Archive of Our Own ^beta

The hunt had been a good one. His hird had felled a thick, healthy buck and brought it back through the deep snow, hung it up over the pit, and the meat would feed their people for two weeks, possibly more. If the other hunters brought back even a brace of rabbits, it would mean food for at least a moon.

And in the depths of winter, when the sun barely rose to shine, when even the smallest victory was means for celebration, such a fortuitous hunt was cause to dance and sing, to get drunk on mead and thank the gods.

Nathan sat back in his chair, pulling said mead to his lips. It was hot and frothy, a rich, thick brew of the previous season’s barley, and the yeast tasted strong, a comfortable weight in his belly as he drank it. The heat radiated out from within him, his body already sweltering despite the fierce cold outside their fur-lined hut. He was stripped down to his breechclout, legs spread and a woman resting between them, her head upon his wiry haired thigh.

In the center of the large, circular hut, a great bonfire burned, flames licking up to where the furs formed a thin circle to the sky, releasing plumes of smoke. The heat from the fire, and the dancing bodies, created a thick, powerful atmosphere, the air so hot that he worked to breathe it, watching the mostly naked bodies dance about the fire, celebrating their kill.

“The others shoulda been back by now,” a familiar voice to his right said, displeasure in his tone.

Nathan grunted.

“It’s late,” Pickles continued, obviously wanting more from Nathan than that. “Something’s nat right.”

“Probably just didn’t want to return empty handed,” Nathan dismissed. There had been two hunting parties that evening, one made up of Nathan and his hird, one of other warriors. The supplies had run dangerously low, and nothing had been found nearby for over a week. It had been decided to send two strong hunting parties out in either direction, one towards the mountains, one down to the copse, and see what they could find further from their regular hunting grounds.

Both parties had known well that their people were depending on them to come back with meat. Even Murderface hadn’t complained as much as normal.

“Nah,” Pickles said, waving that off like it was nothing. Nathan frowned at him. “It ain’t that. Somethin’ ain’t right. I can feel it.”

“Maybes you shoulds go talks to the ladies about yous lady feelings,” Skwisgaar said as he approached, one fine maid under an arm. The other held a stout of mead. “De seiðkona could uses an apprentice, ja?”

Pickles just cast a glare at the foreigner, crossing his arms over his chest.

Nathan looked at the fire, ignoring the bickering of his hird. He reached one hand down to rest on the head of the woman between his legs. It was late.

Still, it wasn’t unreasonably late, and both he and the other hunters had known well that they needed to come back with something. Nathan could easily imagine himself staying out this late, searching and hoping for some sign of game, just to satisfy his duty to his people, unwilling to shelter the guilt that would surely come returning with nothing.

But he also knew to listen to Pickles when he spoke.

“She wants yous dick, ja?” Skwisgaar’s voice broke Nathan’s concentration.

He looked up at the foreigner, blinking owlishly.

The bladesman gestured to the woman between Nathan’s legs.

“You gots a pretty goods slut there,” he clarified. “You should takes her backs to yous bed, before Pickle convinskes us to goes stomping around in the snows again.”

“Fuck that,” Murderface declared. “I’m not going back out there. I already froze my shtupid ballsh off the first time.”

“As ifs we takes you.” Skwisgaar huffed and took another swig of his mead. Nathan smirked at that a little.

“Yeah,” he chimed in. “I bet we’d have done even better without you scaring all the game away.”

“I didn’t shcare shit!”

“Your smell is enough to scare them.”

“Ja, and yous always stompsking around. Makes so many noise, pshh.”

“Fuck you all!”

Nathan chuckled. He looked up at Pickles, looking to see similar amusement on his face, but instead, his second was just looking into the fire, that same consternated expression there. Nathan sighed.

“Pickles—” he started, but then pulled up short. He’d been about to try and reassure him, but Nathan knew better. Pickles’ advice wasn’t to be just brushed aside. Nathan was headman, but it was his old friend’s voice in his ear that truly guided their people. Nathan didn’t have the mind for things like that. The patience for them, really.

“…we’ll wait another mark,” he assuaged, waiting to see Pickles turn his head to look down at him, before continuing. “If they’re not back by then, I’ll send scouts out to search the edges of the village. And if we need to… If we need to, we’ll head out at first light to look for them.”

Skwisgaar and Murderface both groaned. It wasn’t as if their hunt had been easy on them, and Nathan was certain that they were both looking forward to a warm bed as much as he himself was. There was a reason that he was reclined here, and not mingling with all the ample bodies on display, after all.

But being headman meant that things such as rest and comfort had to sometimes be laid aside. Being part of the headman’s hird meant a similar responsibility. For all of their complaining, Nathan knew that if he set out at first light, the two of them would be there waiting when Nathan emerged from his hut, ready to leave with him.

Pickles too, of course, and his second nodded in response to what he’d said, apparently appeased.

It didn’t come to that, though. Before the mark had even passed, a heavily clothed guard entered the sweltering hut, snow melting from his helmet.

“Sire,” he said, approaching Nathan and looking somewhat out of breath. “The other party has returned.”

“See?” Nathan said, rousing himself from the half-sleeping stupor he’d slipped into, gesturing his stein at Pickles. “I told you—”

“Something has happened,” the guard continued. “Only one man came back.”

Nathan stopped at that, and he half expected Pickles to lord it over him. Instead, the older warrior’s expression settled into a frown. He reached to grab up his coat and trousers, pulling them on as quick as he could manage. Nathan didn’t bother. He just rose from his seat, stepping over his woman carefully but with determined resolve. He grabbed his mace in one paw, setting his stein down.

“Take me to him,” he demanded with short, sure command. He was dressed only in boots and breechclout when he stepped out in to the swiftly falling snow. The flakes landed on his bare skin, his sweat freezing to him, but Nathan didn’t care. He followed the guard back to where he could see some others gathered, Nathan marching through the thick snow, the heat of the tent wafting off of his shoulders as curling steam in the freezing air.

By the time he’d broken through the little circle of onlookers, he heard and felt Pickles catch up with him.

They’d sent six other men off towards the mountains, while Nathan and his three hirdsmen had gone down to the copse, but it seemed that only one of those six had returned, and it was clear that he was not long for this world.

Nathan crouched down, looking the hunter over.

Otkell, Nathan figured out eventually, looking through the stringy, blood matted hair to make out a largely mutilated face. It was only the man’s obvious bucked teeth that gave away his identity.

Nathan reached out, laying one broad hand on the dying man’s shoulder.

“Otkell,” he said, voice short and simple. “Tell me what happened to you.”

“Monsters,” he whispered, but it felt more forceful than a whisper. His voice rasped, as if broken — as if he’d screamed his voice away, and this paper thin thing was all that was left. He spoke through tatters, and behind Nathan Pickles cursed — Nathan didn’t take long to figure out why. One of the man’s arms had been stripped of flesh, only bone and haggard meat hanging below his upper arm, the muscle dripping like cloth.

Nathan frowned.

“There were monsters in the mountains,” Otkell said, a hush falling in the snow.

“What do you mean? What were they?”

“Monsters…” he murmured again, shutting blue eyes that looked unreal against the blood soaked skin. “Came down from the mountains… Monsters. They ate us all…”

Nathan shook him.

“Otkell — speak sense. What happened? Where are the others?”

“Nat’en,” Pickles said. Nathan glanced up at him, then down at the man he was now supporting, his breath no more than a death rattle. It came in and out, in and out, in once more, and then on a shaky puff he let out the last of his life, and Nathan couldn’t imagine it as anything else but relief in that state, even his bones cold, frozen by the winter, and the trail of his blood leading through the snow, out into the darkness.

“…great.” Nathan set him down, just as Skwisgaar, Murderface, and others from the tent came up, dressed in their furs and a little out of breath.

“De hell is dat?” Skwisgaar asked, his sword strapped to his back, looking down at the wrecked body in front of them.

Nathan didn’t answer. Instead he looked to Pickles with a frown.

Pickles looked back up at him with a similar expression. It was clear that there’d be no rest for them tonight.

Nathan had not intended to rule his people. He was not a man for such things.

He was strong, of course. No one doubted that. Even as a boy the other children had had the sense to fear him. He had been quiet, a boy of few if any words, and had tread so carefully that even the hare he could catch with his bare hands. His size, his silence, and his withering glower had been more than enough to keep most sensible children at bay. Other boys with vainglorious fathers egging them on soon learned not to boast their skills in front of Nathan — they had learned to be sensible themselves, in time. For even a great and powerful warrior knows when he faces a berzerker.

Nathan had grown from a silent, sullen boy into a warrior of great aptitude, respected in the glima and feared in battle. He towered over most of the men of his tribe, eclipsed them in height and weight both, and by the time he had reached his majority, no one was foolish enough to try and mock him with the laughable notion that they might beat him. Winter did not wear on him, and the icy north wind moved him as well as it did the mountains. He was a warrior true as Thor, the type of man that Valhalla was made for.

Some of the gamboling young boys in those days told him that he could be headman, tried to push him to do so. They said that he could destroy Cornickel, who had led their people for many years, and take up his mantle.

Nathan had little interest in this. He was content to hunt deer and bed lusty women. He was content to drink and sleep, to wear himself in battle and collapse by firelight, the unquestioned victor.

And besides, the old man who led their tribe was a good man. Nathan respected him. He had ruled their people for years before Nathan was even born, and he had always been kind to Nathan. Taught him how to wield a mace, how to skin a coney, or sharpen a stone into a blade. Even though he was old and couldn’t run with the other men, couldn’t hunt or fight like they said he used to in his younger days, he was a wise man, and for all their people valued strength they were not fools. No one called him to holmgang. Even though he was no longer strong, the respect he’d earned stayed the hands of the younger men, letting him rule even into his twilight time.

Nathan had been content to be no more than a warrior under the headman’s rule, until the day that Cornickel’s son had slit his throat in the night like a coward, and then dared call himself king. He had been under some foolheaded notion that because he was the headman’s son that no one would challenge him. That he was owed their obeisance.

Nathan had called him to holmgang and split his head with a rock to dispel this notion. It had been the clear course of action to him.

He just hadn’t thought that it would end with him crowned chief. He’d hardly been prepared for it.

“What’re ya doin’, Nate?” Pickles asked him as he gathered his things in his hut.

Nathan had remained out in the snow only long enough to dispose of the body, so as not to worry the mothers and their children, and then he’d returned to his hut, pulling on fresh leathers.

“I have to go and find the others,” he replied with a grunt, tying his cinch around his waist.

“At this time’a night? It’s pitch black out there.”

“Once I get far enough from the village the moon will light things.” Nathan strapped his armor to his chest. He’d had no need of such things on the hunt — leathers more than enough, and the ability to travel light a premium. He had more flexibility without armor, and rabbits and foxes were hardly threats to him.

“Uh, yeh, but what’re ya gonna accamplish?” Pickles shook his head, his hands on his slim hips. His daggers were there. He’d strapped them on the minute they’d left the bonfire hut.

He’d been Nathan’s friend since Nathan was a boy. Some six winters his elder, Pickles had been the one to show him how to light a fire, how to build a hovel out of dried leaves for shelter. He’d given Nathan advice how to bed a woman, and helped him home piss drunk more times than Nathan cared to count.

And since Nathan had been made headman, it had been Pickles murmuring in his ear that had helped him make his decisions. He was Nathan’s friend and adviser, and the only person he would trust the people with in his absence.

“I will find them or I will find their bodies, and then I will find those that killed them,” he answered. He picked up his helm, the metal sculpted into a crude imitation of a bear, its teeth curving down over Nathan’s temples.

Pickles was silent for a moment, then spoke again.

“Fine. Ah’ll go get the others. They won’t be wild about goin’ out again—”

“No.” Nathan cut him off, turning to look at the smaller man. “I need you and the other two to stay here.”

“Waht! No! Fuck no. Why the hell d’ya think that’d happen?”

“Because I’m not going to leave the people unguarded.”

“We gat, y’know, guards fer that shit.”

“And you’ll use them.” He straightened out. “But if anything happens to, uh, you know, happens to me— They’re going to need you as headman.”

“Well that’s a nice, healthy way a’ thinkin’—”

“Pickles.”

Pickles puffed up his cheeks, scowling over at him. But he didn’t object, this time. Instead, his hands came up from his hips to cross over his chest, looking put out but accepting.

“Fine. I get it. But I still think y’ should take someone with y’. Who knows what attacked those assholes? Monsters, he said. And what the fuck does that mean? Men from the south? Or mebbe the men of the heretic god?”

Nathan shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Men don’t do that. Not sane men. As for monsters…maybe the Grandmother was wrong, in all her stories. Maybe Odin didn’t vanquish the frost giants, and they have come with their appetite for the flesh of men. Perhaps the wolves have become too bold. All I do know is that it’s my place as headman to go and find out. I’m not going to wait here for it to come down on our heads.”

“But you’ll ask me to wait here,” Pickles reminded sullenly, his sharp shoulders sagging. “Like ah’m some kinda coward.”

Nathan took a step towards him, reaching out to lay his free hand over the shoulder of his friend.

“No man would call you a coward,” he assured.

Pickles looked up at him dryly.

“Yer optimistic streak is showin’.”

Nathan huffed and dropped his hand, turning back to his preparations. He found his boots, the insides lined with thick hides, and pulled them onto his feet, tying the leather thongs tight around his calves. Pickles settled down next to him on his bench with a huff.

They sat together in companionable silence, Pickles one of the few who’d ever seemed to understand Nathan’s propensity for the quiet. Nathan could feel the other man’s worry, his displeasure, radiating off of him, but they didn’t need to talk about it. Pickles needed to stay here, to take care of the people, and even though he understood that, he still disliked not being there to stand at Nathan’s back. Nathan understood. He’d miss Pickles equally.

They weren’t like, going to talk about it, though. Fuck that.

“I’ll be back in two weeks, or I won’t be back at all,” Nathan announced after he’d stood up, making his way over to the entrance to his hut. He reached down, picking up his mace, a massive piece of weaponry, iron banded wood for the double-handed handle and a sphere of spike ridden metal at the top, dark and jagged. This weapon had been used to cleave the heads of men who dared to stand against him, and though it was useless for hunting meat, it was perfect for hunting men.

Or monsters, as the case may be.

Nathan hefted the great weapon up onto his shoulder, taking its weight, and glanced back at Pickles.

“Keep the people,” he ordered simply.

