Simon was only seven years old when it happened. He would never forget the day a tall, gangly man in tattered robes wandered into his peaceful mountain village. He looked the part of a beggar, but with eyes as hard as steel, and his gray hair seemed as ancient as the mountains that surrounded their village.
Impenetrable cliffs enclosed them on all sides except one. A sliver of a waterfall fell from high above, far beyond where the villagers could climb. It formed a silvery pool beside the dozen wooden buildings where they lived and worked. The pool spilled over at one point, flowing into a narrow stream that wended its way through the village center and out to the lone mountain pass. That grassy path between the peaks was the only way in or out. The villagers relied on it for trade and hunting, and they treasured it, for it offered them great protection from the world beyond.
The gangly man crossed his arms as he gazed about the small village. Simon’s father placed a hand in front of his son’s chest and stepped forward.
“We do not know your face,” he said.
The man cast his gaze up the waterfall to the high, unreachable mountains. “A rather poetic end for a dying elder of the Esradeen, wouldn’t you say?”
“I beg your pardon,” Simon’s father interjected. “Are you looking for help, stranger?”
“I am Corinth.” The gangly stranger slowly swept his gaze over the village once more. “I achieved much in my life and am feared by many. But we all grow old, and my time has come. So, I choose your village as the final act of this existence. All of you will end with me. Your lives will be forgotten. Your village will crumble. Your legacy will be lost. But I must endure, as a caterpillar to emerge from the cocoon as a glorious butterfly, and your valley will sustain me.”
The villagers glanced at one another, eyes wide at first, then narrowing.
“You do not speak as a friend. Therefore, you must leave,” Simon’s father said through gritted teeth. His hand slid to his side, fingers curling around the handle of his hunting knife. “Leave now, and we will forget you. If you do not, there will be consequences.”
“Consequences from the likes of you?” Corinth threw his head back and laughed at the sky. Then he bowed, his gaze lingering a moment on Simon’s father, and at last on Simon himself. “I almost pity you, child. For you and your generation will be the last in this place.”
He turned his back to the village and slowly walked toward the mountain path. A short distance in, he spun around. Simon’s father drew his blade, and other men followed suit. A couple of women gasped, covering their mouths.
Corinth raised his arms skyward, murmuring unintelligible, dark things. Simon’s eyes widened as he watched. The man’s ragged legs no longer bore the color of flesh. They turned brown, wrinkling like ancient tree bark. His toes spread like roots into the earth. The ground groaned as his body grew several times its height. Little branches sprouted from his head, leaves forming on them. His roots reached the edge of the mountain stream, and his body transformed into a trunk as wide as a man’s reach.
“None may pass, either out of this village or into it,” Corinth’s voice groaned across the valley.
Simon’s father leapt upon the tree and stabbed it with his hunting knife. Corinth shrieked, though his head had melded with the trunk. Blood dripped from the wound, running down the bark. A branch lashed out, hurling Simon’s father back and striking down his companions.
Though the villagers tried many times in the years that followed, none could cut through the trunk. It grew thicker, its branches fuller, and the people, cut off from civilization, nearly starved. Only the waterfall-fed pool sustained them with fish, which they ate until it became a curse upon their lips. They remembered the days of venison and traded fruits as a distant dream.
After a decade had passed, the villagers contented themselves with their fate. They stopped trying to escape. The waterfall was kind enough, and they endured. The tree grew larger still.
A few days after Simon’s seventeenth birthday, he waited until the village slept. Then he strode beneath the starlight to the mountain pass and glared at the tree. It had never spoken since the day of Corinth’s arrival—until this night. Not in words, but in a deep, creaking chuckle that rattled his bones.
“Only the Creator determines fate. I will not be imprisoned here as the others are content to be,” Simon whispered.
Again, the tree chuckled.
Simon set his jaw firmly. He stepped to the edge of the pass and lifted a stone as large as he could carry. He hauled it to the stream and dropped it into the water. Then he brought another, and another.
The tree chuckled one last time, but it turned to a growl as Simon stacked the stones into a wall across the stream. All through the night he labored. His muscles screamed. His joints begged him to stop. But he would not.
When golden sunlight touched the peaks, Simon’s dam blocked the mountain pass. The villagers awoke to find that he had torn boards from their homes and stolen shingles from their roofs to fill the gaps between stones.
They stared in disbelief at Simon, standing upon the wall with a hunting knife in his hand, his back turned to the pass.
“It is time to end this horror,” Simon called out. “We have been subject to this terror for too long.”
The mountain stream swelled against his barricade, water rising to the height of a man’s knees. The villagers screamed as it surged higher, flooding back toward their homes. They cursed Simon—even his father shouted for him to stop.
“Trust me, this will be worth it in the end,” Simon shouted. He pointed with his blade. “Get on top of the houses. Hurry, or you’ll drown!”
Still cursing him, the villagers obeyed, more out of necessity than belief in his purpose. The water kept rising, and the waterfall above—once a gift from heaven—now threatened to turn their valley into a lake. The water churned as it rose. Every little building became an island frightfully fragile in the water’s rage.
Simon swallowed hard, waiting for one of them to collapse. They must live, or his actions would mean nothing.
He turned to look behind the dam. Beneath the rising sun, the stream had been cut off. Its bed lay drying in the light, and the roots of the tree lay exposed upon it.
Leaping into the streambed, he lifted the knife and stabbed it down into the nearest root. The tree lurched, whipping its branches towards him. But it had grown tall and even its lowest branches could not reach him from the distance of the stream. He stabbed again and again, each strike leaving behind a trickle of the tree’s blood, until the blood poured generously. The tree’s branches trembled as they tried to reach him, its leaves withered, and Simon ventured closer to the tree’s base.
It did not notice him at first, but when he stabbed with all his might into one of the thickest roots. It had once been Corinth’s big toe. The tree roared. Like an old man it wrapped its branches around him and squeezed. It squeezed until his vision darkened and he saw death’s visage as an angel descending to remove him from this life.
The pressure loosened and he collapsed to the ground. There he lay for a long while, then struggled to his feet and back to his wall of stone and wood. He climbed painfully atop it, lifted a stone, and dropped it over the edge. This he repeated until the dam broke, the flood draining away from the village in a rush down the streambed.
Sitting upon the portion of his wall which remained, he watched the villagers creep towards him. They stepped through the broken dam and stared at the tree which had been their curse. They dared touch its bark, breaking it like dust in their fingers, and they turned their attention up to Simon.
His father sat beside him on the wall, tears running down his cheeks. “All along, we had the power to change things. We only had to sacrifice and not accept things as they were. Son, you’ve made me proud above all my hopes.”
The End
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