Tall Tales: The Nymphs' Symphony (Scott T Beith's Tall Tales Saga Book 1)

by Scott Beith

  There was a vast underground connection of igloos and tunnel-ways beneath this town, all webbing into one giant nexus of ice caves throughout the town. But that was hardly obvious looking across its plain wintery surface. To be fair to these villagers, on the surface their home was virtually unnoticeably to the untrained eye, and I, myself, wouldn’t have been able to see anything other than their wooden townhall ski-lodge if their underground network hadn’t already been described to me by Tamara a fair while ago.

  In a different situation, I could’ve sight seen all day long, explored the ice pockets and ghost lakes underneath the surface, but we were stranded in the centre of an open hill, and the wind was so freezing cold it was literally sucking away the heat straight from the cores of our body. We had no choose but to abandon the basket and stomp through the snow towards the main timber lodge. Our teeth chattering as we passed rugged up children building snowmen of their own.

  We rushed inside the lodge, closing the doors as quickly as we could. Finding a warm cabin fire already it, along with a whole farmers’ market set up, filled by a group of elderly eskimo nymphs, who came up to us with blankets in a confused but welcoming invitation. These eskimos inspected us briefly before placing knitted blankets over our shoulders to help with our shivering. Serendipitous to our dilemma, there was an linen and fabrics stall right by the entrance door on the first floor of this two-story establishment. And it just so happened to have all the supplies we needed for our trip.

  An old male merchant selling gloves, jackets and snow boots directed us over to him with a silent wave. “How much for all of it?” Anara asked him, pulling out the last of the gold coins she had.

  “We don’t accept that here,” the merchant said. “We have no need of it,” he stated, offering another vital clue of Midas’s involvement here, as only in the presence of our former king did we ever have a time of which gold and metal was no longer valuable in trade.

  “What would interest you then?” I asked.

  The merchant inspected us. “Do you have any spare fabric or food?” he enquired politely.

  Anara pointed upwards. “There’s a giant basket out there you can keep,” she then offered, which was more than enough to pay for the items we needed.

  While passing her own coat over to the merchant, Anara took out the tiara from its inner lining, turning it invisible as she hid it from them and discreetly placed it under her arm while simultaneously combing out the snowflakes from thin coat jacket and her hair.

  On first impression, the frost nymphs seemed like nice people, but that didn’t necessarily mean they didn’t have connections with Midas, so it would have been foolish of her to let them know someone from the royal family was among them. As also, in my belief, I think hiding her crown was something Anara did because she didn’t want the merchants to see it and think it was for sale. Regardless of how bad things were between her and her mother, that tiara was a sentiment of the close relationship they’d once shared. And just like my new sparkly moon pendant locket. To her it was her most treasured possession.

  Once we were geared up in our new winter attire, we headed outside to begin our hike, knowing we had to move quickly to avoid Vallah getting frostbite on her limbs. And so, descending down the snowy mountain slope, we passed along the side of townhall and its thick housing snow mounds, noticing the garden of pine trees, which had countless diamonds encrusted into the bristling caps of their pointy tree stalks and branches.

  “How beautiful are they?” Anara said to me, both our eyes fixed on the glowing trees. Looking at their version of street lights with awe; each tree carved and socketed with gemstones, light illuminating out of the crystals via the hollowed trees. It was a clever integration of plumbing and circuitry that must have gone all the way through the roots and into the volcanic rock beneath our snow-covered boots.

  Of various fluorescent colours, each tree glowed with a red, green and silvery gold glimmer resembling a very similar glow to that of the Nyx statues back home. However, I believed the village’s version to be more for general lighting during storms than any actual form of spiritual awareness.

  Behind consistently thick grey clouds, there was a severe lack of sunlight, and yet those trees were utilising some clever technique of reflecting the light off the volcano’s molten core to compensate for their never-ending night time. A place deep down that we were going to have to skim very close to if we wanted to reach The Crystals Caverns by the end of actual day.