“Don’t die, y’jackass,” Pickles responded, leaned over with his elbows on his knees.

Nathan huffed a short laugh, but promised him nothing.

The walk into the wilderness was a long one, and not easy up the sometimes steep incline of the mountain. Rocks jutted out of the snow, or sometimes hid beneath it, obscuring dangerously sharp edges. He had to watch his step — this far out from his village and alone, there would be little hope for him if he injured himself.

For any other, this would set up fear. Indeed, for any other the fear would have been foremost only to the loneliness during the nights that Nathan made camp under the overhangs of rock or in the occasional hollow or cave. He managed a small fire the first night, still close enough to the forests to gather kindling, but even that was not company.

Their people did little alone. The winter was not made for solitude. Most nights out on the hunt, these days, Nathan would be surrounded by the sound of Skwisgaar and Pickles’ accents, Murderface’s grumbling complaints, and the wild and wary stories they all told around the campfire, wiling the night away as they tracked their prey. Stories or poems, or arguing, anything to drive back the night, brighten it with voices and bold claims, and Nathan would listen to them all.

But in this, too, he was different from his people, for he didn’t need it.

He didn’t need the dancing and the singing that the others indulged in, whenever the hunting parties returned with food. He didn’t need the stories that the Grandmother told, or games of words that the older warriors indulged in, flyting back and forth.

Nathan enjoyed such spectacle, from time to time, but his own journey was not poorer for its solitude, not for him. He, who could live easily with silence where other men could not.

It was something that Nathan heard from the younger men. A longing for battle, for the clash of weapons and the roar of angry men, or else the ecstatic screams of an eager woman, or perhaps the shrieking laughter of girls dancing around the fire. Yes, all these things, they said, all these things I need. Drunken voices raised in song, the bellow laughter of men telling tales, the clink of steins and mead flowing — all these things, they needed.

They didn’t understand their own weakness. Their dependence.

Nathan trekked three days up the mountain slopes and said nor heard a word in those three days. He woke to chirping songs of the mountain birds, walked under the whistle of the wind, and bedded down in silence, only himself for company, and he enjoyed it just as well as he did anything else. It was what it was, and Nathan needn’t anything else. Nothing but himself and his mace, for a true warrior needed little else.

On the fourth day, however, he felt a brief nip of wistfulness when he came to a split in the path up the mountain, his mind fabricating Pickles’ rye grin and helpful advice at choosing what to do here. Before his hird, he would never have thought such a thing. Before the four of them had formed their strange and annoying bond, Nathan would have never wanted for anything more than himself, but now he found himself thinking with almost fondness about how Murderface would wheedle his way into taking a break, or how Skwisgaar would wander off to start obsessing over his blade. Nathan couldn’t help but hope the three of them were doing well, back down in the village.

As for himself, he still had a choice to make, and no Pickles to seek council from.

For here in the path up the mountain, the road(a charitable term for the faintly worn pass through the flatter part of the slope) split in two. The main path continued up the mountain, but a smaller pass was formed between two crags that led off to the right. An old niðing pole was planted at the V of the fork, a thick stalk of birch planted deep into the rock, with a horse’s skull dangling on top, time having rotted away the flesh from what once would have been a full head.

A warning, both to those who lived beyond this point and to any of Nathan’s people who came this way: the exiled ones lived down this path, and anyone still of the people was not to go near them.

No one had gone down to see the heretics in years. Glanced from afar, perhaps, watching them gathering tubers and collecting thin rabbits caught in their snares, but other than that, they knew to avoid Nathan’s people. Cornickel and his men had pushed them out back when Nathan was still but a small boy. He hardly remembered the dark priest who’d come from the southern lands, speaking of his heretic god.

He’d preached of some strange way, of one god against the thousand, and believed not in Odin or Thor, but rather a weak, strodinn god who was too scared to show his face to men. The preacher had tried to convince the people of it. Generally speaking, Nathan’s tribe was fairly accepting of strangers and travelers. So long as they pronounced no threat nor trespassed against their village, newcomers were allowed safe passage through their lands. But the preacher had begun to speak against their gods, had begun to convince others of his strange, blasphemous ways.

He and his followers were driven from the village, gone to live in the hills, and the niðing pole had been struck into the ground in warning.

Nathan remembered asking Cornickel why they did not merely wipe the followers of the heretic god out. After all, they were weak and few, and while they mostly survived on scraps and refuse, even that was competition in a land of long winters. It would take little effort to come down and slaughter them, but Cornickel and just shook his head.

“There is no honor in killing the weak,” he’d said, and Nathan had been just a boy on the verge of manhood then, but he’d remembered it well.

It was not mercy or kindness. It was the understanding that those who took easy victory were cowards in their own way. A true warrior challenged only those who could threaten him with death — or else there was no victory to be found in the winning.

On this advice, Nathan had left the people of the heretic god alone during his time as headman, just as Cornickel had.

Now, he found himself wondering if he should cross the niðing pole. After all, they lived further up into the hills. If something strange was coming down the mountain, they may have seen it before Nathan’s hunters ran into it. Their information might be of use to him.

Nathan grunted, shifting his weight in his boots as he looked down the craggy path. No man or woman was meant to cross the niðing pole, nor associate with the weaklings who lived at the edges of their people. Still, Nathan was headman, and he supposed that necessitated a different set of rules. After all, the wellbeing of his people belonged to him, and to shy away from this as if he were scared, as if these heathen cowards threatened him, was hardly a worthy way to behave.

It was with that thought — and, though he refused to admit it to himself, the fact that there was no one here to witness him — that he turned down the smaller path, walking between the walls of rock and down the steeper slope of the hill.

The slope of the hill converged with the side of the mountain, rising up only briefly before swinging down again, then meeting with the sheer ledge that traveled up to the sky. The followers of the heretic god had made their encampment down around the further side of the hill, in the opposite direction of the path up the mountain.

There was little to hunt here, no fields or woods, and no good land either for planting or foraging. In fact, back home, almost every winter, Nathan’s people around the fires would speculate that the heathens must have died, that there was no way they could make it this winter, but every spring, long after the thaw, some hunting party would spot a woman or child, their eyes too round, set in bony, gaunt faces, scurry away at the sight of Nathan’s warriors.

They were like vermin, it seemed. Always finding some small, dark space to scrape by in, until better days.

Nathan shifted his mace in one great paw, an absent, fidgeting motion as he walked, dark hair hanging around him as he made his way around to the steeper side of the mountain. The path descended then rose, became quite thin in places, one area looking at a straight shot down to the river, hundreds of feet below, before it moved back inwards through the snow.

Nathan didn’t shy away from such sights. He looked down at the churning rapids of the river, white water breaking over sheets of ice, and then looked away again. Above him, the aurora shifted and blazed, lighting the snow in purples and greens, and guiding his steps.

He finally came around to a flat ledge on the side of the mountain, a long stretch of flat ground, enough space to settle on, though with nothing beneath it but unforgiving stone. And settle the weaklings had, for Nathan saw huts and shacks all along the ledge, a small, tight village that had been constructed some twenty years ago, when they’d first been driven out into the snow.

It didn’t look like it had ever been anything good or sturdy, the buildings nothing more than driftwood and twigs bound together, shanties that cropped out of the snow with blankets stretched over gaps, wet with moisture and laced with ice where the water had frozen in the wool. It didn’t look like it had ever been in what Nathan would term ‘good’ condition, but it certainly wasn’t now.

Many of the shacks were half collapsed, or buried in the snow, uneven angles emerging to tell of their presence. Wood beams were broken or rotted through, and the flagging blankets waved now in the wind, baring snow filled interiors with no light or life within them. Debris was scattered all across the ledge, making the snow look dirty, smeared in mud and grit and pebbled with broken clayware or clothing. There was no central firepit that Nathan could see, and no movement beyond the cloth stirred by the updraft.

It seemed that the winter of the heretic god had finally come.

Nathan made a face and hefted his mace up onto his shoulder before making his way into the remains of the settlement, looking for some sign of what could have done this, but he smelled no fresh blood. Here and there he found a bone, but nothing telling. He did finally see a blood trail soaked through the snow, leading away from the village, though it was pinkened and mostly lost in the fresh fall.

Nathan kicked at the lighter, unsettled snow, and it was around then that he heard hollow bones knock together, the sound of feet crunching in snow, and he whirled around, bearing his mace in his hands.

There, emerging from what had once been a building but was now little more than a cobbled together tent, was a boy at least ten winters Nathan’s junior.

He had pale skin and hair the same color as a fawn before it lost its spots. He was wearing baggy hide pants and thick boots on his feet, but no shirt, the center of his chest bare. His shoulders were covered by a black pelt, draped over them and down his back. On his head he wore a large wolf skull, and his eyes were blue like the ice sheets out on the lower lakes in spring, right before the thaw. They were wide with surprise, which Nathan supposed was to be expected.

He snarled at the boy, baring his teeth, black hair hanging his eyes, but it didn’t bother him. The way that Nathan fought didn’t depend on speed or agility. He had no need to dodge or feint. Anything that could get past the battering swing of his mace would only be met with the solid wall of his middle.

“Who are you?” Nathan growled, watching as the boy took one half step back. ‘Boy’ wasn’t quite right. He didn’t have the look of a man, but he wasn’t a child either. Perhaps a little less than twenty winters behind him. Had he been of Nathan’s people, he would be in the midst of his training with the other men, not yet ready to build his own hut, but just about ready to leave his family’s.

Now, he just looked at Nathan with surprise and apprehension, lifting his hand to hesitatingly remove the skull from his head.

“Tell me your name, fool!” Nathan shouted, pointing his mace out to accent his demand.

“Toki!” the boy squeaked, then said again. “I ams Tok— Toki.”

“What happened here?” Nathan gestured about at the ruins of the village. Toki looked around in kind.

“Peoples died,” he answered, and Nathan made a sound of frustration.

“How? Tell me how they died.”

“The dead comes down from the mountains,” he replied, as if that were a natural thing to say. Nathan shivered a little, looking into those too light eyes. The boy continued. “A few days ago, I wakes up to hears screamings. When I gets up here, everyone ams gone. Everything ams all…” He gestured around them, at the broken buildings. He shuffled his feet, looking down at them in the loose top snow. “It ams the draugar. Mine father didn’t believe, but I knew.”

“Your father?” Nathan asked, eyes narrowing, then widening in recognition. He remembered eyes that light — a grey instead of blue, but the same eyes that reminded Nathan of a corpse. The preacher. The man from the Southern lands. The man of the heretic god. “You! You are the son of the mongrel!”

“A-Aslaug,” the boy — Toki, responded.

Nathan snorted, remembering that now. Aslaug — a woman’s name, here. Apparently in the South it was more common on men, but Nathan remembered listening to his father and his father’s men laughing around the fire at the strange, serious man who’d come to them with tales of fire and woe, bringing his funny ways and his funny name with him.

Nathan nodded, a single jerk of motion, and lowered his mace. It didn’t seem like Toki was a threat. Nathan glanced around the ruined camp, taking a few steps further in.

“You didn’t see anything?” he asked.

“Noes.” Toki seemed to have his father’s foreigner accent, but even thicker and the grammar more mangled, despite the fact that he must have been born up here — sometime after Aslaug and his followers had been chased out of the village. It was even possible that Toki’s mother was one of Nathan’s people; one of the fools who’d been taken in by the preacher’s heathen lies.

Skwisgaar had a similar accent, though he came from the East.

“Why weren’t you here, defending your people?” Nathan asked, looking up from the remains of a weak tent, meager tools and clothing now little more than wreckage spilling out from the ruined entrance.

Toki shrugged, looking awkward.

“I lives down in the thicket… That ams where I’s meant to stays, so I stays there. By the time I gets up the hill, everyone ams gone, or… you knows.”

Nathan gave him a funny look. Could he not even say the word?

“You said the dead took them — what did you mean?”

“Draugar,” Toki said, leaping on the opportunity to be useful. “They comes down the mountains. I trieds to tell peoples that things am wrong, that the sky rivers ams all wrong.” He made a face. “No one listens to Toki, though.”

Nathan, meanwhile, was searching his memory, the word familiar but distant. It took him a moment to realize that it was one of the Grandmother’s tales — a draugr, a body of the grave, the greedy dead who rested not in Valhalla but grabbed for earthy goods, finding no honor in a good death and instead clinging to that which they were meant to leave behind.

He frowned, never having seen such a creature, but uninterested in permitting it to remain. If it was true that a monster of the dead roamed their mountain, then Nathan had little hope of recovering his warriors alive. He could, however, at least destroy those that had killed them — tell their women the certainty of their death, and tell their sons that their fathers had been avenged.

Nathan gave the ravaged camp one last cursory glance, for anything he could use, then turned away, intent on returning to the main path.

“Waits!” a voice called out behind him, Toki sounding distressed.

Nathan stopped, glancing back over his shoulder with one raised brow.

“…where ams you go?” Toki asked, apprehensive. He clutched the wolf skull against his chest.

“I go to hunt the draugar.” He had thought it obvious.

“Cans Toki come withs you?” The boy took a step forward, brow pinched in hope. Nathan frowned.

“I have no use for you,” he replied. Toki’s expression immediately fell.

“But…what ams I supposed to do…? Everyone here ams gone…” He sounded lost, sad; and his eyes flickered over the buried remains of his once home.

“What does it matter to me?” Nathan hefted his heavy mace up onto his shoulder. “Your people are not my people. Go back to your thicket and wait for death to take you, or go and fight across the land and find for yourself a good death. It’s all the same to me.”

With that, Nathan turned back to the path he’d arrived by, setting back up its slope towards the main road. He would find these draugar and put an end to their mischief.

Behind him there was the sound of feet crunching in snow, a rapid run. Nathan didn’t know the boy’s intentions, but he didn’t intend to find out too late, and any man who ran at his back should know the consequences. Nathan whirled around, striking out with his mace, but it just flew through the air in a solid arc, hitting nothing but snow at the end of it.

Toki was crouched down in front of him, having just ducked, and his blue eyes were huge, like he’d hardly expected that. He’d expected it enough to dodge, though — or else he had reflexes to rival Skwisgaar.

“Fuck off!” Nathan growled, baring his teeth at the youth. That was normally more than enough to send a man skuttling, but Toki didn’t seem to have good sense. He just popped up, hands clutched together with eager supplication.

“Please! Please, Big Mace Guy! I don’ts wants to stays here! I will be good, I promises!” His face screwed up, obviously searching for something better than that, and then brightened. “Besides, I can shows you how to gets up the mountain!”

