Snow (original)

[Academia Nut]

Alright kiddies, buckle in for the secret project I alluded to a few days ago. Special thanks go to Chris for helping to edit this. Get out some moody music, I recommend Agalloch's 'Our Fortress is Burning - III The Grain'.

---

Have you ever felt the cold? I mean the true cold, the killer cold that clings to you, tongues of wind licking over you like a predator tasting its meal and savouring it before it administers the fatal bite to the back of the neck.

That kind of cold, have you ever felt that?

Have you ever felt that sensation of the very air trying to kill you, sucking the strength from your muscles while paradoxically burning them? Have you ever felt that? If you have, you’ll know that the feeling is not one you can easily forget, even with a lifetime of memories to drown out even a single instance of that kind of cold.

I ask because the sensation of that ravenous cold was my first, and most vivid, memory. Before that cold, there is only darkness, emptiness within my mind. Perhaps that I sprang, fully formed, like Pallas Athena from Zeus’ head, and there exists no memories from before the cold because I simply did not exist.

Then again, comparing my origin to that of Greek Gods is probably a bit of a stretch. They didn’t start their lives as little better than three-quarters drowned rats.

Some time after I first became aware of that hungry cold, I cannot tell you how long as I had no frame of reference from which to start, I discovered a new sensation. My head broke the surface of the water I had not realized I had been in, not that clearing the surface helped much. In fact, considering the hail that lashed down upon my head like rapid fire strikes from an enraged boxer and the rolling waves that sought to crush me with furious indifference, the instinctive attempt to breathe probably cost me more air than if I had remained beneath the surface.

I existed like that for a time. I know that objectively it could not have been more than a handful of seconds -a minute at the absolute most- or I surely would have drowned, but at the time it felt like years. In fact, I would count those first few moments in the ocean as the longest time period in my life. I was trapped in my own infinite hell of water so cold it would freeze solid if not for the fact that it was too agitated for the ice to form. There was too little light to see which was both a blessing and a curse; for while I could not see my doom awaiting in the great black rollers that kept attempting to swamp me, neither could I time my gasping breathes to avoid choking upon the frigid, brackish water that forced its way down my nose and throat.

And then, as if this wretched existence were not torment enough, the thunder gods chose that moment to use me for target practice. My first image, seared as much into my mind as it was my eyes, was of a great lightning bolt crashing down through the murk of the storm to impact the waters a few scant arm lengths in front of me, revealing in its terrible blue-white glare the nightmare that was my existence.

I was in an ocean, surrounded on all sides by water choked white with the hail that continued to batter my head, face, shoulders, and arms. I was carried aloft by the peak of a great wave at that instant, but even with my heightened viewpoint I could not make out much beyond a tiny radius about me, so I had no idea if I was close to shore, or trapped so far from land that it would take a billion years for the fossilized remnants of my carcass to be shoved up into a mountain range somewhere.

And the moment passed, leaving me only the afterimage of that pillar of light connecting the sea and sky burned into the back of my eyeballs to let me know that light existed in this place. That and the tingling sensation in my limbs from being so close to such raw elemental power to let me know that there existed something in the universe beyond the clawing cold.

I cannot say exactly how it was that I found the energy to not just sink beneath the waves and let the frigid sea reclaim what it had apparently given birth to. Somehow though, I discovered not just the energy, but the will to raise a leaden arm above my head and then plough it through the hail covered waters.

And then to do it again with my other arm.

And again with the first.

It was not quite swimming, yet it was more than the random flailing that drowns a man. This was… this was an attempt to claw and scratch and bite and generally thrash the ocean, to pound the seas into submission until they gave way before me.

I moved, I forced the water to get out of my way, and I moved. By the light of the bolts of thunder launched between feuding deities in the clouds, I oriented myself with the waves and rode with them. I cared not where they took me; only that I moved. I was driven like an animal at that point, fuelled by a burning, consuming desire not to give up. For even as my strength waned, even as the salty water tried to freeze up about me, to steal the surge of life I had experienced after nearly touching that missile from the heavens, I refused to let the cold within me.

Yet despite my resolve, I soon found my body slowing, both physically and mentally, as if time itself was slowly freezing in the hail and sleet of this tempest. Every stroke of my arms, every kick of my legs, seemed to take longer and longer to complete as the cold patiently clawed its way through my flesh, into my heart and brain, telling me to slow down, to just give up the struggle and sink beneath the waves once more.

A scant few seconds before the final redoubts of my soul succumbed, the lightning lanced out once more towards the surface of the ocean, only to stop short. At first I thought that a truly monstrous wave was about to smash into me and end this, but after a moment’s thought I realized that it was just the opposite. The lightning had struck a cliff.

A cliff the seas were carrying me towards.

Oh the irony! To blindly swim onward, hoping that the path I was taken upon would lead me to land –and to find it!- only for that land which I discovered to be my killer, breaking me as a thoughtless child might smash a chick freshly exhausted from the struggle to break out of its shell. A fresh, and final, surge of adrenaline struck my veins as I heard for the first time the booming crash of the waves upon the cliff, unheard until now amongst the rest of the cacophonous din by my waterlogged ears.

I tried to crawl up the slope of wave as it began to crest, a futile, pathetic attempt to forestall the inevitable, but the surging foam at the top held me back, prevented me from sliding back down the other side and forcing me forward, towards the unseen, unyielding wall before me.

I should have died there, as I should have died countless times already since I surfaced, yet somehow I did not. Somehow, when the sea launched me against the stone, my body did not shatter, did not burst open like a bladder filled with gelatine and chicken bones hurled against a brick wall. Somehow I struck the cliff, and I stuck there. As the waters receded they tried to claw me from the stone, and with all my strength I hung on until I had but two fingers still attached like limpets to the unyielding stone with my legs hanging out in the open seas.

I hauled myself forward, hauled my exhausted, bleeding, half frozen body forward, knowing I did not have much time until the frenzied seas returned. I, somehow, managed to turn two fingernails digging into the stone into two hands firmly grasping the sea worn stone of the cliff.

Some instinct –or perhaps just a metronome within my brain that had been synchronized to the rhythm of the waves- told me when to take a deep breath and I did so, an instant before the next hammering fist of water broke across my legs and back, punching me into the cliff face and threatening to steal the precious oxygen I had gained. Then, like the coiling limbs of the things that dwelt in the deep, the surge attempted to rip me away once more, but with inhuman desperation fuelled by the undeniable reality of the solid cliff gripped in my hands, I clung to my perch until the wave had receded.

Before the next wave impacted, I managed to get my legs under me, and I immediately jammed my feet and toes into whatever nooks and crannies I could find, attempting to emulate the armoured creatures that dwelled in this most punishing of habitats. I weathered another strike from the waves, and for a moment I felt like I could cling there until the sun died, clutching the stone in such a tight embrace I would become one with it.

But I could not. The cold was still cutting into me, undermining the fragile bastion I had forged with my arms and legs. I could not stay there forever, I had to escape or I would surely collapse and be carried away by the seas to my doom.

I had to move.

So I moved my arm, reaching up until I had a new handhold, and then I clung on once more for the next swing of the aquatic battering ram. And then I found a new foothold and clung on once more. And I did this again and again, where the strength to do this came from I could not say, but surely it was a superhuman feat beyond my understanding. This was something that should not have been, could not have been, and yet here I was, doing it!

I could barely see; my sense of touch was numbed to noticing the mere presence of only the greatest pressures; my limbs were cast from iron while my joints were but paper, and yet I climbed. Still I moved onward and upward. I found no escape from the cold, for still the skies above sent whips of sleet across my skin and barrages of hail to strike my flesh. I often had to claw away at layers of ice upon the rocks to gain enough purchase upon the slick surface…

Yet still I climbed.

A shorter eternity yet a longer time than those first few seconds on the surface, my hand reached up for a new hold only to discover that there was none. It took a wailing second for my frozen, battered, exhausted brain to realize that this was a good thing, for that meant that I had reached the top of the cliff. For a brief second after that a treacherous part of my mind wondered if I had climbed to the top of a spire and once I got over the edge I would tumble back down into the roiling seas on the other side, but I quickly quashed that Quisling voice.

With pathetic strength and yet supernatural endurance, I hauled my body over the edge and onto solid ground. Oh how sweet it felt, and oh what a surge of power I felt after that. I had defeated the ocean! I had struggled, bruised and beaten from its grasp, and an exultant cry broke from my frozen lips. It was raw and gurgling, my mouth and throat still filled with the ever present water of the rain, but for a second my world was filled with the sound of my own triumphant roar, drowning out even the cracking air of the thunder in my ears.

It was not to last, the water finally reaching my lungs and forcing me to cough and sputter and throwing me to my hands and knees, but as if cowed by my cry the storm began to break, the hail letting up and the rain slackening off. In retrospect, the hailstones had been getting smaller for a while now and the rhythm of the rain had been decreasing, but in that moment, I cared not. I had conquered the storm! Nature herself could not defeat me.

As the warm glow of victory began to fade though, the cold returned, to whisper in my ear ‘Memento mori’. The cold was my first memory, and it was telling me that it would also be my last; that I would die alone and without life or warmth.

I had defeated the sea, endured the rain, suffered the storm…but I had not escaped it. It was telling me I would never escape it.

I did the only thing I could. I moved forward. I crawled, on my hands and knees, across the frozen landscape as the chill unwearyingly continued to creep past my skin into the depths of my being, wearying me. I could almost feel ice begin to accumulate upon me, trying to entomb me within a transparent, skin tight cage to create a grotesque sculpture of death snatched from the jaws of life. Here lies a man who conquered sea and storm, yet still failed in the end!

Time slowed further, the clock of my life winding down as ice jammed the gears, yet I could feel light, the words of a new dawn upon the tip of the horizon’s tongue. If I could keep moving until morning, then surely that great ball of fire in the sky would burn away the clouds above and the ice that ensnared me. I just… had… to… keep… moving…

Hours… perhaps days… passed in the blink of an eye before I sense movement; I could sense that beyond the blurred light something living stirred in the aftermath of the storm.

Life meant warmth, meant heat, meant escape from the cold.

I could do this! I somehow managed a deep inhalation to feed oxygen to the few embers left smouldering within me and surged forward, cracking off the frozen cladding that adorned me, grasping out desperately for whatever it was I had glimpsed. There was a cry and then rapid movement away from me. I missed.

If what I had seen was an animal, then I was doomed. But if it were human, then maybe… just maybe… it would return. Return and bring heat and warmth with it. I put the last dying sparks of my person into hoping beyond hope, into pleading with the universe. I had not asked for any favours while fighting the storm, while fighting the sea, but if I had earned any prize beyond my life, I begged that the prize be another person to bring me salvation.

I closed my eyes and all went dark.

For the longest time I had thought that the cold had claimed me fully. That this final trace of activity in my brain was nothing more than the last, stubborn gasps of neurons firing their last… when I realized that I was staring at something in the blackness.

It was a sphere with a half mirrored surface, but those words were not nearly enough to properly express what it truly was. Symbols and numbers ran through my head to describe what I saw, telling me that it was mathematically a perfect sphere, and that it had transmission and reflection coefficients of precisely one half each across all wavelengths.

What these words and symbols meant exactly, I could not quite tell, let alone understand… just that they seemed important to me, perhaps from some point before the cold, if there was such a thing.

I gazed into that darkly mirrored sphere, and a face gazed back at me, one I belatedly realized had to be my own, seeing as how the surface was perfectly spherical and specularly reflective. I looked like…

I cannot truly say what woke me, whether it was my dream or the activities in the waking world, but it would be some small comfort to me to say that it was the latter, for if you fear your own reflection, how can you ever not be afraid?

The sudden transition from the neutral world of dreams to the overwhelming sensations of the waking was too quick to allow proper acclimatization and thus my whole body flailed about in a spastic blur, the only directed motion being that of my right hand which snapped out to grab that which had probably forced me into wakefulness. For the space of a good three heartbeats I remained tense, my limbs bent at odd angles, before my brain had a chance to process what was around me and I immediately relaxed.

Coarse fibres covered my body from neck to toe, excluding my arms which had jerked out into open air, scratching at me while also trapping heat somewhat uncomfortably, and it did not take long to realize that this was simply the feel of a wool or fur blanket next to bare, raw skin that had been exposed to frigid temperatures for too long.

There were also several points of heat beneath my back and about my sides, probably heat pads or the like, and of course there was the point of radiant heat someway over to the left side, an enormous mass of painful radiance that slammed into me wherever my skin was exposed to the open air on that side. The strong scent of wood smoke and pine along with the occasional crackle and pop from that direction let me know that I was near a wood fire.

A blanket and a fire would have been conclusive enough proof that I was around other people, but the ultimate proof rested in my right hand. Clutched there firmly was a wrist, a bony wrist wrapped in wrinkled, leathery skin. For a disbelieving moment I held it tightly, before I ran my thumb up into the palm and then loosened up, so that I could feel the leathery, callused fingers branching off the palm and the swollen, arthritic joints. For the briefest of moments I wondered if the person who had found me was sicker than I was, for the flesh of the one tending to me felt like it was burning beneath my fingers, but then I realized that I was probably still suffering from the residual after effects of hypothermia and thus everything felt uncomfortably warmer than it should be.

So I released the hand and began to cry, weeping tears of joy that I had found another person, someone who knew the secrets of fire and could help me banish away the cold that still clutched at my heart and mind with the terrible tenacity of something that knew it had claimed a part of my soul, that knew I would never be completely free of it.

Yet it was curious that the memory of the sea and the storm haunted me so, even as I awoke, but when I dreamed, they were dreams of a half reflective sphere and not have nightmares of the time in the water…

As I cried, my tears of relief began to dissolve the gum of excessive sleep that had glued my eyes shut, and soon I found myself blinking to clear out the fluid and grime. For the briefest of instants as my eyes tried to focus I felt an irrational stab of fear punch into my gut, that when I opened my eyes I would shatter the illusion and I would be back in water and ice, staring down a bolt of lightning as a great wave reared up over my head to drown me once and for all.

What I found instead was a dark brown ceiling made of some dense, fibrous organic substance, perhaps thatch or sod or something like that, I could not particularly tell at the time, nor did I particularly care as glancing to the right, I viewed the face of my benefactor for the first time.

My host was old. So old that there was a certain androgyny to the features as a truly impressive labyrinth of wrinkles had obscured much of the face, allowing only the most prominent features to show through. A thin mop of wispy white hair sat overtop large, bushy white eyebrows, which in turn brooded over deeply recessed, beady blue eyes tinted with rheumy. Sandwiched between those eyes was a large, bulbous nose that had apparently been broken more than once before and thus drooped to one side towards the thin lips and toothless gums of the mouth, while the chin beneath was speckled with stubble. The rest of the body was wrapped up in thick, form concealing wool and furs, lending no further information as to gender.

The two of us gazed upon one another for a time, and then my benefactor spoke. It was strange hearing the voice of another, for I did not precisely hear the speech directly so much as I heard a person speaking in a language I could not understand followed by another voice at the back of my skull translating. Despite the thick blankets and the fire on my left side, I felt a chill up the back of my spine, for that voice, while neutral and genderless, carried an almost physical edge of ice with it. It was as if the arctic winds blowing off the far northern glaciers had gained awareness and was speaking to me from a point a third of a finger length inside the very back of my head.

It whispered to me, “She said, ‘I see you are awake.’”

Apparently the Arctic Winds could identify the gender of my host where I could not.

The voice, that damnable voice continued uncaring and whispered, “Tell her hello,” before it offered a few short syllables I could not understand, but I presumed at the time meant hello in the language in question.

Instead of repeating the sounds given to me, I instead asked, “Who are you? What are you?” while trying to look about me, but I found only a rough bed and nowhere for a mysterious translator to exist. I also received absolutely no reply to my inquiries.

The old woman looked at me impassively for a moment before she said something else. The voice translated, “She said, ‘I see you do not know my language’. Reply, ‘I do understand,’” and it then provided more words for me to say. Not knowing if what I was told to say actually meant what I was being told it meant, I kept quiet.

Creaking to her knees, the old woman got up and walked slowly and haltingly around the bed, although now that I looked at it the thing was more of a cot, towards the fire. She said, “You must either be some spirit or blessed by the gods, for I have never seen a man grow so cold and not die. You should not even be awake right now.”

I silently agreed with her. Every instinct within me said that I should have been dead a dozen times over, that even if there was the remote possibility of survival in the open seas during an ice storm, I should have been smashed to a pulp when I reached the cliff. And… and…

I looked at my hands. In the light from the fire I could see that they looked a bit raw, like the outermost layer of skin had been rubbed away, but surely they should have been black with frostbite and slashed ragged from the climb up the side of the cliff. I should have been covered in wounds. I should be missing digits if not entire limbs. I should have broken bones all over my body. I should have bruises and cuts everywhere. Every instinct in me screamed that even if I had somehow miraculously survived my ordeal, I should still have suffered enormous physical damage.

A sudden thrill of horror overtook me and I wondered and what my reflection had looked like in that mirrored sphere. For the life of me, I could not recall any specific human faces, but I somehow knew what one was supposed to look like. But I could not remember what my own looked like. Could my own face not live up to the standards of humanity I held?

That sudden impulsive fear was swiftly squashed by logic as I realized that I could not be too far outside the norm or the old woman surely would have commented by now. The panicky, irrational part tried to rally by pointing out that she could be taking pity and saying nothing, but when I ran my hands over my face just to check, I found nothing out of place from the basics. I had no good comprehension of what I really looked like, but I felt confident that there was nothing horrific hiding next to my eyes.

