Legend of the Cracked Life Monuments

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OOC: This is a tale of utter fiction. A story. The main characters are my creations. I don't know what the true history is, hence why it is a legend. I felt the life monuments needed a story to go with them. It is very long, so I have made it into several posts to give the eyes a break. And I have realized that it doesn't save indentations when I post, so it is formatted oddly. Sorry for that. I hope you enjoy.



“And what have you decided to name it?” Uriton stared into the campfire. The brilliant summer night sky ranged over his head, but he ignored it.

“Karys, if burdened with a girl… Karton, if cursed with a boy,” laughed Ariton. “For truth, boy or girl, either will be a joyous blessing.”

“Would you still name it a blessing after weeks of waking in the middle of the dark to tend to its cries? I can just see you now, nodding over your books and scrolls and smelling like sour milk.” Uriton’s lips were forced to curve into a friendly smile.

Ariton’s smile spread easier across his face than jam over bread. “All life is a blessing. By Cory’s light, you know that better than I!” Laughing good-naturedly, he nudged Uriton with his elbow, making his ale slosh over the rim of his mug and into the lap of Uriton’s clerical robes. A dark flush rose on Uriton’s cheeks that the darkness hid. “Oh, brother, I am so sorry…” Ariton started to rise from the fireside.

“No, brother,” rasped Uriton in what he hoped was a light tone. “The fire will dry it out soon enough. Besides, ale washes out easily… who knows? I may become thirsty later. You might have saved me from getting up and getting another mug.”

“Ah, Uri, so forgiving of your clumsy brother… here we are celebrating your advancement to the highest rank of your order, and I go and ruin your new robes… an oaf I am, no matter what you say, brother!” Ariton rummaged in their meal sack, pulling out a length of clean cloth. “Why ever did Krisin bond an clumsy oaf like me…” He knelt before his brother set to mopping up Uriton’s robe.

With unmasked sincerity, Uriton replied to Ariton’s bowed head, “I often wonder the same thing myself.” Ariton did not see the expression that now twisted Uriton’s face and merely chuckled as he worked over the wet robes.

Ariton then paused, still kneeling but not looking up. He twisted the ales soaked cloth. “Uri… thank you for coming. The midwife in town is the best in these parts, but she has none of your skills and I… I feel better with you here to help... The gods know how special Krisin is to me…” He trailed off.

Uriton placed a hand carefully upon Ariton’s head. “Anything for Krisin, Ari… anything.” Looking down on his brother’s bowed head, his face jiggled and struggled between expressing enjoyment and loathing.

Before more words were said the dim clangor of a bell filtered over the grassy hill. Ariton leapt nimbly to his feet. “It’s time! Ben’s breath, it’s time! And so soon!” Already he had the meal sack slung over his shoulder and was striding away by the time Uriton heaved his heavy bulk upright. He doused the fire with a nearby bucket and shuffled no less eagerly after his brother.

Uriton’s robes were drenched more by sweat than ale by the time he huffed his way to the simple house of the bell ringing’s origination. He pushes his mousy brown hair out of his eyes as he regarded it. A thatched roof. Wooden planks for walls. An earthen floor for the single room within. He could have provided with so much more, he thought. The form framed in the lamp lighted doorway then caught his attention. Lit from behind he couldn’t see the face but the rounded curves were unmistakable. His laboring heart managed an eagle’s flutter at the sight.

“Krisin.” he gulped for air as he approached the door. “Are you… is it time? Where’s Ariton?” Grasping her rounded belly Krisin turned aside and gestured Uri into the house. Her features became lamp lit, and he could not help but sigh inwardly at the face that so often haunted his thoughts. Her gently oval face had rounded only slightly as the months of impending motherhood passed. The upturned nose. The dark, smoky eyes. The honey blond hair usually twined in braids flowed loose and free about her shoulders.