  “You know, a peace treaty must have been established here between the fire and frost clans for something like this to exist,” I speculated to Anara, looking at the clever craft of those trees still lighting our way towards the glacier’s closest underground cave pocket, knowing that the nymphs’ eternal tribal feuds must have ended just for those trees to exist before us.

  By the looks of it, these stalks were designed with the ability to accommodate both tribes mutually, providing the fire nymphs with a free flowing water supply from the melting snow as it drained down the thinly hollowed tree shafts. While in return, the light and heat from the lava was pushed up and out from these trees like vents, allowing the frost clans to roam outside despite their winter-land cold and darkness. In turn, keeping them and us safe from all yetis and fierce arctic predators notorious for their insatiable carnivorous appetites.

  And so stopping at the final gorge of the glacier’s cave entrance, we looked down to evaluate the path ahead of us. We knew we were about to head into dangerous territory. The underground networks were greatly uncontested all the way up until we reached the hot springs, where the fire-nymph clan resides, and being a naturally constructed ice fortress. The inside caverns of this gorge had disastrous drop off points, with sharp and slippery ridges, and icicles that could fall from the roof and slice through a body like a sword.

  Regardless of the dangers we faced, though, we had no choice but to suck up our remaining courage and get Vallah into the warm while she still had feeling in her webbed-up feet. Anara and I kept in front of her, carefully stepping down the icy rock steps that led into the mountain, exercising every muscle as we fought to kick our feet deep into the icy snow on the rocks, continuing our slick slow voyage down into the dark pit beneath.

  Walls of ice sealing us like a tomb as we followed slopes of the cave until they eventually warmed and flattened into dense oily granite rock. Ice thawing as the stench of brimstone and ash entered the darker areas of the one underground passageway. It was pitch black and open, with the only light we had coming from my luminous moon pendant. I used what little was shown on Midas’s mine map to direct us forward.

  Before long, we were chasing another light source: a faint red and orange tinge of fog beginning to appear further down the tunnel, much closer inwards – towards the mountain’s hazardous mantle core.

  Ordinarily, a place like the one I saw before me would have been the stuff of pure nightmares and madness – a breeding ground for all the dreadful thoughts of what might be hiding out in the blind spot all around us – but something was definitely different. My necklace and nightlight had brought with it a fleet of soldiers for me to play with – shadows cast on every wall were becoming as thick and three dimensional as an army of the dead.

  Lifeless remnants for me to order and control to remove ice shards ahead of us that would have impaled Anara, Vallah and me if we’d walked into them without knowledge of them being there.

  And as strange as it was to see what I was capable of with just a little help from Akoni and his father’s special science, what was even more astounding was just how strong these images could become. My own shadow, in particular, was as solid as a statue and moved as if it had a mind of its own, scouting the halls ahead before I even thought to command it. It was as if that dark servant was suddenly a warrior covered in thick and spiky iron plated armour. Only ever diminishing and weakening into mist when it stepped into small pockets of light, its body slowly deteriorating as it led us towards the orange glare of lava
trenches, and the cavern’s eventual opening via the last town we would see before reaching the mid-mountain mining shafts, where the boys would already be.

  Losing my shadow inside an encapsulating mist of hot steam that arose and encompassed the waxy greenhouse garden inside the cave’s opening, we walked through even thicker foggy smoke as the foul vapours of brimstone boiled consistently along the sideline of the entrance, most of those lava spurts covered from sight due to a strange lush grove of ferns and dripping waterfalls and wellsprings centred in the middle of the cave hole.

  There were dangerous pocket rivers of molten rock everywhere, except for the very middle of the cave. Bucket loads of water poured down from the cave’s roof like a waterfall, pouring into wellspring pools, leading to the thick sauna we found ourselves in.

  In the cave, it was much warmer and more welcoming than the freezing ice tunnels and glacial caverns we came in from. But as a result of the heat emitted inside that large dome-sized cavern pocket, sweat was drizzling off everything! Off the stalks of trees, off the ferns beside the pools, and even our arms and face as we remained still covered under the rugs we had just bought, the two of us having to discard them as we walked into the multiple island oases spawning in the hot springs all around us.