I did suddenly wish that I had some sort of reflective surface with which to view my own face. The Arctic Wind whispered to me the necessary sounds, but I ignored it. I did not trust anything that I could not say for certain was part of me and that supplied me with words I did not know the meaning to.

As almost a nervous habit I ran my hand over the top of my head, only to return with a clump of hair that had fallen out, causing me to explode out of the bed in shock. I don’t know what it was that made me so panicked to see those pathetic strands of fibre clutched like rotted seaweed in my hand where every other shock had washed off my skin like the rain in the storm. Perhaps it was the incongruity of the rest of my body having taken such a battering and yet my hair, largely left alone in the assault, had been the only part of me to suffer such damage.

I ran my other hand over my scalp, and it too came away full of follicles no longer attached to my head. For a long moment I just stared at my hands as if the long strands of hair strung between my fingers were lines of blood and I were Lady Macbeth unable to purge the damned spot. Somehow broken bones and twisted joints seemed preferable to this inexplicable onset of baldness, for at least I could explain such loss of bodily integrity. This… this…

I blinked and looked up to see the old woman staring at me incredulously. The first thing that I noticed was that I was huge in comparison to her. Had she been standing fully upright, I still would have been about a good foot taller than her, but she was hunched over from a lifetime of gravity pulling her down so that she looked almost dwarfish in comparison to me. The house wasn’t much better either, for my head was brushing dangerously close to the ceiling.

Then I felt the draft.

Glancing down I realized that I was not wearing pants. My cheeks growing hot with embarrassment like an oil spill struck by a spark, I quickly hopped back into the bed, wrapping the blankets about myself to preserve what was left of my dignity far more than to preserve body heat. Intellectually I knew that I had to have been naked around the old woman while asleep, and that she probably didn’t particularly care, but still, it was embarrassing.

Hobbling over to me, the old woman placed the back of a gnarled hand against my forehead and said, “You’re still far too cold to be jumping around like that.”

She was right too. Even with the burn on my cheeks from my blush her hand still felt far hotter than my skin. Obviously I couldn’t be more than a few degrees cooler than her, but in body temperature terms that was a huge amount. I must have felt like ice to her.

What was I?

“Are you a jotun?” She asked suspiciously.

I froze up, for the statement was simple enough that I could make out the subject even as the Arctic Wind whispered to me the translation of ‘frost giant’. I knew the word already, somehow. From where in my mind it had come from I did not know, and the memory was tattered and faded, but I knew the word ‘jotun’ and it’s meaning without needing the voice in my head to provide translation.

I knew what a jotun was, and I immediately knew how the old woman could draw such a conclusion; I was huge in comparison to her, I was inhumanly tough and strong, and I could survive and even take strenuous action in cold that would sap the life out of a normal man. Was I a jotun? Was I frost giant?

No. No! Every fibre of me screamed that this was not the case, that I was human. I was made of the same stuff as the woman peering over me suspiciously… it was just that something had happened to me. Something I could not remember, something from before the sea, before the cold.

Something involving that damnable sphere.

I could not remember anything more from it than the fact that it existed and a plethora of incomprehensible symbols swirled about my mind like darting silver fish whenever I thought about it. I hated that sphere, after a single dream of it I hated it. It was a singularity, a discontinuity in my mind that broke my life into the time before the cold and the current ice age, with only the occasional scrap tunnelling across the barrier to me. If a before time even existed, so little existed that they might all be hallucinations of an imperfectly imprinted scanned and copied mind upon a clone body-

And what did half of those words even mean?

I blinked once before facing down the old woman. I then crossed my arms in front of me and shook my head violently from side to side while saying emphatically, “No jotun! No jotun!” I’m not sure if the ‘no’ part was necessarily understandable by the old woman, but my demeanour certainly made my statement clear.

I was not a jotun. I was a human.

I kept telling myself that… all the while wondering whether or not I was trying to convince her or me…

The old woman frowned but said, “I guess you’re not a jotun then. What are you then, strange man?”

I was silent for a time before I finally said, “I am me.” She could not understand the words for I did not use the translation supplied by the Arctic Wind, but then again the words were not for her.

The words were for me, an affirmation of self spoken aloud as a warding against the creeping, existential goblins of the mind that would consume me with doubt and angst should I dwell upon anything else.

And it was all I had, those three simple words, ‘I am me.’ They said the sum total of my existence and yet said nothing at all, for such a response answered neither “Who are you?” or “What are you?” to any satisfactory degree.

I swallowed hard and shoved those paralyzing, freezing thoughts into the background. I am me. I am I. That would do for now. To brood any deeper at the moment would do me no good, and there was something within me that would loathe me if I sank into pointless, sophistic circles of baseless arguments and counter-arguments. I had no facts, only feelings, so I had no argument for any particular position, thus I would waste neither time nor energy upon it.

I could live with ‘me’ and figure out the rest later.

Seeing me lapse into this stillness and silence of thought, the old woman shrugged and instead went over to a small cast iron pot hanging over the fire. Lifting the lid produced a wave of steam and within seconds the scent of meat broth, onions, and various herbs, blasting into my nose and overwhelming the prevailing scent of pine and smoke. Saliva immediately rushed to my mouth, and I realized for the first time just how hungry I was. I had no idea how long it had been since I had last eaten, and the exhaustion of fighting the sea and climbing the cliff would have without doubt given me an enormous appetite even if I had been full before entering the water.

Filling a small wooden bowl, the old woman took it over to me before sitting down on the stool she had been on before I awoke. The soup was thin, containing perhaps a few slices of turnip mixed with the occasional grain of barley or slice of onion, and maybe one scrap of meat in the entire bowl, but I could smell the food that my body needed and an almost predatory, animalistic impulse came over me to grab the bowl and greedily devour everything within. I restrained that urge to gorge and instead waited patiently.

“Would you like me to spoon this to you, or are you well enough to eat it yourself?” She asked me.

I held out my hands and nodded, to which she supplied me the bowl and a crude wooden spoon. Bringing the bowl up close to my face, I inhaled deeply, savouring the smell while wincing slightly at the heat. I had the dread feeling that I would forever be cursed to be a little cooler in all things than the rest of humanity. Taking up a spoonful of the thin soup, I blew on it slightly to cool it down, before bringing it my mouth.

When the hot liquid hit my tongue I suddenly realized that this was the first thing I could remember having tasted. I also realized that babies were lucky for having the time of acclimatization to their senses before their ability to remember clearly was properly formed. I envied them at that moment.

It was not that the food was bad, far from it, and I did not go so far as to spit up the mouthful of soup, but I certainly had to choke it down as my senses exploded into a celebratory fireworks display inside my head that left me dazzled. The heat, the flavour, the texture, it was all too much to handle all at once. Coughing and sputtering, I lowered the bowl for a moment as I tried to let my senses recover. Shaking out my face, I looked over at the old woman before smiling broadly to show that I did not think her cooking was bad. Snorting derisively, she left to get her own bowl once she saw that I was still going to eat what I had.

Taking up that bowl again, I took another spoonful and brought it up to my lips, before taking a small sip of it. Wincing at the burning feeling, I retracted the spoon from my mouth and blew on it somewhat belatedly. I then took another sip. And then another. And another.

Time fell away and I entered into a sort of mechanical rhythm of taking a spoonful, blowing it cool, then sipping it dry before repeating the process over again. Somewhere along the line my bowl emptied and I requested another. And then another. And another. Until finally the old woman told me, “There is no more.”

I blinked in astonishment. Could I have really eaten that much and not realized it? I recalled her only having a half bowl, so I must have eaten everything in that pot, yet I did not feel full or sick, just in need of more despite the fact that my stomach should have been bulging from all that soup. Sighing, I handed over the bowl and spoon before settling down. I didn’t feel tired, but what else was I to do?

Looking over me, the old woman just shook her head and asked quietly, “What are you stranger?”

“I wish I knew,” I replied.

Her eyebrow immediately rose up in curiosity and she said, “Now that you have food in your belly you speak my tongue do you?”

I froze in shock and realized that I had not exactly been paying attention and had said the words provided to me by the Arctic Wind. I had been thinking the words already and I had wanted to say them, but in my distraction I had used the sounds provided to me instead of the ones I instinctively knew already.

“I… err… well…” I said, running at the mouth while trying to think of something to say. The Arctic Wind was silent on this issue, seeing as I had no thoughts to translate. Finally I had something I wanted to say and the sounds were provided to me. I could only hope that they had the meaning I wanted.

“I’m not from here and I don’t know how to speak your language very well,” I answered truthfully.

“You sound like you were born in the village, although that is impossible as I would have delivered you myself,” the old woman replied. Apparently she was some sort of midwife, or considering the fact that she was taking care of me, some sort of healer in general.

This gave me pause. I had to think about what I wanted to say in my language, and then get a proper translation from the Arctic Wind, but once I had the words I didn’t need to think much about how to change them from thoughts into actual sounds. Did this mysterious ability supply regional dialects as well? Or was this language from before the cold? Could I be known to the people of this place? But if this woman was some sort of healer, then surely she would recognize me.

Unless of course I did not look the way she remembered me.

I shook my head. Down that path lay a whole nest of problems that I did not particularly want to tackle if I didn’t need to. Still, it couldn’t hurt to ask and gather some information…

“Do you know where I could have learned your dialect then?” I asked. The actual translation was not quite like that, but the meaning in my head was along those lines. It certainly seemed that my diction was considerably at odds with the way I said it though, for the old woman looked at me strangely after I said that.

Snorting, she said, “Ah, now I have it. You must be a skald to speak so, and a loony one at that to craft such flowery words in such a rough accent as ours.”

Finding no useful data there, I shrugged. “I do not remember much. As far as I can tell you are the first person I have ever spoken to, despite the fact that I clearly have spoken to others before.”

Peering at me, she nodded and said, “You will make a good example to the men of the village as to what too much wine will do to a man. It will make you wander out naked into the middle of an autumn storm, nearly freeze to death, come close to falling off a cliff, and then finally wake up with no memory!”

I frowned. On the one hand I wanted to protest this accusation of my character by explaining what had happened to me, but on the other hand, when even I only half-believed my story because I had actually lived through it, what would she think? She would at best think I was crazy. At worst she would think me some sort of evil spirit in need of killing before it harmed the village. Instead, I said, “I don’t think I was drinking. I remember the cliff quite clearly and I was crawling away from it, not stumbling towards it, when I collapsed.”

Glaring at me, the old woman said, “There are only two reasons why you would be crawling away from the edge of the cliff where we found you. The first is that you stumbled towards it, realized you were heading towards your doom, and then turned around right quick. The second is that you somehow crawled out of the sea in the middle of a storm that would tear a longship asunder with a single wave, let alone a man. Which do you think is more likely?”

Thinking for a long moment, first to come up with a reply and then to get a translation, I said, “I could have been dumped there by a third party. A blow to the head could be responsible for my loss of memory.”

The old woman flicked me upside the nose and said, “Don’t be stupid. If you were mugged then why would you have been left so close to the edge of the cliff when throwing you over would have ensured that you were never found alive again?”

Scowling at the unwarranted assault upon my person, I choked down the first thing that came to mind, which the Arctic Wind translated into an absolutely filthy sounding phrase, and instead I said, “Perhaps the storm scared them off while the task was incomplete?”

“You were less than ten paces from the edge of the cliff. It would have taken no more effort to have dropped you there than to have finished the task,” the old woman explained.

I frowned, not from her statement, but because I had crawled further from the edge than that! Then again, my perceptions were fairly warped at the time. I still had no idea how tall exactly that cliff had been, but somehow I doubted I had climbed Devils Tower barehanded, despite the fact that I had certainly felt that way when I was ascending. Then a thought came to me.

“Lightning. I remember lightning striking nearby; close enough to feel the tingle. If I was accosted and someone attempted to dispose of me in the sea, then they might have left had a bolt of lightning struck so close while they were attempting to commit murder,” I replied. Surely they would have seen the scorch marks from the lightning bolt that struck the cliff and warned me of my impending impact with the rocks.

Furrowing her eyebrows, the old woman thought for a moment before finally she said, “There was a tree near you that had been smote by Thor, but do you not think that your mere survival of that night is enough blessing from the gods? Must you construct fanciful tales of robbers attempting to ditch you in the sea when simple drunkenness is so much simpler an explanation?”

Shaking my head, I said, “On the surface it is simpler, but I know that I was not drunk when I was crawling on that cliff, and since my mere survival strains credulity as it is, would you think that I had time to sober up somehow makes it more believable?”

“Well you were not struck on the head either, I know what a blow to the skull looks like, and while you have some cuts and scrapes I cannot explain, your story also has holes in it,” the old woman pointed out.

Of course, considering that the story I was presenting was just as true as the one she was suggesting, the fact that it had holes in it was unsurprising. Fed up, I said, “Unless you are suggesting that both our stories are false and that I did crawl out of the sea up the side of the cliff, this is a mystery for another day.”

Snorting, the old woman said, “Well, at least you have some sense in you. Now go to sleep, you’re still in no condition to be arguing with old women like me.”

Sighing, I decided not to protest the fact that I wasn’t particularly sleepy. Settling the blankets and furs a bit more comfortably about myself, I paused as I realized how rude I had been. I had not yet asked the old woman her name! I immediately said, “Forgive me for not asking sooner, but what is your name?”

“Runa,” she said before walking away, clearly intent on making sure I did not stay up to continue arguing with her. Not that there was many places for her to go, what with the fact that there appeared to be one room in the entire structure, but she was clearly giving off the message that she was in no mood to continue the conversation.

[Academia Nut]

Closing my eyes, I tried to relax and fall asleep, but found that rest refused to come; unwanted or unneeded I did not know. So instead I faked the sounds and motions of sleep until I heard loud, nasal snoring coming from the shadows nearby. I remained there for a time, wondering if Runa had adopted the same strategy as I had to see if I had fallen asleep, but eventually my confidence grew that she was indeed, asleep. Or perhaps it was less that my confidence grew and more that my paranoia waned.

I slipped out of my bed with my blanket wrapped about me- more for modesty than warmth as even with the fire banked for the night the heat was greater than I found comfortable- as I padded silently over to the hearth, crouching down to examine the red glow that emanated from within, holding out my hands to the fire to try and warm them, despite the fact that I didn’t feel cold. I held them there for a time, waiting for some warmth to soak in, but as soon as I retracted them I could feel that whatever energy I had picked up swiftly bled away into the thin night air.

Frowning, I rubbed my hands together and then put them closer to the embers of the fire to try and bring in more heat. My hands felt uncomfortably hot, as if they were about to spontaneously combust, but within a second of retracting them they cooled off to match the rest of my body.

Growling with frustration, I threw my hands forward with too much gusto so that instead of coming to rest a fraction of a finger-length from the surface of the hot ashes, I instead plunged my left hand deep into the red hot coals.

Now my hand was warm and stayed warm! With everything I had in me, which in retrospect was probably considerably more than most people, I bit down on my tongue, almost literally, and prevented myself from screaming as I tore my hand free, hopping up into the air and banging my head on the ceiling- which I now positively identified as being thatch- while I clutched my burning hand to my chest.

Frantically searching the darkness, I saw the outline of what appeared to be a door and immediately stumbled towards it as quietly and quickly- two mutually exclusive parameters in this case- as I could. Fumbling out with my right hand I soon found that the door was sealed with a simple bar over it that I quickly removed before opening the door inward just enough to let me escape.

Outside it was pleasantly cool, at least to me, with the air crisp and clean and small, intermittent drifts of snow lying upon the ground. Spying a convenient looking one nearby, I plunged my hand into the snow, eliciting a brief hiss as my overheated flesh flash melted the ice crystals. The icy shock of doing that was almost as bad as the original burn, but although part of me said that doing something like that was stupid beyond measure, after a few seconds the cold had seeped into my hand and I no longer cared.

Slumping down onto a drift of snow, which was uncomfortably cold, but not so much as to take my mind off my hand, I carefully lifted it out into the open air from the cavity I had made in the snow drift and held it in the open air for a time before working up the courage to have a look at my palm. Slowly turning it over, I examined the damage.

All in all, it didn’t look too bad, although with only the light of the stars and a waning gibbous moon, I couldn’t be entirely sure. It looked like I probably mostly covered my hand in first degree burns while the upper part and the tips of the fingers looked to have taken bad second degree burns. Already I could see blisters starting to form.

“Well that was stupid,” I said with a sigh before glancing up at the sky simply because there was little better to do.

A few dark clouds drifted across my view, probably remnants from the storm, but overall the sky was clear, presenting a spectacular light show composed of billions of dazzling stars spread across the night in the great band of the Milky Way, while the moon hung low and large in the sky, casting long, dim shadows over everything and giving a calm, eerie blue glow where it struck the snow.

Glancing about the infinite depths, I quickly found the constellation of Orion, brightly light amongst even the other brilliant stars. I then found Ursa Major and from there Ursa Minor and thus Polaris. Something in the back of my mind quietly worked away for a moment before telling me that I was both fairly far north and that something wasn’t quite right with the alignments about me.

Frowning, I glanced about at the other constellations, and although they all seemed to be in order as well, although there was this niggling doubt at the back of my mind that there was something fundamentally wrong with the heavens above me.

I sat there, in the snow, for quite some time, just observing the sky, before I realized that I was sitting in a snow drift in the middle of the night in autumn in what was probably Norway while naked and I had yet to freeze my balls off. Deciding not to push my luck any more than I already had, I quickly scampered inside the little hut and barred the door.

Collecting up the blanket from where I had dropped it next to the hearth, I tiptoed back my bed and sank into it. It really wasn’t much, and I wondered if I was simply uncomfortable with the bed and couldn’t sleep, but with my hand throbbing from the abuse I had put it through, eventually I slipped into unconsciousness.