Her welcoming smile tensed into a grimace as she waddled towards the only bed. Setting the bell on the side table, she panted, “He… used one of the teleport scrolls…to fetch… the midwife... in town” With a grunt she lowered herself carefully onto the bed and caught her breath. “He worked so hard to save for it, lacking the spell himself as he does. I do hope Junum is in town to open a portal back here, or else he and that midwife will have a long walk!” Krisin’s face broke into a sweet smile, barely tinged by the pain she was feeling. “I am so glad you are here with me, Uri. This would be harder to bear if I were all alone.”

Uriton felt his chest ache confronting that smile. He remembered well when he first saw it. The bazaar in Branishor had been full and busy that day, and he had been so much younger. Ariton had wandered off to watch the blacksmith at the forge while he, Uriton, shopped the new wares that had arrived from over the waters. The hot bazaar was crowded with people yammering and haggling all around him. Protected by his girth, Uriton barely felt people jostle and move around him. He had lifted a worn tunic from the table in front of him and saw a wicked looking dagger hidden beneath. Shaped like a fang from a beast, its hilt wrapped in simple leather, he had envisioned Ariton’s jealous face as he waved it at him. Uriton had daydreamed briefly, picturing himself standing atop a pile of slain beasts with that dagger clenched firmly in hand and the cheers of the townsfolk filling his ears. Dreamily, he reached for it, only to wrap his hands around a slender wrist reaching for the same blade. An angry retort filled had his throat and ended in a gurgle as he looked up and saw that same brilliant smile. The moment hung awkwardly in the air until Krisin giggled, “You can let go of my wrist now.”

Uriton had looked down and saw his fat fingers were still indeed gripping her. A thought suddenly thrummed through him - but I don’t WANT to let go. Shocked by its vehemence, he had let go reluctantly and with a sharp stab of loss. He managed to look back up into those dark eyes, so dark almost black. Contrasted with her honey hair he immediately placed her as a one of the Plains people. And she was still smiling at him, at him! When most girls laughed and sniggered behind their hands as he puffed and huffed through town. But not her. Then the thought had come unbidden – he wondered if her golden hair smelled like sunshine.

No, Uri decided then, he couldn’t let her go.

Krisin had quirked her fine brows at this point and set the dagger gently back onto the trade table. In a friendly tone she said, “Please, the dagger is yours. I can find another skinning knife elsewhere.” She turned to go. He quickly placed a meaty hand on her shoulder then snatched it back, “No… wait.” He tugged at his change pouch and dumped its contents onto the table. Swiftly he counted the coin and handed it to the merchant behind the table. He saw how her eyes had widened in gentle surprise as he took up the dagger he offered it to her hilt first. “I-I-I-it’s yours now…. I-I-I-,” he began to stammer. His hand burned where it had barely brushed her shoulder. It shook so hard he almost dropped the dagger.

But then Ariton had bounded back from the blacksmith, and all was undone. Ariton, with his slender form. Ariton, with his handsome face. When Uriton saw how different and brighter her smile for Ariton was, he wished he had taken that dagger and ran it through his own chest. But… wasn’t there that briefest of moments that he had wished it through Ariton’s chest?

That day did not seem so long ago. His hands had never stopped tingling, and so he chose the cleric’s path, hoping from constant use to heal people’s ills those hands would bring about his own healing. Hard he studied, training diligently, and over a short span of years he had rose quickly to the highest cleric level one could attain. Often he mused at how puissant his simple hands had become.

Uriton shook his head and eased the door shut behind him, shutting out the dark and the memories of that day. “Are you all right? You are a month early, right? Are you in pain? Do you need healing?” He tried to ignore the burning itch in his palms.

Krisin laughed lightly, “Of course there’s pain! I’ve not known child birthing to be without it. No, the pain is natural. I’ll bear it as the gods intend.” A hand flew to her belly as a gasp escaped her lips. Her face tightened as the contraction passed. She moved as if to lie down on her bed.

He waddled swifter than a moose to her side. Eagerly he said, “Here, let me help you…” He wheezed as he bent over, hands reaching for her feet. Smoothly they rose up and away from his grasp.

