Ralan, Gramsci, and the Mountainminer Chest (Gnostem #1)

Please enjoy this fun little fantasy story - keep dialectics in mind please

Three-quarters of the way up Mount Ruskin teetered precariously a cobblestone-and-wood house in which Ralan Mountainminer playfully reached for a cat’s tail. The cat’s acrobatic dodge would have you think it a pacifist. Don’t let the cat fool you; she’s has fierce claws and a low tolerance for bullshit.

“Gramsci, must you evade my love eternally?” Ralan asked.

While Ralan spoke in a deep tone, with the vernacular of a grown dwarf, the few hairs of his beard betrayed his true age of a mere decade.

Gramsci stared in response, her soft, orange hairs a welcoming trap. The standoffish feline made a pastime of sprawling out along the narrow landing at the top of the stairway only to lash out with claws or pounce on hard, hairy toes.

Ralan rose to look out the window, preparing a sneak attack. Past his own reflection Ralan surveyed the spine of this fair land, the jagged peaks of the Reified Mountains. In those mountains, somewhere, would be his father Broralan Mountainminer, adventuring once more with his motley cast of intrepid heroes—each, they would tell the townsfolk, fated to uncover a grand treasure or die in glory at the hands of one of the Austere Dragons of FrioMarkat, Lord Father of all Dragonkind, Scourge of the Dwarves, Creator of Austerity.

Ralan fiddled not with Austerity, as he was only ten. He would have an entire adult life to explore with childlike petulance the art of taking away from others.

Whoosh! went the curtains as Ralan pivoted and grasped for Gramsci. The cat could have teleported for all Ralan knew because she was within his grasp and then across the room in less than a second. Gramsci licked a paw, as if bored of the game.

“Ralan!” came a shout from downstairs as the door burst open. “I’m home, young lad!”

“Father! How was the trip? I hope no malfeasance bore you down.”

“Wonderful, lad, I see you’re working hard at talking like a normal child,” Broralan said, the irony dripping off the statement as much as melted snow from his beard. He set down an oak chest with a thud. A chain held the chest in a cold embrace.

“This,” Broralan started, “we found deep in the caves of the Debbs Mountain. But before we set to work getting it open, I need an ale and to regale you with a tale.”

---

“—and when we made final approach at the foot of Debbs, a nasty howl assaulted our ears. The smell was indescribable and nearly unbelievable; hear me now, son, the only thing more dangerous than a Yeti’s claws is his odor!”

Ralan laughed and his eyes sparkled. Nothing captivated Ralan like a tale from his father. Broralan had a gift for poetic storytelling; often the Jarl would invite him to the top of the mountain to entertain the court. Broralan finished the tale in musical meter:

         “When we looked up, we met eyes with the wild beast,
      its course hair bloodied and muddied from a day of feast;
	    though we were five, we huddled in a throng,
	       and it’s clause was six scrolls long!”

Ralan looked up at his father, confused.

     “AYE hahaha, makin' sure you hadn’t fallen asleep, laddy,
     it’s claws was sharper than any blade in the Jarl’s army. 
	
         He stormed us, yellin’ and slashin’ all the way, 
	    Dwassoc lost a finger or two in the craze 
	     while Jorhatin was sliced chap to nave.
        On we fought, axes flyin’ though his skin was tough,
          any less than three swings and it would rebuff.

           But alas, we fought for Nussouck Rubyriver,
           who many moons ago met Stagnos the lifgiver
        after a fatal engagement for which he was not ready,
   meeting with the strongest foe in the mountain, the white yeti.

       As daylight waned and the beast stood through sheer will,
           we joined axe-to-axe to break the standstill.
          Instead, the beast fled over the Reified range,
     and we thought maybe he sought for the wider, green plains,
            or maybe he sought for a place to recover,
         because the motley cast was tore him asunder!”

Ralan whooped and shouted and clapped at the end of his father’s tale. Nobody could stir the townsfolk quite like the legendary adventurer Broralan Mountainminer. But to Ralan, his father was a hero nearing the prestige of Ruskin Granitespine, for whom their vertical mountain village was named.

Gramsci, as was her way, stood apart from the merry duo. She eyed the chest with suspicion and circled it while Broralan and Ralan began dinner.

Sometime late afternoon Krobranth returned home from his work in town, kissing Broralan and hugging Ralan on the way in. Krobranth and Broralan were wed decades ago on Ruskin’s peak in a private ceremony, though the reception afterward filled to the brim the cavernous chamber within the mountain. Krobranth was a well-respected blacksmith in the upper half of the vertical village. It was through Krobranth’s work that he and Broralan met and fell in love; few were the men in this world who knew the perfect grip for an axe’s shaft, but the village counted Krobranth among their number.

Each day Krobranth would descend a quarter of Mount Ruskin to the town center. The town stretched from the foot of the mountain where the unlucky scrounged for coin to the top of the Jarl’s palace, a wonderful and well-appointed abode for the dwarven leader. The vertical mountain village drew awe from the world all over for its design, a unique twist of ingenuity and boldness, was one only a dwarf could conjure up.

“What a splendid tale!” Krobranth said after Broralan regaled once more the house with his adventure. “And all the more impressive, what a hearty meal you both have made. Now, what to do about the chest?”

