The Last Troll

A Willerby Short

William knew this would be his last autumn.

He had been slowing for centuries. For the last fifty years waking from summer hibernation had become harder each October.

As a young troll – a time that seemed as yesterday as it did tens of thousands of years ago - waking happened with the ease of instinct, his eyes open and alert at the prick of the year’s first frost and his great bones pulsing with cold, sharp life.

Back in those days when trolls were masters of all the land, he had been one of many.

He remembered boreal forests, plains and heaths filled with joyful blood-calls. He remembered fierce, earth-shaking embraces beneath the honk of departing geese and, later in December and January, the eldritch crackling of moonlit freezing nights when he and his clan hunted the first soft-bodies, so funny, so frail, for sport.

But that was all in the deep past when there had been many of his kind.

The last hunt had been more than a thousand years ago, before the first guardians arrived in what they now called Willerby and forbade what they called murder with spells and incantations. Now the soft-bodies were called humans and the young ones, played on his sleeping body in the summer and had no fear of him when he was awake.

Sometimes when it was very cold and he was in a good mood, he carried them on his back on plunging rides over snowbanks and frozen streams.

He had grown fond of the littlest ones, careful of their easily bruised and breakable bodies, while still relishing his memories of the pop and crunch of their ancestors’ still twitching corpses when the world was younger.

Although he had not killed for many years and did not miss it, he had no remorse or regret.

That was then, and this was now.

Times change.

He was very old now. Older than the trees. Older than much of the earth. Older than even the shape of the stars in the sky. He was older than anything except the shape of the landscape around him, and a strange dark thing of water that like him spent much of its time asleep but seemed to have it in itself to wake almost as bright and fierce as it was when young when the conditions were right.

William was not like that thing. He had lost the capacity to be bright and fierce, even in the depths of cold, cold winter when all the world’s water was bound up like iron in the earth.

Things were different now.

The summers seemed longer, the winters shorter.

The older soft-bodies who came to speak to him sometimes said this was not just his perception – that the world was slowly warming everywhere because of smoke from too many fires burning for too long – but William knew it was not just this.

Perhaps if the world were not changing, he would have a fistful more years, but only a few.

Another ten or twenty. No more than fifty at the very most.

As things were, William knew his time was just days from now.

Time to slow.

Time to stop.

Time for the great dreamless sleep to fold his earth and stone flesh and bone into the landscape where it would stay for as near enough forever as made no difference.

Time to die.

William asked one of the young ones to fetch the guardians.

The two he knew – the man and the woman – came with two he did not. Another man and another woman, not young but younger with a few more seasons left in them.

They sat on a fallen log on the riverbank by his cave wearing coats and hats of bright colours, shining like metal or polished stone, so different to the brown and grey furs and animal skins worn by the ones he had known first – those who sang in the soft-body world in melody, dance and chant, binding him to oaths he had once hated then come to accept and tolerate.

Part of him wondered whether the promises had been long tricks to bind and tame the wild world before it knew what was being done.

Those of his kind and others akin to them had slowed, diminished and declined while the soft-bodies had multiplied, filling the land, the rivers and even the skies far above him with their fast mayfly lives and their violence, cruelty, loyalty and love.

He tried not to dwell on those thoughts – it made no difference now.

He would soon be gone.

He looked upon the last guardians he would know. Then in a voice that was freeze-thaw scree and tumbling rock he found his final words.

“I think,” he said, “I might be the last.”

The older male soft-body looked at the older female to which he was paired. She nodded.

“You might be,” he said. “There are no others we know, neither near nor far.”

“It is hard to be the last,” William said, pulling himself from the ground and into a hunched crouch that placed his head dozens of feet higher than those of the four humans below him. “There are no older and I do not know where to go. There is nobody to tell me how to find the way.”

“Perhaps they are waiting for you,” the older female said, and William had learned enough of humans to know by this she meant to be kind.

“Perhaps,” William said, “and perhaps there is only nothing, like the dark of the long sleep.”

“You will be missed,” the female said, “and remembered.”

“Not for long,” said William. “Soon I will be memory, then nothing.”

“The same will happen to us,” said the younger man.

“Yes,” William said, slowly. “I go before you, but this will come to you soon. For you, everything happens soon. But at you have others like you to take your place and I do not.”

“Is there anything we can do?” The older woman asked.

“Keep your young ones away from here until the winter,” William said, “I am too tired for them, and they will be disappointed because they do not understand. When it is time for them to come again after I am gone, tell them I am asleep and will not wake. Tell them they can climb and play their games on me, and to call my body William’s Bones and to pass on stories about me until they forget.”

“William?” The older woman said.

“You could not say my real name,” William said, “and now I think there is nobody left who can.”

“William?” The younger woman said, “are you afraid?”

“Yes,” he said, after what seemed a long pause, “and alone with my fear.”

There was nothing more to say, so they left him there, sleeping, the last of the trolls, whipped by a funeral confetti of brown and gold leaves in the spray of cold rain.