Tundra

Artwork trodden into the fresh snow betrayed their location. The sets of gigantic tusks set like arches at the entrances to the campsite made it even more obvious. We had followed the caravan’s loose tracks across the tundra until finally we reached the mammoth riders who could take us to Mossen Grove. From here, we would have to go our separate ways. Or at least, Eiron would go his separate way, while the rest of us advanced inland, towards where the gilt, purple mountains stabbed the sky, making it bleed crimson and staining the smears of grey clouds. Unslinging his faithful axe, the Seafarer approached me, where I was standing in the snow, letting my robe flap and flutter around me in winds that warned of a coming blizzard.

‘It’s time,’ was all he said. He had never been one for elaborate words. Whereas I was a smith of syllables, he was a smith of conventional steel.

‘Yes it is,’ I admitted. ‘You know, you don’t have to go. We could probably use you here.’

‘No.’ He bowed his braided head, so that we were almost level. ‘I’m not having people say a mage was braver than me.’ And with that, he was gone, a grey figure marching off resolutely into the blinding snow, which quickly enveloped him in curtains of white. The rest of us looked to each other, having already taken in the uncanny sight of standing stones, the only seemingly solid things in an ocean of swirling powder and fog. This was it– the edge of Mossen Grove. Pine trees rose up, jagged as arrowheads and black on the horizon, beneath their own pale blanket. Naked sticks protruded from the outermost rows of the forest like ranks of lowered spears.

‘So,’ I wondered aloud. ‘What happens now?’

The answer came from an elder of the mammoth riders, a cowed old woman with hair as white and wispy as the drift. ‘You take these stones,’ she said, holding out a wrinkled hand, on the proffered palm of which were three polished pebbles like landmarks on a creased map. ‘Take these, and go out to where the ground will swallow you.’

‘Don’t I have to eat the fungus again?’ I asked, uneasily.

The old woman chuckled softly. ‘No,’ she said, with a tone that implied I was in for a treat. ‘There is so much of it in the air that you will breathe it in.’

‘I have the exorcism prepared,’ said Hackley, meekly.

‘Thank you,’ I muttered.

With the crunch of fresh snow beneath my feet, I stepped into the grove. The stone I had selected was immensely heavy in my hand, as heavy as the space-defying mass of a dead star. Fumes wafted around me, noxious clouds of purple. It was just as impossible to avoid inhaling it as it was not to choke or retch. I felt the clammy fingers of a malevolent spirit forcing their way down my throat, clawing closer to my lungs, reaching out for my heart. I started to sink into the earth, as though there were nothing at all beneath that settled snow, no real solid ground to catch me and my handheld anchor. I could not tell whether the looseness that gulped me down was sludge or quicksand, or something else altogether.

Then, I saw something else, something silver darting like a squid through an aboveground tangle of kelp, propelled by multiple legs. Curiously, it had a human face, as did the chimeras that followed it– possessed druids with fox ears, antlers, dangerous stripes, hooves, tentacles, tails, skittering feet and paws. I tried to move towards them, but I was bogged down, stuck in a nightmare that grew steadily more bizarre as the torrent of creatures dived out of the trees, from behind rocks and out of the barrows under the standing stones. Forward they rushed, towards my friends, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. The wolves were closing in.