Grinning down at him, “Pregnant and ready for birthing, yes, but I can still manage to lay myself into my own bed, Uri.” Krisin’s breathing became rapid as she rubbed her massive stomach. “Oh, how it quickens to be born!”

Twisting his hands in on themselves, he stood over her. “Please… I … I can’t bear to see you in such pain, Krisin. Please… let me… let me lay my hands on you and-,” he stopped at the look that was now on her face. It was if a candle had been blown out. Chips of obsidian regarded him now.

“Don’t. Touch. Me.”

He recoiled as if slapped. He opened his mouth in protest and looked down at his hands. They hovered above her, quaking with desire. She had ascertained their true intent, even as he strove for all these years to hide it from himself. He watched those traitorous hands curl into fists and return to his sides. Backing away he sat heavily into a chair that groaned beneath his weight. Krisin watched him retreat with sweat standing at her brow. The contractions began to occur at faster intervals, her pain shining more clearly on her face, but those eyes never left him.

An infinity later Ariton returned with the midwife.

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Uriton walked dazedly at the midwife’s side back to town. The old hag muttered and kept company with herself. The birth had been difficult, and there had been a lot of blood. The hag may have been the best, but none would have known it with her barely coherent murmurs to push. Over and over Ariton had asked Uriton to ease her pain, and Krisin would only smile at Ariton and pat his hand, “No my dear, I’ll have it the way the Gods meant me to.” Her gaze never wavered towards Uriton the whole time.

Marcs passed before they reached the town limits. As they neared the center of town, a shimmering blue mist appeared – a portal formed and Ariton fell through it. Sobbing and wild-eyed he lifted his head up from the dirt road. Spying Uriton and the midwife he half-moaned, half-screamed, and scrambled towards them.

“Please! Save her Uri! The bleeding… the salves aren’t stopping it!” He fell against Uriton’s chest, slathering it with woe.


They were too late.

Ariton stayed by her side, brushing Krisin’s hair back from her still face. A few moments passed. Quietly he asked, “Why is she still here?” Ariton looked up and down her inert body. He let go of her hand and turned to Uriton. “Why is she still here?! She should be reforming!” Panicked, he grabbed the front of Uriton’s ale spattered robe. “WHY IS SHE STILL HERE!?”

Uriton stared into his brother’s grief. He heard his clerical training mechanically, automatically, rise up out of his throat like it had so many times when he had to console others, “She died naturally. Not through fighting or being attacked. Not from magical harm. There… there is no reforming when they pass into Cory’s light naturally.”

Ariton did not release his white-knuckle grip. Bewildered, “She’s not coming back to me?”

Yanking his brother’s hands off his robe, Uriton snapped, “No, not ever!”

Ariton’s grief overcame him and his eyes rolled up into his head and he fell to the ground like a sack of water. Uriton looked at his brother’s unconscious form. “What woman would want to come back to you?” He turned his gaze to the blanket draped form on the bed. The yawning emptiness of his love-struck heart was being filled with rage. He snarled at Krisin’s body, “How dare you… when I could have saved you. To tell me no…me!” His visage became unspeakably twisted as his chest heaved, “ You knew you wouldn’t come back…You KNEW it. I wanted you to come back…I would’ve taken care of you!! I would’ve been such a better bondmate for you than my sniveling weakling of a brother ever could be…” Unaware of his wet sobbing, he tromped over to the bed and stared down. “Natural it was…” A light of madness crept into his eyes. “So be it. Natural. For everyone. No one will ever come back. No one will ever rise again. Just like you.” His trembling hand reached out to caress a lock of her honey hair like Ariton had, but the memory of her obsidian glare and words of command stayed him. Instead he leaned close he whispered, “I’ll show you… I’ll show them all… how unnatural death can be.” Grinning insanely, he turned and stormed out of the house and onto his new path.

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A cleric’s mind is one of determination, of intention, of concentration. It is not here and now to tell of the will and the way the power of blessings are focused and summoned, or even where they come from. For Uriton, it helped him to imagine himself like a water pitcher filled to brimming, to be filled with the argent, clean, healing beauty of Cory’s Light. By imagining, he could better concentrate on any healing needing to be done, imagining the healing light pouring out of his hands.