I awoke to find Runa glaring down at me. Not even bothering to pretend otherwise, I just said, “So what gave me away?”

“You left muddy footprints coming back into the house,” Runa replied in an annoyed tone. “Plus you left a trail of hair.”

Sighing, I felt my head and discovered that I was now almost completely bald. With a few runs with my hand I excised the ‘almost’ part from the equation, just so that I would not have those straggler hairs remaining to make me look worse than if I was actually totally bald.

Holding up my left hand, I said, “I burned my hand last night and ran outside to cool it off in the snow. Stupid, I know.”

Taking my hand and peering at it, Runa shoved it aside dismissively and said, “Bah! What a baby you are!”

“What? I mean, yeah, it could be worse, but…” I began before trailing off when I caught sight of my left hand. Gone were the blisters and angry redness and cracked skin oozing clear fluid, replaced instead with just some patches of mild redness in place of the worst bits, while the rest of my hand looked completely fine.

“What the fuck?” I demanded of the universe, staring intently at my hand. What I saw didn’t seem possible.

Then again, so far no part of my story seemed possible.

“What was that?” Runa inquired, causing me to look up. Obviously I had slipped into the language I defaulted to normally.

“This was much, much worse last night, honest. In fact, I don’t know why I didn’t come to you right away, other than the fact that I wasn’t thinking straight what with the searing pain and all,” I said as earnestly as I could.

Runa did not seem to share my distress.

“Men,” Runa spat while rolling her eyes. “You nick yourself shaving and you come crying to me. Honestly, live with it.”

“But I… oh forget it,” I said in defeat, sinking into the bed and staring at my nearly undamaged hand in horror, unable to look away from the impossibility of what had happened.

Shaking her head, the old woman hobbled away to prepare breakfast, continuing to talk, not caring for my plight in the slightest. “You’re still colder than you should be, but you are too active to keep you cooped up in here any longer.” She lifted up the lid to something and sniffed it, shrugging before carrying on. “There are some clothes under the bed you can use, the ones we originally found you in were complete tatters, but don’t you go thinking that you can get away with them for free, or the bed, or meals I’m giving you. Winter is coming and I need firewood chopped, you understand that?”

“It’s already snowed; shouldn’t you already have all of that stowed away?” I asked.

Shrugging, Runa said, “I’ve been working on it, but not enough people have been sick or needed babies delivered this year to get me enough strong backs to build up both a good pile and a food supply. I have enough thick blankets that I would rather risk freezing to death than starving.”

“This is going to take a couple of days, isn’t it?” I asked wearily while the back of my mind went through some quick calculations as to fuel consumption and gave me a picture I did not particularly care for. “And you’re going to charge me for whatever firewood gets burned while staying here as well as for the food, aren’t you?”

“Of course. No freeloaders in here. So either you chop wood, or you get something worth my time from wherever you came from,” Runa replied.

Shrugging, I said, “Well, I don’t really know who I am or where I’m from anyway, so chopping wood sounds like as good a plan as any to me.”

Runa looked at me quizzically before she asked in a tone that said that she doubted she would want to hear the answer, “Do you know how to chop wood?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

Shaking her head, she said, “Well, you’ll either learn or cut off a foot.”

“No, I meant that I have no idea whether or not I know how to chop wood. I honestly don’t remember anything from before the night you found me,” I replied.

Frowning, Runa said, “Truly? Perhaps you did bump your head, although considering that I don’t see any bruises on your head, I can’t really explain it.”

“Maybe I just heal fast,” I said with a noncommittal shrug.

“Maybe you’re just a sissy who passes out from the slightest tap on the head,” Runa countered. “Now get dressed.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said dismissively while reaching down beneath the bed to find the clothing. Picking it up, I got it most of the way on before I suddenly hit a wall with trying to sort out the way that everything fastened together. I was soon grumbling and swearing under my breath at the obstinance of getting anything done.

Runa glanced over at me fumbling with the clothing, rolled her eyes, and asked sarcastically, “What is wrong now you twit?”

Frowning, I said, “Sorry, I’m just not familiar with how these kinds of clothes go together. I mean, I get the basic arrangement of pants and shirt and such, but the proportions aren’t quite right, and there are more belts than I’m used to.”

Shaking her head, Runa hobbles over to me and immediately sorts me out, showing me how to get dressed all the while muttering, “What are you, a man or a babe?”

“I’m just not used to these clothes, I’m not stupid. Here, now that I know what I’m doing, I can do just fine,” I said in annoyance before proceeding to demonstrate that now that I knew what I was doing, I could quite easily clothe myself. “I’m not stupid… just ignorant.”

Runa shook her head and said, “You are the strangest man I have ever seen. You know not your name or how to properly clothe yourself, yet you speak our coarse country tongue like a poet. You are a giant, and yet you whinge and whine at the slightest scrape, your skin soft as a babe’s and paler than anyone I have ever seen before. Yet you weather the cold so well.”

Snorting in annoyance, I said sarcastically, “I guess I’m just a delicate snowflake then.”

“Ha! Snow is what I shall call you then!” Runa replied. “I was getting tired of thinking of you as ‘hey you’ anyway.”

Shrugging, I said, “I guess Snow will work until I remember my real name.”

“Yes, just as you will work, you hungry ogre. Get out there and start cutting chopping wood while I make you something,” Runa ordered.

“Yes… yes…” I said while getting up and making sure that the boots provided were fitting alright. They were a touch too small for me, but I really didn’t really have much of an option there, now did I?

Heading outside, I balked at the brightness of the light that assaulted my eyes as I opened the door. The door quite evidently was south-east facing as the morning sun was shining directly into my eyes. Once I had acclimatized to the spectacular brilliance, my eyes having only known the moon and stars and fire and lightning as sources of light so far, I noted the beauty of what I saw.

What had been shadows and blue glow the night before had now resolved into forests and mountains. Runa’s home seemed to be situated in a valley between two large peaks, each one backlit by the rising sun to appear as titanic black pyramids limned in orange fire, while the conifer forests were as endless rows of paintbrushes reaching towards the sky, their tips dipped in every shade of yellow, orange and red. The scattered drifts of autumnal snow that had glowed blue in the moonlight the night before now reflected the fires above, ensuring that it seemed as if the whole world was burning. Even the clouds were ablaze, their cobalt undersides turned to purples and reds by the light of the new day.

“So Sol is putting on a pretty show, she does that a lot. Now get out there and cut some wood?” Runa said from behind me, making shooing motions for me to get outside, her tone that of a person who had seen such sights daily for so many decades it no longer mattered.

Shaking my head, I said, “I’m going, I’m going. Yeesh, you think you could let a guy enjoy his first remembered sunrise.”

From the darkness of the hut, Runa said in annoyance, “Cut wood!”

Heading out into the comfortably cool morning air, I glanced about at the hut in full, more or less anyway, lighting. It was a small thing really, squat and brown and windowless, a circular structure perhaps six or seven paces across at the outside. The only thing made of stone was the chimney jutting out of the hut. Otherwise the whole thing was rather unimpressive and even a touchy shabby looking.

A short way from the door was a small woodpile next to a storage shed kind of structure added onto the hut at some point after its initial construction. Glancing inside the shed, I found a long handled axe set with a black iron head. Picking it up and examining it, I found it a touch crude but ultimately in decent condition and more than serviceable for splitting wood. Further examination of the shack revealed there were a few other tools and some plants drying out, hung from the ceiling, but there seemed to be nothing else that could be used for wood cutting except for a small hatchet.

Taking the axe out of the shack, I examined the wood pile and immediately frowned. Everything here had already been split! Taking another look at the axe, I noted that the head would definitely serve better at splitting wood than cutting it, as it was more wedge-like than blade-like. Heading back to the hut door, I peeked my head inside and asked, “Runa, do you need me to fell a tree for you?”

Sitting next to the hearth and fiddling with a pot, she said, “Yes, any of the ones around here will do, just so long as you don’t drop a tree on my house.”

“Do you have a felling axe then?” I asked.

Runa looked up at that and asked, “No. I’m surprised you knew about that though.”

Shrugging, I said, “I could tell from the structure of the head that it would be inefficient at cutting across the grain as it is optimized for splitting along the grain.”

Runa stared at me blankly for a second before she asked, “What?”

Pausing, I ran over the translation provided by the Arctic Wind, which I had slipped into using with surprising ease, and realized that half the words I had used had no actual translation in the language Runa and I had been speaking. It all must have sounded like complete gibberish to her.

“Uh… what I meant to say was that the axe didn’t look like it would be very good at cutting because it looked better at splitting,” I simplified, earning a grunt in reply.

“You are very strange, Snow. Anyway, you’ll just have to make do with that axe for now,” Runa said dismissively.

Shaking my head in defeat, I walked away from the house and began a quick survey of the woods surrounding it. There was a small path worn by many years of people walking that lead away to the west, so I wouldn’t want to be cutting anything down around there until I had figured out how to drop a tree properly, lest I risk dropping it on someone.

Picking a spot to the south of the hut, I glanced at a likely candidate and looked it up and down. Looking at it, I then set the axe upright next to it and compared the shadow. The sun was still rising so they were quite long, but doing some quick comparisons I estimated that the top of the tree should land several paces from Runa’s hut, even if it fell along the most direct line.

Taking up the axe, I lined up on the tree and wound up for a mighty swing. Throwing my whole body into the strike, I swung the axe into the trunk with everything I had. Unfortunately, not only did I hit a point considerably higher than I intended, but the majority of the force rebounded into the axe and sent it flying out of my hands. Throwing up my arms on instinct to shield my face, I cried out, “Fuck!” while the axe, fortunately, spun away harmlessly into the undergrowth.

Once the danger of dismemberment at my own hand had died down, I glanced at the tree and scowled at the rather insignificant dent I had put into it.

This was going to take some experimentation.

Recovering the axe, I set it next to the tree before heading back to the shack, where I picked up the hatchet and examined it. It definitely had a head more suited to cutting than the axe I was using, though the shorter handle and blade meant that working with it would be a much bigger pain in the ass. Still, I took it with me back to the tree.

Looking at it, I shrugged and took the hatchet and began to cut into the bark at the point I intended to. It took me a few experimental swings to figure out the right strength needed to get the hatchet to actually cut the wood without getting stuck or attempt to fly out of my hands.

“That’s going to take you quite a while,” Runa commented from behind me.

“I know,” I grunted while working at the tree. Already the air was strongly scented with the sweet scent of pine sap and I was continuously wiping off the blade to keep it from becoming excessively sticky. I really was no good at this sort of thing. “I’m making a bit of a pilot cut at the moment and then I’m going to try with the splitting axe.”

“Have something to eat then,” Runa said, offering me a bowl of thin soup similar to what I ate last night and a chunk of black bread with what looked like a mixture of fat and honey spread over it. Taking the bowl I quickly devoured everything within before attacking the bread. It was a tough, dense bread, and the spread on it was definitely something my palate would take some getting used to, but it was food and I was hungry so it was quickly eaten.

“Thank you,” I said, handing the bowl and spoon back to Runa.

Looking at the bowl, Runa said, “My you eat fast.”

“I’m hungry,” I said with a shrug, before picking up the axe. Glancing at Runa, I said sheepishly, “You’re probably going to want to go back to your house while I do this. It isn’t going to be pretty.”

Snorting derisively, Runa said, “Bah! You just don’t want an audience to your incompetence.”

“Well, that too, but that is because last time I swung this thing I probably would have decapitated any audience member in close proximity,” I admitted.

Muttering about my competence as a man, Runa left. Once I judged her far enough away that any rogue axes would not threaten life or limb, beyond me of course, I took up a stance next to the tree that I thought would give me proper balance and took a light swing to see if I had my aim in. I frowned at how off I was and then took a few more practice swings to get everything squared up nicely.

With a satisfying whack I managed to get the axe to go where I wanted it and I knocked out a small piece of the tree. Grinning slightly, I continued working for a time until I noticed a sort of visceral pressure that I should have expected before this point. I had to empty out my bladder, which promised to be all sorts of fun.

Setting the axe aside, I wandered off away from the hut just far enough that I could still see it, but where I was unlikely to be seen, not that it really would have mattered to Runa, but it would have mattered to me. Glancing about to check to make sure that I was actually alone, it would be just my luck to accidentally relieve myself in front of someone else, I then began fiddling with my clothing. Unfortunately, while I had figured out how to put it on and take it off, I was still a little fuzzy on how to go about partially undressing for this sort of thing.

After several embarrassing minutes that I was glad no one had witnessed, I went back to working on the tree. It was long, hard work seeing as the axe I had was not meant for doing this sort of thing and I had no idea what I was doing.

Eventually though I had enough of a chunk taken out of the tree that I felt that it was starting to look a little unstable. Glancing about, I made sure that everything was clear of any potential path the tree might possibly fall in before I began to take a few final swings at the tree. As the last few chunks were taken out, I could hear the tree begin to groan and creak as its own weight began bear it down.

Retreating a bit, I watched the tree as it shuddered and swayed until finally it stopped moving. Frowning, I cursed the resilience of the damned thing before moving in for one last swing. Feeling a tad frustrated, I wound up far more than was necessary and ended up burying the blade in the wood.

This time the tree had now lost too much structural support and was no longer in the condition to continue in an erect person. With the tree swaying dangerously like a drunk, I decided that perhaps now was a good time to run. Abandoning the axe as the trunk began to twist about it I went deeper into the forest while crying out, “Timber!”

With a series of pops and cracks, the pine crashed to the ground, its branches snapping and snagging on the other trees, creating a massive cloud of conifer needles. The very tip of the tree came to rest right on top of the woodpile outside Runa’s hut, so that for her part when she came out to investigate the ruckus the old woman just said, “Give it a little more space next time.”

Shrugging sheepishly, I said, “I’ll make sure to include a larger safety factor.” In my mind the strange symbols that described reality told me that I had made a small rounding error that had carried over to produce a smaller estimated height than I had thought I had figured out using the shadows.

Returning to the stump that had been the base of the tree, I searched for the axe for a minute or so before finding the head and most of the pieces of the handle. While the head was really the important part, the whole axe was useless to me until I replaced the handle. Sighing and preparing myself for an epic tongue lashing, I gathered up the pieces and walked over to Runa, who was surveying the tree.

“Umm… Runa… yeah, look, the axe kind of got stuck in the tree with that last swing, so it was sort of… well… under the tree when it landed,” I said, holding up the pieces.

Sighing, Runa took the axe head out of my hands and said, “Snow… if you weren’t so ready to admit your own incompetence I would do it for you.”

Shrugging defensively, I said, “Hey! I’m not a lumberjack; I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. This was probably inevitable.”

“Can you think of a better way for you to pay me back?” Runa asked.

“No, but if this continues I’m going to be working for you all winter doing odd jobs trying to pay you back,” I said.

A broad smile covering her wrinkled, toothless face, Runa replied, “Huh… that’s terrible.”

I suddenly got the sinking feeling in my gut that I had just been outplayed. “You… you… you’re doing this intentionally?”

Waving a hand, Runa replied, “Oh come now, why would a little old lady like me possibly want to create a situation where a strong young man like you would have to spend a winter doing heavy lifting for me? Now get this cleaned up as much as you can, we’ll go see the blacksmith about getting this head hafted after lunch.”

Sighing in defeat and knowing that I was probably going to be stuck with Runa for a while to come, I went over to the stump again and found the hatchet, before going to work on removing the boughs from the three. This was going to be a long day.

For a short time after that I worked at cleaning up the felled tree by stripping off the branches with the hatchet and piling them up next to the wood pile. I would probably have to cut up the branches further at a later time to make them easier to feed into the fireplace as kindling, but for now my top priority was in getting the tree down to a bare trunk for later.

Eventually though, as the sun had climbed towards its fall zenith, Runa exited her home with the second meal of the day. Lunch went similarly to breakfast, a simple fare that left me feeling in need of more, but not hungry enough to actually have the gall to ask for more of Runa’s food, but once finished Runa returned carrying a basket and a walking stick.

Without even needing to be told I took the basket from her and slipped the woven fibre carrying straps over my shoulders. Runa harrumphed appreciatively before she said, “I will admit, you learn quickly.”

“You’re welcome,” I replied in mild sarcasm as I followed her down the simple dirt path that led through the forest. The pace was about as slow as would be expected from an aged woman walking a rough forest trail, but the fact that she had no load and a steadying hand to help her certainly accelerated things considerably.

While walking in this way, it occurred to me that something was not quite right here. Speaking up, I asked, “Runa, why don’t you live with other people? It can’t be very safe for you to have to make these sorts of trips.”

“Short answer: I angered the local jarl but I’m too valuable to get rid of. Long answer: you might be the biggest sissy of a man I have ever met, but Jarl Notger is the biggest babe of a man I have ever met, prone to throwing tantrums. When one of his sons was born lame in the leg, he blamed me. The rest of the village though didn’t particularly want to get rid of the only midwife and healer in the area, so I was told to leave the village… but not very far. So I got my little shack in the woods,” Runa explained with a large degree of bitterness.

“Wow,” I noted in surprise.

“Yes. Unfortunately my husband, an incorrigible drinker, decided that he wasn’t going to give up going to the mead hall with his friends despite the walk and ended up getting lost in a blizzard,” Runa replied in a sad, disgusted tone.

“Oh,” I replied. No wonder she hated drinking.

“Fortunately my son got enough sense from his mother that he didn’t leave her in the middle of the woods completely alone, so despite the fact that he stayed behind with his own family, sensible really, he made sure those first few years I wouldn’t starve or freeze,” Runa explained.