“I know how to get up the mountain,” Nathan grunted, lifting his mace again. He brushed the snow off of the spiked head. “There’s a fucking path.”

“No, no.” Toki shook his head. “The path yous people use, it don’t go all the ways up. Only goes up the southern side of the mountain until the cliffs.”

“The fuck is wrong with you? There is no way to go all the way up. The path goes up as far as you can go, and the northern face is one straight fucking wall down into the river. Are you going to tell me you can fly?”

“No, not flies.” Toki gestured to the other side of the camp, opposite where Nathan was headed. “It ams why mine father settled his peoples here. We finds a path what follows around the northern side of the mountain, up to the ridges where the goats graze. Since it don’t goes around the south, we never runs into yous people and gets our heads cuts off. It goes farthers up than the way you go — if you wants to find the draugar, you should take this path. An’ I can shows you.”

Nathan frowned. He looked back up the well worn path between the crags, the one that would lead back to the hunting trail that his people used — something well known and a road that Nathan knew the end of. Toki wasn’t wrong. The trail only went about halfway up the mountain before it met a sheer face. High enough for his people to scavenge for food, and besides, if they couldn’t get up the cliff wall, then what prey could, besides the birds?

But to be honest, Nathan hadn’t even known that there were goats living on the mountain. They didn’t come around to the southern side. Unless the boy was lying, of course — though it didn’t seem like Toki had much skill for deception in him.

Nathan frowned deeper. If there were goats living up the mountain face, who was to say that other creatures weren’t up near the peak? Creatures like the restless dead themselves, descending from the cliff face to prey upon his people. If he followed their traditional path up, he might find nothing and return empty handed. The only way he could be sure that his people were safe and their lands their own was to search the mountain in its entirety.

He let out a breath.

“…fine,” he agreed sullenly, turning back to look at Toki once more. “Show me to this northern trail of yours. But I warn you, don’t cross me. I won’t hesitate to fucking end you.”

Toki was just nodding along, looking like a child who was being permission to stay up with the men around the fire.

“I will be good, I promise— I just gots to goes gets my things, then I shows you the way.” He waited there, apparently unwilling to leave without the guarantee that Nathan was going to wait for him.

Nathan grunted, impatient, and Toki accepted this tacit agreement, darting away, back across the ledge to the worn down tent he’d initially emerged from. Nathan waited, ankle deep in the thickening snow, his mace dangling at his side. There was the sound of scavenging, items being tossed this way and that, and Toki popped back up a moment later. He had a sword strapped to his back, along with a small sack of supplies, and he’d replaced the wolf’s skull back on his head, lifting the cowl of the fur to cover it.

He dashed back through the snow, grinning as smoky air was exhaled through his lips. Nathan looked unimpressed. The headman rested his mace up on his shoulder, crossing his free arm over his chest.

“…so?” he goaded finally, when Toki did nothing but grin up at him like an idiot. This seemed to jar the younger man into action.

“Oh! This way, I shows you.” He tripped a little as he turned to jog away from Nathan, leading him towards the further edge of the camp.

Nathan sighed and looked up at the thick grey sky, the clouds settling in properly now and the snow descending more thickly.

He wished he’d brought the others with him.

Toki woke at hours beyond the understanding of the gods — this, Nathan learned in the first few days they journeyed together.

Toki had shown him the other path up the mountain, but ‘path’ was a generous term for it. The mountain on the northern face had not been tamed, and no feet had worn the trail they now walked. Instead, it was merely a natural formation in the mountain — thin ridges that snaked back and forth across the rock, sometimes vanishing into the stone, forcing the travelers to make a dizzying jump to the next nearest outcrop.

Nathan was not a man meant for such maneuvers. He was a beast in battle, an unyielding wall of flesh that took wounds without flinching and could not be moved no matter the onslaught. Such a disposition was poorly suited to jumping and landing, his wide feet better to brace himself with than to dance across mountainsides.

Toki was better at it, moving about like snow leopard, his worn hands coated in leathery skin from years of scaling the rock, and he slammed his palms onto grips without hesitance. Nathan didn’t complain. If he wasn’t a man for jumping about, he certainly wasn’t a man to complain. Instead, he made each jump, every twist, with an angry grunt, displeasure rattling through him with every jarring landing shivering through his shin bones.

Still, though the progress they’d made was slower than Nathan would have liked, Toki’s promises of going higher up the mountain seemed to be true. Already, Nathan stared down at the valley below like he’d never see it. The winter mists hung low between the trees, their dark branches spindling up from the snow like fingers of corpses, and the moon drifted gibbous above, an unflinching eye that illuminated the floor of their homeland. The silver light showed just how far it extended, the woods stretching out wild, all the way to the horizon, where a hazy range of mountains waited, and beyond that, the lifeless crags that lead down to the sea.

Nathan had never been to see it himself, of course, but the Grandmother said that her father and his men had gone out there once, when she was but a girl.

Nathan hadn’t thought about it much. He was a man of the moment, living wholly with his two feet on the ground(again, not made for jumping) and his eyes firmly set forward. He was a berzerker, the bear spirit, a warrior of the earth, and he had patience for precious few things beyond blood and fury, women and mead. Imagining what lay beyond the boundaries of his land were musings for lesser men, who had more time on their hands.

Now, however, fleeting thoughts darted through his mind, strange and foreign, as they made their way up the mountain. Hati and Skoll chased the sun and the moon through the sky, and in moments of rest, or even as they walked, Nathan caught glimpses of the valley, its breadth and almost limitless length, and the whole of it seemed so vast.

And so small.

Small enough to be seen by just one man at one instant, and he’d never thought that such a thing mattered, but he found that it did. Seeing the entire world that he knew, seeing all of it, in one instant, made his world suddenly feel so much smaller than it had before. It had always been enough for him, but now questions taunted him. Questions like ‘What lies beyond those mountains…?’ and ‘How far does it go?’

The questions irritated him and tired him out more than the climbing. When they’d find a reasonable rock to settle on, they’d burrow in to sleep, which was where the tragedy of Toki’s early morning habits came in.

“What?” Nathan snapped from beneath the too thin fur he used for a blanket. The sun was only just creeping up on the horizon, and already Toki was trying to wake him up. This would have been bad enough on a normal day. Nathan, and by extension, his hird, were not early wakers. This worked out just fine, as they did much of their hunting at night. On a normal day, Nathan would just growl at whoever came to wake him.

But on a day where he’d hardly gotten any rest, when he’d been up half the night with those uncomfortable questions and musings, and a strange voice singing to him from over the mountain peaks… Well. On such a morning, disturbance was distinctly unwelcome.

“The boids say it ams time to go,” Toki replied, putting both hands to Nathan’s shoulder again to give him another shake. It barely made Nathan budge.

“I don’t give a fuck about birds,” he growled, twisting away from those annoying hands, tugging his fur closer up to his chin.

Toki made a plaintive sound, like one of their dogs or something, but — thank the gods — he seemed to get the message and leave Nathan alone.

The next time that Nathan woke up, the sun had crested, though it was still relatively low. This time, though, it was not rustling hands and a wheedling voice that woke him, but the wonderful, salty scent of meat roasting.

Nathan sniffed in, then jerked awake. He pushed himself up from the uncomfortable, cold stone he’d called a bed the night before, and looked around. Out near the edge of the outcrop where they’d made camp, Toki had built up a low burning fire. There wasn’t enough wood, this high up, to make a proper fire, but he’d made do with kindling and twigs, stirring up a good amount of heat in embers.

It was in this that he was cooking some kind of fowl, a few handfuls of brown feathers off to the side to give away what it had been before being plucked.

Nathan blinked, looking up over at the younger man.

“I tolds you,” Toki said with a cheery smile, squatting next to his little firepit. “The boids saids it ams time to get up!”

Nathan couldn’t help a little huff of laughter at that — before settling in to enjoy his breakfast.

They were up and moving again within the hour, rising once more towards the peak of the mountain, a slow and inevitable movement.

Toki was an efficient fellow, at least. As strange as he could be, as annoyingly childish, Nathan couldn’t argue with his prowess. The kid climbed the rock like it was second nature, and his eye when it came to hunting was impeccable — not as good as Pickles, who could throw his daggers with unerring accuracy, but damn good anyway.

Toki had no daggers, so he made do with stones found about the mountainside. He would wait, crouched and peering at the thin hawks that made their nests on the rocks, and the first time Nathan had watched him, he’d been certain it was folly. After a good ten minutes, he’d been about ready to interrupt Toki, to get them moving again, when the boy moved, a swift jerk so quick that it looked little more than a tick. Most of his body remained braced, but his arm flew back and pitched the stone. At the exact same instant there was a dull thud of impact, the stone hitting flesh before trickling down the mountain. Another nearby bird took off, but the one struck by Toki’s stone merely fell over, either dead or unconscious, the twitches it went through possible to go either way. Toki jumped up to go and fetch it.

It was the crudest form of hunting that Nathan had ever seen, but he couldn’t argue with how effective it was. The birds had little meat on them, but it was enough to keep them going, and Nathan found in himself a grudging respect.

Toki wasn’t thin for nothing. And Nathan was sure that such a condition was regular for his people, weak as they were. But Toki had survived, in the end, and Nathan supposed that spoke to his caliber.

“The sickness comes last winter,” he told Nathan around the thin coals of their firepit one evening. They’d been lucky enough to find a tuck in the rock — too short to truly be called a cave, but the sliver of space was enough to block them from the storm raging outside. They positioned the fire near the entrance to the sliver so that the smoke would be blown out, and kept the space at a nearly bearable temperature.

“Sickness?” Nathan asked. He’d just assumed that Toki’s people had been wiped out by the draugar, but upon asking as for more specifics to their deaths, he’d found the tale went further back.

Toki nodded.

“Everyone gets all hacky cacky, coughsing up nasty things. They gets real dry, they skin all…stretched, like they bones ams holdings it up.” Toki poked at the embers, his ice blue eyes reflecting the low light. Outside, the wind howled. “At foist just the babies die, and they mothers. But then the men, too, starts to die.” His eyelids dipped. “Mine father starts the coughing. We all knows what happens next.”

“He died back then?” Nathan asked. He pushed back to lean on the rock wall. His knees were propped up, and he casually rested his arms across them, hands dangling.

Toki nodded again, and finally turned his attention back to Nathan, letting out a long breath that didn’t mist in the air.

“He gets real, real sick. Woist than all the others. But he…don’ts die.” Toki’s eyes flicked to the side, a strange reticence there, almost like shame. “He just keeps on coughing all the time, an’ gets real thin.”

The preacher, in Nathan’s memory, was a thin and haggard man, even back then. Nathan remembered the older men mocking his poor physique, his lack of muscle or ability to fight. Now, Nathan tried to imagine him even thinner than that. He must have been like a walking skeleton.

The thought was distasteful.

“But he don’ts die, not like the others do. They all fades out, but mine fathers keep going.” Toki made a face then, like the news hadn’t been good. Maybe it hadn’t. Nathan held the preacher in little esteem, but he’d assumed it’d be different for Toki. After all, it was his father, and the leader of his people.

But Toki didn’t sound glad, when he spoke of his father’s continued existence.

“He says it ams God, giving hims the will to live — a gift.” Toki shrugged. He was crouched on the flats of his feet, squatting over and rocking back and forth slightly, his hands playing with the toes of his boots. It seemed to be his favorite position. “It don’ts look like a gift to me. Him hacking up all the bloods and spit and real gross. But people keep dyings an’ he says he ams going to go up the mountains an’ ask the Loid to let us seek penance for ours sins, and take away the plague.”

Nathan snorted. There was no way a sick, frail old man could make the kind of journey that they were making right now.

“He died,” Nathan surmised simply. Toki glanced up, then back down, and nodded.

“At least, he nevers comes back. But after awhile, the sickness stops. In the end, there ams only eight people. …pluses me.” He shrugged, his eyes hooded. “I buries the dead.”

“You?” Nathan frowns a little. “Why not everyone left? There had to be—” He paused to count, then realized he had no idea how many people had lived in the heretic colony. “Uh… Well, there had to be a bunch of bodies.”

Toki’s brow pinched, looking up at him under pathetic lashes.

“That am Toki’s job.”

He didn’t elaborate, and asking for more information felt like it would be a more intimate conversation than Nathan really wanted or was prepared for. Too many feelings. Instead, he turned it to something more his speed.

“Where’d you get the sword?” he asked, jerking his chin towards the unsheathed blade that Toki had brought with him from the encampment. Nathan hadn’t really seen a lot of weapons in the mess there, nothing beyond axes, but they were just the small ones used to felling wood, not for felling people.

“This?” Toki brightened immediately at the change in conversation, reaching for his sword, fingers wrapping around the hilt as he dragged it over eagerly. Perhaps a little too eagerly — their space wasn’t great, and Nathan leaned back a bit to avoid getting potentially bonked with it.

The blade itself seemed…pretty haggard, to be honest. The edges were knicked and bitten — jagged, with little teeth of metal spiking where it had been worn away. The edge didn’t look dull, but it was scattered with scratches and pits, and Nathan could only surmise that the kid had used a rock to sharpen it, instead of a whet stone.

More significant than that, however, were the two obvious seams in the blade, where the metal had apparently been shattered. Heat had been used to weld the blade back together, but at a hefty price. Nathan knew the metal wouldn’t hold up well, would snap under too much pressure. As for the hilt, it had been unprofessionally dressed, a small scrap of animal leather wrapped around it and tied with a thong, edges drifting.

It was hardly a great weapon, but Toki held it like it was a prize.

“I finds it,” he said, voice full of wonder. Then his face shifted to bashful. “I was explorksing near yous village, whens I was a boy. I knew I ams not meant to but…” His shoulder hunched up. “I gots curious! An’ I wandereds away from mine chores.” He looked down at the sword in his hands, lifting one to brush over the scarred blade. “I heards the tinkerings of the smith near yous forge. I didn’ts wants to to get in troubles none, but I was real curious, so I got close. There was a junks pile outside the building, an’ he was throwin’ stuff out there. I know that stealings is bad! I do! But…well…he was throwing it aways! So…so I thought maybe…”

Toki looked down at his sword fondly.

