Kell's Legend

really spooking the animals.”
    “Yes. Come on, we’ll walk awhile.”
    They moved on, perhaps a hundred yards before Kell suddenly stopped. Saark could read by his body language something was wrong: he had seen something up ahead. And he didn’t like it…
    “What is it…oh.” Saark stared at the statue, and his jaw dropped. It was thirty feet high, towering up between the trees. It was old, older than the woodland, pitted and battered by the elements of a thousand years, sections covered in moss and weeds, lichens and fungi; and yet still it stared down with a menacing air, a violent dominance.
    “What’s it supposed to be?” questioned Saark, tilting his head.
    “A stone lion, perhaps?” muttered Kell. “Hence, Stone Lion Woods.”
    “I’ve never seen a lion look like that,” said Saark. “In fact, I’ve never seen a lion. Not in the flesh. Apparently, they are terrifying, and stink like the sulphur arse-breath of a cess-pit.”
    “It is a lion,” said Kell, voice low, filled with respect. “Only it’s twisted, deformed, reared up on hind legs.Look at the mane. Look at the craftsmanship in the sculpted stonework.”
    “I’m more interested in whether it’ll topple on us. Look at those cracks!”
    The two men watched the statue, a hint of awe in their eyes, hands stroking the skittish horses, calming the beasts with soothing murmurs. A little snow had filtered through the canopy of Stone Lion Woods, and sat on the statue, shining almost silver in the gloom. The effect was ghostly, ethereal, and Saark shivered.
    “I don’t like it here. The rumours speak of terrible beasts. Ghosts. Hobgoblins. Were-dragons.”
    “Horse-shit. Come on. I feel my axe; she’s getting close.”
    Saark looked oddly at Kell. “You can really sense the weapon?”
    “Aye. We are linked. She’s a bloodbond weapon, and that means we are joined, in some strange way I cannot explain, nor understand.”
    “A bloodbond. I have heard of such things.” Saark closed his mouth, reluctant to speak more. The tales and legends of bloodbond magick were dark and fearful indeed: stories used to frighten little children. Like the Legend of Dake the Axeman; he was huge and shaggy, with the grey skin of a corpse and glowing red eyes. Dake would creep down the chimney of bad little boys and cut off their hands and feet in the night. If they were really bad, Dake would take the child with him, back to the Tower of Corpses where he’d hang the child in a cage from the outside wall and let Grey Eagles eat their flesh. Even now, Saark remembered his father scaring him with such stories when he’d been a bad boy: when he’d slapped his sister, or stolen one of his mother’s fresh-baked pastries.
    For years, such nightmares had been erased from Saark’s memory. Now, especially in this caliginous and eerie place, watched over by a twisted stone statue, the horror of those dark tales from childhood crept back into Saark’s sparking imagination. He remembered all too clear huddling under thick blankets watching the twitching shadows on the walls…waiting for Dake the Axeman to come for him.
    “Are you all right?” said Kell.
    “I was just…thinking of my childhood.”
    “Were they happy times, aye?” said Kell.
    Saark pictured running into the house holding a kite he’d made to find his father swinging from a high rafter by the neck, his face purple, one eye hanging on his cheek. There was dried blood around his mouth, his tongue stuck out like some obscene cardboard imitation. Taking a bread knife, he’d cut down the dead man and sat with him, rocking his head, holding his stiffening hands until his mother arrived home…with the city bailiffs, ready to repossess their family home. There had been no sympathy. A day later, they were walking the streets.
    “Happy, yes,” said Saark, banishing the memories like extinguishing a candle. Strange, he thought. To resurrect them here, now. He’d locked them away in a deep, hidden place for decades. Saark coughed, and tugged at the horses. “Come on. Let’s move. This place gives me the shits.”
    “You sure you’re well?” asked Kell. He appeared concerned. “You looked, for a moment there, like you’d seen a ghost.”
    Saark pictured his father, swinging. “Maybe I did,” he said, voice little more than a whisper; then he was gone, striding down a wide, twisting trail and Kell tugged his own mount forward. The gelding gave a small whinny of protest, and moved