Challenge #01707-D246: And Hardships Unnumbered
(On doing something (in the original a work of magic) usually considered extremely difficult, if not impossible, that the speaker mastered to the point it was near-trivial under [Name], but hasn't done for years)
(said fondly)
[Name] will reform from the ash of her own pyre and skin me if I fuck this up. -- RecklessPrudence
After the disaster that flattened the Forests of Ee, death covered the land like a blanket. The waters soured, and any living thing that entered the lowlands for an entire season choked and died. Winter wrapped the lands in even worse, and the survivors who eked a living out of the highlands were loath to re-enter what had once been a fertile valley.
Tebnir the Little had undertaken the long journey to find Salamer. The only surviving Mage who knew the Life Spells. Mages were peculiar sorts, preferring a life alone in distant towers. Staying away from people and studying. Or living their whole lives in libraries and not actually doing anything. But, once in a while, they could be swayed. If someone had a desperate plight. Or an interesting find. Or enough gold.
Tebnir had two of those things. So she spent a year walking to Salamer's tower. With hope in her heart and a seashell she had found in the mines. Pressed into a rock. From the top of a mountain. It had to be interesting enough to capture a scholar's interest. Or so she hoped. She certainly didn't have gold.
When she reached Salamer, the Mage was at the top of her tower. Working on some kind of device made of cogs and handles and little wheels with numbers on them. Salamer was so into her work that she didn't notice Tebnir passing her things until Tebnir handed over the rock with the seashell in it.
"Oh. Hello," said Salamer. "Is this for me?"
Dumbstruck, Tebnir could only mutter, "...'es."
"One doesn't see a seashell in a rock every day. There's chalk cliffs by the seasides, but... This isn't chalk. This is dolomite. Interesting. Where did you find it."
"In a mine up a mountain." Tebnir had faced all kinds of horrors on the way here, most of them were her own mind's creation. But here? Facing this Mage? It was the only time her lips and her legs trembled from fear.
Salamer had old eyes, even though she had a young face. They looked all over Tebnir as if assessing a sickly lamb in the markets. "Tell me why you came here. It isn't to give me a stone from a hole in a mountain."
Words spilled out of Tebnir. About the valley of death that had once been the valley of spring. How one of the mountains had spewed ash for fifteen days and everything in the valley had choked and died. How not even flies went there, now. How her people were struggling to make ends meet and how they all wanted the fertile valley and the clean water back.
"Ah. You would like me to work life magic on an entire valley?"
Tebnir fell mute again. "...'esplease."
Salamar got up from her desk, and started packing half her shelves into a small bag that could not possibly hold it all. "I must have done so many nature revivals under old Fesrir. Got to be old hat, after a while. Mind you, it's been years." She consulted some pages in a thick book that she subsequently packed. "Fifty years. If I mess this up, now, Fesrir will reform from the ash of her own pyre and skin me with my own teeth."
Tebnir almost soiled herself. Mages were powerful. "Is... there anyone else? Who could help?"
Salamar was looking speculatively at a pair of shoes, and excavated a pair of socks to go with them. "Put these on. You've been walking for a year to get to me. Reaching anyone else would be a convoluted quest you don't need. I can get some horses for us at the nearest town, but those will help your blisters heal. Might make more blisters at first. How many shoes have you had?"
"Including these? Two." Tebnir flipped each of them up to show the Mage what she was counting.
"Oh dear," muttered Salamer. "Good thing those socks have a healing spell knitted into them. You're going to have more pain for a while, but those are good boots and you can keep them. Even after our journey back to your valley."
For the first time in three years, Tebnir smiled. Fortune was finally changing for the better.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / DaveAllen]
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