Bergatroll
by musclelove@activist.com
The legend of the wise, strong, and lonely she-beast.


This short story is a bit unusual. It doesn't satisfy many fantasies, I think,
and it's more about telling a story than anything. But if you like legends and
fairy tales and also strong women, maybe you'll like it.

Deep in the cold, misty mountains of Åre, there lived a lonely maiden. A
strange and forlorn girl was she, who thought herself misfigured. A dozen
stone and half again, breadth of two men and height of three. With a brutal
strength, and wit to meet, she was terror to the greatest of men.

Not always had this creature been alone; for once she had been the daughter of
a great sage of the village, born under a summer sky with the promise of great
wisdom, and she spurned the cold and dark from an early age.

But all too hastily her unbidden promise overcame her, and in a year too early
and too unbecoming, she grew, bulged, became great with muscle and flesh,
breadth and height and size burgeoning without provocation. Her grandfather, a
warrior, reveled at her girth; for the girl, it was but a plight. As the
others around her saw her twisted, so in her own eyes she became.

With sadness and despair she appealed to those with power; none could help. In
pity for their daughter, her father and mother withheld food, in hopes her
body might fail in its tireless journey to monstrosity. Little good became of
it; indeed, the girl's body took nourishment, it seemed, from the air itself,
swelling even greater in absense of such mortal limits as food.

As she reached each day new peaks of might, so the warriors in her village
grew distraught; they saw in truth their life's work fall before them, and
they sought to admonish the girl.

Already in grief, the girl protested, and quickly they were at quarrel. As
often is found when words fail for those of great strength, quarrel turned to
contest, and they fell at one another's necks. But the warrior-men in their
anger knew not the girl's strength, and they lay dead at the girl's feet,
their blood soaking into the grass. The girl, entrails on her hands and blood
in her thoughts, fate sealed, fled. To the mountains she went, here and there
wandering, moving at night from fear at first, growing bold over time as she
went.

Half the land she traveled, far from her birthland, and each day still it
seemed she grew.

Presently she drew near a desolate range, cold and dark and far from health
and hearty humankind; her heart as cold, she found it homesome, and there
settled, as it were, eating little, thinking far too much, and wandering
through her domain in lonely solitude.

With ought to do and none with which to do it, she reveled in her solemn
isolation, drawing closer to her curious nature, working, training, growing.
If she were thought a monster at her departure, it would now be a certainty to
those same who called her such.

There she stayed, year after year. Rarely, a traveler would cross her path;
more rarely still did they see her, her bulk hunched in still silence against
the driven mountain snow. Those who did see her stayed far away, and of those
few the only ones who spoke of it upon their return to their homes did so in
hushed tones and disbelief and as a tale of a troll; not to be paid heed.

So the suns and moons passed and the years went by and the girl awaited death,
but it could not find her.

And so the girl passed into legend as the bergatroll, and for herself she
became ought but a legend too, more myth than mind, wandering the mountains
endlessly.

And so lived the immortal girl, the mountain beast, the bergatroll.

But this was not the end, for she lives still, and still there are those who
encounter her; so many hundreds of years have passed, and her great size is
equalled only by her rage at the cruelty of this unending cruelty the world
has played her. Her wrath, they claim, takes the life of any who now errantly
stray across her path in the mountains....