“You took a blade that shattered in forging?” Nathan asked with a raised brow. It would never be useful, not like that. He didn’t bother telling Toki that the pile hadn’t been trash. The smithie would have melted down the scrap metal the next time he was working. Trying to bind together cool metal was a fool’s errand — the blade would always be weak in the bound spots. Instead, it made sense to discard the metal shards for the time being and smelt them down later into liquid, which would once more be poured into the mold.

The parts that Toki had stolen might have become a better blade, or perhaps an axe, on another day at the forge.

Nathan shook his head.

“If it was shattered, how did you bind the pieces back together?” It wasn’t like the heretic village had had a forge, or even a building that could reasonably house one.

Toki brightened at the question, apparently eager to talk about it.

“Across the valley, in the far far off mountains, there ams a mountain full of fire. If you ams careful, you can get close to the fire water. I stretched out an’ dipped the metal in the river an’ it got all gooey. Then I just pressed it together an’ I had a sword!” He held it up proudly looking at the sword that curled just slightly to the side, listing like an unevenly stocked boat. It was not the impressive sight that Toki held it to be.

Rather, what was impressive, was the other detail in his telling.

“You traveled across the valley?” Nathan asked, eyebrows raising. Their village saw travelers, of course, from the south most commonly, and occasionally from he east. It was from the east that Skwisgaar had come, traveling on his own, which was unusual. He’d been thin and worn, but still strong when he’d arrived, and soon impressed all the warriors of their people with his skill with the blade. Generally speaking, Nathan’s people preferred axes and maces to swords, but no one had the sort of prowess that Skwisgaar possessed. ‘The Blademaster’, he’d come to be called, and carried now as his title.

He’d decided to settle in their village, for whatever reason that he kept to himself, dismissing questions flippantly, and was part of Nathan’s hird almost immediately. He had the tendency towards laziness, and his ability to woo women had earned him the ire of many men whose wives unexpectedly bore blonde headed children, but his place within the people was now nearly ten winters cemented.

The east was a more difficult road that the one to the south, headed through the mountain pass and risking the wolves in winter. But even so, the road was, on occasion, used.

No one came from the north, though.

The valley they hunted in was to the north, a flat, low terrain covered in a sparse forest that was home to much of their game, but beyond that was only an impassable set of mountains, no space between them to found a trail, and no point. If the tales were correct, nothing lay beyond them but ice and rock, and finally, the inhospitable wild sea.

For this reason, none of Nathan’s people journeyed across the valley. Even he himself, a hunter who wandered those woods regularly, had never had to go much further than halfway across to get his game. And halfway across meant a good week in the wilderness.

It was hard to imagine little Toki going all the way across the valley, and then apparently finding a mountain that was full of fire. It was unlikely that he’d traveled with any of his people, and his people had little supplies to lend him good journey.

All the same, Toki just nodded, as if this were a regular thing.

“Ja. I wanders a lot. I had seen the fire mountain the second time I went over there — that’s why I thoughts of it when I knew I needed heat to mend my sword.” He looked down at the blade in his lap and pet it like it could feel him. “I lives down in the thicket, so no one notices much if I goes away sometimes.”

Nathan huffed, a small bit of laughter that sounded impressed — and he was. While he was curious as to why Toki had been shunned from his own people, wondering what he could have done to dishonor himself so, he also found himself impressed with the resilient little mongrel. There was an admirable hardiness to him, despite his dippy, excitable nature.

He reminded Nathan a little of a dog he’d had as a boy. An eager hunter, but too eager for his own good. He’d always wanted to please, a good, affectionate dog, but didn’t have any restraint or common sense. He’d ended up sticking his head in a porcupine’s hole and dying a couple of days later.

Nathan had taken mercy and slit his throat. The poor beast’s mouth had been too swollen to eat, and letting it slowly starve to death seemed too cruel.

The thought sobered him, looking across the sliver at Toki, very much the same eager, hopeful eyes as that blasted dog.

“Hm,” Nathan grunted. “Well. We should get some sleep. Hopefully the storm will have blown over by the morning.”

“…ja,” Toki murmured, his expression stumbling, falling slightly, but he seemed to try and pick himself up. He put his ridiculous, broken sword back over on his things, next to his wolf skull, then tried to settle in for the night.

Nathan tried the same, turning to face the wall, uncomfortable with the way his chest felt uneven, aware of Toki’s presence at his back, and uncertain of where their trail would take them next.

In the morning the storm had passed and as they emerged from the slice they were greeted by a mackerel sky, the dome of it seeming high and distant. The air was clean and crisp, as it often was after a heavy snow, and Nathan could see for miles, straight across the valley like it were a close neighbor. The further mountains were no longer a hazy chain of grey mist but several distinct peaks and fallows, the rock there looking darker than the mountain of Nathan’s people. Beyond the front set of hills and mountains there was a thin trailing of white smoke drifting in the air, disappearing into the blue ether.

“The fire mountain,” Toki said as he came out to stand beside Nathan.

Nathan could hardly imagine a mountain made of fire, or what that would even look like. Further asking brought awkward and accented attempts at description of flame that was more like water, that dripped and shifted, rolling over rocks like pitch. Nathan finally gave up, waving a hand to silence the boy, getting only impressions of things found in the bedtime stories of children, and he couldn’t help but think that at least some of this was Toki’s overactive imagination.

Nathan would have to go and see this mountain for himself, one day. If it was even one tenth of how Toki described it, it sounded…brutal.

The two of them continued their journey up the mountain the brisk morning air, the path all the more treacherous for the snow and ice that had built up on the stone the night before. Crossings had to be more carefully taken, and Nathan shifted awkwardly along gaps, his lumbering form even more inelegant.

More than once, Nathan saw Toki hesitate, the smaller man turning back to watch Nathan make his way over a gap, or along a wall.

On a flat face of rock, with only a slender ledge of rock to guide them, Nathan put the ball of his foot down on what appeared to be stone, but the instant he put his weight on it, he came to find that it had been ice. He felt his weight slip out from under him, the world spinning dizzily. He only had half a heartbeat to lament this ignoble end, wondering if there was any room in Valhalla for a warrior so bold and bumbling as to kill himself on clear ice, for at least he’d still died in service of his people.

But then a hand snatched his wrist, gripping it with an iron determination, holding onto him like a metal band around a barrel, enough that the bones grated together painfully. There was a sharp tug as Nathan reeled backwards, his other foot still on the edge, and when he dared to look up he saw Toki looking down at him with huge eyes and harried hair.

The boy was leaned out over a crest of rock, above the ledge that Nathan was traveling along, one hand white fisted around the jagged edge of that rock, and the other now holding Nathan from falling, arm stretched out to the limit.

Surprised would have been a generous term. Nathan was no flimsy weight, and Toki was skinny from a life of inconsistent food. But as the headman hung back from the mountain at a terrifying angle, his weight and life depending on the determination of one malnourished young man, Nathan could see the cords of muscle bunched in Toki’s arm, the black fur of his wolf pelt curving around the ball of his shoulder.

With all of his might, Toki was holding Nathan to the cliff face.

Nathan swallowed with a click.

Toki’s hand tightened even more, fingers digging into Nathan’s skin, and with painful effort he slowly began to drag the huge warrior back towards the rock. Nathan lifted his other arm, trying to be careful to not unbalance himself, reaching out until he could grab hold. He pulled himself in, getting both foot back on solid ground, and he felt Toki release him.

For a long moment, the two of them just breathed hard, gulping the freezing air that whistled by them and their hearts racing. Nathan’s forehead was pressed to cold stone, and his heart seemed set to lumber out of his chest, thumping away like a devastating drumbeat.

Finally, when he felt he had breath to speak, he said: “…thank you.”

It was a bare, base thing to offer to a man who’d just saved his life, but it was all his dry tongue had to offer.

They continued on, and Nathan was grateful when the ledge opened up again, making a walkable path that began to lead inward, away from the cliff of the northern face.

The mountain itself was made up of two peaks, one lower in the south, and a final one that rose even higher to the north. The path that Nathan’s people frequented didn’t even go up to the southern peak, ending at a plateau beneath a sheer wall leading up to said peak. The path that he and Toki now took began to twist its way into the mountain, emerging finally into an unexpected plain of snow, the peaks of the mountain stretching up on either side of them.

Nathan was shocked to realize they were basically at the southern peak, the top of it only a hundred feet or so above them. The northern wall went even higher, ascending towards the clouds, but in between the two peaks, where the bridge of the mountain met, there was a relatively flat, open space, which curved away from them, the snow leading to the ledges that, in the spring, would bring melt to their rivers.

Nathan had never been so high up in his life.

“…huh,” he said.

Toki, meanwhile, crunched out into the snow, then came to a stop, his body freezing in that way that screamed alert, and Nathan, too, went tense. He relaxed some when he realized what Toki saw: a mountain goat. It seemed like there were several around here, grazing on lichen on the rocks, or the errant weed, grown tough and ragged in the harsh climate. One of them was closer to the ground than the others, its tail wiggling to scatter some fallen snow from its back.

Toki reached back behind himself, grabbing the hilt of his sword. Nathan raised an eyebrow, wondering what he intended to do with that, and was soon informed. For all the grace and precise ability Toki seemed to possess when it came to hunting birds, he seemed to lack it in equal measure when hunting larger game. He ran through the snow, lifting his sword up above his head.

The goat perked up at the obvious sound, and before Toki had even gotten within ten feet of it, the hairy little beast had calmly hopped up the rock, away from potential attack. Toki came to a slow stop, lowering his sword so that the tip dragged in the snow, and Nathan couldn’t help but chuckle.

“You won’t catch it like that,” he said, crossing burly arms over the barrel of his chest. Toki looked back over his shoulder at him.

“Whyyyy?” the boy asked, voice stretching in a whine. Nathan shook his head, beginning to walk over.

“A sword is to hunt men,” he explained, gesturing to the weakened blade that Toki had made for himself. “It’s a poor tool for hunting game — poorer still to try and outrun them. They have four legs — you have but two. No, to catch a creature like that, you gotta known its strengths, and its weakness.”

Toki was still pouting up at him.

“Whats strengths? Whats weaknesses?”

Nathan looked up at the goats consideringly. To be fair, his method of hunting wasn’t that far off from Toki’s. It was Pickles who schemed and came up with traps and snares, who threw his daggers to debilitate, or Skwisgaar who could move through the tree tops like a Ljósálfar, tracking prey without sound.

Nathan wasn’t like that. He wasn’t silent, nor was he meant for traps. He hunted his prey to exhaustion, across the boundless reaches of their thinly wooded valley, following it as a steady jog, an unrelenting force. The deer was faster, could outrun him, but in the snow he could follow its tracks easily, and soon enough he would come upon it once more. And once more, the deer would spring to action, dashing out of his reach.

But each time he came upon it, that dash would be less spry, less eager. Finally, their long race would deteriorate to the deer keeping ahead of him by but a few bounds. Still, Nathan would come. He was relentless and undaunted, and though he was not swift he could hunt a deer to exhaustion across the relatively flat ground of their valley. By the time the chase ended, the deer would collapse, laying docile in the snow, and Nathan would smash its skull quickly and mercifully, and his people would eat.

That method would not work here. The goats were mostly all above them, and the ones on the ground could easily climb up long before he or Toki got to them. It was not an even playing field — open ground that could be hunted across.

Nathan lightly turned the handle of his mace in his hand, thumb rubbing over the wood.

“If we wanna eat one of them,” he replied to Toki. “We gotta be quicker than it. We gotta…” Nathan grumbled, trying to think of what Pickles would say. “We gotta outthink it.”

Toki pouted.

“I am nots good at thinkings,” he said, that slightly petulant whine in his voice that Nathan thought should annoy him. Instead, he found himself huffing a small, fond laugh. He reached out, clapping his hand on top of the smaller man’s head.

“You and me both,” he admitted. Nathan knew his own strengths, and they were considerable, but he wasn’t someone who liked to talk and theorize. Words always got messed up and crumbly in his mouth, where they were strong and powerful in his head.

As for Toki, it was clear that the boy had his own problems.

Speed wasn’t one of them, though, Nathan thought. What he lacked in planning, he made up for in his spry movement — something quite similar to Skwisgaar, Nathan admitted. Errantly, he wondered if the blademaster would deign to teach Toki, if Nathan brought him back with him.

He shook his head of the thought, returning to the matter at hand.

He gestured to the mountain side.

“You can climb the mountain just as good as they can,” he pointed out.

Toki shook his head.

“Sos? Doesn’t mean I can catches one. An’ evens if I did, we just goes tumbling down!”

Nathan snorted.

“Yeah — to me,” he pointed out. He lifted his mace. “Don’t try to catch them. Just knock ‘em down, I’ll take ‘em out.” Teamwork. Pickles would be proud of him.

Of course, saying it was easier than doing it. The mountainside was treacherous and still icy from the storm, and for the goats this was familiar territory. Nathan had Toki begin to climb the ridges far away from the herd, so that he could come across horizontally — hopefully chasing them to the side, as opposed to further up the rock. The goal wasn’t necessarily to get close to the goat so much as it was to force the animal to move in a direction it didn’t want to, or at a less than optimal speed, so that it would lose its footing.

All they had to do was get it to fall.

While the goats had the advantage of knowing the territory, they also had the disadvantage of not having had large predators up this high. They browsed the scrub that grew in the lee of the peaks, which was higher than wolves would ever come, and far higher than a bear would attempt. For the most part, they lived a life uninterrupted by the concerns of other prey animals, and thus, they weren’t accustomed to fear.

They didn’t have the good sense to scatter as Toki stalked them, viewing him and Nathan as little more than an inconvenience, rather than the genuine threat they were.

There were several false starts, and a rather steep learning curve as the two of them figured out how best to herd a mountain goat, but they were too hungry to even consider losing. The goats let Toki get far closer than was safe, and when it came down to it, all they needed was one false step.

In the end, it was a yearling goat, not as adept on its feet as its elders, that made the mistake of trotted out onto gravel. The fall it took was not considerable, a spill their kind was used to making as they journeyed over their rocky home. It bleated, wriggling its legs in the air and shifting the roll back over, but before it could find its feet once more, the heavy thud of Nathan’s quick steps were the short prelude to the thud of his mace, and the goat ceased to live before it even had any idea it was in danger.

Up the rock, Toki crowed in victory, hands thrusting up into the air and thus losing his purchase. He tumbled down with a squawk only to be caught by Nathan, blinking up at the huge man with wide pale eyes, a little snow fox confused by its own foolishness.

Nathan couldn’t help but laugh.