He needed to be filled with power now. Stomping away from Krisin’s deathbed, Uriton summoned his training and all his skill and imagined himself filling with the darkness of the night around him. Filling with the stench of rotten things. Brimming with the eldritch energy of black. In the back of his mind, he heard someone laughing.

The first monument was in small, well maintained clearing. Just the other day, Uriton had paused reverently at the monument’s perimeter and muttered prayers to Cory, before entering it’s circle. Tonight there was no pause, no hesitation. He purposefully laid his hands upon the ancient stone. His training allowed him to feel the throb of energy coursing through it, pure and brilliant. Such a feeling would have made his spirit soar, now his spirit howled in agony. Momentarily he faltered. What was he doing? A life of training… but his resolve grew. That training had been for her. And it came to nothing. Now this, this would be for her as well. The blackness welled up inside of him, and being the vessel he was, he started to pour it into the innocent light of the monument. There was resistance. He was blocked, and his face alternated between anguish and righteous fury.

Suddenly, Ariton’s voice whispered to him. “You can do this, brother.” It was Ariton’s voice, but far colder and deader than Uriton had ever heard it before. He whipped his head around, hands leaving the monument. He saw nothing but trees and shadows.

“What?! Ari!?!” he cried.

“You can do this, brother,” said the voice that sounded like Ariton again. “If you really wanted to. You’re the most powerful cleric the world has ever known, and you don’t even know it. But you let her stop you from proving that, didn’t you?”

“No, that’s not how it was, it-,”

“Now, now. Don’t lie to your own brother. *I *know you are. You were always better than me, and I knew you were hiding it from me. You were so kind and humble to do that, but in the end, I still bonded Krisin, and not you. Maybe if you had shown your power earlier, with less restraint…”

“I-I-I- couldn’t.. Not without…”

“Not without what? Getting your order angry at you? Not that you defied them, but that you can do things, dare to do things, they cannot? Or maybe you’re not the man I thought you were, brother.”

“Don’t say those things! Don’t-,”

“Or what, brother? You’ll sweat on me? Prove it. Prove to me how I shouldn’t say what a disgraceful, fat, disgusting, boring brother you really are. Prove to me that Krisin isn’t better off dead than nuzzling in your arms! PROVE IT!”

A tortured scream erupted from Uriton’s throat as he slammed his hands back down onto the monument. This time he didn’t let the seething darkness within him pour into the unforgiving stone, he pushed it. His hands began to glow unhealthily with tendrils of black ichor dripping from them. He pushed and hammered against the holy barrier with the force of his will. Nothing changed. The monument remained as pure as when it was settled there. Suddenly, Krisin’s smiling face came unbidden to his mind, the sweet look she had that day in the bazaar. Sobbing openly Uriton roared, “FOR YOU!!!” and focused his darkened will into the monument.

He felt something give. Something bent. Something cracked within the monument. Runnels of his black energy began streaming into the life monument. He felt it resist, trying to drown out this violation, but it was too much too fast. He was too much too fast. The pure energy he had initially felt was now tainted and quickly becoming poisoned. The glow from his hands lit his face in harsh, ugly shadows, his eyes wide and lost in the sensation of power, lips pulled back in a skeletal grimace. He felt the monument become full of darkness under his fingertips.

Without realizing it, softly he uttered the words he never before had to strength to say out loud.

“I love you, Krisin.”

A sonic boom erupted in the clearing and Uriton was bodily thrown back from the monument. Coughing, he struggled to sit up. Fine, gray powder drifted through the air. Clutching his chest and breathing hard, he struggled to his feet and stumbled towards the monument. It was split jaggedly through the middle with the ground littered with small shards and pebbles. Warily, Uriton extended his hand and laid it upon it.

It was still. Silent. Empty of both the light and the dark.

Uriton’s smile was full of something else entirely.

