Tundra

He spent his youth building monuments to immortal kings, so now he would make a monument of himself. Erasmus would be what there had never been before– not an immortal king, but an immortal pauper, and lord of all creation.

Meanwhile, Eiron wished to become royalty again, while Aais came from a land with no royalty, no kings or queens or princes, and humbly sought only a god. I had yet to meet any of the three of them, for I was caught in my own predicament. I was on the tundra, where the wolves roamed ragged, and the sea that swept inland through the fjords was smooth and clear as ice. I was where the leaves were curled and dead, and the winter was coming, autumn giving soft surrender to the silent winds that chilled all living things to the bone.

It was not a land or a freezing cold I walked alone. Aais, the fish man, had waddled up the shore and discovered the ice caves that lie to the far west of the continent, beyond the forest with its willows drinking in the twisted streams with twisted roots. The ice caves glittered electric blue as spells, as though built out of magic. In them, seafarers mined for precious, sacred blue ice and metals. The echoes of picks and hammers rang through the caverns as Aais first walked and then stumbled, growing blue as the ice with cold in this strange land. Frost began to coat his scales, giving them an extra, shining veneer and a chill that clung to his outsides as well as biting him from within, whenever his gills drew breath.

Suddenly, a sound rang out that was not a voice.

‘You! Stay where you are!’

Aais froze literally as well as figuratively. Puffing steam from his gills, he stood rooted to the spot. Turning slowly, he saw a gang of rough, leather-clad Seafarers, bone ornament threaded braids and ponytails swinging as they cleaved the ice with pickaxes heaved overhead with both hands. All were tall, much larger than fish men, measuring maybe six or seven feet from long-haired heads to toes. All wore permanent scowls inflicted by the raw wind, and tattoos black with the ink of squids inflicted by raw knives. Aais counted seals and mammoths, sons of wolves and men of knotted serpents. These, he knew, were the marks of rank in Seafarer society. The ones he dealt with were lowly, but they could still be vicious. Indeed, they toiled amongst much rubble, apparently the result of a cave-in, and were not deterred from their work.

‘Hail, Seafarers,’ he said, struggling to master the old tongue. ‘I mean you no harm.’

‘What is it?’ he heard them jabber, in a tone that made him even more uncomfortable than the cold.

‘What’s it doing here?’

‘It talks, doesn’t it?’

‘Ask it!’

Aais spoke without being asked, interjecting in their conversation. ‘I am searching for my god.’

‘Why?’ one Seafarer demanded, impressions of shells rippling on his chest and back. ‘If it’s a god you want,’ he said, pointing to another of his company, ‘we’ve got a shrine to his great-grandfather nearby. He saved four people from a cave-in. You can pray to that, if you like.’

‘Do they have cave-ins underwater?’ another started.

‘Of course they do…’

‘Sea caves and all that…’

Aais shuffled awkwardly, but eventually found his tongue, and tried to be as diplomatic as he could. ‘I am sure that your great-grandfather is a powerful elder,’ he began, ‘but I do not think that he can help me. My god has left the dark water and come this way. I search for Hassis.’

‘Your god,’ said a Seafarer, suspiciously. ‘Is it a huge monster? All tentacles and teeth?

Aais thought of Hassis, the kraken in his ordinary shape, when he was not morphed into a man bearing tattoos of his former glory. ‘That sounds about right,’ he agreed.

‘Something like that came through here a few nights ago,’ said a Seafarer, angrily. ‘Destroyed everything in its path. We didn’t get a good look at it….’

‘We were all hiding. We thought it was an earthquake…’

‘There’s a confluence of underground rivers down there. That’s probably where your god was going. It’s all ice caves, though, and it’s not very stable.’ There was an odd inflection of bitterness in this Seafarer’s voice, as he punctuated his words with swings of his axe. His words were more warning than spiteful when he said, ‘Maybe you should pray at the cave-in shrine after all.’