They found a ledge of rock that jutted out from the taller peak, providing a reasonable stretch of dry slate rock beneath it, and dragged their kill over. Toki had nothing but his sword, but Nathan had his skinning knife on his belt, and he set to disemboweling and bleeding their meal while Toki had the unenviable task of finding enough dry scrub to start a fire.

It wasn’t easy work, and by the time they were situated in their camp, it was long past sundown. The storm had cleared the overhanging clouds out the night before, leaving for an open, bright sky, the northern river swimming along in greens and flashes of purple against the white run of the stars. The colors echoed off the mirror of the snow, giving them plenty of light as they enjoyed their feast.

They cooked and ate the limbs first, both of them tucking in ravenously, and it was only once he’d gone through most of his haunch that Nathan began to talk, ruminating without purpose on his hird and their hunts. He started by just telling stories, amusing anecdotes of times they’d failed or won by chance, and moved on to talking about their strengths, how they hunted down prey together.

“Whats about the other one?” Toki asked, his squirrelly little face dotted with blood.

“Other one?” Nathan replied with a grunt.

“Ja. You talks about Pickle an’ his traps, and Skwisgaar wids his sword—” There was a little petulant jealousy there, at that, before he continued. “But yous sez there ams four of you. What about the other one? Umm… Moidaface.”

“Oh, Murderface.” Nathan nodded, finally realizing what Toki was getting at. “He’s…not really good at anything.”

Toki’s brow just creased, looking confused.

“I dunno.” Nathan shrugged his broad shoulders, and he would never cop to the fond smile that tugged at his lips then. “He’s just…there, you know?”

No, it became apparent. Toki didn’t know.

“He came with us when the men from the south started to move into our territories. It’s not like he can’t fight, he just…doesn’t, most of the time. But he helped us — all of our warriors — fight them back. He was good with his axe. Just…annoying as fuck. He wouldn’t fucking leave me alone, and he started coming on our hunting parties, like we fucking invited him. Acting like we were buddies or something. This was before Skwisgaar joined the people, so it was just Pickles and I, back then. He was annoying and loud and smelly… He scared off all the prey. But somehow, I dunno. We just started bringing home more meat.”

Toki didn’t say anything, just looked quizzical. Nathan shrugged defensively.

“I dunno. It just works. When he’s with us, we’re just…better. We just are. So he’s part of my hird now.” Even if he was an irritating, smelly, self-important dickhole. He was their irritating, smelly, self-important dickhole, it seemed, and Nathan, so taciturn and singular as a child, would never have predicted being so surrounded by others now, as an adult.

He never would have predicted that he’d like it. Or that now, separated from them all, he was…lonely.

He glanced across the small fire at Toki, who was trying to set up another cut of meat to roast, the tip of his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth as he did so.

Nathan was glad he’d brought the boy. Despite himself, he was glad.

That night, when they were bedded down, Nathan took the spot closer to the outside, his broad form the shield it was always meant to be, his back well aware of the smaller body just behind him. Under his protection.

Nathan woke in the middle of the night, and he never figured out why.

There was no sound. The whole of the mountain seemed hushed, like the forest after the snow, only the faintest of crystalline sounds, the sounds of the snow, and even the birds reverent of this moment.

The mountain was silent, and at first, Nathan lay there without an ounce of tension, a beast of a man but at total rest, at peace, his belly still full of goat and a strange warmth in the center of his chest that told him that everything was alright. Everything was good, and he had no need to worry.

That, however, was before the veil of dreams left him, and he woke enough to be suspicious. He pushed himself up quickly, glancing around. He turned immediately to check on Toki, something uncomfortably like worry sticking in his throat, and he felt himself growl when he saw the boy was missing. Nathan’s muscles bunched, promising a hard and painful death to anything that had dared to trespass against him, taking what was his to protect.

He grabbed his mace, pushing himself to his feet and skulking out from under the ledge, having to bend over to avoid hitting his head on the rock above him. He straightened once clear of it, green eyes searching the expanse of the lee.

He didn’t have to look long.

The air was clear and the snow undisturbed save for their footsteps, and a fresh set led directly away from their camp. There was nothing at all to obscure Toki, and Nathan found him immediately.

At first, there was relief. The boy was just sitting in the snow like a fool — nothing attacking him, safe as could be, but likely to freeze to death when he should be sleeping behind Nathan, where he was safer as could be. The relief was quickly subsumed by irritation and the determination to march out into the snow and demand to know what Toki thought he was doing, but that feeling, too, passed, and just as quickly, taken over completely by confusion.

For Toki was sitting in the snow, his calves folded under him, and as he lifted a hand a tendril of light from the sky diverted from its flow, a stream diverging from a great river, and trickled down towards him. It snaked down through the air, dripping over unseen rocks and forming limitless waterfalls. It twisted and writhed like a ribbon, curling down and twisting around Toki’s outstretched fingers, danced around his fingertips without touching, and bounced away just as quick as the boy reached for it.

Toki laughed, a bell of a sound, clear and bright as it echoed off of the rocks, and the light seemed to giggle with him. He lifted both arms outward, palms up, a man at worship before the gods, or maybe something even more primal — the first ice and fire of Ginnungagap, the primordial elements that formed all that was, before even Odin and Vili and Vé defeated Ymir and made the world.

The light came to him, to his command, and the sky played with Toki as if it were a kitten and not the heavens themselves, fire sparkling along the ridges of his skin, embers bursting in tiny shots of starlight. Briefly, Nathan realized that Toki had lit all of their fires, even when the kindling he found was poor or wet, and the fire burned regardless. Belatedly, Nathan realized he’d never seen a flint or stick to bring the first spark. He’d just assumed that Toki had had one, too busy thinking of other things, doing other things, to concern himself with what he considered the rote task of starting the fire — something he always left to Pickles.

And Nathan knew what this was. He knew it to be the craft of the völvas in his village, the seiðkonas who communed with the elements themselves, who could walk in the dreams of men and steal their breath, who could divine the future or tell the past from touch alone. Who brewed the tonics that saved the lives of warriors when infection set in, or came in the middle of the night to deliver a child before a woman even knew she was about to labor.

Seiðr. The art of the witch women, mysterious and unknown to men — a part of their world and undeniably powerful, but something to be shunned by men who did not need to sneak around. Who did not need to shrivel and shirk the open glory of battle, and instead work their arcane powers of trickery and falsehoods.

“Ergi,” Nathan said, and the light stopped, Toki turning to look at him with those big eyes, a mockery of innocence. Nathan snarled.

“Niðingr!” he cried, adding insult to insult, and part of him hoped that Toki would rise to the challenge — would show himself to be a man and not some weakling effeminate witch. Part of Nathan hoped that Toki would take the offense intended and come to fight him, reclaim his honor and prove himself to be the man that Nathan had taken him as.

Not the coward that Nathan could never hope to bring back to his people.

But Toki’s expression just crumpled, something sad and pathetic, and the light receded back into the sky, back to where it should be, and Toki did nothing but rise to his feet, looking as if he meant to make peace instead of battle. Something Nathan couldn’t forgive.

Nathan turned around quickly, stalking back to their camp with angry strides, his hands already curled in fists. The bitter burn of betrayal scoured the back of his throat, set him seething. He wanted something to hit, something to punch until it bled, until bone and breath shattered under his blows.

For he had been betrayed. All this time, Toki had been a seiðmaðr — a witch man. A man who’d abandoned his honor and his pride, descending to the ways of a woman, unskilled in battle and too weak to face her foes head on. Fine enough, Nathan considered, for a woman. Indeed, what else was she to do? Nathan valued the words of his völvas, even if he found them somewhat strange and frightening, the way their eyes always seemed to know things that he didn’t.

Fine enough for women, but it was not meant for men. To learn such an art a man must strip himself of his bravery, strip himself of his very manhood, and engage in trickery. The art of those who could not stand tall and bare before their enemy, who could not fight face to face, with no falsehoods between them. The art of those who had to sneak in behind closed doors, slip in through the crack in a window or through the flap of a tent. Those who poisoned in the night, who laced a dagger neatly between ribs.

Those who had no honor at all, and would never reach the hallowed halls.

Someone like that… Someone like that could never be brought back to Nathan’s village. Someone like that could never be his friend, his brother in battle. Someone like that could never be of his hird, and the feeling of hurt was not one that Nathan dealt well with.

Anger was so much easier.

He snatched up his fur and the few supplies he’d brought with him. He didn’t even bother to clean off his skinning knife, just shoved it into the wedge of his belt. He snatched his pack up, the anger mounting in each motion, flowing freely through him, burning in his muscles.

“Nathans—” Toki’s voice came from behind him, but Nathan had no patience for it.

He picked up several pieces of meat that had been cut from the carcass and cooked the night before, wrapping them in the pelt from the skinned goat before he shoved them into his pack. He turned around, slinging the pack over his shoulder.

“Nathans wait—”

“Get out of my way,” Nathan growled down at him, his voice dangerous, but Toki either didn’t recognize it or was a fool because he came to stand directly in front of him.

“Please, Nathans, I wasn’t doings nothing wrong, I promise—”

“Ergi witch,” Nathan bit out, another harsh insult, the pain snapping out as fire, and still some small part of him hoped to see anger on Toki’s face. Hoped to see the boy lash out, snarl and spit. Hoped to see him want to fight, to earn back his honor.

But Toki just looked wounded, like some pathetic forest animal, and the way that made Nathan feel awful wasn’t something he wanted to inspect.

“Get away from me—” He shoved Toki aside, stalking past him.

“Wait!” Toki grabbed for him, a monumental mistake, and Nathan rounded on him instantly, arm slapping him away and sending Toki falling back into the snow and utterly at Nathan’s mercy. The boy lay there before him, at his feet, and Nathan still had his mace in his other hand. In that moment, Toki had no recourse.

But Nathan had no true desire to bash the smaller man’s head in, and that, that weakness, that cursed affection that mired every human interaction, that had driven him to stay away from others before Pickles had wandered so blithely in, felt like a bur in his heart. It felt like the curse that it was, and Nathan hated it.

And the one who inspired it.

“…stay away from me,” he warned, disliking how tired the words sounded. He turned away, walking off into the snow and not looking back as he headed for the higher peak, hoping to find a path up. To kill whatever monsters threatened his people and return to them, and forget about all of this.

His warning echoed in his ribs, and it felt less like a threat and more like plea.

Nathan smashed his mace into a rock as he passed it.

For awhile, Nathan just fumed. He stomped around the mountainside, looking for a path that didn’t seem to exist.

Nathan grumbled, searching around the rise of the higher peak, coming nearly to the edge of the plain formed in the lee before he located what looked to be a way up. He began his trek in the pre-dawn hours, still tired and only having had a few hours of sleep, but he was eager to get this over with. He wanted to be back down in his hut, warmed by his fire and the bodies of women eager to bed him. He wanted to be back where he could be silent and listen to the tales of laughter by his men, the clink of their cups as mead flowed, thick and sweet as honey, and everything made sense.

He was so tired of this mountain and its secrets, and the discomfort that came every time he thought of Toki’s face.

It only occurred to him, as the sun was lighting the sky and the mountainside, that he really had no idea if he was even chasing the right thing. It was Toki who’d told him it was the draugar, the dishonored dead, who’d attacked his men, and Toki who’d told him where he could find them. And Nathan, like a fool, had believed him. Without a beat of hesitance, he’d assumed the truth of Toki’s words, even knowing he was from the heretic tribe. He hadn’t even questioned it.

And now his foolhardiness was clear to see, revealed to all the world: a fool up a mountain with no idea what he was doing.

He felt like the sun dawned on him, lit him up, and let every creature in the valley and down at the base see him, shining its light on his humiliation, and surely even the squirrels were chittering their laughter, the birds singing their mocking songs, all about him.

He pressed his forehead to cold stone and took a moment to breathe.

The climb from here was in some ways worse and in some ways better. There was less of an obvious ‘path’ to walk, but the wall was less sheer overall, making for less nerve-wracking moments of dizzying vertigo. By the time the sun was setting, Nathan wasn’t sure how much progress he’d really made. He came to a ledge that looked down over the lee, some one hundred feet below.

He ate a few strips of goat meat and settled in to sleep. His rest was fitful and uneasy, and he woke up feeling just as tired as he had when he went to sleep. He wondered where Toki was, if the stupid kid was alright, and hated himself for wondering. He continued his climb, uncertain now if he’d find anything upon reaching the peak, but having come this far, he decided he might as well finish what he’d started.

At the very least, when he returned empty handed to his people, he could tell them that he’d thoroughly searched the mountain.

He huffed at his own idiocy, though, when he realized that he hadn’t finished searching the hunting path, where the hunting party would have been attacked. Where their bodies were, and Nathan wouldn’t even be able to return and tell the people that their bodies had been burned, given good rites.

He’d been a true fool, a true rube, and now the consequences of his gullibility would be plain for all to see.

It was not a thought that sat well with Nathan, a proud man on the best of days. He rested uneasily, and his journey up the taller peak was full of fits and stops, uncertainty dogging his usually confident steps, and yet his stubbornness wouldn’t allow him to give up and go home.

He would see this to its completion. If he was going to be a fool, he was going to be the fool in full, for better that than to admit to his mistake.

Two days up from the lee, however, he received clemency.

He reached a crag in the rocks, moving through them to another gamboling plain, reasonably level at one end and then sweeping off downward at the other. The slope was deceptive, Nathan knew. It appeared to scoop away at an even incline, but Nathan knew that if he stepped over towards the drop off, he would find it more sudden than it looked. If the snow shifted under him, it would be all too easy to stumble or fall, and once down he would be rolling with no chance of stopping. He stayed on the level area and looked around, searching for nothing in particular besides any sign of foulness.

He found it quite rapidly, and unexpectedly.

He was peering into what appeared to be a varmint hole, burrowed into what loose rock there was, when the scent of fetid, rotting flesh assaulted him. It was not the sour scent that came with old meat, ready to be thrown to the dogs, but rather, something even older than that. A body laid out in the summer sun for days on end, until the peak of the scent had faded, the flesh sloughed off and the intestines puddled and melted. It was the scent of meat gone dry with age, the scent of dirt, almost, and the cottony wool of desiccation.

Nathan gagged, and two eyes opened in the furrow, sending him stumbling back.

