The following comes from Then A Penguin Walked In and Other Tall Tales, currently on sale digitally and in paperback.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE FINAL EPILOGUE
IN NORTHERN GUND, JUST a few thousand miles south from the most northern point, sat Mount Vent. Not an impressive mountain in most regards, some may even call it the smallest mountain in all of Gund. It was not, in fact, the smallest mountain in all of Gund. That award went to Mount Lombert near the western border of Klont in the southern jungles of Nembly. Mount Lombert was barely even a mountain in the strictest possible sense. Most locals referred to Mount Lombert as ‘the Big Hill’.
Near the top of Mount vent, in a cave lined with moss, there lived a hermit. This hermit was named Baffer.
Baffer may have been human, or possibly a dwarf. Or, based on the amount of body hair, an extremely small troll. It’s hard to say, really. He was short, but not too short, and, as mentioned previously, covered in thick, course, hair. He wasn’t a dirty hermit. He didn’t live in filth. He was actually quite tidy, despite living in a cave lined with moss.
The moss he had placed there himself. Covering every inch of the stone walls and ceilings methodically each night. Using his own spit to attach the clumps of plant to the rock. The moss really did the trick when it came to keeping out the cold, something one encounters frequently this far north when living in a cave on the side of a mountain.
The problem with moss is that once you’ve picked it and attached it to rock using your own spit, it tended to die and then lose most of what made it a great insulator in the first place. That is unless you wanted your cave to be cool and damp, which would defeat the purpose of putting up the moss to begin with. This meant that one would always have to be gathering moss and then reattaching it to their cave walls.
Fortunately for Baffer, gathering moss was one of his most favorite pastimes. Second only to writing poetry.
Baffer’s poetry was famous throughout Gund, a fact he himself was quite unaware of. He did not write for fame. He wrote because it made him feel good. But, feeling good didn’t pay the bills.
Fortunately for Baffer, he had no bills to pay, one of the few benefits of being a hermit. That and the nudity. But bills or no, Baffer still had to eat, and when you spend your days gathering moss or writing poetry, it leaves little room for hunting. So, once a week Baffer would get dressed and travel down the mountain to the city of Darliksford. There he would hand off his newly written poetry to his agent for a basket of eggs, a bag of meat, more paper, and a bundle of pencils.
His agent would then turn around and publish them across all of Gund, which, consequently, made the man quite rich. In fact, Baffer’s agent had become so fabulously wealthy that he now owns Mount Vent. The agent, whose name, by the way, was Birp, had been toying with the idea of changing the name of Baffer’s mountain from Mount Vent to Mount Birp.
Today, a day Baffer will always remember as one of his least productive moss gathering days, the hermit took a short break to jot down an idea or two he’d had for a new poem. He’d already had a title in mind:
THE DAY I WENT LOOKING FOR MOSS BUT INSTEAD FOUND LOVE, ONLY SHE TURNED OUT TO BE A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION AND SO I WAS VERY SAD FOR QUITE A LONG PERIOD OF TIME.
And so Baffer, sitting on the small boulder out in front of his moss-lined cave, began to write.
What Baffer didn’t know, however, was that he wasn’t writing poetry at all. Baffer was a prophet, and when he sat down to write, what he wrote was prophecy. He wasn’t aware of this because Baffer couldn’t read. He only knew that when he bent over his crisp, white paper, pencil in hand, the words would flow out of him. He just didn’t know what the words were.
When he’d made his first trek down the mountain, papers in hand, he’d met Mr. Birp in a tavern. He’d shown Birp the papers, insisting that they were his poetry. Birp, ever the shrewd businessman, recognized them right away for what they were.
Prophecy.
Prophetic writings were veritable cash cows in Gund. So Birp, what with his shrewdness and all, kept up the charade that what Baffer had brought to him was poetry and a deal was struck.
And so, as Baffer wrote, he thought of the day he’d gone out to collect moss and found instead a woman bathing in the icy stream just down the mountain. She had said her name was Gertrundle and Baffer had found her to be most captivating. The most beautiful creature in the world. He recalled the conversation they had had down there by the icy stream and the way she kept touching his arm. He remembered taking her back to see his cave and her delight at seeing the wonderful way he had used the moss. He also recalled the hole that that opened in his heart when he finally realized that Gertrundle did not actually exist.
All of this coursed through his mind. What he put on the paper, however, was quite different.
Phrases like ‘great stirrings in the north,’ and ‘the Beard That Walks has a heart for conquest’; as well as ‘the One must face the Beard That Walks on the field of battle’ permeated the page. Even ‘blood, devastation, death, war, and horror,’ made an appearance. But for Baffer, they were his innermost thoughts and feelings.
He wrote on into the night. He could no longer even see the page, but no matter, the words were all put in their proper place.
When he finished, he had more than twenty pages full of writing before him, front and back. He took the pages, rolled them up, tied them with a bit of twine he pulled from deep within his beard, and tucked it away in a dry corner of the cave.
He looked up at the stars and moon and judged there to be about two more hours of darkness left before the night was over. Rather than spend that time sleeping, Baffer stoked the fire and scrambled up some eggs. He’d need a hearty breakfast of he were to journey down the mountain to sell his latest poem.
The End
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