“So what went wrong this year?” I asked in a careful voice.

Runa grumbled for a moment and I immediately began to apologize before she said, “Notger again. The swine decided that in his dotage years it might be nice to give something to his club-footed offspring as an inheritance, but since he’d already drunk it all away, he would need to find something new. Hearing of the wealth in the land of the Angles, he decided it might be fun to get the village together and go a Viking.”

“I can see were this is going,” I said with a wince.

“That’s because you’re smarter than a pig’s ass, the same of which cannot be said of Notger. Oh, our brave Jarl got his loot and plunder alright; it just cost one man in ten in the village to do it. Now this old widow isn’t going to ask a slightly less old widow who’s still raising her young ones for favours,” Runa explained with thinly veiled rage.

I kept quiet at this while Runa glowered a bit, before she said, “What, no platitudes about how my son got into Valhalla for his trouble?”

I was silent for a long time before I replied, “Well, no matter how you slice it, its not like you’re going to be seeing him again, so I don’t really see how saying that helps.”

“I see you’ve got a touch more sense in you than most of the men I know. Half of them talk about wanting to die gloriously in battle, forgetting what they have back home and the people who want to talk to them,” Runa grumbled.

A wry smile crossed my face and I said slyly, “You know, no offence to your son, but the Valkyries are really looking for the wrong people if Odin needs strong warriors. They’re picking up those who lost.”

I paused for a moment and tried to remember where I knew such things from, before I decided that it was one of those mysteries better left for contemplation at a later date.

“Oh? And who should they be looking for?” Runa asked suspiciously.

“Why, someone who puts up a fight so hard they are never defeated in battle. The kind of person where death has to come for them while sleeping lest there be a fight,” I explained. “You know; the sort of bitter, hard as nails person who doesn’t take crap from anyone, especially not some Valkyrie who wants them to move on when they’re not ready, damn it!”

Runa snorted and looked up at me with an impish expression on her wrinkled face and asked, “You wouldn’t be speaking of anyone you know, would you?”

“Considering that the number of people I know can be counted on one hand… if I had lost three fingers and a thumb… I would say that either I know more people than I think I do, or maybe you’re reading too much into my statements,” I answered evasively.

Shaking her head in bemusement, Runa replied in exasperation, “Snow, I think I’ve severely under valued you.”

“I think I have severely under valued me. I suppose it is just that I find it difficult at times to get the idioms right in your tongue, but I am working on it. Plus I think with my memory loss whatever silver my tongue might have has been tarnished a touch,” I replied.

“Snow, you are… you are just you,” Runa replied, just as we exited the forest.

It was a relatively abrupt exit, the kind that comes from extended forestry as while one moment we were in an old growth forest of various conifers, the next we were standing out in the open, the stumps of cut down trees about us, trailing away into fields. Most of these fields were brown stubble, the crops having already been taken in for the winter, but there was the occasional patch of white, either from the snow or from the sheep wandering about, grazing on the remnants of the harvest.

I could now clearly see the structure of the place. The village lay in a hilly valley that generally sloped down towards the sea at the far end, a few hours walk to the west. A small river, more of an overgrown creek really, wound down from the northern mountain. From this perspective I could also see further mountains where before the two dominant peaks and the lay of the terrain had been obscuring them.

The village proper, which was to say a slightly higher density of squat, brownish buildings from the surrounding farmland, was located at a large oxbow meander such that it was surrounded by water on three sides and cliff face on the forth. A low wooden palisade and the fact that the only routes in were a narrow wooden bridge probably just big enough to allow an ox driven cart to cross, quietly demonstrating the thought that had gone into defensive preparations, as did the relatively small dock. Overall, the place was… brown. That was really my first overwhelming thought. It was wooden and brown with a touch of grey from weathering or smoky snow. The path that wound along the river way towards the village was equally brown, as it was just a simple dirt trail forged by generations of feet- both human and animal- crossing the river once at a larger brown bridge further up the trail.

As walked along the muddy, rut filled path, I noticed how the two of us seemed the centre of attention from the few people out and about on such a dreary day. However, many of them seemed to deliberately try and ignore us.

“So uh… does the jarl’s dislike of you extend to the other people in the area?” I asked, somewhat nervously.

“Only to the extent that they know it’s bad to look too friendly with me, at least publicly. It’s actually kind of funny. They know that unless they have business with me Notger will get annoyed with them so they stay away unless someone gets sick or injured. Of course, that means that they now associate me with only that sort of thing so a lot of the younger ones think I’m some sort of bringer of ill omens,” Runa explained.

“I probably don’t help,” I noted dryly.

“Yes and no. Frankly most of them are equal parts scared and fascinated by you,” Runa pointed out. “I mean… you just look strange.”

I actually froze in mid-step, that irrational fear from the night before that I looked wrong coming back to steal the action from my limbs. I stammered for a second before I asked, “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, for one thing, you’re tall,” Runa pointed out in the clinical tone of someone who had extensive practical knowledge of human anatomy. “You’re a good head, if not head and shoulders, taller than all but the tallest men in the village, and even then you’re bigger than him. Yet your arms and legs are spindly for your size, and you have an almost womanly countenance. Almost, but not quite, for while the set of your features are those of a man, they have the softness of a boy who has yet to sprout his first whisker. Not only that, but your skin is quite pale and unmarked by neither time spent working under Sol’s glare nor by pox, making you appear even younger. Your teeth are whiter than snow and perfectly straight, except for in the back some of them are strangely discoloured yet not rotten.” She slowly examined the few people out in the fields, causing them to look away and Runa in turn to snort softly. “Some say you are a prince, pampered and spoilt. Some think you a freak, outcast from your village. And then there are those who think you a giant, birthed by the storm to bring suffering and destruction to us all.”

“And what do you think?” I asked, nervously.

“I think you are a man, if a strange one. I am convinced now that you are no jotun, just a foolishly clever man of strange appearance and stranger constitution. Perhaps you are a prince, perhaps simply a spoony skald who lost his way in a storm. You would know better than I, and you do not know. You are you, and that is all I particularly care about,” Runa explained.

Her comment resonating with my previous conviction that ‘I am I’, I smiled and said, “Thank you for your confidence.”

“Confidence? Ha! I think you’re a harmless, incompetent madman blessed with the gods’ own luck,” Runa replied.

“Better that than some great destroyer,” I noted quietly.

“Maybe. At least there you would be respected,” Runa said.

“There’s a difference between fear and respect,” I muttered, but by Runa’s odd reaction I wondered if perhaps she saw little distinction between the terms, a worrying prospect to me. As we both stewed with those ideas, the conversation quietly died out.

And so we walked along in near silence, if not stillness. The air was frequently kept alive by the blowing of the wind off the mountains, the bleating of the sheep, the occasional clink from something in the basket I carried, the scrape of our boots across the muddy earth, and the breath passing across our lips.

After a time though, as we approached closer to the village, Runa paused for a second before she asked, “You do know how to behave around others, right?”

This question caused me to pause as well, before I replied, “In general, yes, as our conversations show.”

“I’m not others,” Runa pointed out.

Nodding, I continued, “In specific? No. Not a clue. I know nothing of the finer points of social interaction within your culture.”

Rolling her eyes, Runa said, “There you go again with the strange wording.”

“Sorry. So I take it I should just keep my mouth shut and my eyes glued to the ground when we enter the village?” I asked.

Humming and hawing for a few moments, Runa replied, “Keep your mouth shut, but staring at the ground probably isn’t a good idea. It makes you look weak.”

“Well what else am I to do? I am weak in this situation. Do I make eye contact with people? Do I let my eyes dart about furtively? What?” I asked helplessly.

“Just… just keep your head level unless talking to someone. And if someone gives you a dirty look, just stare back at them until they give up or I break it up,” Runa explained.

“When I inevitably get lots of stares as a pale, bald, youthful faced giant, do I prioritize or split my attention?” I asked half sarcastically.

“Just pick one,” Runa said in exasperation.

By this time we were now quite close to the village, and the sounds, and smells, of human occupation were quite apparent when we were downwind. The distinctive tang of untreated sewage, already noticeable in the more vegetable scent of sheep manure, was quite apparent, although not an overwhelming smell considering the prevalence of fresh water in relation to the size of the village.

Walking across the bridge into the village, the first thing I noticed was the stares. Far worse than out in the surrounding countryside, here it was much harder for people to find something that legitimately interested them so that they could turn away. Worse yet, I was in much closer proximity to the people, so I noticed their eyes watching me that much more clearly.

Not only that, but I also noticed just how different I was from them. Runa, before age had stooped her, had probably been about average sized, maybe even tall for a woman, thus meaning that I was at least a good head taller than just about everyone, and head and shoulder taller than a good majority of the adult population. The men all wore beards, and usually not close cropped ones either.

Most all though, the people were generally ugly to my eyes. Not repulsive, just generally unpleasantly formed. Their faces often had scars from disease, their teeth were crooked and malformed and often outright missing, giving an unpleasant asymmetry to their faces. It was as if everyone was carrying an extra ten or twenty years of wear and tear once they reached adulthood. Combined with their bland clothing and generally squat appearances, it made them just… ugly.

I fought very hard to keep my face neutral as we walked into the village. The stares, the smells, and the appearance of those around me were making it very hard not to scowl or make a sour face, which I knew would only exacerbate the situation.

Then again, the kids were cute, if a bit mud covered at times. Considering the fact that the people did seem to keep their clothing and hair clean, it looked like that was just kids getting dirty from play rather than a general lack of hygiene. In particular the children seemed fascinated by me, at how tall and beardless I was. Possibly also how thin I was in comparison to the squat natures of everyone else, and yet I still seemed to have more fat on me than most. Thinking about it, no wonder the kids were fascinated by me. I must have been striking to everyone who saw me, but only the children lacked the fear and loathing to stare with anything but fascination.

I must have been like a really pretty looking butterfly to them. Weird, but neat to look at.

Runa led the way through the village, refusing to break stride, heading straight for a building that had a larger than usual amount of smoke coming out of its chimney and a particular metallic reek. Considering what we had come here for, I guessed that this was the local blacksmith, and was thus unsurprised when we rounded a corner and found a man tapping away at something.

Like everyone else, he was short and squat, although not quite as short and much more heavily built, no doubt from years of man handling heavy blocks of iron and swinging about a large hammer to bash shape into glowing hot metal. He wore a leather apron with numerous burn marks, but considering the sweltering heat of the forge that sat next to him, it was unsurprising that he chose to let his arms go bare except for the heavy leather gloves that went up to his elbows and it showed. Spot scars showed years of abuse where little points of white hot iron had leapt up and burned him along his biceps.

Perhaps that was why, out of everyone we had thus passed, he was by far the friendliest: years of work related injuries had given him a working relationship with Runa. And it was that first impression of a smile that made me decide that so far this man was the most handsome person I had met thus far. Yes, he was more battered physically than many of the other people, and his blonde hair was scraggly and stained with soot, but when he saw that Runa had shown up his whole face lit up and the light of his smile could be seen reaching his eyes.

“Ah, Runa! I see your patient is up and about. What brings the two of you down here on this fine day?” The man asked.

Runa gestured and I immediately slung the basket off my back. Opening it up, Runa pulled out the axe head I had managed to isolate from the handle this morning and said, “My patient, being far too active for his own good, tried to cut down a tree to get me firewood, and this happened. What’ll it cost to get it hafted again Steingrim?”

I tried to look abashed.

Looking it over with the sort of quick, appraising glance of a professional, the smith said cheerily, “For you Runa? Some of those moss and herb patches you make for burns. My son decided to send my grandson down here for the winter as part of his apprenticeship, so I’m going to need them.”

“Oh? And how many is some?” Runa asked suspiciously.

Thinking about it for a moment, Steingrim replied, “About a dozen I think.”

“A dozen? Have you been inhaling the fumes of your forge again? This is a simple job, something I would do myself if I wasn’t such an old woman and if this oaf weren’t such a dunce,” Runa protested, jerking a gnarled thumb my way by way of emphasis.

I suddenly found the tools hanging from the ceiling infinitely fascinating.

“Oh? And what do you think this job is worth?” Steingrim asked.

“Four patches,” Runa replied.

“Four? Has living alone for so long driven you mad woman? This sort of thing is worth at least ten,” Steingrim bellowed out.

“I think it’s piracy at half that price,” Runa retorted.

Shaking a gloved finger, Steingrim said, “An old she-wolf you are woman, trying to rip my throat out. It’s not worth it to do this job for less than seven of your patches.”

“Seven and two bundles of my herbal tea for winter cough if you throw in that axe,” Runa said, pointing to an axe with a blade better for cutting wood than the splitter I had been using in the morning.

“Eight and four bundles,” Steingrim replied quickly.

“Sharpen that blade after you haft it and throw in a wheel of your wife’s cheese and you have yourself a deal,” Runa said.

“Deal,” Steingrim said as he picked out a length of wood to use as the new haft for the axe and the tools he would need to do it, which amounted to a pair of pliers and a hammer.

By this time my faked interest in the tools of the blacksmith’s shop had transformed into real interest as I began to deeply examine the various tools and wares on display, fascinated by their design and craftsmanship. I only half heard Runa say that she was going to do something else, so engrossed was I in examining the smithy.

“See something you like stranger?” Steingrim asked as he worked away on the simple job.

“Oh… everything. Tell me, where do you get your metal from?” I asked absentmindedly. The village did not have the infrastructure in place to support the sort of mining operation that would allow for the amount of metal on display, so the obvious answer was trade.

“So you do speak. And I get my metal about three times a year from traders,” Steingrim replied.

“So once a season excluding winter,” I guessed.

“Yeah. It’s usually a small shipment in the spring, a medium one in the summer, and a big one in the fall after the crops are in and I can pay for it,” Steingrim explained.

“The farmers must go into debt to you then as I would expect that they would need your services more just before the harvest than after it,” I noted.

“Yeah, they pretty much all owe me by the end of the season,” Steingrim replied while he checked that the new haft was securely in place.

I paused for a moment trying to figure out where my own path of thought was leading before I asked, “How good are you at keeping track of what is owed?”

This caused Steingrim to pause and look at me with a funny look on his face. Shrugging, he said, “I suppose as well as any. I don’t cheat them and they don’t cheat me.”

Symbols danced in my head, their meaning just out of reach, but I knew this was important. “What about the traders? Surely you have agreements with them too.”

“Well… yes,” Steingrim replied.

“Tell me next time you make one that is for the next trading period,” I asked.

“Why?” Steingrim asked in confusion.

I opened my mouth to reply before a quizzical look came over my face and finally I said, “I don’t know… I just know that I want to help you out… somehow.”

“The traders haven’t come in for the season, so I’ll try and remember you then. Incidentally, what is your name, stranger?” Steingrim asked.

“I don’t know, but Runa calls me Snow, so that should be good enough,” I replied.

“Snow? Ha! What a sissy name!” Steingrim commented jovially as he got out a whetstone and began to sharpen the axe.

Shrugging nonchalantly, I said, “I’m not protesting it, so I guess that makes me a sissy guy and thus fitting.”

“You are,” Runa grumbled as she came back into the smithy, carrying a wheel of cheese and a few other food items. She nodded at Steingrim and said, “Your wife has the tea and the patches.”

“Thanks Runa. And your axes are ready,” Steingrim said, handing over the repaired splitting axe and the new cutting axe. Runa immediately placed them into the basket, although with the handles they stuck out the top, along with the other things she had gathered, before closing it up as best she could and handing it to me.

“You owe me,” Runa told me as I shouldered the basket once more.

“I know, I know,” I replied.

Just as we were leaving the smithy, Runa paused and thought a moment before she turned back to Steingrim and said, “Oh yes, tell Sigrun to come see me next time she can.”

“I will Runa,” Steingrim replied from within.

Leaving the village, I commented, “Well that went alright.”

“Yes. Now let’s hurry, the day grows short already,” Runa urged, pointing out the fact that the sun was already getting low, although truth be told it had never risen very high. Of course, at the pace Runa set, it had taken us hours to get from her hut to the village, and hours more to get back. It might very well be dark by the time we got back.

As predicted, by the time we reached the forest, the sun was already beginning to set, and if the rising of the morning sun had set the forests on fire, then the setting had made them in amber clad. Where before the mountains had blocked much of the light such that only the red glow could backlight the scene with the aura of a blaze, here the sun fit between the mountains and cast long streams of gold down upon the verdant woods and the snow capped peaks. Of course, within the dense forest the trees quickly created a criss-crossing confusion of light and shadows.

Thus just before we entered the woods, Runa called for a stop and beckoned me to kneel down. Doing so, she rummaged about in the basket until she pulled out a small, unshielded lantern and a flint and steel striker. After a few minutes work, she had a small, greasy flame lit, and once the flint and steel were packed away, we entered into the woods.

As the sun got lower and the shadows deeper, the sounds of night creatures drifted to my ears. There was a part of me, a deep animal part that was severely spooked by being in a dark forest at night but it was drowned by memory. Not even the strongest wind could rustle the trees strongly enough to remind me of the rolling of the oceans in the storm. I had faced down the worst nature could throw at me, and there was little there that could scare me now.

When we arrived at the hut, the moon was just starting to rise into the sky, the heavens already decorated with a trillion diamond points of light, and without the light of the sun the temperature had plummeted to temperatures that caused Runa’s breath to occasionally fog, but not mine. Considering the fact that Runa was breathing harder than me, I thought nothing of it at the time as I put the axes away and finished my first day in this place.

[TithonusSyndrome]

HmmmmMMMMmmmmMMMmmm... what manner of ubermensch be our hero this time, ACN? An alien, supersoldier, maybe even some interpretation of the jotun or analogous mythical creature he dismissed earlier? And why would anyone want to toss anyone as polite and charming as him into the frozen ocean with his memory compromised like that? All over some sphere, no less?

