Work Text:
Some time between 1,046 and 1,050
The Ice Wastes, Northern Naca Territories
A shape.
Tall and dark, a sharp contrast to the barely blue skies and plains of almost wholly solid massive ice lakes.
The form is vaguely humanoid, covered in thick layers of fur and leather. Dark shades
The front of the shape reveals a human face, decorated and framed by strikingly pinkish hair. The same color brows are drawn over narrowed, pale gray eyes.
Everything is silent, save for the breathing of the only living thing for a massive distance. Merely icy lakes and patches of dirt framed by a horizon of mountains to one side, a forest far to the other, and mostly flat blue glass terrain behind and in front.
The shape stands atop one of these icy goliaths, several paces away from a cluster of rods driven into the thick solid, half fused into it. Even as the frigid breeze bears against it, they stand firm, gaze trained on the group of crystalline spikes.
Change happened in this place. Worse or better, it didn't matter-change is change. Just as death is evil nor good, vicious, or kind.
There were a few times he wished he went into the water and never dragged himself and his teammates out, almost completely paralyzed from the hips down for a time. Like when he woke up in the hospital and heard of what happened to his team. Or when he lost the love of his life. When he lost the rest of his friends.
But that wasn't what he promised them. Nor what he promised himself. He loved too many things to regret surviving.
"Here they lie. Here you do not. Go and live." The man speaks quietly. To the spikes themselves, perhaps.
Every year.