The First Toll
Author’s Note: It’s my birthday! Please enjoy this BONUS TBU story as my gift to you, dear reader. Enjoy!
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When the world was young and knew not sin, the great vines of the Bound Woman wormed and worked their way through the earth. They tunneled deep, splitting stone and rock, hewing sheer cliffs and hollowing vast chasms. Everywhere her roots and vines spread, they seeded the first life upon the barren rock we call home. Vegetation flourished, green supplanted brown, and color bloomed in sterile plains for the first time.
Yet Q’elva gave too much of herself, too much of her power. The more her vines wove throughout creation, the tighter her bonds grew. At the heart of the jungle she stood, hands fastened by coils of green, eyes darkened by moss. She could not walk, nor wander—she only whispered. Her voice slid through leaf and branch, a warning carried on humid winds: Nothing grows without cost. Nothing moves without loss.
Eons slipped away, her cries permeating the very bedrock of creation. And then he heard it. Thalen, the first, the Stone Father, heard the Bound Woman’s anguish. She could free herself, but too much of her power and essence was intertwined with the earth, and to do so would undo all life.
Thalen, vast as the mountain ranges and silent as the mist, rose from the marrow of the mountains. His skin was granite, his breath the dust of ages. He bent low to the earth and pressed his ear to the roots of Q’elva, and there he heard her lament.
When he found her bound among her vines, Thalen’s heart of stone trembled. She had given what he could not: color, softness, the greening of the earth. In her, the lifeless cliffs saw their complement. And in him, she beheld the strength that anchored all she had made. From that moment, love was born.
Stone reached for vine, vine curled to stone. When they touched, creation shuddered. Rivers carved new paths through the land, mountains clothed themselves in forests, and the sky blazed with light. She whispered in the leaves, he thundered in the cliffs, and together they sang the world into order.
Yet they could not remain entwined. The weight of Thalen’s stones would crush Q’elva’s delicate vines and flowers, grinding the blossoms she had sown into dust. Her anguish at the thought tore deeper than any chasm, and Thalen, seeing her pain, recoiled as though split by quake.
So they parted, though their love was unbroken. She remained bound to root and river. He returned to cliff and cavern. Only where vine clings to stone, or where root splits the mountain, could they touch again.
But Q’elva’s longing could not remain hidden. It coursed through her vines, saturating root and leaf, river and flower. From her yearning the pattern of all creation was set: plants stretching toward the sun as if it were their absent beloved, beasts calling out in the night for one another, and man, their greatest child, destined forever to yearn for his mate. All the world carried the ache of her desire.
Yet love itself demands a price. To endure, something had to be given. Thalen tore from his own body a mass of formless clay, and with rough stone hands he sculpted delicate features. When his toil was finished, the heavens glimpsed man for the first time. He lay upon the ground, formed but unmoving.
The earth trembled, bearing the golem to Q’elva. Upon seeing Thalen’s work, she knew her task. Reaching into her very womb, she plucked a seed of life and placed it at the heart of the stone man. Closing his chest, she bent low and breathed upon him, imbuing him with the same life she had poured into the world. For the first time, Man opened his eyes and gazed upon his creators.
The rocks whispered with Thalen’s voice: “Movement shall exist where once there was none. But no step is free. Every road forward will be paid for in loss.”
Thus the First Toll was spoken.
Man rose and walked, yet his steps echoed with the weight of the law. Though his body was strong with Thalen’s stone and his heart alive with Q’elva’s life, within him already stirred the hunger of her yearning. He would seek, he would strive, he would wander—never content, never still. For in his veins pulsed the ache of separation, and in his bones lay the truth of the law that all things must be paid for.
Q’elva wept, but her tears were sweet, watering the roots of the first trees. Thalen turned away, his silence broken only by the grinding of the mountains. Together they watched their creation walk into the vast jungle, the first path cut where none had been.
And the earth remembered. The Toll etched itself into stone and root, into water and wind. It waits at every crossing, every road, every gate. For what began in love and loss could not remain hidden—its price was sown into the marrow of the world.
Now Q’elva is old, and her strength wanes. We, her children, bear the burden of keeping her desire alive. We offer our memories to the altar of remembrance, that through our eyes she may glimpse again the face of her beloved. If we should fail, she will draw back her vines, and life itself will unravel, unspooled from the earth.
And so the Wanderer walks still, bearing the wheel and the club, first child of toll and loss. In him the yearning of Q’elva and the strength of Thalen endure, a living witness to the First Toll—and a shadow of all tolls yet to come….