I like this, though. Agalloch is a superb accompaniment for this story, from the sinister violence of a cold, uncaring universe at the beginning to the bewilderment and disorientation Snow feels when he awakes. I mentioned to you earlier that the main character interactions are reminiscent of those in Shadow of the Tyrant, but in reverse as it were; that this time it's the enigmatic character being thrust into the hands of the soft healer, and instead of a trying, sunbeat Cretaceous, it's in a frozen Nordic winter. But even in spite of that, there's a warmth about it, even in Snow's slightest musings and observations. Runa trusts him and finds him likable, because he is, really. His ignorance lends to his depiction as being childlike, and so does his quickness to learn.

For me though, the landscape is what keeps the beat of the whole narrative up at all times. The descriptions of the drowning and the nighttime calm and walking through the snow are in superb detail and even evoke some homesick scenery in my mind's eye, so keep it up!

[Academia Nut]

I am definitely going to have to say that I am most proudly of the environmental material as that is where I focused the majority of my time. That is also why it took me three months (aside from the fact that I'm getting it editted) to actually post, as the material is very deep and slow to get through. Of course, that is why I made sure it was well polished, because I'm trying to take a great deal of pride in this work.

Is there anyone else who I didn't arm twist into commenting out there who would like to tell me that I (suck)/(rock) and that I should (go back to fanfiction)/(keep up with this)? Or get all post modern on me and start dissecting the piece to try and find deeper meaning... ironic since while I usually hate that I intentionally constructed this piece to amenable to such deconstructionism.

Oh, and since I find it kind of funny, hands up how many people think his baldness is a key plot point.

[Phantasee]

Holy shit it's long. That's all I can say for now. I'm maybe halfway through your first post. I'm going to print it all out, if you don't mind, and read it on the bus or something, because my eyes are trying to claw their way out of my head from trying to read on this old monitor.

[Academia Nut]

Go ahead. But I warn you, if I find an East Indian (that is the right geographic area at least? Please don't kill me if my targetting data was off by a village ) guy with a stack of printed papers at the U tomorrow looking confused, I will possibly ask, "Phant?"

Just as a warning, its 34 pages in my Word document.

[Chris OFarrell]

Go ahead. But I warn you, if I find an East Indian (that is the right geographic area at least? Please don't kill me if my targetting data was off by a village ) guy with a stack of printed papers at the U tomorrow looking confused, I will possibly ask, "Phant?"

Just as a warning, its 34 pages in my Word document.

34 pages? I laugh at you.

That said, I also impateintly await the revelation of what kind of superhero this guy is.

I still have $50 on Primarch

[Alferd Packer]

Obviously, Snow is really Eric Branson with amnesia.

No, wait, he's Pietro Ludvigs with amnesia! Actually, he's Pietro Ludvig's son, sent through a dimensional gateway to ye olde Viking times. It all makes sense now!

Actually, one of the things that really grabbed me is that you captured the environment so well, even down to the low sun angle and short days that high latitudes endure in autumn and winter.

[White Haven]

A spindly-limbed Primarch?

[Academia Nut]

Well, as to the environment, while its not exactly Scandanavia, where I live its not exactly a tropical resort. The description of cold at least comes from my own personal experiences with <-35C temperatures. And while we don't get round the clock darkness or light during the solstices, we do get plenty of seasonal variance in ambient light levels.

Although, if any Scandanavians reading this have any environmental corrections to make, please point them out. Obviously the local geography is made up, but making sure the general conditions are correct would be nice.

Also, you're wrong. Snow is clearly the offspring of Pietro and Cherach's daughter and Eric and Mary's son dimensionally shifted. Of course, now I realize that this is going to make a detail in later chapters spring out at you guys even more. Sigh... just... continue with the wild mass guessing.

[White Haven]

Speaking of that... *glares at dangling story-fronds*

I kid, I kid, great stuff as usual.

[Academia Nut]

Hence why I lampshaded previous behaviour over in "The Open Door". This time however I am doing something a little different. Basically, what I'm going to do is write some Snow for a while until I have a section I feel is ready for review, then fire it over to Chris, whereupon he will take his sweet time looking it over for me (you know I kid ), giving me a week or two to work at TOD and refresh my batteries for Snow, and flip flop like that. The updates for Snow will be large but far between, while you can probably expect to see a TOD update once or twice a week.

[Robo Jesus]

Sigh... just... continue with the wild mass guessing.

At first I thought it was a story regarding The Sphere, but then I saw the "Original" in the title and had to discard that idea. This seems like an 'original' time travel fic. The bit about the hair falling out seems like the after-affects of exposure to a large amount of radiation. The whole 'wind whispering' seems like radio signals, perhaps from implants maybe?

Anyways, wild guessing over with, this story is awesome, and I majorly enjoy reading it. Thanks Academia Nut.

[Enigma]

Hence why I lampshaded previous behaviour over in "The Open Door". This time however I am doing something a little different. Basically, what I'm going to do is write some Snow for a while until I have a section I feel is ready for review, then fire it over to Chris, whereupon he will take his sweet time looking it over for me (you know I kid ), giving me a week or two to work at TOD and refresh my batteries for Snow, and flip flop like that. The updates for Snow will be large but far between, while you can probably expect to see a TOD update once or twice a week.

Screw TOD! I want more stories of Pietr Ludvigs!! That and more Snow. Until then you are banned from writing any other stories! !!!! and a few more !!!!

[Academia Nut]

Here is what seems to inevitably happen with my stories once they cross a certain threshold:

Train of plot

+

Writer's landmine

=

New train

Thus I have decided that the ideal way to stop these nefarious terrorists is to run many lines simultaneously so that they have no idea where to bomb and my teams will have plenty of time to search out and eliminate such attempts at sabotage.

[Academia Nut]

The soft whack of steel against wood rang out across the clearing, as I continued the work of paying off Runa what I owed her, same as I had for the past several days. It was a slow, monotonous routine, but it did have benefits I had not initially thought about.

For one, when I got to working with the axe on wood- be it a standing tree, a fallen one in need of sectioning, or sections in need of splitting- I felt the cold retreat. Perhaps it was because the sounds of nature required no translation by the Arctic Wind, preventing the chill it brought from overwhelming me. Perhaps it was because the physical activity and the weak sunlight warmed me sufficiently in my furs that I no longer felt the cold that had seeped into my limbs nor the outside heat that reminded me of said cold.

Then again, perhaps I enjoyed chopping wood because it was an activity that actually caused my debt to Runa to go down instead of up, as every other action on my part seemed to do. My initial ravenous appetite seemed to have settled down after the first few days- and in fact Runa had started to complain that I did not eat enough, and that if I kept up I would starve to death and leave her in the hole for what I had already eaten- other things had come up.

I had the vague feeling that there was someone who needed blaming for such a situation, but the name escaped me. All I knew was that whoever he was, it was his fault that something always came up.

The biggest problem I had was that I had, as Runa called it, a finicky nose, and I kept insisting on bathing and washing my clothes every day.

The problem of course was that I boiled the water before washing with it, which required me to burn wood in large amounts. Runa had quickly refused to let me burn any wood that I had not chopped that day for those purposes… and thus she removed what she would need for her pile first.

Then with what I owed her for the consumption of food.

And what she would need for the night.

Combined with my inexperience- and thus painfully slow rate of cutting- I was only very slowly gaining ground.

Then there were the other things that hampered my ability to make a profit. Every two or three days Runa would gather up a bundle of split wood and put it in a basket. I would then carry said basket to town with her, where she would trade with Steingrim and a few others for food and clothing for me. At first I thought that perhaps Steingrim was the only one who would trade with Runa, until we went to another person and I realized that because of all the farmers owing him for work before the harvest, he also seemed to serve as a sort of informal banker at the moment. He had large quantities of food on hand, far more than he could use, and the traders had yet to show up, so if you wanted to do deals in the village he had the most supplies on hand at the moment.

I later smacked myself in the head when I then realized that Steingrim was a smith and thus the commodity he used the most was fuel. I had over thought the problem and missed the obvious.

Still, whenever we did trading I kept running things over in my head, standing by quietly while Runa went about her haggling routine, trying and failing to produce the words to express what I wanted to say clearly, but without a coherent set of thoughts the Arctic Winds were silent in how to say anything to those around me. So I simply observed while thinking and learning.

I suppose the one good thing to come out of being Runa’s mute pack mule- aside from getting shoes that actually fit me properly- was that the villagers slowly began to stop staring and just ignore me. After my third or fourth visit, I had lost all interest to them. Something I was quite glad of as I found dealing with everything else that irked me about the village hard enough, and not having to deal with their unabashed stares was a welcome relief.

Taking a break after I had finished segmenting the latest tree into manageable chunks for splitting, I practically flopped down on a stump and ran a hand over my scalp. Already I could feel my hair growing back as a fine layer of stubble, although it seemed to be mostly confined to the top of my head as I had yet to have facial hair show up, something that Runa enjoyed taunting me over. Presently, my hand came back slightly damp, the sweat from my exertions having accumulated on my scalp. Runa kept telling me that I was going to kill myself the way I was so unconcerned about frigid temperatures

Deciding not to put my axe down in the snow that had fallen the night before, I instead examined its head in intense but low sunlight. After a few seconds of inspection I decided that what few tiny nicks were there were inconsequential and thus the blade did not need sharpening. Still, I stared on at the edge for a moment, trying to peer into the section of the black metal where the whetstone had turned it somewhat silver and reflective, and I attempted to see my own face.

It was somewhat humorous that after… what was it now?

A week and a half?

Two weeks?

Was it really that long?

However long, it seemed too long to have gone without seeing my reflection, especially considering that I had never in my experience seen my reflection. It was disconcerting, and I found each day that there was at least one moment like this one where I would try and peer into a reflective surface and discern the features of my own face.

My reverie was broken however not by a hoarse shout from Runa of “Chop wood!” but by another sound, one I had not heard before, but like so much else I could readily identify without really knowing why. I heard the sound of shoed hooves on hard packed, snow covered earth. It was a faint sound, but one I heard due to the stillness of the air around me.

Getting to my feet, I tracked to where the sound was coming from just in time to see a most peculiar grouping emerge from the woods along the path towards the village. It was peculiar mostly because of the location in which they were found, and mostly because of the third member of the group, the horse. The horse indicated a high degree of wealth and prestige, and yet neither the rider nor passenger of said animal appeared in need of Runa’s ministrations, so the only explanation that leapt out at me was that this was some sort of social visit.

“Runa! We have visitors!” I cried out towards the hut while carefully lowering my axe to the side. An irrational fear swept over me as I wondered if perhaps someone rich had come to bully poor Runa, or me for that matter, such that while I did not brandish my woodcutter neither did I relinquish my hold of it.

Of course, the rational point of my mind said that since the passenger was female it was highly unlikely that violence would begin unless I was the initiator, even if not the aggressor. But when confronted by the unknown, rationality tends to get pushed to the side in favour of having a weapon in hand, just in case.

Rationality got the last word in by pointing out that unnecessary wars often got started because of that sort of thinking.

Marching out of her hut, grumbling, Runa asked, “Did some fool get their foot stepped on by a cow again…”

Quite unexpectedly, when she saw the visitors, Runa’s wrinkled expression broke out into a beaming smile and she cried out, “Sigrun! Ah, you finally got my message from that old soot Steingrim.”

Sliding out of the saddle, the female passenger – who was significantly younger than Runa - rushed over to her with a happy cry of “Grandma!” Embracing the old woman in a big hug, she said, “I’m sorry I took so long, mother had us doing the finishing work for the winter up until a few days ago, and when I heard that you wanted to see me it took me a while to get ready to make the trip. Fortunately Thorgeir offered to give me a ride.”

Having approached the conversation while hanging back, I took a good look at these two and sighed inwardly at my first observation.

I was going to be considered freakishly tall again.

The horse was shorter than me, although only by a very small margin, which meant that I suppose it was just small in general, but this was getting ridiculous.

Of the two human visitors, I was somewhat amused to note that Sigrun was the taller of the two, and in comparison to all of the other people I had seen she was probably one of the tallest women and could give a number of the men a run for their money. She was also less ugly than I had grown accustomed to, her skin showing considerably less signs of disease damage than many of the others I had seen. Thinking about it for a moment, I realized that she probably had some of the best health care as a child as her family would not have shunned Runa like the others in the village.

Her companion though was perhaps the more interesting of the two. Where she had the kind of blonde hair and bright blue eyes typical of the people in this region, Thorgeir possessed a shock of dark, almost cherry wood red hair that burned over deeply recessed, dark brown eyes topped by almost comically overlarge eyebrows. The only part of his hair that seemed to have been tamed in any way was his moustache, and even that was excessively bushy except for at the edges where the hairs had been gathered into long, thin braids that drooped down for nearly a hand span, the braids kept in place by tiny silver hoops that looked like they were rings crafted for a baby’s fingers. Also, where Sigrun had a youthful beauty, Thorgeir was excessively ugly even by the standards of his peers, which was saying something. He had apparently narrowly escaped death at the hands of some unpleasant disease at least once, for what parts of his face were exposed had an excessive number of pockmarks and scarring, a fact that probably explained why he let his hair grow so wild and thick. Aside from the scarring, it seemed that the underlying bone growth had also been affected for his face and body were distorted and had lumps and gaps in odd places, suggesting that the diseases he had suffered had gone bone deep to do their damage.

Of course, this was countered by what he was wearing. Sigrun wore the typical greys and browns I had seen so far, but Thorgeir had a fine, pale buckskin jacket trimmed with ermine and a long cloak made out of grey wolf pelts. The ermine alone would have marked him as a wealthy member of the nobility, but he also had several bits of silver as further decoration, such as a hammer shaped clasp that held his cloak together in the front. An exquisitely detailed and colourful kilt hid the majority of his legs, but they were protected from the saddle by buckskin chaps, while his feet were sheathed in oiled and polished black leather boots.

Well, one foot anyway. The other appeared to be on backwards, growing upward and severely stunted. The boot on that foot had clearly been made to help compensate for the birth defect, with a sort of forward section that probably at least gave him the ability to use his stirrups properly.

Despite the foot and the scarring of his face and the odd way his body was put together in places, I immediately respected Thorgeir. Not because of his obvious wealth and social status, but because while he was shorter than average for these people, his shoulders were also nearly as wide as he was tall, and I got the definite feeling that the large bow and spear were to explain for that, and I immediately wondered if the leather and the skins that went into his clothing had been obtained by his own skill at arms.

Clearly, this man did not allow the word ‘disability’ to mean ‘liability’, a remarkable feat in such an insular, superstitious culture, one that had shown me what it meant to be an outsider for looking different.

He also did not look down on me despite the fact that his seat on his horse made him the first person I had met who I could not see the over top of his head.

He was obviously a noble, and yet he did not look down at me.

Perhaps it was because as I had been sizing him up, he had been doing the same, and he had seen the impressed look in my eyes, devoid of fear. Or maybe it was the fact that he looked to have an utterly lethal confidence about his own abilities that he had no need to look down on others.

I could not tell, but I just knew that he did not seem to fear or despise me like so many others I had met.

All of this took a few seconds, at which point I asked politely, “Thorgeir, son of Notger, jarl of this land?”

Thorgeir nodded and said, “That I am.”

Bowing my head respectfully, I said, “Pleased to meet you.”

Thorgeir smirked and looked at Runa before he asked, “What nonsense have you been filling this stranger’s mind with?”

“If by nonsense you mean ‘the truth’, then plenty of it,” Runa replied.

Snorting, Thorgeir turned back to me and said, “Stranger, my father is an obstinate ass of a man with the mulish disposition to match.”

“You may call me Snow, and I find that it is not wise to insult a man’s father when he is on horseback and armed,” I replied.

Thorgeir’s smirked grew wider. “Do you think my hair gives me a temperament to match its colour?”

Blinking twice, I ran the words over in my head, trying to figure out if I had offered some insult, but before I could reply, Runa – of course - interjected, “The temperament of the man holding the weapon has nothing to do with the wisdom of not insulting him.”

Now breaking down into snickering, Thorgeir waved off my discomfort and said, “Worry not my well-named man; I was merely playing at insult. I do thank you for showing my father what little politeness he is due from a stranger in his lands, and I commend your intelligence for showing it to me.”

Brewing on that statement for a moment, I finally asked, “Does this mean we can now start slinging the insults freely, as there are some I heard Runa use that I’ve wanted to use.”

Laughing long and hard at that one, Thorgeir replied, “Ah! I had heard from those in the village that you and Runa had a reputation for fierce verbal sparring, but I had no idea my father would consider your tongue a trinket worth adding to his collection.”

That one took me a second to parse, before I figured it out. Shrugging, I replied, “It is one of the risks of having a silver appendage of any sort. Fortunately the benefit of being able to talk such scoundrels out of maiming me more than makes up for possessing such a shiny tongue.”

“Silver appendage? My, my, Snow, unless you were merely speaking of your tongue, you exaggerate too much,” Runa added in with derisive sarcasm.

My jaw dropped and my cheeks ignited once I figured out what she had said there, while Thorgeir nearly fell out of his saddle from laughter. Once he had himself in hand, he shook his head in mirth and replied, “Oh, you have Loki’s own caustic wit Runa. No wonder my woefully inadequate father cannot stand your presence.”

“Bah! If he were just inadequate as a man he would be far easier to deal with. Now shoo you two, go do manly things, I wish to speak with my granddaughter alone for a time,” Runa said, waving us away.

