To some, it may have seemed large, but it was moderate in scale for me. The mountain was clean, it’s peak lacking the usual snow, with volcanic, white stone making up the entire, gorgeous structure. On it’s highest point, lived a barbarian of earthly and unclean origin, with much more unclean past sleeping in my consciousness.

I dismounted my steed and stripped myself bare, leaving only my dagger, and began the ascent, remembering well the tales of this mountain man’s beastly actions. Not long before my crusade had he slain a shepherd and ate his stock, holding the herding hound high above his shoulders and hurling it from atop the alp. Killings like this, brought on by primeval thought and little reconsideration, show a creature of poor moral direction, and must be ended if an age of acceptance and good will is to thrive. I hoped to, in my advance, hold purity in a world which birth men of degeneracy.

I crawled along the mountain’s scree and rough, sloping side, my dagger acting as hiking pick, wedging into rocky creases and becoming a handle for me to pull my weight. In the ascent, I split the decaying skull of a lamb with my blade when hooking it onto an overhead cliff, sparking in me the burning memory that my enemy had no value for another’s life, and his days lacked any form of civilised action or thought. My mission was mighty: a journey of extreme well intent and social right.

I clenched my fingers onto a ledge, above it nothing but sky, and hoisted myself over onto dipped stone. From rolling, I stood to see a bowl-like, circular plateau, mirroring a hillock’s summit in size. Near the far edge, he sat.

He was bent over a lump of wet pottery, which he moulded into some sort of spherical shape. Raising his head, he stared me down with evil, emerald, glistening eyes. Rising to his feet, skin empty matt, almost completely without texture, he glanced at my blade. The figure was, like me, strapping; like me, nude. But he was grey and of clay; I am of colour and flesh.

“Come you to kill me?” he sturdily asked.

I did not reply; I would not. He began to breathe heavier and pulled away a sheep’s skin and collected his own pottery knife before standing pillar-like, facing me.

I marched slowly closer, chest first. Every second moment was met with the clap of a foot’s sole upon the sloping stone. Then, once near, I lunged.

I was caught in a lock, as we each held another’s weapons away from ourselves. He threw me to the side, next to a collection of pottery vases, one of which I launched at him, missing. He charged and I threw him into a dead fireplace close, the ash creating a black cloud. We wrestled on the rough ground desperately, clinging and kicking and slipping and scraping and falling and rolling.

We collectively rose, again holding each other’s knife away from the body. I steadily forced my weapon near his face, against his resistance, before violently whipping it away and thrusting the blade into his side. He gasped and clung to my neck with saddened expression, instinctively clutching tighter and tighter. To stop it, I swiftly slid the blade from one hip to the opposite through him. The animal roared and collapsed to the ground as a heavy mass, releasing. He pathetically held his front and squirmed about, and so, turning it to point downward, leaning over, I threw my dagger repeatedly into him until he ceased movement.

I stood, looking at the lifeless mess. He received his inevitable punishment brought on by his ways with the shepherd; fate met him through me. In continued fulfilment, I pulled his torso from the stone by his locks before cutting the former free. I held the head high above my shoulders and hurled the thing from atop the alp, watching the heavy lump’s crash. I would spend my last moments on this mountain, far from defeated and on a high from combat, in constant memory of the disgusting actions and thought in the life of the man of clay, before thinking it best to prolong punishment of the monster in his end in switching the dagger to other palm and mutilating the body further.