His hand went to his handle of his mace immediately, the weapon latched into his belt, and he watched with wide eyes as a skeletal hand emerged from the earth, bone clawing against rock and, unevenly, with great disgrace, a body scratched its way out. The head was largely naught but skull, strips of old flesh and the silvery white shine of tendons clinging to lichen colored bone. Its shoulders and chest, too, revealed little other than bone, moss growing in the joints, and Nathan flinched in instinctive horror when the corpse broke its own shoulder coming out of the burrow.

He pulled his mace out then fully, after fumbling for half a heartbeat, and whatever shock and horror was put to seconds, warriors instincts to the fore.

Horrific and maligned as it was, Nathan didn’t fear the monster. He feared nothing, and as it came out, pushed itself to stand on meatless heels, Nathan braced himself in the snow, ready to fight.

It might have been a monster, but Nathan was a berzerker, and he had nothing to fear from the dead.

It came at him shambling, all of its movements unnatural. Nathan swung his mace with all the power in his massive arms, the bulbous head of the weapon hitting the weakened bone like a sledgehammer, shattering it immediately and leaving half of its ribcage as nothing more than splinters on the snow. There was no flesh to pad the blow, none of the elasticity of life, and the bones were dry and brittle.

Nathan smirked — this would be easier than he thought. Indeed, how had such a thing even managed to take down one of his warriors, let alone five?

The draugr glanced down at itself, as if it had eyes to inspect, then it looked back up at Nathan, and continued its plodding progress, disaffected by the wound, and Nathan’s smirk fell. It was already dead — a killing blow meant nothing to it.

Nathan snarled, baring his teeth as he took a few steps back, keeping a steady distance between himself and the draugr. His next blow hit its humerus, shattering the upper arm even as the creature tried to lift it out towards him. The rest of its arm fell to the snow, leaving only a stub rotating out of the shoulder.

Nathan didn’t stop, that time. He just continued to swing his mace, hitting its opposite shoulder, slamming into its pelvis. Soon enough, it collapsed to its knees, and Nathan took his next swing to its head, removing the skull completely and cracking it into pieces.

He felt, surely, that without a head, the beast would be destroyed.

But it had moved without a heart, without a brain. The skull meant as little to it as a finger or toe, and Nathan watched in disbelief as it tried to shamble to its feet once more, despite every broken bone and shattered appendage that Nathan had doled out.

He resumed his attack, this time with breathless enthusiasm, hitting it again and again, reducing it to pieces, and it was in the midst of this that he saw the arm that he’d first disembodied. It was crawling through the snow towards him, pulling itself with its fingertips.

“The fuck!” Nathan roared. He brought his mace down on the hand, obliterating it, only to feel the fingers of the other hand beginning to tug on the leather thongs of his other boot. His whole skin shivered and he leapt back, sending his mace swinging like a bat, knocking it away.

Nathan spent the next several minutes just smashing the skeleton to little pieces, hitting every bit that was more then a few inches complete. He brought his mace down again and again, hefting it back up into the air and dashing the next portion apart.

But the time he was done, his muscles were burning, and he was a bit out of breath. The skeleton was completely scattered, every pieces of itself smashed up, but Nathan noticed that a single finger joint, a single knuckle, was trying to inch its way through the snow, still horrifically animate.

“Ugh,” he spat, making a face. The skeleton was no real threat to him now, in such small pieces that it couldn’t no longer amble or crawl in any fashion, but Nathan knew he wouldn’t be making camp here that night. Maybe the shards would slowly wiggle their way over, an inch at a time, and crawl inside his furs while he slept.

He shuddered at the thought, and he was lifting his mace, straightening himself, when he saw the second one. Then the third.

He swallowed, raising himself up to his full height, and he looked around the sloped plain, eyes ticking from one to the next, finding some six or seven draugar all crouched and waiting, watching, their clawed hands gripping the stone. They were above him, around him, and their eyeless sockets looked straight into him, one with a mountain posy blooming out of one hole, a blanch of color against stained and dirty bone.

Nathan adjusted his grip on his mace, frame braced.

The single draugr hadn’t been too dangerous, in the end, but it had taken considerable work to neutralize it, to make it no longer a threat, and even now Nathan didn’t know that the very shards might not try to chase him. Determined to bring death, no matter how slow. Inexorable.

Six or seven… He could turn his back on one, only to have its disembodied arm or leg sneak up on him. Indeed, hitting one without obliterating it might only mean that he turned one attacker into three or four smaller but just as deadly ones.

The living had the good sense to die when their head was removed or bashed in. The dead, not so. They would come for him regardless.

They began to crawl down from their perches, or stagger out of the crevices, all in varying states of decay. Two looked like the one he’d already defeated, all mossy bones and cracked skeleton, but the others all looked fresher, to varying degrees. The more flesh on the bones, the most difficult they’d be to shatter, Nathan knew, and cartilage may well hold up under his blows, even as he battered them.

He could fight like a demon, and still be dragged under by the slow but unstoppable weight of the storm. And still he had no intention of fleeing.

The first one to reach him was probably the one closest to life, wrinkled and decaying skin still stretched over rotted flesh. The odor was awful, considerably worse than the first corpse, but its remaining meat allowed it greater speed and dexterity than its dryer brethren.

It reached for him, not going for a blow, but rather just trying to grasp him, drag him into the grave with it, Nathan supposed, so that they could be alone together.

Nathan hit it across the face, the spikes on his mace smearing its cheek into mush, baring horrible teeth, and the release of death stench was sudden and overpowering, enough to make Nathan wretch. But he reined his stomach in, lifting one foot to deliver a hard kick to the center of its chest, sending it falling back.

From there, he reeled to face the bony hand reaching for him, and he felt the warm rage of battle settle over him, pumping in his veins like liquid fire. That feeling, that comfort, the familiar feeling of battle and chasing the thrill of victory, lit him up, and at first, that feeling bolstered him.

He descended happily into the haze, letting it cloud him and make him clear both at once, a constantly moving, constantly fighting beast, and the berzerker flowed over his skin like a well worn jacket, something old and familiar and trusted. He fought them off, smashing them with his mace or kicking them back. With one of the skeletal ones, he brought his foot down on the skull after it had fallen with a satisfying crunch, bone splintering and flying everywhere, and he whirled to face his next attacker.

In battle, Nathan could not be dragged down. He could not be conquered. He was the mountain, unmoved by the storm no matter how hard it blew. He was a primal force all to his own, and as the minutes ticked by, the air filled with his roar, it seemed that, once more, nothing could touch him.

But even mountains can be conquered by waves, no matter how weak, so long as they are unending, and Nathan had never fought with foes that did not die. He went for their heads and their chests automatically, used to hitting those areas when fighting men, but to the draugar it was all the same. Head, chest, neck, arms, clavicle, foot. Every inch of them was dead, and every inch of them longed to bring him to the grave with them. Whether he smashed their little toe or their brain didn’t make any difference to them, and they kept coming.

As fiercely as Nathan fought, he would be overwhelmed. Somewhere beyond the battle haze, he knew this. Somewhere, growing in the back of his mind like a choking weed, he knew this to be true.

This must have been how his men died, down on the mountainside.

He spun around, smashing his mace into a corpse and sending it flying, tumbling down the slope and unable to stop, and Nathan grinned at that — he couldn’t kill it, but it would be a long, long climb to get back to him. But the fleeting victory cost him. He paused, and behind him a gnarled hand snatched out, tangled in his hair and dragged him back, the pull throwing him off balance. He flailed, feeling the world tip, knowing he was going down.

And knowing, when he did, he’d never get the chance to get back up again.

“Yaaah!” a voice cried out, a voice most definitely not of the dead, for they had no voices, and something clashed behind him, the tension on his hair releasing. Nathan reeled back up onto the flats of his feet, jerking around.

“Toki!” he exclaimed in surprise, seeing the young man swinging his sword at the now half-armed draugr, the limb severed at the elbow. Nathan felt his skin crawl and he clamored back around himself, reaching over his shoulder to tug at his hair. He yanked the still dangling, still clawing hand out, throwing it to the ground and smashing it beneath the heel of his boot.

He looked up to find Toki fighting the draugar with all his might, his blade untrained and somewhat unwieldy, but Nathan could see the natural talent beneath it — the strength, the flow, and the way he dodged and whirled, moved like water. He smashed his blade up into the chest cavity of one of the monsters, and as Nathan had always known it would, the sword snapped. It met the spine of the draugr, and that was it. The poorly welded together metal couldn’t bear the strain, coming apart with a ting!, like an icicle breaking.

Two thirds of the blade fell to the ground, leaving Toki holding the hilt and a fraction of his sword.

Nathan rushed to him, swinging his mace wide and shattering the jaw of an approaching draugr, spinning around until his back met with the younger man’s, the two of them facing their foes, weapons drawn. Shattered as it was, Toki’s sword would have to be enough.

They fought hard, panting in the cold, cloud-thin air, breath fogging. Nathan brought his mace down again and again, and this time the bloodlust took more comfortable hold, knowing that an ally was at his back. He fought with the ferocity of the bear, roaring his rage, and if he fell now, if he fell today, he couldn’t bring himself to feel regret.

To his surprise, though, Toki fought with equal passion and verve. The kid was skinny and raised by heretics who eschewed the glory of violence, and yet he fought as if possessed — possessed as much as Nathan, and in the heat of it, in the mess of battle, there was a moment when their eyes caught.

The bear and the wolf, two seekers of prey, two hunters of the world, their eyes ringed red with blood, and Nathan saw in Toki that which he saw in himself.

They who fed on blood. They who fed upon the weak. The bear and the wolf, mangy in winter, alone and standing in the snow, staring across each other, each of them knowing each other more than any other could.

And together they would have the world begging at their feet.

And then the moment passed into many, the two of them dancing as only predators could, fighting back those which sought to steal breath from them.

Nathan didn’t know how much time had passed when he let out a full throated yell, bashing to pieces the draugr at his feet, the pumping hedonism of the blood rage beginning to fade now, but not fully gone. He brought the mace down again and again, the muscles in his arms burning, screaming, but he found only pleasure in the pain. He smashed it over and over again, pulling back only to bellow his scream into the frigid air, whirling around to face his next attacker, only to find them…retreating?

He stopped, breath still coming in fast, heavy pants, broad shoulders rising and falling as he watched them crawl and shamble away, disappearing into the rocks and the earth.

He looked to Toki, who heaved as he did, the young man jumping in shock when Nathan put a hand on his shoulder, reeling around. He relaxed a little, when he saw who it was.

Toki’s face was pale and drawn, his blue eyes almost seeming to glow in the contrast, haunted by the moon and the stars and the night even now, before the sun had fully set.

Nathan lifted his hand, thumbing Toki’s chin.

“…Úlfheðinn,” Nathan murmured in wonder, his mind jogging to catch up with the concept. That an ergi sorcerer could also be one to pull down the spirit of the wolf, could fight like that, with bravery and courage. With the fierce determination of their ancestors, or possibly the gods themselves.

Toki swallowed with a click, and his old eyes shifted away, became young again, looking out at the ridge as the last of the draugar vanished.

“…they ams gone,” he murmured.

Nathan nodded. Wherever they’d gone, Nathan would have to find out. Whatever answers waited for them, waited at the peak now, and if Nathan was to defend his people, he would have to find them.

Toki’s eyes ticked back to his own, hesitance in them, and Nathan felt a similar uncertainty. He swallowed. Belatedly, he realized that his hand was still on Toki’s face, and pulled it back.

“…thank you,” he said in stilted gratitude. “For…coming. You didn’t have to.”

Nathan hadn’t exactly been charitable in their parting. He’d never known an ergi man to have that kind of power in him — although he realized, then, he’d never met an ergi man at all. He’d seen Toki wielding the female magics and that had been enough for him.

He felt an awkward pull to apologize, but such a thing didn’t come naturally for a man like him, so he merely stood there awkwardly, his huge body more lumbering than intimidating.

But Toki relieved him of that. The boy reached up, putting his hand over Nathan’s, which was still held up in the air between them.

“It ams okay,” he said simply. He offered a small smile, a kind of hope there that Nathan didn’t necessarily know how to deal with, how to shelter or protect. It struck him sort of sideways that he wanted to. Wondered what it might look like if it grew, became something less fragile.

He shifted his weight uncomfortably, then lowered his hand.

He cleared his throat.

“Uh. We, uh… should try and find some shelter. Before nightfall,” he said, the snow already beginning to pick up. The sky was clouded now and the light already dim, and before long the snow would block what little visibility they had.

“I can comes with you…?” Toki asked, brightening, as if being offered something wonderful. As if he hadn’t just been following Nathan anyway.

Nathan coughed again.

“Yeah,” he said, then: “…yeah.”

He wasn’t at all prepared for the hug that Toki launched at him, arms going around his middle, and face mooshed into Nathan’s chest.

He wasn’t prepared for Toki, a seiðmaðr and Úlfheðinn both, a child and a man, someone who fought like he was dying, and then turned around just as quickly to indulge in an embrace, like his sweetheart had come home. Nathan didn’t know what to do with any of that, and for a long moment he just stood there, mace dangling in one hand and the other raising and lowering, uncertain what to do with itself.

It was with a sort of final, fatal acceptance that it came to land on Toki’s head, in his hair, and let the dumb kid hold him.

They managed to scurry into a crevice before the worst of the winds hit them, burrowing into the tight space and hiding from the night as it covered the sky. Toki’s sword, only about a foot long now before it met its jagged end, rested just at the entrance, with Nathan’s mace and helmet and armor. There’d be no room for a fire tonight, but the two of them grinned at each other like fools when they outran the wind.

Outside the snow fell, but it didn’t blow in, and there was good distance between them and the shattered remains of the draugar. Nathan was more than content with that.

“Did you bring any of the goat?” he asked, reaching for his pack.

Toki shook his head, looking sheepish.

“Nei. I ates what I could, but I…didn’t wants to lose you, so I lefts the rest.” He looked down at the floor of the little crevice, nudging pebbles with his toe. “I know you saids to stays away, but I gots worried. …and scaredsed.” He shrugged a little, glancing at Nathan from the corner of his eye. “You amns’t mad…?”

Nathan considered his feelings and finally shook his head, deciding that even though he couldn’t really tell what he was feeling, it at least wasn’t anger.

“…I said a lot of shitty things,” he admitted, as close to an apology he’d dare get. “In the people— In my people, only women practice seiðr. It is…not seemly, for a man to do so.”

Toki shrugged slim shoulders.

