Young Bathe always wondered about the endless forests and mazes of mountains that surrounded his village and why no one dared to step near them. Elders spoke the tales of an undead evil sleeping deep inside the forests that must not be woken.
It al...
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'You want to come down, any time soon?' Thorin asked.
Bathe didn't reply; he must be angry. It was a beautiful cycle between those two souls. In the past, even after doing the exact opposite of what Thorin asked him for, and then after facing his anger, he would go silent. Like he was the one who should have been angry instead of Thorin. A little effort from Thorin would be needed then to cheer him back.
Thorin waited for a moment for an answer.
'Who wants to help me with the 'sword of hell'? Huh.'
It always seemed appealing to Bathe and he couldn't resist breaking his silence.
'I will,' he said and came down sprinting to the axe of Thorin left on the ground earlier. He took the heavy axe and tried to raise it properly.
'You are getting stronger than me,' Thorin chuckled, coming close to the little bundle of woods and kissed Bathe's forehead. Bathe had forgotten all his anger and smiled huge revealing all his tiny teeth.
'Come on, let's decide what we eat today,' Thorin yelled like he was coming victorious from some kind of war and was ordering his troops to loot. They dragged everything and entered the hut.
Small and big huts, some having more wood than the others, stood randomly over the carefree Asyut-elm village land. There was no pattern of houses built around Bathe's hut. All random, built anywhere folks found suitable but with some distances to have their own Hedges. It appeared like a colony of twenty families around there and then fields of rice and wheat surrounding them from three directions.
Night came, gentle as always to this part of the world. Oil lamps flickered at the porches and inside while the widespread silence felt lone and vulnerable for those who were still on roads.
Bathe and Thorin were on the bed after having a dinner of boiled rice and chopped vegetables. Bathe hated that food, especially that particular combination of vegetables and rice. But couldn't complain and let father pour his vast knowledge of food and good habits again, like a couple of days back when father's take on for healthy foods ended by midnight.
'How will you become strong and tall like me?' he would ask. And then would add more of that chopped thing in the plate. 'Oh, you are eight and four months now—you should definitely eat more.'
Bathe was thinking about today's lesson lying on his wooden bed, which had a quilt and a few covers of plain cloth sheets to make it comfortable. He wasn't sleepy and stared upon the empty roof. He felt a gentle touch of the father's hand over his hair and turned his head around. His bed was just steps away from Thorin. Almost every night he would come and sit beside Bathe's bed before sleeping. Bathe would know his presence sometimes when he wouldn't be asleep—like today.
Thorin wasn't a good storyteller but would try his best to string lines together lamely to pull out any tale for Bathe. But Tierri, living in the neighbourhood, filled that job. Only rarerly Bathe would ask the father for a tale.