Shaking his head, Thorgeir said, “Women,” while he rolled his eyes. Runa just waved us away before taking Sigrun and leading her inside the hut, closing the door behind them.

Effortlessly moving his horse about so that he could better face me, Thorgeir leaned forward in his saddle with a sort of bored yet amused expression. “I must say, while at first I came up here to get in the good graces of Sigrun and to get a look at the man who has replaced me as the freak of the village, I find myself much more interested in speaking to you than I thought I would when I set out.”

“I find myself heartened by the fact that you appear to have improved your appraisal of me from ‘freak’,” I countered, a touch miffed by his words.

Clutching his chest in mock pain, Thorgeir winced, “You wound me with my own words good man! I do apologize for my brutish handling of the language.”

Considering for a moment, I finally said, “Well, I suppose if I be a freak, then it is alright if another freak says it.”

Thorgeir’s face darkened for a moment and I immediately winced, suspecting that I had wandered into a sore spot. Had I said the right thing? Had the Arctic Wind translated it right?

Before I could apologize though, Thorgeir held up a hand while he pinched the bridge of his nose where it met his brow and said, “Please do not apologize, for that time you truly did wound me with my own words, but since they were mine to give in the first place, I must accept the pain they bring. Instead, allow me to apologize. I should not have called you a freak in the first place. I know too well the pain it brings to have others stare at you, and no matter how much more attention you bring, nothing you do will turn my foot around. It was unfair to make you think it was alright to say that.”

Frowning, I said, “No, it is not right that only you apologize. My tongue and mind can outpace my heart at times. I see that you are a proud man, just by the way you bear yourself, and I should have considered that more carefully.”

Waving it off, Thorgeir said, “Then shall we stumble over each other until the womenfolk finish their nattering, each man trying to outdo his apology to the other?”

“It would be an interesting exercise of the mind, no?” I asked cheekily.

Shaking his head in amused bemusement, Thorgeir said, “I may have inherited my father’s ass-like inability to back down, but I can safely say that I know when I am beat. Apology accepted!”

Cocking my head to the side, I asked in confusion, “Which one of us just won that argument there?”

Stroking his beard, Thorgeir replied slowly, “I. Do. Not. Know.”

“When you leave, I shall have to spar with Runa’s wits to bring my form in line,” I noted.

Shaking his fist in mock anger, Thorgeir said, “Cheating scoundrel! No fair getting practice when I have naught but the braying of asses and the bleating of sheep to work with.”

“So Sigrun inherited nothing from her grandmother?” I asked, curious about Runa’s family.

Crossing his arms in scorn, Thorgeir said, “I appreciate what talents she has inherited, but as of now I would prefer that her tongue not become a lash across my hide, thank you very much.”

“Those talents being?” I inquired.

“Knowledge of herbs and treatment of injuries, things I find invaluable since my father kicked Runa from the village,” Thorgeir replied, bitterness colouring his words at the end of his sentence.

I suddenly realized why Thorgeir was so badly scarred and bitter about his father, or at one of the major root causes. He had surely been a sick child due to receiving no help at all from the local healer, and when he grew up and realized that he was ugly because his father refused to take him to the doctor, and that must have been a pill bitterer to swallow than anything Runa could have concocted, that must have hurt.

“Ah,” I noted profoundly.

“Now your way with words falters?” Thorgeir asked.

Thinking for a time I finally replied, “The truth of words is that they are like arrows. Sometimes to achieve the best effect you should launch them in vast volleys. Sometimes though a single shot expertly placed is what is needed.”

Thorgeir absorbed this statement before he replied, “Ah.”

What then occurred was the two of us stared at each other for a good thirty seconds trying to maintain straight faces until finally I- followed a heartbeat later by Thorgeir- broke down into giggles and snickering.

Wiping away a tear at his eye, Thorgeir said, “You are indeed a strange and wonderful man Snow, and I am glad that I have made your acquaintance.”

Smiling, I bowed my head slightly in recognition to him and said, “And you are a proud and lively man Thorgeir, and I am glad that I have made your acquaintance. I would hope to expand upon this new found friendship. For example, your jacket. Did you get the leather from something you yourself hunted?”

Thorgeir blinked and looked down at his clothing before he said, “Yes. How did you know I hunt?”

“The giant shoulders and the bow sheathed at your saddle seem like dead giveaways to me,” I pointed out.

Furrowing his considerable eyebrows, “Very few people who don’t already know me pick up on that.”

“How often do people who don’t know you meet you while you are mounted on your horse?” I countered.

Thorgeir opened his mouth to say something before pinching his face in thought as he considered my question. Finally he answered, “Very rarely, now that I think about it. I usually greet outsiders with my father at the mead hall.”

“So they do not get to see you at your best,” I pointed out. I then asked, “Would you mind terribly if I speculated for a bit?”

Frowning, Thorgeir said, “I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean.”

Working my jaw to the side for a moment I replied, “I uh… I want to make some guesses about you to see if I understand what I see properly, but I do not want to offend you.”

“I… see…” Thorgeir said before he shrugged and told me, “I do not quite know what it is that you are getting at, but so far you have shown yourself an honourable man with a witty mind and a gift of speech that can keep up. Show me what you can do.”

Bowing my head, I said, “Well, if you will, when I see you, I must admit that I find you quite physically ugly, your body twisted in unpleasant ways by disease and how you were born.”

Thorgeir frowned dangerously at my words.

Holding up a placating hand, I said, “But I also see that you do not let that stop or slow you. Your foot is not properly formed, so you have taken four more by mastering the art of riding, and now you can run faster than any man. You cannot perform the footwork necessary for the sword or the axe, so you have taken up the bow and learned to kill at a distance. You are proud and stubborn, but in the sort of way that acknowledges that your limitations such that you seek ways around what holds you back. For that, I see your scars as battle wounds inflicted in the struggle we call life, things of honour. You are a struggler and a survivor, and from personal experience, I can respect that enough that I no longer see the unpleasantness of your physique unless I remind myself that you are not shaped like others.”

Thorgeir was quiet for a long moment before he finally slipped out of his saddle and limped over to me. His lame foot could not support him properly, so he listed to the side somewhat, favouring his good side, but he clearly had long ago refused to use a crutch and learned to walk even with his disability.

He looked up at me for a moment before I squatted down so that we were eye to eye. That stunned him for a moment, before he said, “Upon my horse I am as a king, while upon my own legs I am a beggar, yet still you stoop for me.”

“I see a proud, honourable man before me, the same I saw a moment before,” I replied.

Thorgeir was quiet for a time before he said, “Would you care for me to tell you what I see?”

I nodded.

“I see strange, unnatural giant before me, a creature seemingly carved out of the glaciers by some god. You are pale and soft, with such youthful features not fitting your size that when I first saw you I thought you might perhaps be an elf if you were not a jotun. Your tongue is made steel polished to shine like silver, yet you use it for playful jest and sage thought and not as an instrument to cruelly slice others. You look like the sort of being who would either bully and cow others with his size or entrance others with your beauty into doing taking your work from you. Yet here you are, cutting wood for an old woman unfairly despised by her community because she took you in. Here you stoop, to a bitter, lame son of an ass of jarl, so that you can look into my eyes not as a smirking superior or a cowed subordinate, but as an equal. Thus I say to you that I see a noble, wondrous being,” Thorgeir told me, clearly growing fatigued by the end with trying to sustain such a speech, before he finally burst out crying and lunged forward to embrace me.

I was stunned by the emotion, although it was even worse when Thorgeir yelped in surprise and recoiled back, crying out, “By the gods man! Are you made of snow?”

Stammering, I said, “I… uh… well… I’m a little cooler than normal, that’s all, and…”

Before I could finish, Thorgeir was pushing me towards the hut while Thorgeir bellowed, “Runa you old witch! Why do you make this man work with such a deathly chill?”

After a few moments Sigrun opened the door with Runa behind her, and Runa replied, “He’s always like that.”

Shoving me inside, Thorgeir pointed to the fire and said, “You. Sit in front of it. Now.”

Sheepishly following his orders, I did so while Runa and Thorgeir got into an argument that I quickly tuned out. I had the more pressing concern of trying to work out how I felt about Thorgeir hugging me. I felt that he did it as a gesture of brotherhood, from one man expressing his understanding for another, but I felt deeply anxious about it for some reason. I had only really been around Runa and to a smaller extent Steingrim and I had no idea how close people normally got to each other in this culture. Runa had been living alone while being half-shunned for a long time and could very well expect more room than normal, and all of the times I saw Steingrim he was often covered in soot or swinging about some tool easily capable of maiming someone who got too close.

Whatever the appropriate distance for comfortable personal space was in this culture, I suddenly had the feeling it was significantly smaller than mine.

I suddenly felt very cold indeed.

To my surprise, Sigrun drifted over to me and looked like she wanted to say something, but she held her tongue until I looked up at her and asked, “Yes?”

Sitting down next to me, a comfortable distance by my estimation, she said, “I just wanted to say that I am glad that you are doing well. I was the one who found you.”

My eyes going wide, I immediately asked in surprise, “That was you?”

Sigrun nodded.

“Thank you!” I cried out, dumbstruck after that by actually meeting the one who had discovered me and returned me to the world of man.

Bowing her head shyly, she said, “It was nothing. I must admit though that you gave me quite the fright. You were completely covered in… snow… yes snow, when I found you, so I didn’t realize that you were… you until you moved.”

I frowned slightly and realized that she had lied, not for my ears but for the still arguing Thorgeir and Runa. I knew in my heart that Sigrun had lied because I had been covered in ice and thus I should have been dead. It was also possible that she lied for her own sake, not wanting to think about the awful implications of the impossible situation she had stumbled across.

The human brain was so very good at lying to itself.

A tiny shiver ran up my spine.

Still, I smiled weakly and said, “I’m sorry I scared you, although in my defence I was trying not to die at the time.”

Sigrun laughed slightly before she glanced over at the now dying down argument and she asked softly and quietly, “Are you quite done berating Thorgeir, grandma?”

The comment struck me as odd. I had expected her to defend Runa, who was not only kin but had the upper hand in the argument, but instead she had defended Thorgeir. That was until I noticed the look that passed between them, and it became fairly obvious to me which relationship was stronger. Even Runa noticed and she abruptly gave up with a dismissive wave and a sigh of disgust.

Even stranger.

I suddenly felt very alone and small, having stumbled into an old, complex interplay of lives that I understood very little about. The bombastic cripple Thorgeir; the quiet girl Sigrun; and the old, sarcastic crone Runa. What did I know of them? What did I know of their histories together, of the conversations already had, the experiences already shared, all the things I was not, and never would be, privy to?

And what things were locked in my own head that I was not privy to?

My growing melancholy however was disrupted by Sigrun turning back to me and saying, “Oh yes, Steingrim said to pass along the fact that the merchants for the year should be here tomorrow, and you apparently have something you wanted to do?”

My brain suddenly flooded with symbols, their meaning just beyond the reach of my mind, but tantalizingly close to the fingers of thought I stretched out to them. One set however burned brightly in my mind, so close that I could feel the implications. It was a warm feeling, a familiar one; I knew these symbols near instinctively, I just needed to use them.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said brightly.

For the rest of the day and night, I was in a strange, warm haze as my mind worked away, exercising unconscious warm-ups for whatever it was that I wanted to do, and my dreams were odd and filled with things I did not understand.

I was leaning against a finely made, impossibly smooth tube of silvery metal, clean and polished to a shine, but with an underlying dull, brushed texture such that I could not see any reflections within. I was standing upon a strange, dense, fine sort of turf-like material, only it was a brownish-red, of the sort that might be associated with thick loam soaked in the blood from a recent battle. In front of me there was a large panel of a similar material to what I leaned against, set with strangely familiar symbols, one of them burning with an unnatural inner light. Next to the panel was a set of what appeared to be very thin doors of the silvery, brushed metal.

And I was surrounded by ice, a bubble of it that I could feel slowly moving.

It was the thinnest, clearest ice I could have ever comprehended, and it gave me a view out to the world around me. I was above the clouds, but so were dozens of other of these strange structures made of stone and sparkling ice of every imaginable colour, that stretched up out of the rolling white clouds below like spires of rock jutting out of the sea. The stone was strange, seemingly more sculpted by unnatural forces into perfectly sharp planes than carved by the hand of man.

Standing next to me in this bizarre conveyance was a man who I was animatedly talking with, although I could not hear the words being said. He was the same as me, in that he was tall, pale and had a youthful face… at least in comparison to everyone I had met in the waking world. His dress was strange, yet fit for a king, made of sheer fabrics of incredibly tight weave and tailoring. He wore a small blue jacket the colour of the sky at sunset, open to reveal a shirt white as freshly fallen snow and set with buttons seemingly made of solid pearl. Strangely, he also wore a piece of flat fabric about his neck like a noose, dyed brilliant red as if it had been soaked in fresh blood. Even his shoes could have been used as ransom, for they were of fine, thin leather dyed midnight black and polished to a near mirror shine.

The bubble of ice we ascending in slowed then came to a stop. The polished metal doors began to shrink into the sides of the surrounding walls of their own volition…

Waiting on the other side of the door was the sphere. I glimpsed briefly in its dark reflection two similarly dressed men, obviously the man next to me was one and I the other, but before I could get a glimpse of my face in its surface the dream shattered, my body jerking taut in the physical world in reaction to what I saw in my mind’s eye.

Damn it!

[Alan Bolte]

I really enjoyed that update. It's long enough to get absorbed in it, and then... Damn it!

[Robo Jesus]

Oh yeah, this guy was definitely from a high tech culture. Elevators, skyscrapers, electricity.

The update was much appreciated, and very thoroughly enjoyed. Thanks Academia Nut.

[Academia Nut]

I do hope this chapter gets the emotional response I am looking for. Tell me what you all think.

---

Despite my interrupted sleep, I still managed to arrive at the village in the morning, or rather early midday by the time Runa and I made the trip, in good spirits and feeling refreshed. This was fortunate, as it seemed that I had stepped into a completely different world from the last time I had been here only a few days ago and the surprise might have overwhelmed me had I been less awake or less cheerful.

There was… colour!

Despite the snow on the ground having turned to mud and slush with the passage of feet, the whole village had brightened up as people put on clothing with bright greens, deep blues, and wonderful reds. There were fresh smells of baking and meat cooking and the whole thing had a carnival atmosphere I had not experienced before. A small longship was moored at the village docks, and there were a set of small canvas tents set up outside the walls.

Music tempted me to go see the entertainments set up, but I decided that my curiosity about what was in my head telling me to see Steingrim outweighed my curiosity about pipers. Thus I separated from Runa as she went to do her own shopping elsewhere.

Walking into Steingrim’s workshop, quiet and cool from the forges remaining unlit, I discovered him talking animatedly with a blonde haired man in expensive looking furs, his hair tied back in an elaborate braid held in place by a gold loop. The two of them were haggling over some sort of trade agreement.

Coughing slightly, I got their attention. Steingrim looked up and smiled at me, while the merchant turned about and his eyes went wide in shock at seeing me. He was a large, handsome man in comparison to most of the other people I had seen, but his eyes were still level with my nose, and light disease scarring could be seen visible just beneath his beard.

For some reason I felt a twitch of smug self-satisfaction at being able to put him on the back foot so easily while not making him look at me with outright fear or revulsion.

Grinning, I said to Steingrim, “Don’t mind me; I just want to… help… somehow.”

“Who is this?” The merchant asked suspiciously while retaining the appearance of pure business.

“Ah, this is a recent acquaintance of the village, Modolf,” Steingrim explained in a casual tone. Apparently Modolf was the name of the merchant.

“You can call me Snow,” I replied with a smile, beaming with my many, improbably shiny white teeth. “Please, don’t mind me.”

“Err… yes…” the merchant replied. Turning back to Steingrim, he said, “In any case…”

I found a small pile of wood and listened in to their negotiations for a time, keeping my face passive while my mind bubbled with thoughts I could not properly describe. Then Modolf said something that stuck in my mind.

“Look, I have a lot of stops before you and they all want iron too and are willing to pay for it quite handsomely,” Modolf said.

“I can appreciate that, I am in business as well, which is why I am willing to pay you quite well to keep some in reserve,” Steingrim said.

“I’ll try, but that’s months from now and-” Modolf was cut off by me leaping to my feet and crying out, “Of course!”

My mind frothing with thoughts, I rushed over to the cold forge and reached in while Steingrim and Modolf watched me like I was a madman. I was certainly possessed by a burst of intellectual activity.

Pulling a blackened piece of charcoal out of the forge, I rushed over to a bare wall and asked somewhat frantically, “Steingrim, how much iron will you need in the spring?”

“Uh… twenty pounds?” Steingrim suggested. I immediately began scrawling on the wall strange symbols that even I only half understood.

“Modolf, how much would it cost you to hold on to twenty pounds of iron until this point in your trading?” I asked frantically as my eyes darted back and forth between the players in this drama and the writing on the wall.

“Uh… well, usually by that leg of the trip the iron is up to five or six silver pieces a pound but-” Modolf began before I started writing again.

The charcoal scratched against the wall as my mind raced, clawing through the translucent membrane of amnesia that cut me off from these skills. “Okay, twenty pounds of iron times six silver pieces is a hundred and twenty silver pieces, add on another ten percent… Modolf, Steingrim, would you say that it would be fair for both of you if twenty pounds of iron were kept by Modolf for sale here at the previously agreed upon price of a hundred thirty two silver pieces?”

Both men scratched at their beards for a time as they tried to absorb the symbols. Eventually Steingrim broke the silence and said, “That’s a bit steep, but well within what I can afford to pay.”

“I might get some business elsewhere…” Modolf said, vacillating.

