These people, they are strong. They are resilient. And they are vengeful. They rail against their own neighbours for real and imagined slights. They sling arrows and stones across their borders to people they do not trust. They guard themselves internally and externally.
But, for all this, they are happy. It may not seem like it, but in these circumstances, happiness is a strange thing. It is far better to use this energy on each other than to turn it on their true enemy.
The winters are cold here. You may think that winter is cold anywhere, but here the winters are particularly cold. The grey clouds that form in the hour after dawn sit heavy over the land the whole day. What sunlight is able to make it through to the land below lacks warmth. The winds curl up from the south and it is common to see thin tendrils of ice hanging from the hardy trees that grow here.
There is little to do in the winter. The ground is too hard to tend, the animals are kept inside and only the most minimal attention to them is required. The people stay inside and keep as close as they can to the fire, the only reliable source of warmth. The elderly knit thick wool blankets and share them with those who need them.
But this is the same as every year. Everyone in these lands understands this is how life is out here. There is very little complaining, and what is complained about is never anything anyone can do something about. And so the world turns, winter into spring and then to summer and the days get colder as the autumn returns and winter once again covers the land in its icy grip.
The children grow and they learn about the world around them. They learn about its dangers and they learn how to stay safe and keep others safe. They learn that there is nothing in the mountains worth risking anything for.
There is a change in the air. There is a child. A young man who questions everything. Who drives the adults mad with his incessant need to know why about everything.
He sits there, in his classes and he absorbs every piece of information the elders give him. He compares it, in his head, to every other piece of information he already has and when he finds a contradiction, or a gap, he asks a question. Its never a complicated question; he is not yet 12, but it is a question the adults do not wish to answer. Some of them because they dont know the answer themselves, but others because they do.
The one question the boy keeps coming back to is, “what is in the mountains?”
Every day the people of this land imply to the younger ones that the mountains are dangerous. That no one should go up there. No matter what they think they might find. No matter what is said to be on the other side. The mountains were off limits and only a True Hero, whatever that meant, was to ever go there.
As soon as the frustrated and overwhelmed wife of a farmer said the words True Hero, the young man was on them. He questioned those words, the meaning he knew and the meaning he didnt. The exasperated woman, unsure of what she did to deserve this, fobbed him off as much as she could. Eventually, she said the words that seemed to keep him quiet.
“Go and ask the priest.”
The priest was an outsider. No one knows where he came from or what he was doing here. He had been here for many years, and had always maintained he had a reason for staying, but no one ever learned it. He had a reputation as a man of knowledge. Not normal knowledge. Strange, foreign knowledge.
The children were not allowed to go to his hovel, just outside of town, but each and every one of them was curious about it. It was common to see a small group of them standing at the edge of town – the limit any of them were allowed to go – and encourage each other to head out to the priests hut. Only the bravest of them would go past the borders of the town, but none had ever actually made it to the front door.
The boy would never admit that he was scared. He would blame his shaking knees on the ice cold chill that was borne by the wind. He would blame his slow pace on not wanting to slip on an unseen patch of ice. He would blame his unusual quiet on not wanting to alert any predators to his, and the other childrens, presence.
He had walked a few hundred yards beyond the town border. Almost halfway to the hut. He could see it, nestled in among the treeline and he could see a small wisp of smoke from its chimney, evidence that the man was home.
He turned to see if any of the others had ventured this far, but they were all still back there, huddled around each other, watching in terror as he kept getting further away. This, for some reason he would never fully understand, steeled his resolve. Seeing them back there, scared, gave him the motivation to turn back around and keep walking to the hut.
As he got closer, the door opened and the old man exited, looking directly down the road at him. Something that resembled a smile passed over his face, but was immediately replaced by his usual passive stare. He stepped clear of the door, and waved his hand to invite the boy inside. Even from here, the hut looked warm and inviting. The priest did not look back at the other children.
Inside the hut was nothing that the boy could have imagined. The walls were lined with shelves which contained books and scrolls and items that he could never have guessed the names of, much less their purpose.
The priest took a steaming kettle off the small furnace and poured himself a cup of something thick and brown before making a hot chocolate for the boy. He set the mugs down on the small table and sat opposite the boy.
“You are the first young person to come and see me,” he said in an accent that was unfamiliar, thick and almost warm just by itself. “I have been waiting for such an event.”
“Why?” the boy asked. All of his questions about what it meant to be a True Hero were gone from his mind. He had been expecting him? That was something far more important.
“The children are so scared of everything. Because the adults make them scared. This hut is not scary. I am not scary. I am known, yes? You know me?”
“I guess,” the boy said. This was not going at all as he expected. “Who are you?”
“Ah, you see, you dont know me. But I am familiar. I am a local. I was here before you were even born, but I knew there was someone here who would see me.”
“Youre the priest.”
“Not a fitting name, I will say,” the priest said. “I am no longer a man of the cloth. I understand too much for that occupation these days.”
While the boy was desperate to know what all of that meant, he hadnt the understanding to ask the right questions to learn. Instead he reverted back to his original plan. “I was told to come and ask you about something my teachers cant tell me.”
“Yes?” the priest said, taking a long sip from his drink, urging the boy to do the same.
“I wanted to know what it meant to be a true hero.”
“Surely you know those words already,” the priest said. “These are not hard words for a young person to understand.”
“I know them,” the boy said defensively. “But the farmers wife, she said them in a strange way. She made them sound different, like they were only one word.”
“Ah,” the priest said. “A True Hero, you mean?”
“Yes, like that!” the boy said. “I know what true and hero mean, but I dont know what it means when its said like that.”
“Such is youth,” the priest sighed. “You have so much to learn and you are impatient and want it all at once. But the teachers, they dont know it either, so they cannot teach you. It is a vicious cycle that can only lead to bad places. Each year less and less is passed on and so when it comes time for you to teach, you can only pass on what youve been taught. And in thirty years time, do you think you will remember everything?”
“You know everything,” the boy said lamely.
“I assure you, I do not,” the priest said. “But I know the answer to your question.”
“What is it?”
“Patience, young man. There is another thing you must learn first.”
The boy slowly breathed out, took a drink from the mug and sat in his learning stance and waited for the priest to talk.
“There is a danger in the mountains,” he said. “And I dont mean the avalanche, or the wild animals that live there. Within the mountains themselves lives a creature. It is not an animal, nor is it a human. Where it came from no one can say. It hoards the wealth of this world and incinerates everyone who comes even close to its lair. Do you know the name of such a creature, lad?”
“No,” the boy said. He racked his brain but there was nothing he had learned that fit the description of such a creature.
“It is what we call a dragon. They are very powerful and very angry. They prevent us from exploring, from finding whatever it is beyond those mountains. It keeps us prisoner here, on these plains, in other words. Many people, even some from your village, have tried to cross the pass that you can see from here, but none have returned. The dragon eats them.”
“Will this,” the boy pauses. “True hero,” he tries, “save us from the dragon?”
The priest shrugs. “It cant be known. But there is a story. An old old story, my great-great granddaddy told me it when I was younger than you are, and he told me that he learned it when he was that age too. No one can say how far back it goes, but it is older than The City and it might even have existed before your people settled here.”
“What does the story say?”
“That such a hero would make a stand before this creature. I do not have the exact story here, but we can travel to read it,” the priest said. “Back to The City. Where a True Hero could be trained. A man fit to stand before the dragon and, maybe, defeat it.”