The Stone Heart of the Mountain

Story Awards

★★★★★

★★

Ratings by readers

Before memory, when the world was soft rock and flowing fire,

The Great Peaks were born,

thrust upwards by the earth’s restless slumber.

And within the tallest, a heart of stone began to beat,

slowly,

each pulse a tremor, a shaping of the land.

This was Vorlag, the Mountain Father,

his skin granite, his voice the avalanche.

He saw the first rivers carve their paths,

silver threads upon the nascent green.

He felt the wind, a new sensation,

whispering secrets only stone could comprehend.

He was silence, and strength, and the waiting of ages.

From his shoulders, forests unfurled like dark green cloaks.

Creatures, small and tentative, found shelter in his crags.

He did not command them, nor did he offer comfort,

for his nature was immutable, a steadfast presence.

Yet, life flourished around his unyielding form,

drawing sustenance from the waters that flowed from his icy crown,

and from the rich soil weathered from his ancient bones.

One day, a spark of fire, fallen from a passing comet,

lodged deep within a crevice near Vorlag’s stone heart.

It did not die.

Instead, it fed on the mountain’s stoic energy,

a slow burn, unseen, unfelt for millennia.

This was the birth of longing in the Mountain Father,

a warmth that began to thaw his core of ancient ice.

He did not understand this new stirring,

this ache that was not pain, this movement that was not rockfall.

The stone heart beat faster,

and for the first time, Vorlag looked outwards not as a fixture,

but as a being aware of its solitude.

The world he had watched form now seemed distant,

and the wind carried voices he wished he could answer,

but his only language was the rumble of the earth, the fall of stone.

The fire within grew, a silent, burning core in the heart of the eternal mountain.