"Oi… Are you the whelp of a goblin who broke my mountain?!"
The voice was old and rough, like stone grinding against stone. It came from somewhere below me, and I turned to see a figure standing on a ledge about fifty feet down the slope.
He was short, barely reaching my chest, with a beard that hung past his belt and a face that looked like it had been carved from the mountain itself… literally.
His skin was the color of granite, and his eyes were the pale grey of winter clouds. I found them to be strikingly beautiful in a face that was carved out of stone.
He was holding a hammer. It was a very large hammer. And he was pointing it at me with what seemed like anger, but in his eyes, I could only see curiosity and amusement.
I stared at him. He stared at me. The wind blew between us. In my mind was sheer disbelief at the presence of this unknown being, and at the fact that our languages, across all that time, were nearly identical apart from small tonal shifts.
