me, dragging behind–and over, tossing me through the air towards the chasm below. I let go, but I was already moving, reaching out with my chafed and raw hands–
–and grabbing hold, not of the stone bridge, or my bag at the end of its ark, but the tip of the troll arm’s hook, driving it deep through both my right hand and its protective mitten.
I screamed wordlessly, dangling over the side of the bridge suspended from a cord of pain. It at least sharpened my mind a little, numbed as it was from hours of labour and cold. It was enough that I managed to get my left elbow up onto the cobblestone bridge side, lift myself up, and pull myself forward. The knife at my belt took seconds–painful, long, seconds–to pull from its scabbard, but once it was free I went to work, sitting with my back against the oily, wretched troll skin, sawing away at the arm above my head.
I managed to get through the gristly skin, and after hitting bone it only took a few strikes from the knife’s pommel to snap the arm away from its body. “Huuuuuuh fuckfuckfuck,” the words came out in one long string as I yanked the hook from my flesh, “oh gods-damn this thing!”
Some of my tunic served as a rough bandage, though the loss of even a little fabric made the wind’s chill that much worse. Luckily–given a certain definition of luck–the nearest place of warmth anywhere nearby was exactly where I intended to go.
Bent or not, the sword was still sharp enough, especially at its tip, to pierce the trollhide and slide into the foul smelling flesh. The sword’s blade firmly gripped in my gloves–the right one stained red and with olive coloured cloth (also rapidly staining red) peeking through its central hole, I went to work widening the wound in the troll’s surface and, slowly, digging my way into its flesh.
Troll blood smells like burnt hair, mold, and blood. Last part makes sense, other parts don’t. At first it gushed from the troll flesh and quickly left the deeping cavity the way I’d come from. The deeper I went, though, the more it pooled at my feet and coated my body in a layer of sticky red slime. After what might have been hours the warped sword was finally too dull to make progress, so I abandoned it for the knife; this slowed me down even further, as it made only small, ragged incisions.
It became apparent that, if I couldn’t force the blood to vacate the cavity I’d formed, it would soon drown me. The salt in my pocket posed a temporary solution at least. Areas of significant bleeding–arteries?–I rubbed with pinches of salt to encourage clotting and slow the bleed. It occurred to me, right before I finished carving into the troll’s central cavity, that in the process of trying to kill the beast I was actively preserving its life by slowing its blood-loss.
If troll’s can die from blood-loss, anyways.
Suddenly, my blade pierced through into empty space, and with one long downward pull and a swift forward kick, I opened a hallway into the troll’s central chamber. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be: a cage of thin bones circled a twitching, oblong seed, sprouting from a tiny patch of exposed cobblestone. Long, draping cords–muscle, nerves?–ran from the seed, wrapped around and past the bone cage, and joined the beating flesh of the troll. The entire interior space, the floor, ceiling, and walls, was covered with blinking, glaring eyes.
All different sorts of eyes–varied pupil shapes, many hued irises, small and large ones. A few even seem to look like human eyes. One of the closest to the heart looked just like mine. They all stared inward, at the seed.
They look angry, I started thinking, before reconsidering. They look hateful, they hate the gods-damned seed as much as I do. The muscles in my body started relaxing as I kept looking into the eye that looked just like mine. There was something seductive about the hate, the simplicity of it. I hated the troll too, but really, that was just a surface level problem. My problem was with people, with how they’d treated me, with myself. The hate I felt, it was being directed outward but the problem was inward, it ought to be inward. What am I doing here, I thought to myself, while my hand dragged the bloody knife up across my arm, my chest, my neck.
Such were the thoughts intruding into my mind before the eye I’d found myself entranced by blinked. Immediately, I noticed it looked nothing like mine–it has a damn goat’s pupil! I thought–and that my knife was now poised to slit my throat.
“No! Gah, fuck, nope, no.” I threw the knife across the chamber and it clattered down just beside the seed. Can’t look at the eyes, I thought while fishing around my coat for something, anything. Magic was no use–“repairing” anything was no help, and fire would just cook me and potentially leave the troll warmer but otherwise fine if the seed wasn’t detached first. I was almost out of salt, and the blood had started to gush behind me again; already a spreading pool was making its way across the chamber.
Nails. I had about fifty of them–I’d found a good price and had some change leftover from the boots–and there were only three dozen or so eyes in the room. I gently pulled a nail from the box tucked into my coat, and, trying not to look into the eye, drove it down into the pupil. It punctured, but the eye stayed open, still moving (if filling, slowly, with blood). Gods, what are these things made of?
Instead of just nailing each eye, I grabbed each of their eyelids–it took time and significant feeling around, since I couldn’t look directly at what I was doing–and nailed the lid shut, down into the eye itself.
It was grisly work, made harder by the influx of blood coming in behind me. Once I finished–the last eye was a massive thing, the size of my fist with a square pupil and multi-colored iris–a foot of blood was pooling in the small space. It was so thick wading through it took significant effort, so by the time I came up against the central bone cage protecting the heart I was exhausted. Inside, the seed and my knife.
Maybe I can just pound my head into the bones and they’ll break. It wasn’t a thought suggested by the now thankfully blinded eyes; so far, the only thing that had gotten me deeper into the troll was sheer stubbornness and a willingness to endure pain.
Instead of cracking my skull in order to break its ribs, I started driving my left boot, with its wood reinforced and en-runed toe–into the bone I was leaning up against. It eventually snapped and, in the process, one of the jagged edges tore open a gash that sent me to my knees. The blood pool had gotten higher–up to my kneeling chest–and it occurred for the second time that I might drown inside the troll before I could kill it.
