by Sean Rodden
The cold in the forest deepens with each crawling hour of night. The wilding gods of winter have marshalled the wrath of the west wind, have gathered unto them sundry storms from the distant sea, have combined these rages and herded toward land such a mass of wintry might that Rheln will see no day for six risings of the white and weary sun. Nature has endowed the animals of both field and forest with wit enough to sense the approaching storm and to skitter and scatter, seeking refuge in the pillared galleries of the forest, hiding and huddling there in mute fear of the icy death they instinctively know may be imminent. Even the sleek grey wolves that haunt the paths of the forest abandon their hunt and sequester themselves in secret and secure havens, stealing warmth from one another and resolutely ignoring the hunger that festers in their hollow bellies.
Like the lupine creatures after which he is named, the boy knows a storm is coming. His young bones ache quietly and his lungs detect a subtle edge to the cold of winter. The storm will be brutal, violent, lethal. He knows this. He accepts this.
The winterborn of the Rhelmen are the hardiest of a hardy people – for only the strongest of newly born infants may survive the trials of the year’s most devastative season. His paternal grandfather is of the winter-born. His father and uncle also. They each survived the Rite of Becoming under particularly harsh and severe conditions. The boy is resolved that, though it mean his death, he will do no dishonour to that legacy.
He maintains that his spirit guide and protector will come. It must come.
Must.
The night wanes. The dark dawn comes. The cold deepens further. The boy has neither slept nor eaten nor taken water for two days and two nights. He is very cold. He is very hungry. And he is so all alone.
Yet he is unafraid. And he does not abandon his vigil.
As the day waned and dusk darkened the Northern Plains, the seed of a cold foreboding planted itself at the core of Runningwolf’s being. And the Rhelman’s sense of dread increased, magnified, sharpened with each length southward. Soon the ruby and indigo glowings of twilight chased the sun down behind the Haunted Mountains and a bitter chill infested the gloaming over the grasses. Runningwolf warily drew his steed to a halt. He peered about his environs cautiously. His nostrils twitched, testing the air. Something faintly acrid had accented the sweet scents of the prairie flora – a nearly imperceptible taint, a pale stain on fresh linen, the transparent tear upon a child’s cheek.
Featherfoot snorted in displeasure, and hoofed the earth once, twice. Runningwolf rubbed the Rhelnian’s neck reassuringly.
Hush, dearest. It is but the scent of death on the prairie. A predator has made a kill.
The Rhelman sniffed once more, and the slightest of frowns marked his brow. He scanned the southern horizon with sharp and searching eyes. But little was to be seen there – only the rapidly falling shades of a night yet too new for either moon or star.
Runningwolf leapt lightly from Featherfoot’s back, and rubbed the amber down.
We will take our night’s rest here, dear one.
Featherfoot nickered, then trotted into the rising night to water and graze at leisure.
The Rhelman settled to the ground, his legs crossed in the fashion of his folk, and ate sparingly of his rations. And as night claimed the Plains in the fullness of its dark embrace, Runningwolf rested his forearms upon his thighs, sent his cares away into the distant morrow and calmly closed his eyes.
Curiously enough, words of the Shield Maiden flitted like so many little white moths against the drawing curtains of sleep.
I cannot be certain, but I would guess the Rhelman’s totem animal is the mirarran, Caelle had surmised upon their first meeting.
Runningwolf’s breathing slackened. His heart slowed.
And it is well possible that a mirarran came to him during his Rite of Becoming in the wilderness, the Rhelnian ritual of passage from child to man.
The last conscious thought to drift upon the rising seas of the Rhelman’s slumber was of how very wrong the Shield Maiden had been.
Anent the storm.
The morning skies heave and erupt in masochistic glee. The winter winds lash the land with frigid force and fury, whipping the snow-strangled air into whirling multitudes of white devils. The storm surges with ever increasing strength, with ever deepening cold, ever intensifying power. Living things long accustomed and well adapted to bitter Rhelnian winters begin to die. The snows swallow the stiffened carcasses in mere moments. All the land of Rheln, field and forest and frozen rill, is buried, interred, entombed in pallid darkness. Nothing moves but winds and snows and the wheeling wights of winter. And ever does the storm grow in its violence, in its maleficence.
In the long-held beliefs of the People, the Ending of the World is to come of a winter such as this.
The boy is past shivering. His face is raw with cold. His fingers and toes tingle painfully. Winter has seeped into him, wringing all warmth from him. His blood flows slowly as though choked with floes of ice. His breath is ragged, raspy, coming in pained wheezes and gasps. He has been in the forest for two entire days, long and cold, and two entire nights, longer and colder. Without food. Without water. And this, the third morning –
And his spirit guide has not come.
