Mountain Voices
This flash fiction was inspired by and written during a trip to Mammoth in February, 2023.
Snowboarding is one of my passions and this is the first time I’ve used it in my writing.
Panoramic photo taken at top of Stump Alley Ski lift on Mammoth Mountain by Michael G. Fischer
It was his ankle. The cold had bitten through the wrapped bindings and found the bloody wound. The pain was excruciating as he weaved down the mountain. Toe-side, heel-side, toe-side — each jostle sent a bolt of lightning up his left leg as the board carved through ice and snow.
Stopping now would be a death sentence. He couldn't be sure how far behind his pursuers were, but the trail of blood he left wasn't doing him any favors. The sword had sheared clean into his rigid fibula, stopping just shy of severing his Achilles.
'Also,' he thought, 'sword?!’ The armed figures were in black snow gear from head to toe, complete with goggles and masks. He didn’t remember swords being one of the requirements for cold weather.
While he had no idea who they were, he did know what they wanted. The tattoo on his right shoulder pulsed affectionately. The black-clad swordsmen were after his demon.
There were only six hundred and sixty-six demons in hell to begin with, but over the millennia those numbers had dwindled. Warlocks, sorcerers and witches, pharaohs and shamans, and even just bad luck had resulted in the summoning of demons to the plane of the living. Some of them were released eventually, but many were killed in great conquests or trapped forever in artifacts when the human master had perished.
There were only six demons left in hell (well, five now). One lived on John's arm in the form of sentient tattoo. It was named Shuckjaw. That was its latest name, at least. Very misunderstood creatures, demons were.
They were deeply loyal and emotionally complex. By nature, they weren't evil. They tended to the souls in hell like gardeners, and would you call a gardener evil for growing plants the way they were told to grow them? (Of course, the tending included torture and occasionally eternal suffering, but that came with the territory.) Demons were also incapable of speech. Instead, they communicated via emotional outreach. A human master might feel sudden waves of joy or outrage when commanding a demon. To the uninitiated, these may feel like internal emotions, but John knew they were the demon's empathic tether.
And so it was with John's tattoo, Shuckjaw, who was currently attempting to fend off John's pain with rapid pulses of positive emotion. The black- clad men intended to steal the demon from John for their own master: Reeves L. Blackthorpe. Of the six demons left, Blackthorpe controlled the summoning of four. He very much intended to broaden that portfolio as he hunted for lost artifacts of ancient demons. John, being uniquely not ancient or lost, was an obvious target. But, seriously? Swords on skis?
