The Lord of the Mountain

This tale is about a little girl and the Lord of the mountain. Listen close.

Once upon a time there lived a little girl on the bottom of a mountain. Her mother had died when she was only a baby and her father was a despicable drunkard and simply a menace for the entire village. But her life was not all sad, for she loved to run around in the grasslands, climb trees for fruits and make toys and jewelry out of vines and leaves. One day she would pretend to be a warrior of old with a wooden stick as a sword and a helmet made of thick leaves and another day should play as a princess of a fairy kingdom with a crown of flowers and leaves.

The world was her playground and everything in it her toys.

Tidings were bad one winter. The harvest was bad, there was no aid coming from the next village. One evening the girl came home to a mess with her father on the ground with a bottle still in his hand and the reek of alcohol in the air. When she tried to wake him up he went on a fit of rage and struck her on her face. His addiction had brought out the worst side of him again as he lifted her by the arm and threw her out the door. This was the case every winter when he would start drinking and mourning her mother and curse his life.

She ran to the grasslands over the hill, her usual play area, but only this time she didn't stop there, she kept running and running and running until she realized she was inside the forest, already a quarter way up the mountain. The sun had already set, and the moon was the only light in that small clearing. There she saw a tree with blue coloured flowers and a fallen tree log near its base and she saw a young boy of roughly her height sitting and playing with some twigs and flowers and pebbles. For a moment she forgot about the dangers of the wild.

The boy looked up after a couple of seconds and realized he had an audience, he waved and beckoned her to join his little make believe game.

The children played for hours without a care for the matters of the outside world. They ran around, they pretended to be knights for a while, fought with sticks, rolled up mud to make made up delicacies and then pretended to be shopkeeper and customer. Their games went on what felt like forever and the girl had smiled brighter than she had ever in her life.

The next day when the father woke up and couldn't find his daughter he went rampant, he went about screaming for her and shouting across his house and then the rampage continued onto the village. By noon the village had started looking for her but not to found anywhere. And at some point they started wondering if the girl had wandered off to the woods. Nobody had seen her wander off to the woods but that was the only explanation.

The mountain was huge, several groups of people spent several days looking for the girl and after 7 days they found her sleeping on a bed of soft grass with the mark of the forest imprinted on her neck in the language of the forest. The language of the forest was an old language made up of only straight lines. Nobody understood it since it was a dead language but all knew that nothing good would come from it as it was associated to the magic and mysteries of the great forest.

When the child woke up again she was back in her house, but she cried as soon as she realised she wasn't back in the woods. She tried to run away but the people believed that she was under a spell or this was the work of spirits and tried to exorcise her, but all she wanted to do was go back. The girl was bound by her leg with rope to the grill of her window.

But peculiar things started to happen in the village. The grasslands to the border of the mountain started to shrink and trees with flowers and fruit started to appear each new day and after a couple of weeks the grasslands were gone. The woods had become the very boundary of the village. The crop fields started to dry out and huge trees took their place almost overnight.

One night the people of the village was awoken to a loud crashing sound and at the source of the sound they found the girls house torn apart and in its ruins a tree with blue flowers and the girl sleeping peacefully on one of the branches and her father not to be seen ever again and the laugh of a young boy was heard from the woods. The forest had reached her at last.

The shamans called this the acts of the spirits of the woods and the faery folk and ordered that the village be let go to the forest. Nobody would take the child so she was left to her own and when she awoke the warm rays of the sun gently hit her face, and she heard a familiar friendly voice again, of the boy in the forest. She climbed down from the tree and looked around but couldn't find him nor anyone for that matter. She was back in a forest again and for the first time she wasn't afraid of being in her own house, even if it was cleaved in half by a tree.

No one knows what happened to the little girl after that, some say that she lived out her life in the woods. Others say she wandered off to a nearby village and was adopted by a lovely family and gained a new life with the forest right behind her to come to her aid if ever needed.

"But grandma, that doesn't make sense, you said there was a boy, so was he a spirit? was HE the Lord of the mountain?", cried out the child pushing his blanket away.

The old woman on her chair laughed gently and got up from her chair, put her hand on the boys head checking for the temperature and then pulled away and gently nudged him to lie down.

She then sat beside him on the bed while gently patting his chest.

"This is what most people debate about kiddo, but the question is wrong", she said.

"The Lord of the Mountain is neither the boy nor even a spirit, he's not even a he probably. No one had gone up the mountain in decades or probably centuries and when one did she was taken from him, even though she wished to stay. He extended his domains of power far out so he could reach the child who needed him."