“But you might not,” I countered. “If you agree upon it now you’re both guaranteed business later. If the price of iron goes down a great deal, Steingrim might end up paying more than he might otherwise, but he still gets what he needs. Similarly, if the price goes up, you Modolf might lose a bit of money, but you’re also guaranteed a buyer. Twenty pounds for a hundred thirty-two, that’s it, you two can haggle the rest out later if you want.”

“That’s nice Snow but how can your fancy runes help us remember this agreement in a few months. Modolf has a lot of business and while he keeps it all straight in his head, come spring he might have misremembered how much to bring or how much we agreed on exactly,” Steingrim replied.

Modolf glared at him and said, “As might you.”

“I’ll write them down for you,” I replied. “You’ll each get a copy of the agreement and you can compare them when you return to ensure that nothing has changed.”

“How do I know this isn’t a set-up you’re running?” Modolf asked suspiciously.

There was a slight pause as my brain worked before I whooped for joy as I said, “I can teach you the numbers!”

Rushing over to another blank wall, I began making a series of tick marks and putting symbols next to them. “This is one… this is two… this is three… wait… wait… I’m forgetting something.”

My brain percolated for a bit before I drew a circle above the one and no tick marks next to it, “Zero! I almost forgot zero!”

“Zero?” Modolf asked, his tongue tripping over the foreign word.

“Yes, zero! It’s the number for nothing,” I said excitedly as I finished off the first ten numbers, including zero. “It’s important because of this.”

I then drew the symbol for ‘one’ and the symbol for ‘zero’ and made ten tick marks. “Zero is a placeholder. See? There are only ten symbols, but it’s possible to combine them into an infinite array… err… unlimited number, depending on position and order. See? Zero-two is just two, but two-zero is twenty. One-two is twelve, while two-one is twenty-one.”

Steingrim looked at my previous writing and said, “Yes… I see the twenty. And the one-three-two… one hundred thirty-two like you said, if I get this right.”

“Yes, see, the position affects it. Each step up is an additional multiple of ten. Ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands, and so on and so forth,” I explained excitedly. It all made so much sense!

Steingrim and Modolf were both hard headed, practical businessmen, and while they didn’t really understand what they were seeing, they were clever enough to see the utility in this case. Nodding, Modolf said, “I see… you’ll carve these runes for us on something that will keep and some record of how to decipher them so that neither can be taken advantage of, and thus we will remember exactly what we agreed upon today.”

“It seems so… vulgar to use such things like this,” Steingrim noted.

I blinked a few times before I began to write again, a giant grin pasted on my face, tears of joy streaming down my cheeks. I could remember! It was like… like…

There were no words for this feeling. The closest comparison I could think of would be to have a limb amputated, to suffer through the phantom pains of not having it for years, get used to its none existence, and then one day wake up to discover the missing appendage has grown back overnight and you have full use again.

At some point my mind realized what my hand was doing and I stepped back to peer at what I had written. I read aloud, “Words are perhaps the most vulgar of all of man’s inventions, in that there is no benefit in keeping them sacred and locked away. Their true magic only takes place when they are read and spoken by many.”

I blinked a few times while Steingrim and Modolf looked at me oddly. Steingrim wore a look of concern for my well-being, while Modolf seemed more concerned about how my mental stability would affect his well-being. Part of this was probably because I was friendly with Steingrim, but another part probably had to do with the fact that Steingrim knew he could break me in half if it came to a fight, while the less muscled Modolf had no such confidence.

Trying, and failing, to suppress the jubilant grin that was still plastered to my face, I said, “I think this means its okay to use writing like this. Here, find some wood and a knife or something that can cut it and I’ll make each of you a set of contracts.”

Steingrim rummaged through his supplies before handing me a few flat pieces of wood and, somewhat more hesitantly, a small awl for scoring it. I looked at him slightly hurt as I took the fine iron spike and said, “I’m not going to hurt anyone with this… except maybe myself through my own incompetence.”

Rubbing my hands together eagerly, and to get off some of the black soot that had accumulated from my handling of the piece of charcoal, I took the awl and began carefully inscribing the terms of the deal and the numbering system so that no would feel that things were being misinterpreted.

Picking up the first contract, I held it up to the light of the northern autumn sun and smiled. It looked perfect to me, a near eternal record of the conversations we’d had today, but I had to make sure that everything was identical on the next copy. I must have looked deranged, but I didn’t care. I could read the symbols I was writing and understood what they said as perfect as if I was talking to someone in my native tongue.

I in fact started to hum a triumphal song dredged up from somewhere deep in my subconscious by the glory of what I held in my hands. Words, plucked from my mind and made tangible and solid, something I could run my hands over, something that about me that was true and undeniable. I could write! I could write!

Tears streaking my face with a broad, toothy grin plastered over my face, I handed a copy to each of Modolf and Steingrim and said, “Here you are, both of you. Don’t lose them, otherwise you won’t be able to confirm that neither one has been tampered with.”

Both men nodded quietly before Modolf turned to Steingrim and said, “Well, now that our business is concluded, I must be off to the little fair my associates and I have set up. It was good doing business with you.”

Steingrim watched Modolf leave until he was out of sight before he turned to me, an enormous grin on his face and said, “Snow, you wonderful bastard! Do you have any idea how much money you just saved me?”

I was silent for a moment, still slightly dazed from the discovery of writing that all I could say was, “No?”

Patting me hard on the back, Steingrim said, “I normally have to pay twice that amount come spring time and I still don’t get as much iron as I need.”

I blinked for a moment before I asked, “Why would Modolf agree to that then?”

Steingrim grinned slyly and said, “Because he knows I know what he charges other smiths usually. He knows I’m desperate for material so when he shows up with almost everything already sold he can talk me into buying at a higher price. Bit of a weasel like that. However, he knows that if I can get a guarantee from him he’ll have to sell at a rate comparable to other smiths, which is why until today he’s never promised me anything other than to ‘try’. He now thinks that I have the services of someone who can cut and read runes and he doesn’t want to tangle with that kind of power.”

I frowned slightly and said, “I don’t really have any power, I can teach you too if you want.”

Steingrim waved me off and said, “I’m too old for all of that hocus-pocus.”

“It’s really not magic, and as I wrote down, the strength of words comes from being shared. The more people who can read and write the more power there is,” I insisted.

Steingrim shook his head and said, “Nah, none for me thanks. But I will admit that they have a power that I can’t deny. One second…”

Steingrim then went into the back of his smithy and began digging about a bit before he came up with a large heavy looking bag that jingled as he walked back to me.

Shaking my head, I said, “No, no, no! I don’t need anything. I did that as a sign of friendship to you, and just remembering about reading and writing is my reward.”

Shaking his head in turn, an amused smile on his face, Steingrim said, “Snow, you are some sort of divine creature of charity and kindness. The way I see it, you did me a service worth at least seventy pieces of silver, if not more. Now hold out your hands.”

“Steingrim…”

“Snow…”

Realizing that I would offend him if I did not accept what he was offering me, I held out my hands and said, “I do protest this!”

Steingrim then began placing stacks of small, often tarnished silver pieces in my hand. They were not uniform and had nothing stamped on them, but they were of about consistent weight, although clearly an actual scale would be needed to get a proper account, and with no standard system of weights and measures there was surely a huge amount of imprecision and inaccuracy.

It occurred to me that these little lumps of metal mirrored the entire culture I found myself in: crude and imprecise but with the seen of something greater that might grow one day. What exactly that might be I had no idea, but I could feel it deep within me that there was more than just this.

Once Steingrim had carefully counted out seventy pieces, the biggest ones too I bet, he smiled at me and said, “That should be plenty to get you all squared up with Runa, with some to spare.”

I blinked as I looked at the heavy little pile of silver in my hands and thought about the implications of this. I then blinked again as Steingrim handed me a small leather pouch to carry them all in. “Consider that part of the payment too.”

“This is far too much Steingrim; I didn’t really do anything and…” I said before trailing off as the stern look on his face told me to shut up.

“If it makes you feel better, think of this as a gift to you out of friendship, just as what you did for me was a gift,” Steingrim said.

“I… alright. Thank you Steingrim,” I replied as I tied the little pouch securely to my belt.

“That’s a good man! Now come on, let’s go see what’s going on at the party!” Steingrim said boisterously. “My wife is already over there looking for beads and coloured fabrics, but me, I want to see if any good mead was brought in.”

Grinning lopsidedly while I attempted to wipe away some of the tear streaks but only ended up smudging the soot on my hands over my face, I said, “That sounds like fun.”

Following Steingrim out of the smithy and then out of the village, we approached the boisterous little collection of tents, where savoury smells and merry music emanated and the sounds of dancing and singing and commerce and all the wonderful things about human life could be found.

I felt good. I felt really good. I had written words back, I had money, and most of all I had friends in Steingrim and Runa and Thorgeir. Winter was coming, but for the first time in the short span that I could remember, I was actually feeling warm, the chill that seemed to set me one step away from others finally receding.

Steingrim pulled me along to where a merchant had set up a few small casks and was selling small drinking horns of mead. Smacking his lips in an exaggerated manner, Steingrim said, “Buy you a round?”

“Only if I can buy you the next one,” I replied cheerfully.

Laughing, Steingrim thump me on the back rather harder than I would have liked before he haggled with the seller for a bit and managed to procure for us a pair of cheap horns with the frothed up mead. Handing one to me, he said, “Now I don’t know if you know this but-”

I crashed my horn into his enthusiastically, having already seen a few others doing it and feeling like it was appropriate while I cried out, “Cheers my good man!”

“Ha! You do know how to party!” Steingrim said uproariously before he brought his own horn to his lips along with me and we both drank deep.

The mead was bubbly and frothy, heavily fermented to produce lots of bubbles and lots of alcohol, but was still incredibly sweet. In fact, if it weren’t for the addition of what tasted a bit like an odd blend of mint and cinnamon, the honey taste of the mead probably would have been overwhelmingly sugary. Honey brown liquid pouring around the edge of my horn and down my face onto my shirt as I tried to keep up with the equally enthusiastic and messy Steingrim, I finally found that there was nothing more coming out and thus took a deep, happy breathe.

“Good stuff!” Steingrim cried out.

“Another round?” I asked as I wiped off my chin as best I could. I would definitely have to wash my clothing tonight.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way!” Steingrim cried out happily.

“Shall we savour it this time instead of chugging?” I asked after I had finished my quick negotiations with the merchant, who somewhat unfortunately seemed intimidated by me and thus folded in his haggling rather quickly.

“Sounds like a plan. Maybe the women-folk won’t complain so much then,” Steingrim said, elbowing me playfully, if still somewhat painfully, in the ribs.

“I don’t think Runa likes drinking in principle, but I think its drunkenness that really makes her mad,” I replied while quietly rubbing my side. “Not that I intend to get drunk.”

Snorting in amusement, Steingrim said, “Oh yeah, I wouldn’t want to face that scolding.”

“I just don’t like being drunk,” I said while taking a sip. It really was good mead. I then added on with a grin, “It’s more fun to watch drunks than be drunk.”

“Bah! Then you’ve never been to a good enough party before,” Steingrim replied.

I paused for a moment as I considered where this preference not to get drunk had come from before dismissing it. This was not the time to get existential. This was the time to watch all the happy, smiling people go about their business of having fun. There were so many bright colours and interesting things to see. Merchants were hawking goods unavailable in the village, locals were offering up hot foods fresh from the recent harvest, and in all everything was just one big celebration.

Maybe it was just the mead starting to kick in, but I was really feeling warm now! I was even feeling lost in the bustle of all the activity, no one really paying special attention to me, everyone so consumed in this once in a season, maybe once in a year, gathering.

And then the smile died away and the warmth not only died, but the cold snapped up to the forefront.

It was positioned well away from the village and the tents, up the hills somewhat, but it was now clearly visible. An old ash tree; carefully tended to and probably imported amongst the pines that seemed native to the region. And amongst its branches, gently swaying in the cool autumn wind was a body. A human body.

Judging from the bulging of the tongue and eyes and the cyanic blue tinge of his face, he had obviously died from strangulation when he was hung from the tree. Whatever life he had before it had been cut short had obviously not been a pleasant one as he was dressed in rags and was painfully, skeletally thin. Despite the distance, I could also see long lesions on his body, presumably wounds, and quite possibly whip marks.

I stared at that pathetic figure suspended in the air and my first initial spike of disgust transmuted into the sort of anger that slowly simmered and boiled. But it was a deadly cold boil, the kind of boil that involved pale blue liquids that froze flesh solid while also simultaneously dissolving and igniting it. The cold had settled over me once more. My bones felt as frost covered steel bars and my blood had turned to sea water in the Arctic Circle.

Worse than that though, I felt something trying to worm its way in behind my eyes, something cold-blooded and reptilian; something inhuman. My fingers began to itch and twitch slightly, as if they wanted to curl and deform, the bones at the tips breaking out and thinning into deadly, ice pick points. I struggled for a moment to push that mad, violent impulse away from the forefront of my mind, and I must have looked truly deranged while I did it, but managed to regain some semblance of control after a few seconds.

Hissing like a pot just barely about to violently boil over, I asked while pointing at the tree, “Steingrim… what is that?”

Glancing over, Steingrim shrugged and said, “That’s the village sacrifice to Odin for our prosperity this year. I think it’s supposed to be done at the solstice, but we’re too small and poor to hang on to a sacrificial slave for that long during the winter, so Notger has it done right away. I still say that an animal sacrifice at the proper time would be more suitable, but Notger has to be extravagant and go for the human sacrifice.”

“That is because the All Father cares only for the quality of the sacrifice, not the timing,” a voice said behind us.

I turned about and saw, for the first time, Jarl Notger walking with Modolf and Thorgeir, a tableau that was immediately burned into my mind for the sheer fury it induced in me. While Notger contributed slightly to the rage, it was Thorgeir that truly made me angry.

He was nearly invisible next to the merchant and his father. Gone was the proud, noble man who refused to let anything get him down that I had seen yesterday. He was just limping along, trailing behind his father, clearly not wanting to be here. His enormous shoulders were slumped down so that they appeared weak and pathetic, and his scarred face looked even uglier when curdled into a melancholy frown, his eyes darting back and forth fearfully, waiting for the next lingering stare, the next whispered comment. He looked utterly miserable and to see him so broken and sad looking made me feel physically ill.

Three factors were different than from yesterday. The first was that he was out amongst people. The second was that Sigrun was not around him. The third was that he was with his father. I had the distinct feeling that the first two factors were directly related to the third.

I stared at Notger and I realized why so many people called him an ass where he could not hear, for he did have a certain mulish appearance. His face was long and slightly equine in character, his eyes even a little offset and unfocused. He also had this beady little gleam in his dark grey eyes that suggested the sort of unintelligent, unyielding obstinance that would have him march off a cliff because the bridge was clearly not out. It could clearly be seen in his hair, a mop on his head that had clearly once been a major contributor to the brown tones in Thorgeir’s cherry-wood hair. Unfortunately for the man, he had neither the insight to realize that his hair was just as uncontrollable as his son’s nor the intelligence to realize that the attempt to use copious amounts of grease to create a comb over was simply not working.

There was, however, one big reason why people called Notger an ass more than they called him a pig. While the man did have a large layer of fat over his frame, it was clearly under laid with an impressive amount of strength, no doubt from combat training as the sword at his side suggested. At best he could be considered a boar: greedy and piggish but still packing a mean set of tusks and a bad attitude to go along with them.

Swaddled in expensive furs, dyed cloth, and polished leather he was adorned with bits of silver and gold, his hair tied up into large braids at the back and with his beard and overly slicked up on top in attempt to cover up a clearly growing bald spot but failing badly, Notger’s entire projected persona was of avarice and disdain for the thoughts of others.

The urge to strangle him with his own beard was only held off by the fact that the bastard was armed while I wasn’t and the pleading look in Thorgeir’s face that said that he didn’t want me doing anything stupid. Still, here stood before me a man who I knew was guilty of multiple counts of murder and he could get away with it because it was cloaked in religious or political reasons.

That reptilian part tried to take over again, but fighting inhumanity with inhumanity would leave nothing human at the end.

So instead I just kept my damn mouth shut.

Notger looked me over, and despite the fact that it was pretty obvious who I was from behind, or at a distance, he refused he acknowledge this fact and instead said in a slow, deep voice dripping with contempt, “So is this the stranger he passed off to that yapping bitch Runa?”

I was physically looking down at the little boar and I could feel both the inadequacy he radiated like the sun and the fact that he still thought he could look down at me. Perhaps metaphorically the accident of his birth gave him a position of power that he could look down on others with, but I was a mystery, the sort of person who seemed immune to such scorn.

He saw me as an underling to be bullied about. I saw him as something unpleasant I had just stepped in, and it took everything I had to not throw all that contempt and scorn he showed me back at him, magnified a thousand-fold.

Instead I smiled the phoniest smile ever and nodded, saying, “Yes, you may call me Snow, sir.”

“Snow? What a weak name, although I suppose it fits with the pathetic whiteness of that scrap of hair atop your scalp,” Notger replied disdainfully. I almost expected him to snicker as if it were some sort of joke, but it seemed that I was even below a thing of humour to this man.

I did not know what colour my hair was growing back in, but I suppose if it was white it might make Thorgeir’s comment the day before more understandable. It didn’t particularly matter though. I wanted to throw the comment back in his face so badly, but I knew that it would just cause trouble.

No wonder Thorgeir looked so miserable.

So instead I just shrugged and said, “I cannot particularly say one way or another what other names I might bear as I cannot remember my life before arriving here, so I shall take what has been given to me by others.”

