‹ Prequel: Ninety Days of Water
Status: Active.
Tundra
Chapter XXII – Wolves – Part III
This was a forest of blades. The sun skated the horizon, peering through leaves shaped like serrated hacksaws, or spread like rakes and fans of knives. The wind was a rattling of rib cages, and a biting of bones. It was the chill of the grave, and the chill that follows in the wake of graves. It gnawed on the arthritic skeletons of trees, whose hoariest knuckles were pews for the mountain's many, silent crows. Harbingers of wintertime, who knew the art of scavenging and sent wolves begging, these sleek birds perched in frozen moments, winter's orb reflected in their glassy eyes.
As Eiron watched, one broke the reverie with its barking. Three syllables shattered the clear air, and two eyes found him, a polished sun in each. He shivered, though he did not want for furs. Beneath three walrus hides, his skin glistened with sweat. Some of it, he had worked up at the forge of memory, scraping the metal of thought on the metal of bravery until it inflamed, spraying hot sparks into the snow. The rest had accumulated as he hiked uphill, breathing clouds and lugging his axe and two picks newborn of ice and fire, which he had obtained from the mammoth riders before he left.
Ice and Fire. Fire and Ice.
One for each of the peaks named after the elements that ruled this range like brothers, and fought like bitter enemies. Fire was a rugged fist thrust up to accuse the sky. Ice was a scarred face of permafrost, cleaved by an ancient river and built for rebuffing blizzards. Both would need to be mounted before he could cross into the fortified part of the world where the now beached elder was being kept.
Eiron sighed and felt his breath curdle around him again. Life was an infection here, and heat was just another sign of weakness– a fever for melting senses and filling bodies with convulsions. Amongst all living things, only the crows, as gatekeepers between life and death, were permitted by virtue of the work they did picking carcasses clean of offending flesh. On Fire and on Ice, fat and muscle were impurities to be sloughed away by wind, rain, hail and sandstorms. Bone was hardier, but only stone was truly welcome.
Eiron would become stone. When he had mounted this slope and climbed both ascendant spires, when he had first fended off the guardian crows and then allowed them to pick at his meat, and when the ritual was complete, he would invoke all of the strength that stone offered. He was adaptable, and if death was the price of living, then death he would embrace.
For the time being, he had fire in his heart, ice in his tangled hair, and liquid dragon's breath –fire's closest consumable approximate– igniting his every fibre.
That would be enough.
As Eiron watched, one broke the reverie with its barking. Three syllables shattered the clear air, and two eyes found him, a polished sun in each. He shivered, though he did not want for furs. Beneath three walrus hides, his skin glistened with sweat. Some of it, he had worked up at the forge of memory, scraping the metal of thought on the metal of bravery until it inflamed, spraying hot sparks into the snow. The rest had accumulated as he hiked uphill, breathing clouds and lugging his axe and two picks newborn of ice and fire, which he had obtained from the mammoth riders before he left.
Ice and Fire. Fire and Ice.
One for each of the peaks named after the elements that ruled this range like brothers, and fought like bitter enemies. Fire was a rugged fist thrust up to accuse the sky. Ice was a scarred face of permafrost, cleaved by an ancient river and built for rebuffing blizzards. Both would need to be mounted before he could cross into the fortified part of the world where the now beached elder was being kept.
Eiron sighed and felt his breath curdle around him again. Life was an infection here, and heat was just another sign of weakness– a fever for melting senses and filling bodies with convulsions. Amongst all living things, only the crows, as gatekeepers between life and death, were permitted by virtue of the work they did picking carcasses clean of offending flesh. On Fire and on Ice, fat and muscle were impurities to be sloughed away by wind, rain, hail and sandstorms. Bone was hardier, but only stone was truly welcome.
Eiron would become stone. When he had mounted this slope and climbed both ascendant spires, when he had first fended off the guardian crows and then allowed them to pick at his meat, and when the ritual was complete, he would invoke all of the strength that stone offered. He was adaptable, and if death was the price of living, then death he would embrace.
For the time being, he had fire in his heart, ice in his tangled hair, and liquid dragon's breath –fire's closest consumable approximate– igniting his every fibre.
That would be enough.