Tulgus Balm

The people of the Northwoods had never been numerous - or perhaps they had, in ages past. What remained were the stone circles: perfect rings of moss-blackened granite that broke through the forest floor like the ribs of long dead giants. Hikers often found them in the deep woods. Townspeople even found them in the most unlikely places. Children dared each other to spend a night within their bounds, though few ever did.

The circles were all that testified to what had been: settlements of some kind, though no one could say for certain. The elders spoke of towers - great spires of blackstone that had pierced the canopy - but the elders were dead now too, and their children remembered the stories imperfectly, the way one remembers a dream upon waking.

The Northwoods people themselves had become less than legend. They were a whisper. A suggestion in certain clearings where the light fell strangely. A beauty glimpsed in peripheral vision and lost when you turned your head.

Tall, they said. Pale-eyed. Their skin like birchbark in winter.

Then nothing. The towers fell or faded. The settlements returned to root and loam. The stone circles remained because stone remembers longer than flesh, longer than song, longer than the forests that devour all other traces of human ambition.

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Seeker Marien was not looking for anything in particular.

She’d spent three weeks in the Moonvale, trading with the Ihrnbri and observing the Vallestalf in the snow-white forests. The journey home took her through the deepest part of the Northwoods - a route she’d traveled twice before without incident.

The tower appeared between one breath and the next.

She’d looked away to check her cloak fastening. When she raised her eyes again, there it stood: a column of blackstone rising from the earth like a finger of accusation. The trees bent away from it. No birds sang within sight of it. The air itself seemed to thicken, become watchable.

Marien was young. Marien was curious. Marien had read too many stories that began with someone turning away from mystery and ended with them dying old and bitter, wondering what might have been. And after all, what is a seeker without a spirit of adventure?

She approached.

The tower had no door that she could see - just a gap in the stone where a door should have been, an absence that suggested entrance had never required something as crude as hinges. Inside, the air was cold enough to make her breath visible. The walls were smooth as glass and faintly warm to the touch, which made no sense given the chill.

A spiral stair wound upward into darkness.

She climbed.

At the top, a chamber. Empty of furniture, empty of decay, empty of anything except stone pedestals, laid out like a stone circle - uniform and empty. Except for one - And on that pedestal, sat a book.

The tome was bound in leather so old it had gone gray, and when Marien opened it, the pages rustled together with a raspy whisper. The script was strange - but not something out of the ordinary, Germanic perhaps?

But for some arcane reason, simply looking at the text, allowed her to understand it.

Most of the text eluded her—recipes or rituals, instructions for crafts she lacked context to understand. But one entry drew her eye, written in a hand more careful than the others, as if the author had wanted to be certain these particular words survived:

The Tulgus Balm. Our gift and our vanity. Pure tallow of the heath-cattle, rendered under moonlight, cooled in vessels of horn. Nothing added. Nothing taken away. We anointed ourselves at dawn and dusk, and our skin remained as it was in youth—smooth and pale as snow, untouched by wind or sun or age.

Vanity, perhaps. But beauty is not nothing. Beauty is the visible face of the invisible soul. We made ourselves beautiful because we wished to be worthy of the forests that kept us, and the forests did not judge us for wanting to be more than the mud from which we came.

The entry ended there, unsigned, as if the author had been interrupted.

Marien stood in that empty tower for a long time, the book open in her hands. Curious… this knowledge is far from unknown, and certainly not magic. Or…was it?

She descended carefully. The tower remained solid behind her as she walked away, though when she glanced back one final time, she could not be entirely certain it was still there.

The artisans of the Moonvale listened to her story with great interest. They understood the magic in mundane things.

The Tulgus Balm was born that winter.

It worked. Not magically, perhaps, but it worked the way the best things work: quietly, consistently, without fanfare. Those who used it spoke of skin made supple, of weather-wear softened, of a kind of smoothness that reversed the ravages of time.

The Northwoods people remained gone. Their towers were still lost. Their stone circles still broke through the forest floor in clearings where the light fell curiously.

But their beauty persisted. Not in blood or bone or the faces of descendants, but in this: a simple preparation of rendered fat, passed from hand to hand, generation to generation, carrying forward the only thing they’d wanted anyone to remember about them.

That they had been beautiful.
That they had existed.
That once, long ago, they had lived among the trees and wanted to be worthy of them.

In the end, perhaps that was enough.