“I should think thrice striking it would do the trick,” Broralan suggested.

“Have you not stricken the thing yet?” Krobranth asked.

“I stayed my axe for the journey was tough and we wished to return home quickly.”

“Gramsci has taken a liking to your bounty,” Ralan noted.

“Indeed, he has. I wonder what he knows,” came Krobranth’s reply.

After Ralan and his fathers exhausted themselves with axe swinging, Ralan suggested that Krobranth melt the chain down at his smithing kiln.

“I’m afraid it’s too big, Ralan. And it surely would catch fire before the chain itself was melted off.”

“Should we try a prayer to Stagnos?” Ralan suggested.

“I have done so already, Ralan,” Broralan said. “It must be protected by Janus’s dark magic for Stagnos has yet to make a reply.”

Stagnos, god of civilization, was thought by many to be in eternal combat with Janus, god of transition, borders, and gates. At the mention of the gods, Gramsci coughed up a hairball. It was either a coincidence or a sign, though they say there are no coincidences in storytelling.

Krobranth, Broralan, and Ralan grew feverish in their attempts to open the chest. They hacked at the chain as though possessed by some malevolent force. For hours they worked until their focus was broken by Gramsci, who took up residence atop the mysterious box. For one terrible moment, Gramsci thought they would not cease their hacking, but finally they decided to call it quits for the day.

---

The next morning, Ralan awoke to find Gramsci licking her paws by an open window. The brisk air forced Ralan out of bed. Before he could get to the window, his attention was arrested by a book laid out at so perfect a spot that he could not have missed it. The book was not familiar to Ralan. The cover read “A Tale of Two Jarls: The Birth of a New Village.” It was history of the dwarven village on Mount Ruskin as told by inhabitants over decades. The book, which Ralan swore was a full-length, academic text when he opened it, now shifted into an epic poem before his eyes.

Centuries ago following a time of dwarven prosperity,
the dwarves were saved by an uncommon hero, a rarity;
The Great Scourge of Bhig Phrodd drove the dwarves to exodus,
and now the Bhig Phrodd is as much a city as Persepolis.

The Great Dragon FiroMarkat laid waste to our town,
he pulled the rug on a civilization of great renown;
And the dwarves who had once been the Austere Dragons’ disciples
from that day on made war with their erstwhile idols.

Upon Ruskin Granitespine’s back did the dwarves rebuild,
founding the vertical village and the gem-mining guild;
though they shared a united foe, the dwarves still split
right down the middle because of a political gambit.

Indeed, after Ruskin died the power vacuum called,
and for control of Ruskin two factions clawed;
diametrically opposed Jarls fought for the crown,
and split the vertical village from the sky to the ground.

Scrounging for coin became a needed pastime,
for budgets were tight and jobs hard to come by;
former friends became enemies, trusted advisors became fiends,
and expeditions were halted for want of adventuring teams.

The Ruskin dwarves’ former glory faded,
and the village grew small as jaded folks emigrated;
the Ruskin town was the runt of the lands,
an embarrassment to dwarven culture and tales formerly grand.

Decades of division led to the Night of Spilled Ale,
when a brawl broke out through a town already frail;
hundreds died in an event that illustrated,
how a town made of honor had been denigrated and stagnated.

“Ralan, we’re heading into town,” said Broralan.

“Right, we’re going to see about a locksmith,” Krobranth added.

“Okay, see you soon,” Ralan said.

He continued the story.

After decades of being labeled miscreants,
the dwarves made a discovery bigger than the location of the tree ents.

They found in the papers of the late, opposed Jarls,
a treaty between the two to fake the fighting and snarls.

The division was sown by those in power,
to stagnate a town and make the people sour
on neighbors and friends whom they once loved,
and for what? Money, power at the expense of some blood.

Ralan looked up from the story and dropped the book—he no longer cared how it ended. Sitting at the open window was Gramsci, and beside her, the chest. It teetered precariously; a light gust of wind would push it hundreds of feet down the mountainside.

Ralan rushed to the chest. But Ralan had always been too slow for Gramsci.

The cat’s paw gingerly nudged the chest out the window.

---

Broralan and Krobranth rushed up the stairs upon their arrival home for they heard Ralan’s cries. They found Ralan staring down the mountain’s slope out an open window. Gramsci was nowhere to be seen, though this fact was not entirely surprising. The mischievous cat often disappeared for days at a time.

“Gramsci pushed the chest out of the window!” Ralan cried.

“Let us journey below, perhaps we can discover its contents yet,” Krobranth said.

The trio journeyed hundreds of feet below to a spot they estimated the chest would have made landfall. Instead of finding a chain and thousands of pieces of splintered wood, the Mountainminers found teeth. The chain and most of the chest were missing, though some split off shards of wood remained.

“Gramsci saved our lives,” Broralan said suddenly.

“How do you figure that?” Krobranth asked.

“That was no chest. That was a mimic.”

As Broralan said mimic, a high-pitched, evil laugh rode the wind toward the trio. Ralan looked to the West from whence the laughter came, the Reified Mountains a beautiful yet daunting backdrop. In the snow, he saw, were a cat’s paw prints. But after a few meters they shifted into a human’s prints, before disappearing entirely.