Dark Fantasy Super Short Stories

I was out behind the shed watering the tomatoes and the eggplant when I heard Charlie calling for me.

“Dad! Dad! Come quick!”

Well, I didn’t go there quick. I didn’t even move. I was tired. Dog tired, actually, after working at the plant all day spray painting the doors to Dodge trucks and then off to work at the feed and seed store at 4pm and just got home a half hour ago at 7:45…I was done running for people.

Charlie came running to the garden screaming: “Dad! There’s a hole in the ground! Like in the movies! The ground is moving! The ground is moving!”

I swiveled around slowly to face him, the water hose blasting the plants, the lawn chair, and finally Charlie. He laughed as he tried to defend himself from the spraying water, yelling for me to cut it out. I dropped the hose and asked him what was so important he had to interrupt the only enjoyment I get the entire day.

His response: “The earth might swallow all of us up!”

I blinked.

“Including your mother?”

“Dad! Yeah!”

“Even Gosomer?” He was our Blue tick hound who had little patience for squirrels, passing cars and generally anyone walking up the drive, including me.

“I said everybody, damn it!” Charlie immediately looked down at the ground and apologized.

“Alright,” I said, removing my hands from my waist. “I’ll look at your moving earth, Charlie Cole, if it will humor you.”

“Dad,” Charlie said with a scoff added at the end. “I wish you’d stop saying if it will humor me, usually when I’m serious nothing will make me laugh.”

Huh. I had to smile at that. Barely twelve and the boy already has his mother’s biting wit.

“Okay, okay. Where’s the hole.”

“Asgard and Vanaheim,” Prospero scanned the map. “By Mitra, I had almost believed those countries to have been fabulous.”

Conan grinned savagely, involuntarily touching the scars on his dark face. “You had known otherwise, had you spent your youth on the northern frontiers of Cimmeria! Asgard lies to the north, and Vanaheim to the northwest of Cimmeria, and there is continual war along the borders.”

“What manner of men are these northern folk?” asked Prospero.

“Tall and fair and blue-eyed. Their god is Ymir, the frost-giant, and each tribe has its own king. They are wayward and fierce. They fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night.”

“Then I think you are like them,” laughed Prospero. “You laugh greatly, drink deep and bellow good songs; though I never saw another Cimmerian who drank aught but water, or who ever laughed, or ever sang save to chant dismal dirges.”

“Perhaps it’s the land they live in,” answered the king. “A gloomier land never was—all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray, with winds moaning drearily down the valleys.”

“Little wonder men grow moody there,” quoth Prospero with a shrug of his shoulders, thinking of the smiling sun-washed plains and blue lazy rivers of Poitain, Aquilonia’s southernmost province.

“They have no hope here or hereafter,” answered Conan. “Their gods are Crom and his dark race, who rule over a sunless place of everlasting mist, which is the world of the dead. Mitra! The ways of the Aesir were more to my liking.”

He had expected to have fallen by now. Part of him wanted to but his feet kept trudging through the snow. The cold had stopped bothering him and all he wanted was to sleep but some stubborn, thoughtless, and uncaring sense of survival kept him walking southeast across the arctic wasteland.

His sword hung reassuringly on his back. The furs he wore sheltered his body from the sharp bite of the cold. Only his face was unprotected and this he covered from his nose down with a strip of blanket. His large pack was lighter now that his tinder and food were almost depleted. He was starting to feel as empty as his meager supplies.