  The heat and humidity was so intense, it had us yearning for the freezing cold we’d just escaped from.

  Without any further use for it, Anara and I abandoned our winter gear by the entrance, discarding the bulk of it beside some prickly ferns near the first few boiling water pools and lava ponds. It felt like such a waste of resource, but I took some pride in knowing if we didn’t come back for it, it would at least benefit whoever decided to claim it.

  We waved to a bulky and confused half-naked tribal chieftain as he put on his feathered blue and red hat and pushed through the thick shrubbery to come and cautiously inspect us. As a leader, he was a great deal younger than I would have assumed – he couldn’t have been a decade older than either me or my princess.

  He eventually opened one hand out wide and bowed towards us in a humble invitation, before waving for us to follow him towards the more inviting centre shrubbery of his humid village town.

  He brought us through multiple bushes that kept us safe from the trenches, we headed towards a centre campfire – of all things, trying to appear as friendly and non-threatening as possible while his tribe all came out of their thin wooden huts to examine us and our spider. Every one of them was bald and tattooed, wearing very little over their hairless and darkly-tanned skin.

  And yet, they all stared at us like we were the odd ones out. Whether they were boys or girls, young or old, they were all tough and muscular individuals, but were smiling graciously in invitation towards us. More than happy to hear our story and have us join them in their Saturday morning relaxation.

  They were an odd and isolated culture, to say the least. Many of the children were sitting by a stone idol of old nymph worship, covering themselves in the mud from its base, seeking to protect themselves from the heat and light emitted from the lava pits spotted about the far edges of this grove.

  Anara gave them one of Jax’s souvenir jars of honey in a humble gesture of friendship.

  The villagers spoke in a strange foreign tongue neither Anara or I could understand, but we smiled and hoped it was positive, watching as the feathered tribal elder opened the jar and dipped his finger into the mixture. The apparent chieftain grinned towards us as he nodded his head in appreciation of the gift, putting down his feathered hat before letting out a low-pitched scream and dived into the middle wellsprings and water fountain spa that linked all the tiny hut-sized islands together.

  The rest of the villagers followed in his lead as they too sprinted into the spotted pools around their large encampment. The mud-covered children were laughing as they started pushing and nudging at us to jump in like everyone else.

  “Anara, what do we do? How do we say no without offending them?” I asked as at least four kids continued to tug at us, their pulls ludicrously strong as they began forcing us closer and closer to the edge of the tropical spa the rest of the villagers were dipping in and out of.

  “Just follow my lead,” she responded, first to give into the muddy children’s persistent pushing. She mimicked the funny high pitched scream the tribal leader had made, before jumping into the pond. I quickly threw off my thin coat, before being dragged in right after her.

  As for some short time, we sat and soaked in those wellsprings, trying to communicate through pointing and smiling. Stuck watching the kids play as they put mud on Vallah, who was sitting near the flat land area, with threaded beads weaved into braids that were tied into her fuzzy front leg hairs. Meanwhile Anara and I tried to negotiate our way out of the villagers’ pleasant hot springs. We didn’t want to risk offending them by refusing to stay, but neither could we wait for too long before getting back on with our journey.

  “We really don’t have time for this,” I whispered to Anara as she leaned further into the bubbling water of this spa, after a good thirty minutes or more had passed.

  “They are not going to want us to leave until we at least look relaxed, so just start pretending, alright? Then we can ask them where to go and not be rude,” she replied, feigning a yawn before falling back further into the warm wellsprings, giving in as she placed her head under the overhead rock’s leaking glacial waterfall.

  “And how do we ask?” I said, following her, just as clingy to her as the children were to Vallah.

  “Not sure. But you’ve got ten minutes to figure it out before they invite us into their mud baths,” she stated rather unhelpfully, watching the villagers coalesce. “But I have the utmost confidence in you,” she then added.

