The Valley

A Sword & Sorcery Flash Fiction Tale

For two years the Empress’s army had marched east, and nothing could stop it. Fortresses that stood in her way were burned. Lords who refused to kneel were hanged by the neck from the highest spires of their cities, naked and castrated.

Then the army reached the blank space at the edge of its maps, and the crusade of conquest funneled into a valley of green-black trees, walled on both sides by jagged, snow-capped peaks so high one had to lean back to see their summits. There was no way over, no way around—the only path east lay through the unknown valley.

The valley floor was choked with dense timber and broken ground, too tight and treacherous to move an army through without a clear path. To advance blind would be to lose soldiers, horses, and supplies.

The Empress sent scouts to plot the way ahead, yet the first party never returned, nor did the second. The third stumbled out of the trees four days after entering it. They swore they had marched due east by sun and star, yet they had become lost. It seemed the valley changed every day, its landmarks shifting around them. Soon, they could no longer tell which way was forward and which was back.

And so, the army waited. Most nights, a faint trembling ran through the ground beneath the tents, and a low moaning wind drifted up from the valley.

The Empress summoned the royal cartographer, Wulfric, to the command tent, where a great map lay spread across the table, weighted at its corners with daggers. The eastern portion, where the valley began, remained blank vellum.

“Three scouting parties,” she said. “Two deserted me or died. The third wandered in circles for four days and came home babbling like fools who cannot follow their own trail.”

“Your Majesty, if I may,” Wulfric said. “Those were seasoned scouts, the best pathfinders in your army. Perhaps we should proceed with caution. There could be beasts or barbarian tribes in the valley.”

The Empress slammed her fist on the table. “I don’t need excuses, cartographer. I need a road. Draw me one.” She threw a blank roll of vellum before him. “Take fifty of my royal guard. They will slaughter any beast or barbarian that stands in my way.”

***

He rode out at dawn with fifty of the Empress’s elite soldiers, hardened warriors in dark armor under the command of Sergeant Volda, a one-eyed woman of unyielding grit.

The journey proved difficult. On the first day, the soldiers hacked through black-barked trees that bled sap thick as clotted blood, and by dusk they had gained less than a mile. They made camp beneath a rock formation, and sleep took the exhausted soldiers quickly.

The ground shook them awake in the darkest hour. A violent tremor rolled through the valley, and with it came a low and hollow moaning. Then the tremor stopped all at once, and the silence that followed was somehow worse than the quake. None of them slept again before dawn.

At first light, they saw the land had shifted. The rock formation they had camped beneath now stood in the opposite direction.

“This is madness,” Wulfric said. “This valley is haunted, or cursed, or something I have no word for. We should turn back.”

Sergeant Volda looked at the rock formation for a long moment, then turned to face him. “If we return without a map, the Empress will take our heads. Yours first, then mine.” She placed a hand on the sword hilt at her belt. “Try to leave and I will cut you down myself. Prepare to march.”

No one spoke of turning back again. And so it went: for five more days they cut a path forward, and each night the valley quaked and moaned, rearranging their surroundings.

On the sixth day, the forest thinned and gave way to a circular clearing of soft green moss. The air was sweet and thick with the smell of spoiled honey. Across the clearing, the bones of men and beasts lay scattered in the moss.

“I don’t like this, Sergeant,” Wulfric said. “Something is wrong.”

“Find your backbone, cartographer.” Sergeant Volda drew her sword. “Soldiers, at the ready!” she shouted, followed by the sound of fifty swords leaving their scabbards.

The ground began to tremble.

Wulfric looked down as the fibers of moss elongated, then whipped around his horse’s legs. The animal shrieked in terror, throwing him from the saddle.

The center of the clearing sank, and the ground became a funnel of steep walls. The moss sloughed away in sheets, revealing glistening gray-white flesh.

Then the valley opened its throat: a ribbed gullet of pale, veined meat, wide enough to devour the company. Tentacles tipped with hooked black barbs lashed out, snagging horses and soldiers. The sweetness in the air curdled with the stink of bile and old carrion. A wind howled up from the darkness, hot and wet, the same low moan they had heard each night.

The ground tilted steeper still. Soldiers and horses slid into the throat in the earth, screaming and trying to cling to something, anything, as they were dragged down.

Wulfric slid with the rest. He laughed, a broken sound lost in the howl of the beast’s breath. There had never been a valley. There was only this creature, hungry and patient. He opened his hand, letting the unfinished map flutter away in the stinking wind.

By the next morning, the basin lay flat and still once more. Slowly, the picked-clean bones of horses and men pressed up through the green moss.