“Mine fathers hated it too. I didn’ts mean to none. I don’ts even know hows I know. I just does. I starts plays with the light an’ the snow an’ the animals back when I was real little, an’ I hads to go out into the winter to does my chores. When he saw… He sez it ams the way of the old heathen gods, that we amns’t to do things. It ams against the word of God.” Toki pursed his lips. “I try stops, but it never works.”

Nathan considered this. It was, in the end, outside of his understanding. He did not know the way of the völva, the ebb and flow of seiðr and the threads of the Norns as they wove through the World Tree. These things were not the things of men, of warriors. He didn’t know what it might be like to feel it, to feel it tug at you.

But then, he supposed he could understand how it might feel. If someone asked him not to fight, not to hunt, if someone told him to turn his back and run away, he could never live with that. The warrior’s blood flowed in him, and it flowed but the one direction.

He wondered what it must be like for Toki, for he had both warrior’s blood and völva’s, and the two must flow against each other. It must have been like having two hearts, one working always against the other.

He made a little face, then settled.

It was only once they’d settled in, and the night settled just as surely, howling away outside their door, that Nathan struck up conversation again.

“You fought with the fury of a wolf,” he said, the words meant as compliment.

Toki looked up, blinking, but it was too dark to really see his expression.

“My people believe that the greatest warriors abandon their humanity, their civilization, upon the battlefield. That they fight as if possessed by the bear itself. You… I saw it in your eyes. Now I know why you wear that wolf pelt.” He gestured to the black fur over Toki’s shoulders. “You slew him in battle and took his spirit, didn’t you? As I took the bear.”

Toki didn’t respond immediately, and the atmosphere seemed somewhat tense. Nathan wished they had a fire more for light now, than heat, but eventually Toki responded.

“I didn’t slay Tobias.” In the dim moonlight, Nathan saw Toki’s arm move up, the boy running his fingers through the fur of the pelt.

“Tobias?”

“My friend. The wolf.” Toki shifted a little in their small shelter. “My fathers sends me out intos the valley all the times. To brings wood or fish, or just to makes the trek, so that I may journey until my sin ams gone.” He shook his head. “Downs there, there was no peoples. No one to crosses theyselves when they sees me, or curse mine name. Down there, there ams just the animals, and they like everyone just the sames. The squirrels were the easiest to makes friends with. They just like nuts. Fatty, one of the badgers, he likes it when you rub hims belly.”

Now, Nathan didn’t need the light. He could hear the wistful smile on Toki’s voice.

“I finds lots of friends,” the boy continued. “But none like Tobias. I thinks…maybe he gets separateds from his family? Or maybe they chase him away with the bitings, because they don’t like him, like no one likes Toki. …either way, I sees him one day, hunting in the woods.” Toki swallowed, an audible thing. “He kills my squirrel friends.”

Nathan had eaten plenty of squirrels in his life, and never before felt an ounce of regret for their deaths, but in that moment, in the sadness of Toki’s voice, he felt a twinge of grief.

“I forgives him eventuallies. It ams hard, but…but he was just hungries. I know what that ams like. At first, Tobias don’ts likes me none. But I got plenty times, all through the winter and the spring and the summer and in the fall, he lets me touch hims nose. He ams my friend. My best friend, for two wholes years.”

There was a happiness in Toki’s voice, but a sort of happiness that seemed as if it were made to break.

“What happened?” Nathan asked after a sufficient pause.

“My father kills him.” Toki shifted a little again, and Nathan thought he might be curling into himself some. “He sees Tobias an’ I playings. He figures out where the missing foods go. He shoots him with an arrow and Tobias…Tobias dies.”

“…that sucks,” Nathan said, knowing well how little that meant.

“So I takes Tobias’s fur to keeps me warm, to keeps him withs me, so we will always be friends. Next spring, I finds his skull. I don’ts know. I just…didn’ts want to lose him. Everything I loves, they always die.”

“…my first hunting dog,” Nathan started awkwardly, trying to reassure. “I kept his collar for many years. He was…a good friend.”

“Ja. A good friend.”

They were quiet for a long few moments. Nathan was sure that it wasn’t long in reality, but it felt it, each heartbeat of silence feeling stretched out and uncertain. He wasn’t good at this. More specifically, he’d just never done this. He wasn’t the guy that people came to talk to. He hadn’t been the child that other children played with.

He stood apart, always had.

He’d only found the comfort of friendship, brotherhood, with his hird quite recently, over the last few years of his life, and even in that, it was they that came to him. They who extended themselves to understand him in his taciturn silence. Of everyone in the world, it was Pickles that understood him the most, his oldest friend, and Pickles had so much patience that Nathan was certain he’d be kissed by the Valkyries themselves when he died.

Pickles just understood him, even when Nathan didn’t understand himself. Nathan didn’t even have to try.

He had to try now.

“Thank you,” he said again, finding it bearing repeating. The gravel of his voice was low, a mere grumble in the low shelter of their cave. “For following me. I’m…glad that you did.” He glanced over at Toki. “You are a good friend too.”

Strange but loyal, Nathan couldn’t claim to understand Toki, yet he found himself grateful that he was not alone on this journey, treacherous as it was.

In the dim light that reflected off of the snow, Nathan could make out a faint smile on Toki’s lips, across the sheen of his eye.

“I’m glads I come too,” he said, and the words meant more than they did on the surface, but Nathan didn’t chase it.

They bedded down one more night, that much closer to the peak, and whatever it was that waited there.

The temperature shifted upon dawn, but the sky was still overcast, blocking out enough light that it seemed as if the sun came late. The light didn’t reach their crevice for a little over an hour after dawn, creeping in reticently, trickling like water over stone, and Nathan blinked, that first wakening sight that still landed somewhere squarely in dreams.

He blinked again, and the breath eased in and out of him, a steady flow, the thump of his heart low and even. He felt at peace, and long minutes stretched past, his brain uninterested in questioning anything.

It was only when Toki moved, shifted a little against his chest, that Nathan became aware that he was holding a smaller body against him.

This time when he blinked, it was in surprise.

He looked down, finding his own rebellious arm draped around Toki, the boy laying on his side and curled towards Nathan, his eyes shut and forehead resting against the leather of Nathan’s jerkin. They’d created warmth between them, nothing so potent as a fire, but enough to sleep easily through the night, heartbeat to heartbeat and circulating heat. Toki was still wrapped in his black wolf’s fur — Tobias’s fur — and he slept on, oblivious.

Nathan had only ever woken in such intimate circumstances with a woman. And most usually a woman that, while he might hold in fair regard, he did not intend to be more than a good lay for them both.

Not…that he intended to lay with Toki. Because that would be strange.

His whole body suddenly became a lot more tense, the morning breaking dreaming sleep and whatever spell lay between the night and the day vanished once and for all, carried away on clarion winds.

“Uh,” Nathan started, uncertain what to follow that with, but it seemed a fair place to start. At the sound, however, Toki just grumbled and burrowed in closer, like some tiny chipmunk eager to sleep the winter away.

Nathan was somewhat disturbed by how the imagery amused him. He cleared his throat and tried to straighten, or at least shift back, but the crevice wall was directly against his back, and there was nowhere to shift. His hand, pressed to Toki’s back, or draped over it, really, had become tangled in the younger man’s hair, soft, if frayed.

He blinked a little when his rough hand found strange strips of flesh, raised lines and equal furrows — scar tissue, and Nathan was used to scars, had many of his own, but not like this. Like the boy had been…whipped, or caned, the skin of his back flayed, and the thought made Nathan’s stomach churn. The wounds were all well healed and calloused over, which meant the blows must have been delivered long ago, when Toki was even smaller.

He was small enough now. Well, not really that small. Still a good sized warrior verging on manhood, bigger than Pickles, who had to be some twenty years the boy’s senior, but Toki seemed small, like this. In the lee of Nathan’s own huge form. The thought triggered a strange feeling of protectiveness, something that Nathan was largely unfamiliar with.

He didn’t really get close to people. Or, people didn’t get close to him. They never had, all through his childhood and into his adolescence. Pickles had been the first, back when he was about Toki’s age, the older man showing him the ropes with a kind of fearlessness that no others seemed to have, when it came to Nathan.

And then there were Skwisgaar and Murderface, who followed Nathan’s lead, but even so, they trespassed upon him, teased him, with the sort of ease that no other men could claim. They made him laugh. They made him…happy.

Nathan would bludgeon any who hurt them, any of his hird, his men who stood beside him and behind him in battle. Who were, all in their own ways, pains in his ass.

But even if Pickles was smaller physically, none of them seemed quite so small as Toki — younger, damaged. A boy with witch’s blood and wolf claws, at turns innocent as a child and vicious as a starving hound.

And with Toki laying against him thus, that protectiveness only surged, and Nathan could only blame Pickles, because if Pickles had never urged him from his shell, none of this would have ever happened.

Stupid fucking Pickles.

“Um,” Nathan murmured, and his hand moved up from Toki’s hair, reaching for his shoulder. He shook it. “Hey. Toki.”

The kid stirred, mumbling in a foreign tongue — perhaps the tongue of his father’s lands — and for a terrifying moment moved closer, and Nathan had no idea what to do.

He wriggled a bit, shifting around, but Toki was waking, even if slowly. He sat up as Nathan shifted around onto his back, the boy pressing his hand to the center of Nathan’s chest, pushing himself up.

“Hi Nathans,” he said with a yawn, more casual than Nathan would have expected — or, at least, more casual than Nathan was being. Toki lifted a hand to rub at his eye, only to brighten when he realized where they were.

“We ams here!” he declared. He grabbed the leather of Nathan’s jerkin. “The peak! We ams not far now — just a little more walksing and we find out what wakes the dead!”

“Uh, yeah. But how’re we going to deal with them? We can’t just smash them all to pieces. And even if we did, what if they re-assembled themselves?”

“The dead didn’ts stir before. Something ams waking them, ups-setting them. We don’ts got to kill the dead — we gots to kill what makes them rise.”

Nathan’s brow furrowed. He sat up some, ignoring(or trying to) Toki kneeling in between his own two legs.

“How do you know? How did you know, to begin with? How did you know it’d be up the mountain? And now that the thing at the peak is what’s controlling them?” Nathan looked the boy over, Toki’s face sufficiently shameful, and the headman figured it out. “…the lights. When you were working your seiðr. You were asking the Norns or the light or…something for guidance. …to help me.”

Toki paused, then nodded, and now Nathan felt like an asshole. Mostly because he was an asshole.

Nathan grunted.

“…thanks,” he said, in lieu of apology. It seemed to work just fine, because Toki went from awkward pouting to a happy grin, like a dog who’d pleased his master.

Unable to help himself, Nathan reached out with a low chuckle, ruffling Toki’s hair.

It turned out Toki was right. When they emerged out into the light and set back up the mountain, they weren’t far from the peak at all.

The slope of the mountain wasn’t too harsh here, the two of them able to follow the snow around the ridges and up to where the peak spiraled. Nathan worried a little, knowing the snow they were walking on was quite deep, and that it was that, and not the mountain itself, that made the slope manageable. Should their weight dislodge the snow, it could go tumbling down the mountain, taking them with it.

“Still too cold,” Toki assured, his hand against stone as they made their way around an outcrop. “Snow will only gets slippy when the spring starts to melt it, an’ the water runs down undersneath.” He glanced upwards. “We okays for now.”

Nathan took that under advisement and said nothing, but he kept his footing careful until they came up to the final ledge, the flat ground that sloped up gradually to the very top of the peak. Once there, the snow was the least of his concerns.

The peak of the mountain rose up behind what could only be called a throne at the summit, a chair of stone and ice not so much carved into the mountain as built upon it, a shambles, a travesty. Rocks and pebbles tumbled down the sides of it, lodged in the snow, and not a sprig of vegetation grew here. Everything was slate and snow, a lifeless tableau, completed only by the corpse upon the throne, head bowed in a hand, a king in repose, a king in throes of agony, deciding his people’s fate.

Only it wasn’t a corpse. Nathan took a half step forward and saw that, coming to a frozen stop when he saw those revealed lungs inhale, swell in a chest half carved open, and deflate once more. Frigid air moved from the king’s mouth and nose, billowed out colder than the mountain itself, and Nathan could see his fucking jawbone. Flesh hung from it like pulp, dangled and frozen at the tips. His nose was peeled back, skeletal and revealed, the wisps of hair on what remained of his scalp only agonizing the production.

Fingers with skin so tight they seemed naught but bone cradled that haggard skull, those shoulders slumped, and he wore a robe, or what remained of one. Like many things about him, it had decayed with time.

The dead that Nathan and Toki had fought before had indeed been dead, as animate as they were. They had no heartbeat, drew no breath, but this creature, dead while still alive, raised its head, one bald eye milky, but the other still reactive to light, still possessed, almost cruelly, of life.

A decaying corpse of a body, but this man was still a man. He had not yet died.

Nathan had always glorified death, held it as great and honorable, the noble way to pass from this life. He had never feared it, but he’d never thought of how it could be merciful, as well.

“Father,” Toki breathed, and Nathan felt sick.

He looked to the boy at his side, saw Toki’s twisted expression, and it couldn’t be anything else.

“Fuck,” Nathan mumbled, and looked back at the half-dead man on his broken throne.

“There,” it — he? — said, lips stiff and stumbling, and his voice a coffin croak, dusty air moving upon a throat ill used. “You have finally come.”

Nathan pulled his mace forward, holding it out both as a wall and a threat, feet braced in the snow, but the man of the heretic god wasn’t looking at him.

“Father… Why?” Toki asked. He’d brought what remained of his sword, the blade tucked into his belt, hilt jutting out but undrawn.

“Why indeed,” the old man hissed. “Why do you torment me so, devilspawn?”

“Stop it,” Nathan demanded, then changed his track. “Stop whatever it is you’re doing. Raising the dead, or whatever. Or I’ll smash your skull to bits.”

“Do you think I care, heathen?” Now his attention was drawn to Nathan. “Do you think your puny gods can hear you here? You are alone. We are all alone. The dead know this well. As the flesh rotted from my bones I knew the agony of being not alive and not dead. The dead slept in peace. Why should they have peace when I cannot? So I raised them. I called them from their slumber, and they knew my agony. But still, it wasn’t enough. I looked over this mountain, looked down upon you all, and why should the living have joy if I cannot? So I sent my tortured souls to take your joy from you.”