  And just like Anara’s prediction, ten minutes later we ended up in mud pits, in the tribal leader’s island spa, surrounded by two other families that must have been related to the tribal leader. I had had enough, but maintaining a civil politeness, I jumped into the centre wellspring to get clean, and found myself dry virtually a minute after getting out. I went back to my coat to collect my things, grabbing the map and pen before approaching a village elder and gesturing for him to point the path that would take Anara and me to the Crystal Caverns.

  Eventually getting him to point out the way. Only to pull Anara up and bow in thanks as we waved goodbye to the unfussed tribesman, who waved back before returning to their bathing, sun-baking and swimming, too relaxed to care that we were leaving.

  From there, we grabbed Vallah from the children’s tugging arms and continued onwards with haste, the new dirt path we were following eventually taking us out of the cave and further inwards towards the core.

  By the outskirts of another tunnel’s opening, a whole old mining precinct, which had, at the very end of it, a dark old elevator shaft that looked like it could take us to the more central chambers. We headed towards it, passing a railway station, a whole cluster of brick and steel factories, and many other tunnels. This main tunnel looking as if it were a street of abandoned engineering chambers many modern industrialists, like Akoni, would have dreamed of getting to visit.

  We didn’t have time for sightseeing, though, and so continuing our descent, we reached that old rundown wire elevator.

  Neither of us had much trust in its operation, but we got inside it all the same, the elevator’s churning and clunking had spooked us greatly upon our scary descent down. But thankfully, the elevator’s rusty mechanics managed to roll us down the dark shaft with relative ease.

  We stopped at its starting base floor, the cold breath of mountain wind returning to the air, due to a large cracked entrance gap in the mountain’s side, all three of us finally arriving beside the giant spiky cog doors of the Crystal Caverns front entrance.

  The cloudy white and grey skies were lighting up the front entrance cave hole as we took to our next and final challenge, working out how we were to pass the giant metal blockade made up of multiple lead wheels on rails that seemed to
block any further passage into the mountainside, the three circular metal cog doors acting like an impenetrable vault, as on that same lingering inspection, both Anara and I were amazed to have briefly overlooked and gazed passed the one sight we gone all this way to retrieve.

  It seemed Arlo and Akoni were still sitting there by this doorway, drenched in drying mud and cold thawing ice from their mountain climb. They hadn’t even noticed Anara and me walking up to inspect this door directly behind them, clearly too exhausted from their travels.

  The prince, for one, wasn’t even bothering to look up from the floor as he rested his back upon the very door they wished to open. He seemed to think that if he sat quietly in silence, his smart friend Akoni would uncover the key to opening this door. I saw the irony in that, considering the sword he had lying beside him was being completely overlooked by the two of them.

  Arlo finally caught a glimpse of us, jumping up in surprise. He and I remained in a silent stare with each other, while Akoni kept his eyes on the door, trying to figure out how to open it, oblivious of Anara and my arrival. He looked a great deal more tired and frustrated than Arlo, but seemed overly determined to decipher the risque hieroglypic illustrations along the keyhole of the most outer steel cog. The wheels were built into a slit of the mountainside, and it seemed the only way to roll one open was to move the one beside it.

  “How did you...” Arlo began to speak, too bewildered to even finish his sentence. He tapped Akoni’s leg, the brainiac finally turning around to face us, his face morphing into the same bewildered expression as Arlo’s. “There is no physical way you climbed that cliff just after us,” he said rather rudely. “Nope. No way. Not with that baby spider carrying the two of you. It’s impossible. How are you here?”

  “Well, we didn’t need to climb up the cliff,” Anara retorted to her brother. “We thought it would be easier to get a lift to the top and work our way down, rather than climbing up,” she witted. “Doing that would have been so exhausting,” she then stated in a funny but demeaning manner. “And why are you two so muddy?” she then asked, pinching her brother’s shirt sleeve, which was covered in dried mud.