The Tale of Peaks and horns

Once upon a time, there was a village tucked away in the jagged folds of a range known as The Mountain. Its people were carved from the same gray stone they inhabited: sturdy, rough-hewn, and unyieldingly upright. They were wealthy and prosperous, thanks to the trade of bear hides. The air there smelled of ochre and musk, for they tanned their skins with a mastery that made the leather as supple as a second skin. A single lineage, the Master Furriers, held the reins of this "brown gold" trade.

But prosperity had made them soft. From years of counting coins, they had forgotten how to hold a spear. To protect their coffers, they hired the Forest Hunters—men with dark eyes and hands stained with sap. The pact seemed perfect: hundred bags of gold every full moon.

One evening, under a blood-red moon, the pact shattered. The protectors became predators. The mountain village was devoured piece by piece, moon after moon, until the merchants' pride was nothing more than a dusty memory.

It was into this gray misery that the Strange appeared.

A woman gave birth to a son whose forehead bore two ebony points, as hard as diamonds. The village did not let out a cry, but rather a murmur of disgust. For these people, who believed only in what could be sold, the anomaly was a jarring note. "It is the sign of our downfall," the elders said. They cast the child into the ravine, preferring the death of an innocent to the insult of his difference.

He was rescued by Kael, an old Hunter who lived as a hermit. Kael was no saint; he was a deserter, a man who had refused to pillage the mountain village out of loathing for his peers' cowardice. In the horned child, he saw a mirror of his own exclusion.

For two hundred and forty moons, the boy—baptized Ornos—grew up in the silence of caves. Kael taught him how to fight and how to listen to the rock. His horns grew, becoming massive black antlers that seemed to catch the very vibrations of the earth.

The wind howled between the peaks, a high-pitched whistle that seemed to wring secrets from the stone. Ornos sat at the edge of the void, motionless. His horns, long and dark, caught the bluish glow of the rising moon. Behind him, Kael approached with a heavy gait, wrapped in an old wolf-skin cloak.

"They don't deserve you, you know," the old hunter rasped.

Ornos did not turn around. His fingers brushed the cold granite. "That is what the rock tells me as well. It remembers the fall. It remembers the cold of the ravine when I was small."

Kael sat beside him, his joints creaking like dry wood. "Then why? Why go down tomorrow? You could stay here. The mountain is vast; she will hide you forever.

Ornos finally turned his head. His obsidian eyes locked onto the faded ones of the old man. "You came down to get me, Kael. Yet you had every reason to leave me to the crows. You carried the shame of your people, and I, the fear of mine."

The old hunter looked down, staring at his trembling hands. "I didn't do it for them. I did it so I wouldn't become like them. The day I refused to raid that village, I lost my name. But the day I picked you up, I found my soul."

Ornos stood, his silhouette casting a vast, strange shadow upon the ground. He touched one of his horns where the base met his skull. "I feel every heartbeat of that village here, Kael. Their fears, their tears, and even their cowardice. But if I do not go down, these horns will be exactly what they said: a curse. If I do go, they become a rampart. I am not fighting so that they will love me... I am fighting so that the ravine stays empty. So that no more children are ever cast into the shadows."

Kael gave a sad smile and placed a calloused hand on the young man’s shoulder. "Then go. Do not be their soldier, Ornos. Be their mountain. Strike with the strength of the earth, but keep your pariah’s heart. That is where your true strength lies."

The full moon rose, round and cold, bathing the village entrance in a chalky light. The air smelled of dry dust and the rancid fear seeping from the closed shutters of the houses.

The Hunters arrived loudly. There were fifty of them, their coarse laughter preceding the smell of poorly tanned leather and alcohol that followed them. They marched like conquerors, dragging their spears like walking sticks. They had come to harvest, as one picks fruit that is overripe.

And then, they stopped.

In the middle of the dirt path, a silhouette blocked the way. Ornos did not move. Under the moonlight, his skin looked like hewn stone, and the two immense black horns crowning his skull cast an oversized shadow that stretched all the way to the boots of the lead Hunters.

"Move aside, livestock!" shouted the leader of the Hunters, a massive man with a scar across his nose. "We don't want to damage the merchandise."

Ornos did not answer. There was no heroic speech. No warning. There was only the sound of his breathing—heavy, deep, like the wind rushing into a cavern.

The leader, insulted by the silence, gave a signal. Two of his men stepped forward, spears leveled, snickering. They thought they were scaring a fool.

That was when Ornos moved.

It wasn't a quick motion, but a brutal, irresistible acceleration. He lowered his head and charged. The ground trembled under the impact of his bare feet.

The first contact wasn't the sound of steel, but a dull, wet thud. The sound of a battering ram of flesh hitting unprepared bodies. The first Hunter didn't even have time to scream; he was lifted off the ground, his ribcage crushed by Ornos’s shoulder, and sent flying ten feet back like a ragdoll.

The second tried to thrust his spear. The steel tip screeched against Ornos’s skin as if hitting granite, leaving nothing but a white scratch. Before he could process it, one of the ebony horns caught him in a lateral sweep, snapping his arm and sending him rolling into the dust.

Panicked, the Hunters threw themselves at him en masse, a pack trying to bring down a bear.

There were cries of rage, howls of pain, and the sharp crack of wooden spears shattering against the colossus's body. Ornos did not parry the blows; he absorbed them. Each impact seemed to make him denser, heavier.

He fought without grace. He would grab a man by his tunic and hurl him against a stone wall. He delivered headbutts that shattered leather helmets. His horns were terrifying weapons, not because they were sharp, but because they were unstoppable: a single swing of his head swept three men aside in a crash of broken bone.

The air grew thick with a metallic tang—blood—mixing with the dust kicked up by the melee. Ornos was covered in superficial nicks that barely bled, as if his flesh were too hard to truly open. He was a living statue demolishing men of clay.

The leader of the Hunters, seeing his best men snapped like deadwood, recoiled. He looked at Ornos, who stood amidst the moans of the fallen, his chest heaving with effort, his black horns glistening under the moon, dripping with blood that was not his own.

Ornos’s gaze was empty and pitiless, like the mountain itself—an ancient force that tolerated their presence but had just decided to crush them.

The leader dropped his sword. The ring of metal hitting the earth was the signal for the rout. The predators became the prey. They fled toward the forest, tripping over their own dead, screaming in terror, pursued by the immense shadow of the one they thought they had come to rob.

Ornos did not chase them. He stood there, alone in the middle of the devastated path, listening as the silence slowly returned, broken only by the gasps of the vanquished and the dull thud of his own heart of stone.

The Mountain village regained the peace, prosperity, and tranquility that had reigned before the arrival of the hunters. They finally understood that the two-horned man was far from the curse they had feared.