He moved one arm outwards, the wind whistling between ulna and radius, skin and cloth both hanging, and it was hard to tell which was which — the cloth black as pitch, and the flesh blackened by the necrotic rot of ice. But Nathan’s gaze instead followed the gesture of his hand, and the headman started when he saw the dead pulling up from the snow. Some of them were old, like the ones that they’d fought before, but more significantly were five fresh bodies — the bodies of Nathan’s huntsmen, who he’d sent out into the cold night never to return.

Now their eyes were filmy and blank. They saw nothing, felt nothing. They were dead, and yet raised.

“You fucking asshole…” Nathan hissed, then reeled on the heretic fully. “You fucking dick!”

But Aslaug just laughed, a dry, long chuckle, the sound itself tortured.

“Yes. And now you, too, will join them.” Aslaug’s one still working eye ticked back to Toki. “For you have done your work. You have brought him to me.”

Nathan’s heartrate picked up at that, and he thought back to the first attack. The draugar had only made their first appearance when Nathan had left Toki behind. When he was no longer useful to Aslaug. And they’d retreated again once Toki had joined him. Letting them live, so that they could make it here.

“The hell do you want with him?” Nathan asked. Toki didn’t say anything. He still hesitated to draw his weapon.

“I need him.” The broken king rose from where he sat, half decayed legs shaking under his weight. “I can no longer live this way. I came up the mountain to pray, but the wind and the plague rotted me from the inside out. I knew I was to die, and yet death refuses to come for me. I waited and waited, and yet every morning I woke again to see that life had not fled me. Even as my body betrays me unto ruin, he will not release me from this mortal coil. He will not release me.” He raised that awful hand and pointed at Toki, a terrible accusation upon it, and Toki shrank away.

“I don’ts knows what you means!” he cried out, his voice sad and lost. “I didn’ts do nothings!”

The dead lumbered towards them, Nathan’s tribesmen lumbered towards them, and Nathan took a step back, trying to maintain some distance.

“If it’s death you want, I’ll give it to you,” Nathan growled.

“Try your luck, I dare you.” The spectre dropped his hand, looking at Nathan derisively. “But you cannot kill me. Nothing can kill me. Save his love.” He looked to Toki again, and Nathan shivered in realization.

Everything I loves, they always die.

Toki didn’t love his abusive, crazy, dickhole father. Who would? No. Toki hated him, as any sane person would, and so long as he hated him, he would never die. The cruelty of that hit Nathan square in the chest.

Anything that Toki couldn’t stand, anything he hated, would never leave him.

Anything he dared to love, would be ripped from him. Ripped from him because he loved it, the fault, the blame, the guilt, laying squarely at his feet.

Toki fell to his knees in the snow, and he let out a broken sound, a sob that cracked and shattered, and the dead moved to swarm him. Nathan wouldn’t let that happen. He jogged across the snow, swinging his mace in a smooth arc, impacting the one reaching out for Toki and sending it flying upwards, outwards, away from the boy. Nathan whirled around and struck the next closest, slamming it into the ground. He stamped his boot down on the back of its neck, holding it down as he stood against the others.

They stood all around them, to the left and the right, the back and the fore. They were all around, and Nathan knew he wouldn’t be able to hold them off forever.

He’d damn well try, though.

The fight was a long, exhausting affair, a constant shifting of weight that took a greater toll of him than he’d think, not able to just brace himself and chew through whatever came at him. But these weren’t warriors. They weren’t men who could battle or think or love, and they had no need for honor, or understanding of it. They came from all directions, would swarm him without second thought, and in several instances almost did. He battered them away with every strength he’d built, his big body finding here its purpose — to fight, to defend, to make in destruction a haven for someone smaller.

And if he fell, which he surely would, their assault unending and his own breaths numbered, he would do so with the knowledge that he’d fought with honor. Died the most glorious death that any man could wish for. Even if he was raised again, denied Valhalla and dragged back to suffer in this world as these corpses did, he would do so without regret.

He would rather die before his own conscience, be stolen from the afterlife promised him, than fall away now and live with his failure of heart. He would know, at least, in his last moment of consciousness, that he was a man, and not a coward.

A coward like him.

“Give up,” the coward spake, slumping back into his throne. Even his words sounded defeated. “You cannot win. They will drag you down, as death drags every man.”

“Only if you run from it,” Nathan panted, standing surrounded by still crawling corpses, their fingers clawing in the snow. Sweat painted his brow despite the cold, and his shoulders heaved.

“It matters not.” Aslaug brushed his fingers through the air. “Embrace death or run from it, it will take you. Can you not see? Already the boy cares for you. Your doom was already handed down.” Aslaug’s smile was a cold, uncaring affair. Behind Nathan, Toki keened.

“This is why he doesn’t love you, you fucking dickweed,” Nathan growled.”

“Death will take every man but me,” Aslaugh continued, uncaring, “so long as he holds me immortal. No, give in. Give in to the grave, and leave me my burden. From my loins sprang this cursed creature, and it shall be my duty to take him from the world. We will burn together, and God will forgive me.”

“You’re insane.”

“Ah ha ha!” Aslaug cackled, as if to prove the statement. “The dead are the only sane ones! You, you heathens, crawling around, singing your drunken melodies, drinking your mead and fornicating through the night… You cling to such sin, and in the end, what will it win you? You sing of death, but you don’t know the first thing about it, or the worlds that wait beyond. The Lord himself will judge you, will judge us all, and I will not be found wanting. I will do what I should have done on the day he was born, taking his own mother’s life as he slipped from her decrepit womb. I will end this.” He looked Nathan up and down, then glanced to his corpses. “End this,” he echoed, this time an order, and they moved again, ready to drag Nathan down with them.

Even as his muscles burned, Nathan swung his mace and turned to scrambled meat the face of a man he’d known his whole life.

“Go!” he yelled back to Toki. “Run!”

He reeled around, looking back over his shoulder at the boy, still kneeling in the snow, a helpless, hollow look on his face.

“…run,” Nathan said more softly.

Toki’s eyes widened, and he shook his head.

“Yes,” Nathan replied to the gesture. “You have to. You’re the one he wants. I’ll hold them back.”

“I can’ts, Nathans—”

“Get to my people. Take them away from this place. Take them to the places you’ve journeyed, little wolf. Find them somewhere safe, away from these monsters, and let this mountain of the dead fall.”

“Nathans…”

A hand clawed at Nathan’s arm, split his skin open and made him bleed. He roared and reeled at it, back into the fray and hoping only to buy Toki the time to escape. They’d come up the mountain to end this, Nathan had come up the mountain to end this, certain he could fight any monster, but he couldn’t fight this. No man could fight death.

Aslaug was right about that much. All that mattered was how you faced it.

They swarmed, bodies and pieces of bodies, brought him low, the weight of them and their attack too much even for his great strength, and Nathan fell to his knees. He crumbled, but tried to catch himself, tried to keep fighting, feeling their teeth try to tear through the hide of his jerkin, fingertips clanging against the metal of his armor.

Through it all, distant though, he heard Aslaug speak again.

“Come to me,” he said, reaching out, but there was no gentleness to his words. It was the same slim order that Toki must have heard his whole life, full of anger and derision. Words that no parents should ever speak to their child.

But Toki got up, rose to his feet, and Nathan cried out.

“Toki, no!” he cried, knowing that Aslaug didn’t deserve one inch of Toki’s compassion. Nathan tried to surge up from under his attackers, almost did, almost made it to his feet before one knee buckled and he was down again. Toki walked past him, to the throne of rubble, and his father.

“Say it,” Aslaug breathed, looking up at his son.

Toki was shaking.

“Say it. End it.” Now his voice was pleading, a sweet song, wheedling his purchase from a boy he’d already scarred too many times to count.

He’d already had his pound of flesh, and still he wanted more.

Nathan once more tried to get to his feet, throwing himself forward as his body bled and feet slid in slick snow, his teeth grit and bared, trying to get to them. Trying to get to Toki.

Toki looked at his father as the man reached a bare bone hand up to his throat, and a tear slipped down over Toki’s rich, living cheek.

“…I forgive you,” he breathed, giving a gift that didn’t deserve to be received, and tearing it out of himself in the process.

The man before him seemed to smile, though it was hard to tell on his ragged face. Nathan’s weight remained pressed to the creatures draped over him, but his eyes were fixed on the father and son at the summit. Then, the motion so sudden that it made Toki jump, Aslaug’s hand and expression fell at once, his good eye rolling back and life fleeing him. Fleeing him, and taking Toki’s love with it.

Toki cried out, backing up in horror as the body slumped and fell down into the snow at his feet, and the draugar on Nathan ceased their animation. Their bodies fell away like brittle leaves, and at the first sign of reprieve Nathan growled in ferocious anger, shaking them away, surging to his feet.

But once there, he found there was nothing he could do. His foes were defeated, the dead were dead and still as they should be, and the mission that Nathan had set out to complete completed. Done.

There was no one left to fight, and yet, as never before, the victory felt hollow.

There would be no cries of celebration, no hearty yodeling of bloodied men having proven their metal. There would be no feasting tonight, no drinking and merriment. They had won, but Nathan didn’t feel triumphant.

Instead, he watched with pierced brow as Toki broke, his sobs echoing on the mountain top, and then collapsed, bent so low that his forehead touched the snow, his wolf’s pelt having fallen away, and the scars of his back bared to the unforgiving sky.

All Nathan could do was watch.

Toki cried through the zenith of the sun, its rays scattering over the earth, shadows shifting from one side to the other, and still Toki wept, shattered and destroyed. The throne of the damned king lay unoccupied, his finally perished corpse having slumped in the snow before it.

Not knowing what else to do, and certain it couldn’t be a welcome reminder, Nathan dragged it away, around behind the summit of the throne. He kicked at the snow around it, fitting the body into the divot before covering it with the snow. It wasn’t a hallowed grave, wasn’t lit with fire to send him into the afterlife with glory and splendor, but then, he probably wouldn’t have wanted such. Nathan didn’t know the ways of the heretic god, but he planted the old man’s staff in the ground, a meager grave marker, and hoped that perhaps it might please his wizened spirit, wherever it was that the heretic god took it — enough that he might torment Toki no more.

Nathan returned to the front of the throne, and Toki was sitting up. The wind whistled through him, stirred his hair and it blew in fingered strands, unevenly shorn and unerringly straight. His eyes were shut, wet lashes dark against pale Nordic skin, and his head was tilted back to the slowly lightening sky.

His bare shoulders seemed as stone, and his body a statue, a pleading sacrament to the gods, holding open its palms in supplication. A warrior praying for the safety of his kingdom, or a mother the return of her children, Nathan wasn’t sure which.

The halfway-here-halfway-there didn’t quite scare him as it had only a few days ago, and he wondered if Toki would call down the now invisible stars to comfort him.

But he did not, and that left such tasks to Nathan.

He coughed awkwardly.

Toki breathed in and opened his eyes, tired and doughy skin beneath them, but when he saw Nathan looking at him, some veil shattered and he remembered himself. He sniffed some, lifting hands to scrub at tear stained cheeks.

“…you okay?” Nathan asked, knowing full well that he was not.

But Toki nodded, apparently game to play along with the illusion.

“That was… It was fucked up,” Nathan continued. “What he did to you.”

Toki’s mouth opened and shut, words playing at his lips then falling apart. Finally he shrugged and shook his head, giving up on the endeavor entirely. In lieu of a reply, Nathan went over and offered his hand, man to man, and Toki looked up, softening before he reached out to grip it, and Nathan helped haul himself to his feet.

“We should get you a new sword,” Nathan mumbled, more for something to say than anything else. “Skwisgaar has like…twenty. He can give you one.”

“That would bes nice…” Toki rubbed at his opposite arm, but he didn’t glance back at what remained of the broken blade in the snow. They were both silent for a long moment. “What ams you going to do now?” he asked Nathan.

“I guess…I go home.”

“What about Toki…?”

“I dunno. What, uh. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know… I don’t know what I should does now.” Toki looked out over the valley, the near infinite stretch of it, looked towards the distant mountains and the range of fire. The steam floated up in the cold air, so far from them, and Nathan wondered if Toki would go that way. If he would walk north until there was no more land and then… Then what? Would he go east? Would he go west? Would he journey far away, to the land of the Anglos, to the islands where they said the elves lived?

Or would Toki just sit down on the edge of the sea and stare out at its rough waves until time wore on him like water wore on the rocks, until he ceased to be at all, the boy cursed with death leaving this world as ignobly as he entered it?

“…come with me,” Nathan said finally, and it felt like the words were unexpected and planned at the same time, things he had battled within himself surely as he had battled the dead upon this peak. “Come back to my people. Be part of my hird.”

For a second, Toki looked hopeful, looked up with brow pinched and expression tender, but it shattered just as easily.

“I can’t,” he replied, letting out a breath of defeat. He shook his head, a violent affair. “You heards what he said — and it ams true. Anything I loves, anythings I get close to. It dies. That’s why I liveds down in the thicket, away from the others. Where I go…death follows. An’ I can’ts do that to you.” He flustered a little. “I can’ts does that to yous people.”

Nathan made a face, considering this, but finally he just reached out, laying his meaty hand on Toki’s strong shoulder, feeling it supported despite the slump.

“Then you shall have to come and see what it means to be of our people — for my people do not fear death. Only fools and cowards run from death, for it will find us all one day. It’s not a matter of ‘when’, but a matter of ‘how’, and all of my people, from the greatest warrior to the smallest child, from those who hunt game to those who weave our baskets, will not shirk from such a noble battle. Men, women, children, we are warriors true. We fear not our mortality, and I will be proud to list death itself amongst our number, for it will show that it is our people who are so strong to survive it.” Nathan managed a low, gruff smile, and he squeezed Toki’s shoulder, certain of that. Certain that the strength of his own people would not be found wanting where the people of the heretic god had. “Come. Come with me. There is more to life than cowering in a thicket.”

He paused, uncertain of himself, then lifted his hand, tipping under Toki’s chin, tilting it upwards.

“…I don’t fear your curse,” he muttered, a little embarrassed, but true.

Toki blinked up at him, eyes bluer than the sky at dawn, the pale sky now above them. He stared up at Nathan, the land of the people scattered out at their feet, the valley and the hill of the village, the woods and the copse and the mountains of fire in the distant north. The winter snow had quelled, leaving all the land clear as crystal, the air dry and charged, and their foe lay vanquished in their wake.

Toki’s lips broke out a shy, hopeful smile, an ember finally stoked, and for Nathan, it was a good day.