Frodo glanced down at the carved piece of ash wood in his hand... his unfinished Atlatl.
It was crude, held together by quickly dried sinew, but the physics of the lever were universal.
He didn’t wait for his father to negotiate. Frodo stepped up to the edge of the snowy precipice. He fitted a light, flint-tipped javelin into the groove of the throwing stick, hooking the butt of the spear against the carved spur.
He pulled his arm back. With a snapping motion of his wrist, Frodo hurled the weapon.
The Atlatl acted as a massive extension of his twelve-year-old arm, multiplying the torque exponentially. The javelin blurred through the air, covering the fifty paces in a fraction of a second.
It slammed into the permafrost less than an inch from Kael’s fur-wrapped boot, its flint-tipped head shattering against the rock.
Kael leaped backward, tripping over his own staff in pure shock.
The warlord’s arrogant grin vanished, replaced by furious disbelief. No human could throw a spear that far with such speed!
Scrambling to his feet, Kael’s face twisted into a mask of rage. He pointed his staff at the cave entrance. "Slaughter them all!" he roared. "Leave nothing alive!"
The Blood-Walkers howled, a sound that rattled Frodo’s teeth. The war band surged forward, abandoning any semblance of formation, charging madly up the icy incline that led to the cave mouth.
"Brace yourselves!" Tor bellowed, stepping in front of Frodo and raising his thrusting spear.
The twelve able-bodied men of the tribe formed a tight horizontal line across the bottleneck of the cave entrance.
The first wave of invaders crashed into the defenders. The sickening crunch of stone axes meeting bone and the wet tearing of flesh filled the freezing air. Tor fought like a demon, his arms driving his spear through the chest of a charging warrior, lifting the man off his feet before tossing him down the slope.
"Garek! Now!" Frodo screamed over the din of the battle.
The crippled watchman, perched on a ledge above the entrance, didn’t hesitate. He kicked a wooden lever Frodo had rigged just hours before.
At the edge of the cliff, three clay pots, originally used to store water, now filled to the brim with rendered, boiling mammoth fat, tipped over.
The liquid cascaded down the icy slope, coating the packed ranks of the charging Blood-Walkers.
Screams of agony erupted as the boiling fat blistered their skin, but before they could retreat, Tor grabbed a burning branch from the central fire pit behind him and hurled it down the ramp.
The moment the embers touched the fat, the slope erupted.
A literal wall of fire roared to life, consuming the narrow pass. The flames climbed ten feet into the air, feeding greedily on the rich animal grease and the furs of the invaders.
Frodo’s stomach rebelled.
The sickening, sweet stench of roasting human flesh and searing hair hit his nostrils like a punch.
Frodo dropped to his hands and knees in the snow, emptying his stomach.
The fiery barrier bought them a handful of minutes, instantly incinerating a dozen of the vanguard. But the flames quickly exhausted the fat.
The surviving Blood-Walkers, driven mad by pain and bloodlust, threw the burning bodies of their own comrades over the flames to smother them, creating a gruesome, smoldering bridge.
They poured over the charred corpses, swinging their stone clubs with desperate fury. Tor’s line buckled. Two of his hunters went down under a flurry of axe blows, their skulls caved in.
Frodo wiped the bile from his chin, forcing his eyes open.
He looked toward the ceiling of the cavern, where Kaelen and the other women were hiding on a secondary ledge. Frodo caught his mother’s terrified eye and gave a downward nod.
Kaelen raised a flint knife and began sawing at a bundle of tension-bearing sinew ropes tied around a stalagmite.
The Blood-Walkers pushed Tor back into the mouth of the cave, funneling their entire remaining force into the enclosed, rocky threshold to finish the slaughter.
They were focused on the kill, unaware of the structural trap resting directly above their heads.
With a final slash, Kaelen severed the main rope.
A wooden scaffold, loaded with the gargantuan, stripped bones of the mammoth and hundreds of pounds of loose shale, had been suspended directly above the cave’s threshold. Released from its tension, gravity took over.
It crashed into the middle and rear ranks of the Blood-Walkers. Giant femurs and jagged boulders pulverized the invaders, snapping spines and crushing skulls instantly. A cloud of rock dust and snow exploded outward, blinding everyone.
When the dust finally settled, the remaining five Blood-Walkers at the front, realizing they were cut off and surrounded by the mangled remains of their kin, dropped their weapons.
They fell to their knees in the bloody snow, shivering in absolute terror at the devastating "magic" of the mountain spirits.
Frodo let out a long breath, his legs giving out as he sat on a stone.
He looked up at his father, whose chest was heaving, covered in enemy blood. "We broke their spine, Father. We won."
The hunter leaned on his spear. "Do not celebrate, boy," Tor rasped.
Frodo frowned. "They are dead or surrendered. Their momentum is gone. What is left to fear?"
"Look closely at the dead," Tor commanded, pointing the bloody tip of his spear at the fallen invaders. "Look at their arms. Look at their furs."
Frodo squinted through the settling dust. As he observed the corpses, the reality began to dawn on him.
The men lying dead in the snow were lean, almost sickly.
Their furs were patched and thin. None of them wore the prized pelts of the cave bear or the lion.
"Kael is not among them," Tor said.
"Why?" Frodo asked. "Why would he sacrifice thirty of his own men in a frontal assault just to stay behind?"
Tor spat a glob of blood into the snow. "Those were the hungry, the slow, the expendable ones. He sent them to drain our strength, to force us to use our traps, and to see how fiercely we fight."
Frodo looked down at his unfinished Atlatl.
Victory tasted like ashes in his mouth. After all, if he wanted to save his tribe from a war band, his spear alone wouldn’t be enough. He needed something more powerful.