The boy no longer moves. He barely blinks. He is aware but he is not alert. He is only partly conscious. His lone thought is the staunch and steadfast resolve to remain awake. To sleep is to die. To die is to bring shame to his family, to his tribe, to the People. Shame. Such a petty human suffering. What shame can there be in a noble failure?
Hours pass. The storm rants and roars with the arctic savagery of a thousand ice dragons. The boy’s skin discolours. His flesh and bones are past pain. His heart beats slowly, feebly. His breath is so shallow that it cannot even mist in the frigid air. He struggles to remain wake. He strives. He battles. But he weakens. And even the most resilient and resolute of Rhelmen have their limits. In a moment of stark revelation the boy realizes his folly and abandons his faith. He knows now that his spirit guide will not come.
Will not come.
Alone in the dark and the cold and the suffocating snows of the forest, the boy’s chin descends upon his chest. Sleep rises like the ghost the boy is to become. He sighs. The sound is as the chill pale whisper of Death itself.
Will. Not. Come.
Slowly, sorrowfully, the boy closes his bleak unseeing eyes.
The Rhelman rose long before the second sun of autumn. He stretched briefly, flexed, felt the blood in him feed his rested muscles. A wind had risen in the night, sourced in the south, thick and slow, blackened breath crawling over the ground. Runningwolf brought his totem to his temple and spoke a brief and silent prayer. His nostrils twitched, sampling the cool dark air of the small hours. He could smell the frost on the grass, the cool vitality of the black earth, the icy hardness of the underrock that lay still and silent beneath. But above these, around and beyond and throughout them, he detected something profoundly colder – colder, blacker, harder.
Death. Much death. Older than it had been the previous evening. Older and more foul. Rife with rot. Decay. Putrefaction.
A shadow passed over the brown stone of Runningwolf’s visage. Something of a grimace tightened in his face. He peered southward into the last deeps of night, but saw only grasses silvered by frost and fading starshine. The Rhelman huffed the viscous oily stench from his nose, dismissing and dispatching it to a dark corner of his cognizance.
Then, at a subtle and silent beckons, Featherfoot emerged from the chill of waning night. The golden bay hoofed the earth in greeting, nickered softly, then snorted his distaste for the repugnant reek. The Rhelman leapt agilely astride the splendid stallion, knotted one fist in the flowing mane, and caressed the noble neck. And he remembered words spoken to him of a winter night long before.
Fear no death. Fear only the dying.
The amber pranced in answer, eager to run.
Fly, now, dearest! commanded Runningwolf
. Fly like an eagle awing the wild wind! Fly, my love!! Fly!!!
And with a whinny of delight, the great amber leapt forth, virtually transforming into a bolt of yellow fire in the grey gloom of the Plains, striking southward into the risen wind, into the dawn, into the day.
They happened upon the first carcass at middle-day.
The sun shone a cool heat upon the Northern Plains, dry and autumnal, and beneath its white light the long grasses chafed together in a conspiracy of hushed and frightened whispers. A short distance southward from horse and rider, a small dark cloud swirled low over the fields, and a faint but constant hum rode the slow wind. And as man and mount drew nearer the odour of death thickened, became more present, more powerful. And above it all there lingered another foulness – the caustic stench of brimstone, flavouring the air with the acrid fragrance of ash.
Featherfoot slowed at an unworded command from Runningwolf and breasted cautiously through the grasses. Every instinct within the Rhelnian stallion urged him to turn from this place, but the amber’s love for and loyalty to the man upon his back were the greater suasions.
Runningwolf eyed the dark cloud hovering and humming over the grasses. His calm countenance twitched imperceptibly.
Bh’ritsi. Scavenger vermin. Thousands upon thousands of the large flesh-eating flies. Feeding. Feasting. Runningwolf knew what he would find beneath the swarm of bh’ritsi – the decomposing carcass of a deer, perhaps, or that of one of the great buffalo that migrated across the Northern Plains come new autumn. The sheer number of flies made the latter the more likely of the two.
Runningwolf drew Featherfoot to a halt. Something disturbed the Rhelman, something subtler than massed flies feeding on a dead thing. His gaze moved away from the swarming bh’ritsi to the clear autumnal skies. Not a wisp of cloud. Nothing but endless blue, soft and light, with the stark white orb of the sun directly overhead. Perturbed, Runningwolf shaded his eyes with his hand, peering searchingly into the blue, scanning the skies from horizon to horizon to horizon – seeking something that should have been there but was not. Momentarily, he lowered his hand, and then his eyes.
