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THE GRAY KING

A SHORT STORY

Phil Strahl

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Phil Strahl on Smashwords

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THE GRAY KING

A SHORT STORY

He opened one eye, slowly and inert. Then, after many hours he opened the other, just as indolently as the first and gazed with his stone-gray eyes motionless into the darkness of the cavern surrounding him. The stalactites had grown longer, the stalagmites had grown taller and some of them had already merged into monumental pillars circling a massive natural stone table. Some more hours passed as he observed the cavernous hall (or rather the hall-like cavern) with a lazy stare. Occasionally there was some movement between the rocks and flowstones, a slow yet determined movement of small creatures shuffling from pillar to pillar.

"Which Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ is it?" he spoke up in a voice that sounded like gravel being ground between boulders and echoed for a long time from wall to wall. At first his question reverberated unanswered between the wet pillars. Then, after some time had passed, one of the creatures came stumbling into his direction, slowly but steady and from all around high pitched voices could be heard, whispering and excited, and somebody ignited a small fire in a corner of the cave. The creature headed for the throne stepped out of the shadows and into the faint glow of the fire. On the foot of the massive geologic throne it took a long and deep bow before the Gray King, its beard and nose almost touching the salty ground.

"My liege..." the creature began to address the king with a voice like the creaking of a tree's branches in a storm; obviously looking for the right words, or words at all.

"Thou hast awaken too early as it appears" the gnarly and weary looking creature continued, that still bowed and pointed at the table amidst the pillars. The Gray King was observing the homunculus with half closed eyes and without making a move whatsoever.

"Thou beard, my liege, thou bristly beard has entwined the table not more than ten quarters as of now." Expectantly the creature looked up from its bow and beheld its grumbling master who began slowly looking down on his beard. Dark gray it sprouted from his boney chin, was stretching over the uneven ground where it became home of fungi and lichens. It had thinned as it grew longer over the years, the decades, the centuries it kept growing from the king's majestic jaw around the table two and a half times.

"Indeed", the king replied to his servant,

"Indeed. The dozen has yet to be reached." Slowly, the Gray King sat up in his massive, corroded throne, a flowstone entity like everything else in his majestic hall. His crown started to slip on his gray hair which reflected the cave's appearance of colorless, weary stones. Swiftly, the bowing creature jumped up and gently, ever so gently, put the chiseled crown back in place.

"See and behold the signs, Friedrich, see them with your naked eye," the Gray King commanded without seeming to have noticed that Friedrich saved the crown from falling on the ground.

"Yes, my liege. Certainly." Friedrich bowed deep once again, his auburn beard swiping on the stones as he scuttled backwards. After he had gained some distance to the holy throne, he slipped through a narrow chink in the wall, and then another one, each with a pass so narrow and crooked that a human would get helplessly stuck and starve to death. But Friedrich knew his way around despite the pitch-black darkness and continued his ascent, guided only by sound and touch. For hours he climbed the wet rocks, slipped through seemingly impassable rock formations and even swam through a river or lake whose chilly waters would have numbed any common creature. When he got hungry he ate some of the strange fungi that grew occasionally in the most obnoxious corners and places, when he got thirsty he licked the wet stones, when he got tired he laid down on the hard rocks. Friedrich had grown modest.

And so Friedrich climbed and continued his way upwards for five days. The longer he traveled, the wider and taller the caves grew until eventually one ended in a harsh bright light that hurt Friedrich terribly in his beady eyes but the sensation lost gradually its ferocity. As the hours had passed, so had the color and intensity of the outside world. As it was milky and blue, Friedrich could finally step outside into a hazy and cold alpine air. The world was as frugal with spectacles on the outside as on the inside, there were rocks in all kinds of sizes and formations and the biggest difference seemed to be the lack of a ceiling or opposing walls. The dark blue haze seemed to stretch endlessly and chewed on the pale moist skin of the cave-dweller. After all those years he was not used to the chill of the wind anymore, the brightness and the uncomfortable vastness of the alpine panorama that stretched below him. He sat down on a jagged rock and just listened into the void of the outside world. He listened to the wind, to occasional loose pebbles rolling down towards an invisible valley, to his memories, buried under a mountain of years spent in the cave. A chamois jumped from ledge to ledge over a gaping chasm not hundred meters away from Friedrich. It didn't seem to notice or care about him. An eternity ago, Friedrich remembered, he was jumping just like it from rock to rock, from field to field, from kingdom to kingdom. It was so long ago when he pledged allegiance that he had forgotten almost anything about his existence before it. Perhaps it was better that way. He served a bigger purpose now. And then as the wind had waned for a moment, the dark blue dusk carried the croaks of a raven to Friedrich's ears. He looked up, instantly dismissing all thoughts and memories haunting him. There it was, a majestic black bird against the sky, croaking and shouting at Friedrich. And then another raven. And one more. The three of them fought against the strong wind circling the mountain, then dived below it and let themselves get carried away to the east where the sky was as black as their feathers. Just like they had vanished, so had their cries. Friedrich stared blankly into the darkness after them, only a moment, and looked at the stars in the sky. It was not a melancholic, reminiscent stare, rather a scientific, calculating gaze Friedrich made before turning around and beginning his five day long descent back to his king. No, it was not just his king, it was his emperor.

As Friedrich arrived in the sacred hall five days of deprivation later and advanced slowly towards the sacred throne, the Gray Emperor was sitting in it exactly in the same posture as when Friedrich had left ten days ago, as if he had fallen asleep for a short nap. Not even his cold stare seemed to have fixed anything else in the meantime.

"The signs, my liege, are good," Friedrich reported and the Gray Emperor slowly blinked as if to say Go on.

"Further, my liege, the Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ counts seventeen-hundred-and-one-dozen." For more than an hour the emperor looked at Friedrich, contemplating and pondering until he opened his mouth a last time for the next hundreds of years and muttered the same phrase as he had done three hundred years before:

"When ravens no longer fly around my kingdom's summit and when my beard has entwined the table a dozen quarters, our Lord will end the world and I shall return for His last battle." Then he slowly closed his furrowed eyelids of his furrowed face and fell asleep before the echo had faded away like the shine of the fire that swiftly got put out.