KINGDOM OF THE STONE -- a Wattpad featured novel

Chapter One

Macander choked and put down his waterskin while Theris laughed and slapped him on the back. At ten years of age Macander should have been too young to endure the z'taema, but he adored his brother Theris and would not be left behind. Naipho had only relented because everything Macander did seemed blessed by the High Lord himself.

"Truly? Have we returned?"

Naipho pointed to the mountain peak towering over them from the southeast and chuckled. "That is where the High Lord lives. Only the Simarrah, the promised one, will find the path of return."

Karux stared at the mountain, looking for a path up its sheer stone sides. The weight of its holiness bore down on him as if the High Lord himself were leaning over Archetor's slopes, peering at him through the clouds.

"Rest time is over," Arrain, Karux's father, called out. "Let's get moving. We want to make it to the spring before dark."

The men started moving the more reluctant boys while others like Theris and Karux rushed to the front. Amantis, Theris' odious cousin from the "civilized" tribes between the two rivers caught up to them.

"Guess what I shall do?"

Karux and Theris ignored him.

"What will you do?" Macander asked.

Theris flung Macander a dark look that made him flinch.

"I shall climb the mountain itself to its very summit and knock on the door of the Most High."

"Arrogant," Karux muttered and picked up the pace.

"Do you truly think you could be the Son of the Mountain?" Macander asked.

"Who knows?" Amantis said casually as if what he had proposed was nothing more than a fishing trip, rather than the height of sacrilege. "It could be any one of us. Is it not said that someday one will come down from the mountain to lead us all back to the High Lord's home?"

"But you?" Theris challenged.

Amantis shrugged. "One must go up before one can come down. If no one else will do it, why not me?"

Karux heard the conceit in his voice. He didn't have to look back to see the smug smile.

          -=====|==

Later that hot and dusty afternoon as the lowering sun perched on the western foothills, the travelers came upon a small, cold spring rushing from a pile of well-worn rocks. The men set up camp and started a fire while many of the boys played in the spring's ice-cold waters. They ate their meal and watched the light fade from the sky. The men told their sons stories of their adras, their fathers, and the lives they lived when the Pelahin tribe still wandered the hill country from the stormy coastal shores of the northeast along the arc of the Pelahi Mountains to the fae-haunted forests of the south. They told their stories of struggle and deprivation with such delight that Karux began to wonder if they regretted having settled down in semi-permanent camps in the northern valleys and surrounding foothills.

As night fell, the fire burned down to glowing coals and the stars wheeled in the sky. The talk turned to older tales. Uncle Naipho recounted how Andrae and Cynae, the first man and woman, were lured from the High Lord's home upon the mountain, condemning all the tribes of man to wander forever homeless across the world, unable to find the path of return.

"Forever? But what of the Simarrah?" Macander asked.

"Well, not forever, only until the day of judgment when the world is brought under subjection to the Lord of the Mountain. Then he'll send the Son of the Mountain...."