Fuck that, I thought, I’m not dying in this bastard thing. I stood, and with a bellowing kick, cracked the next long rib-like bone in half and broke at least one of my toes.
“Godsdammit!” I screamed, tears welling in my eyes.
The gap made by the two broken bones was enough that, with some pulling and rearranging of their dangling halves, I managed to pull myself in towards the seed. The only thing connecting the troll seed to the flesh were the dangling, fleshy cords, which I was pleased to discover my knife could cut through given time.
Once the seed is disconnected, the troll will die, or at least the body will. When teams of professionals kill trolls, they normally burn them from the inside out with magic or chemicals designed to burn hot; set the seed alight, douse the outside of the troll heavily with pitch, and the whole thing dies and burns before the flesh can petrify and turn to stone. It works, but as mentioned before, it tends to start fires that spread.
I was inside the troll. The rapidly rising pool of blood alone, regardless of my broken toes, was enough that I wouldn’t be able to move quickly enough if I set the seed alight and ran. If I was to burn the seed, I would burn with it. If I cut the cords connecting it to the troll, I’d likely be stuck inside a crumbling stone cave on a bridge likely to collapse from the sudden weight.
I need a better option. I hadn’t necessarily planned to survive the attempt, but now that I was almost done, I wanted to live. I wanted to be the person who killed a damn troll, alone, and survived. I wanted to see the look on their faces, everyone who ever dismissed me as pointless and worthless.
The plan, a plan, at least, came to me suddenly, slumped around the troll seed. It was not a very good plan, but all things considered, it was better than drowning in foul-tasting blood.
I started by casting magic from one of the two scrolls. Not to heal myself: I repaired the troll, its wounded side and broken bones. Not entirely–I had enough control of the fluttering energy once it began to issue from my mouth to direct and end the process when I wanted–but just enough to make a new cage of bone and troll flesh around me and the seed.
Then I set to work cutting the cords on only one side. My plan was simple: the cords seemed to be where the troll’s muscle control came from–I’d been noticing them tense when the wind outside picked up, as if to ensure a steady grip onto the bridge. If it lost that control on one side of its body, it might lose grip on one side of the bridge. So much of it was already handing down into the chasm below that I just had to tip the scale.
It took less time than I thought. I wasn’t done cutting half the cords before I heard the sound of flesh grinding against stone–the troll was sliding, slowly, in the direction I’d wanted. This can work! I thought, resuming my sawing. Once I was finished on one side the chamber had a noticeable new axis, indicated by the blood pooling at a new low point. I got to work cutting the remaining cords, trying to go quickly: I needed to have every cord severed before the troll fell, ideally long enough it would start to petrify.
Halfway through the last cord, the noises around me started to intensify and the movement under my feet sped up. All at once, everything lurched–down was no longer under my feet, no longer towards the chambers side, but almost the inverse of before. We’re hanging over the side of the bridge, I thought, clutching onto the sides of the bone cage. The only thing supporting us, the only thing keeping the troll flesh alive, was the half-torn cord dangling beside me.
I wrapped my bloody right hand around the cord, pulling it taught, and with a swift motion cut the last remaining strands of flesh.
The entire chamber, the whole suddenly, finally lifeless and relaxed corpse of the troll, lurched and groaned. I could feel us descending in the pit of my stomach; first slowly as the remaining mass of rapidly hardening corpse on the bridge above whipped across towards the precipice, then, suddenly, faster, faster. We were in free-fall! All around me I could hear the sound of the troll starting to petrify, a rocky, brittle sound of blood turning to dust and flesh becoming silty rock.
I hope it’s enough, gods I hope this works. My last thoughts before we slammed into the chasm below were the scant few lines of the hymn I’d been reading earlier, misremembered and incomplete, but calming all the same. Then, finally, darkness.
Birdsong woke me up. I was still in darkness, partially buried in tiny pebbles and rock dust, and some larger chunks of stone blocked the sky above me. But not enough I can’t hear the birds! The thought was enough to energize my bloody and beaten limbs, enough for me to pull myself from the debris and thread my way through the now quite brittle bones. The heavier stones above me were challenging to move, but I went slowly, shifting them down towards the cavity below instead of upwards.
I started laughing, cackling madly, when I saw daylight peak through above me. I don’t know how much time had elapsed, not since I’d started tunneling into the troll–but it had been enough for at least one night to pass. It was dawn, as I climbed my way out of the stone debris that used to be a troll, clutching its hateful seed in my arms.
I placed it on a stray rock, a little ways away from the debris pile. There was nothing to say if it had been part of the troll or not, but all the same: when I used the second scroll, the one labelled “immolation of repugnance” the crackling, scalding stream of liquid flame that emerged from my outstretched hand shattered and turned to ash the rock just as well as the seed. I’m not sure if the first time I used magic had made me soil myself, like people say it will–I was far too covered in blood and soaked through with sweat to have noticed at the time. But the second time, I know I only smiled wide and laughed.
So what if I wouldn’t have evidence without the troll seed, I thought to myself happily, I know I killed the gods-damned thing myself. I turned to face the dawn, the sun hidden behind the mountain slopes on either side but its light setting the sky above aglow and golden. I killed a damn troll!
And now, I thought with some irritation, looking at my bleak and lonely surroundings, I have to walk the low way through the mountains, with a broken toe and bloody clothes. All the same, my victory and pride put a speed to my pace and warmth to my heart that more than made up for my painful limp and the radiating stink of troll’s blood coming off my ragged clothes.