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Word spread slowly at first. Loved ones heading off to battle and never returning. Magical blasts that had inadvertently killed ones experimenting with them. Simple hunting raids turning costly. The dead were remaining dead, no matter how many prayers were said over them. Then more reports were heard of the ground shuddering and the sound of thunder that was all too close. The cracked life monuments were discovered. Some people were still reforming only to have their neighbors scream at them, screaming why, why had they reformed, and their loved ones did not? Balthazar’s name was whispered more than once. The temples and small altars were becoming crammed with people imploring for answers. Some of the foolish remained foolish and went heedless into the forests, only to have their relatives weep over their mangled bodies.

Then, word of a man was heard. A solitary man in tattered robes with a leering face that was only seen at night. Balthazar in human form, many declared. Houses were shuttered and many refused to leave them. The description of this fabled Balthazar-Made-Flesh whispered, crawled, flew into the ears of everyone living in the lands. Eventually the description fell from the lips of a wary traveler sitting in an empty inn into the ears of his drinking companion. The companion’s face crumpled as it had so often lately and he wept into his ale.

“Oh, Uri,” sobbed Ariton. The infant cradled in his arms began to wail.

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They found him at the last monument. It was still smoking from being sundered. Uriton stood in front of it with his chest heaving. His head was cocked to one side and he nodded intermittently. He didn’t seem to hear them as they approached.

“You will be judged for this!!” challenged the burly leader who wielded a sword.

Uriton turned his head over his shoulder and stared at the gathered crowd of men. Slowly he turned his massive bulk to face them. His cleric robes were now bled gray of all colour, his hair hung matted and shaggy in his feverish eyes. A sickly grin crossed his pasty face as he spread his arms wide, hands glowing obscenely.

“Come judge me then.”

A short time later Uriton surveyed the mangled bodies strewn about him. His chest rose and fell at a steady even pace. His pudgy hands hung limply at his sides despite the sickly powerful glow emanating from them. As he approached the first inert form his hands began to glow more fiercely and filled the clearing with their nauseating radiance.

“Nowhere to go now, nowhere to rise…” Uriton’s grin threatened to split the very skin of his face open as he looked down at his feet. What used to be a young man laid there, barely more than a boy, but foolish enough to bear arms against him. He laid his hands upon its inert chest.

It shuddered slightly.

Suddenly Uriton found himself yanked straight up into the air by a tremendous force. He screamed and flailed his arms wildly. Any glow was immediately extinguished by his panicked cries. He found himself miles above the ground, staring at the beauty of the green hills, the brown mountains, and far away blue oceans. He gaped at the world spinning below him as he himself was slowly turned about and set upright in the middle of palm the size of a village. Two faces were considering him. The stars from thousands of suns shone in their eyes. Their faces were young yet timeless. But Uriton knew them. Carved into hundreds of statues, motifs, altars, he knew their faces and shuddered.

One narrowed his eyes at Uriton. “Balthazar’s been here. I see the tracks on his mind.”

The other nodded his head. “He still chose to do what he did. Yet Balthazar’s influence cannot be denied.”

The first one’s gaze squinted further and he spoke to Uriton. “Stones can be replaced. He has a backpack full of them. Lives however, cannot. You were wrong to try to give life, no matter how awesome your power. That is not your place or purpose. For that, you are judged. May you find the peace you long sought after.” He bounced Uriton lightly on his palm, and Uriton found himself shooting across the sky towards the sun. How beautiful the castle is! echoed in Uriton’s mind before all was washed in light.

The second one rummaged around in his backpack.

“Are you going to replace them all?” the first said.

He shook his head. “I will leave the broken ones as reminders.” He pulled from his backpack a large stone that shone in the sun. “And new ones in new places.”

The first one paused, then spoke, “What should we do to keep them from getting so strong again?”

The other had a far off look cross his features. “Watch and wait. Uriton shall be the last. And they shall find the way to stop themselves. Of this, I know.”

The first mused to himself as a galaxy seemed to explode in his eyes. “Ah, yes. I see it coming to pass as well. We will watch and wait.”

The ground barely trembled as the first new life monument was placed in the center of a busy harbor town.


***THE END***