Waving his hand dismissively, Notger said, “For such a big man you are pathetic, aren’t you?”

Despite the gold mine of comebacks, I held my tongue.

Glancing up and down once again, Notger turned to Modolf and asked, “Do you see anything else worth distracting us further from our conversation?”

I looked Modolf in the eye and he looked slightly worried. On the one hand I had cost him money. On the other I was clearly intelligent and had access to knowledge he did not understand which was as good as having magic on my side, so crossing me would do no good. But neither would crossing a trading partner like Notger help him. So he said diplomatically, “I do believe we can get on with our business, yes.”

Notger then simply forgot about me, turning away and continuing whatever conversation he had going before, with Modolf listening in while trying to hide the pained emotions of having to be in close contact with such an odious troll, while Thorgeir trailed behind them, obviously forced to trudge along with his bad foot because his father insisted he be there just to be there.

For one brief moment our eyes met before he looked away again sadly, obviously not wanting to be seen looking at me for long.

I waited just long enough for Notger to be out of sight before I let the rage bubble to the surface, although it was quickly replaced by pain as I crushed the drinking horn in my hand. Cursing in my native tongue while shaking off the remains, I looked at my hand. There was a bit of blood mixed in with the mead, but nothing appeared to be bleeding at the moment so I figured that it was just a little cut burning as the alcohol got in a small wound.

Steingrim looked at me in concern before I winced and said, “Damn cheap horn!”

A sort of half smile came over his craggy face and he said, “Come on, let’s go see if we can guilt the merchant into a free round in compensation for such shoddy and dangerous products.”

Wincing as I cleaned off my hand as best I could and found no open wounds, I said, “Yeah, I could use something to drink right now, although I’m not sure if that would be a good thing. I’m pretty pissed at the moment.”

“Notger can be… difficult at times,” Steingrim said, acutely aware that there were people around us trying and failing badly not to pay attention.

Frowning, I said, “It goes beyond that. The hanged man really has ruined my day.”

“Why? He was just a slave,” Steingrim said with dismissive confusion.

The words coming from Steingrim were like a punch in the gut, and I wanted to grab him and scream at him for such a disgusting comment, but I found that I felt too betrayed to do anything but stand there weakly. How could he say that?

Biting my tongue until the pain snapped me out of it, I said, “I cannot explain why I feel the way I do, I just feel that it is wrong.”

Steingrim shrugged and said, “Come on, let’s drown your problems then.”

“Just one more drink. Ferocious anger and liquor have a bad relationship,” I replied hesitantly.

“Oh come on Snow, he’s not that bad,” Steingrim said.

I grit my teeth in impotent rage. It wasn’t Notger, not entirely. It was the way Notger and those who supported him could get away with taking someone from his home against his will, then horrifically abuse him, and finally kill the poor man for no better reason than because they could.

Steingrim’s lack of comprehension, of understanding the why of my anger just pissed me off more.

“Look, I-” Whatever I was going to say next vanished into the ether as I saw a group of people coming up from the docks, one of them wearing an iron collar and leg irons and being lead along by a length of rope.

My whole body ran with ice once again and the beast within me tried to take the forefront once more. My mouth actually flooded with saliva as I pictured rushing the scum and ripping into them with fingers and teeth, biting out their throats like a wild animal while gouging at eyes and necks. Blood would flow, bones would break, and joints would be twisted. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, but there was a certain appeal to surrendering to such bestial desires and inflicting such destruction on the scum who sold people as chattel.

I restrained myself despite my lips curling back in a feral snarl for a moment. Instead of rushing off and probably getting killed one way or another, I instead turned to Steingrim and asked, “What are they going to do with that slave?”

Steingrim looked over to where I was pointing and he shrugged and said, “The auction most likely. Although it’s not really an auction as only a few people have the money to buy a slave, so it’s really more of a show for Notger to show how powerful he is by buying a slave unopposed.”

My guts twisted up and I asked, “Who else has enough money?”

“Uh… me for one, although I have children and apprentices to do the sort of work a slave does, so no real point. Maybe a few of the wealthier farmers, maybe the tanner. Why do you ask?” Steingrim asked.

There were so many things I could say to Steingrim that he would not understand, but finally I said the one thing he might possibly understand. I said, “I was wondering if I could annoy Notger at all possible by snatching up his little prize at the auction.”

Steingrim’s eyes went wide as he heard that. He then glanced back at the woman being led away and asked, “Are you sure you’re just not looking for some company, because there are cheaper ways to do that.”

I frowned at him and wanted to throttle him for his stupidity. Could he not see that she was a human being? I would have done my damnedest to save anyone in her situation be they young or old, man or woman, fit or ill, simply because it was the right thing to do. But Steingrim, no, everyone in the village didn’t see another person being lead away in chains to sale to some disgusting ass of a man; they just saw a stranger, someone beyond caring about.

They didn’t pay attention to the fact that she was well beyond the screaming stage, having already endured weeks or months of being hauled far from her home, suffering unspeakable abuses. They didn’t care that she was still talking, babbling really, because they couldn’t understand her. She was speaking another language, thus she was beyond their care. She was an outsider. She was not a human; she was an animal, a thing to them, a horse or cow or plough to perform a service and nothing more. She had no hopes, dreams, or fears in their eyes. They could not understand her, they refused to understand her.

But I could understand.

I could hear her words, the Arctic Wind whispering a translation into the back of my skull, the words cutting into me like blades of ice just from their content instead of their method of delivery.

In reflection later this should have been a world shattering revelation, but I was too furious at the time to notice the importance to me of this detail.

“Jesus and Mary please save me. Jesus and Mary please save me. Jesus and Mary please…” She said; the same phrase over and over again.

Holding down the bile in my throat that threatened to leap into my mouth with increasing insistence as the day wore on I slowly took my gaze off the terrible sight before me and looked long and hard at Steingrim.

After a long moment to consider my words carefully, I said, “If I could find her some place to go, I would probably just free her right away to prove how hollow Notger’s wealth truly is that I who has so little can freely throw it away. But if she just gets captured again it would make the gesture seem futile, wouldn’t it?”

Steingrim thought about this for a moment before he stroked his dirty blonde beard and then said, “Well… I can let you in on a little secret actually. You see, Notger is cheap but pious. Thus he had to sacrifice the best slave to Odin, the best in Notger’s mind being ‘the most expensive’. Since there were only two to choose from and only one of them was male, he had no choice in selection. But that also means that for his little show auction he won’t go above what he paid for the sacrifice.”

“How much did he pay?” I asked.

Steingrim shrugged and said, “Not a clue, but he won’t go above that value, and he probably already argued for a low price not letting the slaver know about the fact that he wasn’t going to pay as much for the woman.”

“So if someone other than Notger were to win the auction, the slaver wouldn’t be likely to do anything about it, right?” I inquired.

Thorgeir shrugged and said, “Probably not, he doesn’t care about Notger and if a minor jarl tries to push him around he’ll just go find someone else to push back harder.”

“So the only reason Notger gets away with this is because no one bids, right?” I asked.

“Not on the first one. If there were two or three then some others might join in, but with only one slave this year no one will try to annoy Notger like that,” Steingrim said.

“Unless of course they aren’t his direct subjects,” I countered.

Steingrim looked at me before he shook his head and said, “Go get your petty revenge if you really want to.”

He then walked off to the mead seller while I followed the slavers with a sick feeling in my stomach. Was I really considering paying such scum for the life of another, even if I did intend to free said life? It would only encourage them to repeat their atrocities on others.

Staring at my hands and trying to quell the fearful trembling, I realized that the only power I had right now was in the clinking pouch of leather at my side. If right now freedom for a single person meant paying the captors, then I would do it. I had the power to do something good; therefore I would do what little I could. It might do more damage later, but it also might not. I could not see that far into the future.

But I could see Notger and making a deal with devils like the slavers was preferable to standing by and doing nothing with him around.

The only question now was if the power I had at my side would be enough.

A small crowd had gathered around a little stage set up off from the main tent fair where the slavers displayed their ‘goods’, although even thinking about another human being in such a way caused me to feel physically ill on top of all the other complicated emotions I discovered within my heart about the subject. My stomach was simultaneously wound tight as a drum and also wanted to explode from the stress.

The head slaver, a short, bald on top man with expensively tacky clothes looked over the crowd with greedy eyes and said, “Ah, I see there are a number of prospective customers out there today looking for some quality merchandise, and quality is what I’ve got here for you here today.”

Pointing to the poor woman as if she was a piece of meat on the block, which I suppose was how the man thought of her, he said, “Fresh from Frankia, he have here a fine specimen, no older than twenty summers, of that I can guarantee. As you can see, she is strong enough to handle working in the fields or in the home.” The slaver then grabbed the poor woman by the arm, causing her to cry out while he showed the ropey muscles on her. “Of course, for one such as her, field work might be something of a waste for gentlemen of discerning tastes. You will notice both her full bosom and wide hip, excellent for birthing if any of you men have been recently left widowed and are in need of an heir, even if he is a bastard.” To accentuate his point, the slaver grabbed her left breast hard while running his other hand over her hip and buttocks.

The image of the man’s head exploding came to my mind, followed by him being set on fire and finally a rather satisfying one of me breaking all of his limbs and then tossing him in the river to watch him flounder about for a bit before drowning… maybe a shallow part of the river though, so he wouldn’t drown too fast.

I reined in my savage grin a bit after I noticed people edging ever so carefully away from me. And they had already been keeping their distance!

“So where shall we start the bidding? A hundred pieces of silver?” The slaver asked the crowd. My heart sank and my guts twisted. To peddle a life for so little seemed so wrong, and yet the tiny bundle of metal at my side would not save her from such a cruel fate.

As if by some miracle though, there was utter silence from the crowd as everyone looked at Notger. The ass just stayed quiet and looked incredibly smug while Thorgeir looked like he had eaten something sour that did not agree with his stomach. Whether he was displeased with slave trading or just his father’s behaviour I could not tell.

I hoped for the former but stronger suspected the latter.

The slaver blinked for a moment before he said, “She really is quite the good find here. Notice how her hair is such a pretty brown colour. Ninety pieces?”

Again, utter silence and the slaver’s face sank, a look that I will treasure for ages, although only that first moment where he realized that he had been had by Notger before he turned angry and instead of praising the lock of hair he held, he instead yanked down, causing the woman to cry out in pain and begin praying more loudly for salvation.

“You will notice how obedient she is despite speaking an incomprehensible tongue. Kneel!” The man commanded, causing the woman to cringe away while dropping to her knees like a whipped dog.

“Seventy pieces?” The man asked savagely.

My heart went from sitting in my stomach in a depressed daze to trying to leap out of my throat in excitement. This was in the range that I could pay for! But still I stayed quiet, not out of a sense of greed and a desire to get the best deal, but to avoid over extending myself in case Notger still had some card to play.

“I can see there isn’t much of a market for slaves down here. Forty-five pieces of silver, minimum bid,” the slaver growled.

“Forty-five,” Notger replied smugly, sure that he had just picked up a deal.

Sighing, seeing the game, the slaver still went through with the motions and asked, “I have forty-five; do I have forty-seven?”

“Forty-seven,” I called out suddenly, causing all heads to whip about to look at me, not the least of which was a shocked looking Notger.

The auctioneer, looking rather surprised by this sudden turn of fortune, asked the crowd, “I hear forty-seven, do I hear fifty?”

Scowling fiercely at me, Notger called out, “Fifty.”

“Fifty-five?” The slaver asked.

“I’ve got fifty-five,” I said.

“Fifty-six,” Notger shouted out.

So Notger had just about reached his max. Chewing on my lip for a moment I said, “Fifty-seven.”

Now beet red with fury, Notger hissed, “Fifty-eight.”

Taking a wild stab in the dark, I nodded to him politely as if conceding and said, “Sixty-one.” I then let a smug smirk cross over my face despite the fact that I truly felt sick to my stomach. Sixty pieces of silver to hang a man. How disgustingly pitiful.

Notger was so visibly mad that he was practically spitting, but eventually he just turned up his nose and left in a huff, Thorgeir following obediently behind while giving me a strange look.

Having suddenly seen a bit of drama, the crowd was slow to disperse, wanting to get a better look at the stranger who had denied Notger victory. Then again, they also didn’t want to stand too close to the stranger who had denied Notger victory.

Approaching the stage with boots filled with lead, I pulled out my pouch and began counting while the slaver began prepping the woman for transfer. In a bored tone that left bile on my tongue for saying it, I noted while counting out carefully, “I would ask you do no more damage than you have already done to my property.”

It was almost terrifying how easily I could slip into this frame of mind that let me so easily say one thing while thinking something completely different and yet not actually lie. I had a sudden flash of a long row of men seated about a long table, dressed as the man in my dream, and I wondered what it meant.

Frowning slightly, the slaver said, “She is not yet your property.”

Passing over sixty-one pieces of silver, I glared at him and asked, “You were saying?”

Quickly counting them out, the slaver nodded, confident that he had been fairly paid, and he turned the woman over to me, roughly shoving her. Narrowing my eyes at him, I pictured it. Shot to the balls, then a knee to the face, and finally twisting his head while he was stunned to break his neck. I felt confident I could do it in less than five seconds just going on instinct and wrath alone.

“Could you possibly remove the leg irons and neck collar? I have quite the trip to take and the collar is so unsightly,” I asked in an annoyed tone, the sort of a bored, impatient merchant with far better things to do.

Rolling his eyes, the slaver said, “She will run off on you if you do that.”

I glanced about the mountains around us and asked, “Where too? At least take off the leg irons.”

Shrugging, the slaver said, “Sure, why not.” He then gestured to one of his compatriots, who came over with what looked like an unpleasant set of oversized pliers and popped open a soft iron rivet on each of the clamps about the ankles, revealing flesh that had been rubbed raw by the bare metal against skin.

The woman looked at me with raw hatred and spat at me in her own tongue, “God will punish you for your heathen ways.”

Sighing, I said in her language, “I’m really sorry about all of this, but this was the only way I had open to me to help you…”

Her eyes going wide, she exclaimed, “You speak Frankish?”

“I suspect I speak a lot of languages,” I said wearily, having long ago grown tired of explaining myself to others. The emotional stress involved with what I had just done also meant that I did not particularly feel like launching into a long winded explanation.

She blinked and took a better look at me, no doubt seeing me as an actual person rather than some fearful monster speaking an incomprehensible tongue and worshipping heathen devil gods. And suddenly I didn’t look like a freak and I had now been upgraded to human which in comparison to everyone else here to her…

“Are you an angel?” She asked in awe.

Shaking my head while wondering why everyone I met seemed to wonder if I had some sort of supernatural origin, I said, “No, I’m just a man who looks funny. What is your name?”

“Fara,” she said.

“Hello Fara, they call me Snow. Now come, I suspect I have to keep up appearances for just a little longer. I’ll get you some warm clothes and shoes and then we can leave here and…”

I trailed off as I noticed Runa looking at me from a distance, obvious disgust on her face. I wanted to run off to tell her that this wasn’t what it looked like, but the woman next to me really needed some better clothes than the scraps she was wearing to get by- to survive- in this frigid Nordic air for much longer. So did not chase the old woman as she turned away.

Heading back into the tent fair, the bright cheer of the place now bouncing off my melancholy mood like rain off oak planks coated in pitch, I immediately began seeking out proper clothing for my ‘investment’ although it sickened me inside every time I referred to Fara as if she were nothing more than a new plough.

It was the smiles that were the worst. For weeks I had desired people to smile at me, but now I wished that they would curse my existence, call me out on what an evil act I had done. But the fact that I had a slave trailing behind me now gave me status and prestige, so they all now wanted my money and my favour, so they faked smiles and laughter.

Better an honest cold shoulder than phoney warm smiles.

As the sun was starting to die and I knew that it was time to leave I discovered Notger and Thorgeir standing in front of me, grinning a serpent smile that made all of the previous expressions seem earnest in comparison. Walking up to me, he said, “Ah Snow, I appear to have underestimated you before. I had just heard that you have knowledge of runes?”

“Well, not the same runes you use, but yes, I know how to write,” I replied evenly.

“And that is how you acquired the money to bid on this slave here?” Notger asked.

“Yes,” I replied carefully.

“Wonderful, wonderful. I had not realized you were quite so capable. Could I invite you to a gathering at my mead hall to celebrate the end of the season and the blessings of the All Father upon the village?” Notger asked in a way that suggested that it was not much of a request.

The pained look in Thorgeir’s eyes suggested that it most definitely was not a request and that it would both be in my best interests to come and not at all in my interests to come.

“You will of course want to bring your new purchase along with you, correct?” Notger asked in an oily tone.

I sighed inside, realizing that this would be some sort of attempt to embarrass me somehow as some sort of petty revenge for a perceived insult. The venomous words at the tip of my tongue wanted to burst out and show him what a true insult was, but I restrained them.

“Of course,” I replied with a fake smile.

[Alan Bolte]

It works well. Notger's response to the insult caught me off guard: he thought of that so quickly.

[Robo Jesus]

Yeah, it does touch on a few emotions well here. Near the end of the chapter, anger at the situation, dread at the situation Snow has placed himself in, embarrassment for Snow at what that girl must be thinking of him, and resignation towards the fact that Snow is more than likely going to have to work with a slimeball for a time.

Also, I was a bit shocked and more than a little happy to see this updated so soon, even when you had already said that you had a bit of work done for it.

[Academia Nut]

I think I wrote half of this entire chapter in one sitting, that half being the latter bit when the emotions were really crackling. If I didn't have my most excellent proofreader, it would have come out even faster.

Now I just need to figure out how exactly to play out the first bit of the next chapter.