Kindling
…and pressed its huge frost-rimed forehead gently against the boy’s.
Eirik felt the warmth of it. Felt the tremor go out of the enormous body.
And then — impossibly — the beast made a sound back.
A low, rumbling note. Wobbling. Searching. Trying to find the pitch of the boy’s tune the way a child hums along before they know the words.
Eirik’s eyes filled. He kept singing through it.
“You know this,” he whispered between notes. “Don’t you.”
The beast huffed a warm cloud and folded its legs beneath it. Down into the snow it went, slow as a tired dog by a hearth, until it lay curled beside him — that monstrous head resting in the trampled white, eyes half-closing.
Listening.
The Pit Master’s mouth hung open. His whip arm dropped to his side.
“That’s not — it doesn’t do that,” he stammered. “It’s killed men—”
“Quiet,” the old woman said.
She’d come down the steps. Nobody stopped her. She stood at the rim in her grey furs, tears cutting bright lines down her weathered face.
“I know that song,” she said.
Eirik looked up at her, still humming low.
“My mother sang it,” the old woman went on, her voice cracking. “In the high villages. Before the long winters. We sang it to the great beasts in the passes, so they’d let the caravans through. So they’d lie down and let the children sleep against their sides.”
She pressed her hand flat to her chest.
“We forgot it. We forgot, and we forgot what they were — and so we put them in pits.”
The arena was utterly silent now. Furs and torches and fog.
“They were never monsters,” she whispered. “They were just… waiting for someone to sing the old song back to them.”
The beast sighed against Eirik’s knee.
Far above, fog drifted across the iron-grey sky, and the crowd — the whole baffled, fur-wrapped crowd — slowly stopped looking at a weapon.
They looked, instead, at a sleeping creature and a small brown-handed boy who had remembered something everyone else let die.
The Pit Master finally found his voice. It came out small.
“…What do we do with it now?”
Eirik laid one steady hand on the great shaggy head.
“You let him go home,” he said. “And you let me go with him.”
Nobody argued.
The old woman began to sing the next verse — the one Eirik didn’t know — and the boy listened, and learned it, and the beast hummed along, all three voices fogging up into the cold together.
Some things aren’t meant to be conquered.
Some things are just waiting, patient as snow, for someone to be kind enough to remember them.
Have you ever met someone — or something — that changed the way you see the world? Tell us in the comments.