I am troubled, dear one, he confided to his loyal mount.
Featherfoot snorted against the sulphuric stench.
Nay, dearest, it is not the smell of brimstone that worries my thoughts – although that and the cause of my agitation may very well be related in a fashion yet unrevealed to me.
He stroked Featherfoot’s mighty neck.
Where are the carrion birds, dear one? Where are the vulture and the buzzard? Why are they not here?
Featherfoot huffed, hoofed the earth.
Sooth, dearest, there is no bird of any feather aflight in this day’s sky. What has frightened them so?
The Rhelman’s eyes narrowed with dark discerning insight.
Or mayhap some unnamed evil has destroyed them all. And this stench of sulphur is the spoor of these destroyers.
The amber flinched faintly.
Runningwolf leapt gracefully to the ground.
Remain here, dear one.
He paused, producing a pungent yellow root from a pouch at his belt, rubbing the root’s oozing oils into the skin at his neck and pits and wrists. Thus warded from the bh’ritsi, he then took his bow into hand and nocked an arrow to its string – lest foes larger than flies approach that root-oil might fail to repel. He glanced upward, only the slightest hint of anxiety clouding his calm countenance.
And beware the sky, dearest. Ware it well.
The Rhelman then moved forward, the deep bronze of his skin melding with the dusty gold of the Plains. He went in silence, in stealth, as though his quarry was alive and alert and not already dead and rotting. Catching the root-reek approaching, the swarm of bh’ritsi buzzed and whirled in displeasure, then dispersed. Runningwolf paused, watching the carrion flies scatter, then pushed his way through a tall tangle of brush to the place of the dead.
Immediately, his acute senses were assaulted, and his steadfast heart started, then fell still for a moment.
The stench struck him first – the rancid reek of rot and decay, a palpable thing, pervasive, perverse – like the fetor of an abattoir left too long unclean in a humid heat.
Then were his eyes assailed. The carcass of a plains buffalo lay in a gory heap in its own offal upon grasses bent and broken and browned with dried blood. The noble beast’s beauty had been savaged, ravaged. Its vast bulk had been hideously mutilated, its hide partially peeled from putrescent pink flesh, its entrails torn from its rent belly and strewn in scarlet skeins upon the ground like great veins bereft of flesh through which to flow. The creature’s lips had been ripped from its skull, its tongue wrenched from between its shattered teeth and protruding grotesquely. One eye had been eaten away, the other gored from its socket and hanging on thin threads of reddened gristle.
And then there was the sound – that sound – the slick wet vociferation of teeming thousands of bh’ritsi larvae feasting upon befouled and fetid flesh – moiling multitudes of maggots, creeping, crawling, chewing – legions of wiggling white worms devouring body, blood and bone from both within and without.
Runningwolf blinked slowly, purposefully, as though in doing so he might wash the sight of the slaughter from his eyes. He then willed the sound of the voracious vermin from his ears, and the stenches of rot and sulphur from his nostrils. His breathing slowed, silenced, and his heart soon thudded steadily against his ribs once again.
He then moved forward, acutely alert, cautiously circling the carcass, his sharp dark eyes scanning both the ground and the gruesomely gutted beast. Once, twice, thrice he circuited, stopping and stooping now and again to probe either grass or gore with the steel head of his readied arrow. At length he straightened, returned the arrow to its quiver and his bow to his shoulder, and raised his eyes to the vast void of the day’s blue skies.
And then Runningwolf walked back toward the place where Featherfoot awaited him, the proud Rhelnian prancing and hoofing the earth at his master’s safe return. The Rhelman nimbly mounted, patting the stallion’s strong neck reassuringly. Featherfoot stilled and nieighed softly at his touch.
Neither wolf nor bear did this thing, dear one, came the Rhelman’s silent voice. Nor panther nor mighty lion – nor even hand of Man.
The Rhelnian snorted.
But for those of the buffalo, there are no tracks leading to or from this place. The poor animal has been brutally butchered, ripped to shreds – yet nothing has been removed, and nothing has been eaten, save that upon which the flies and the worms have fed.
A slight crease distorted the Rhelman’s brown brow.
No, this deed was not done of a natural hunger, dearest, but of evil passions, and for perverse pleasure.
Runningwolf’s eyes seemed to darken to a deep black.
And the thing that did this deed was not of the earth, in either sense of the phrase – nay, dear one, the perpetrator of this abomination came from the sky, and is not of this world.
The amber huffed, and Runningwolf steered the steed wide of the slaughter and the rapid return of bh’ritsi. The stench of brimstone was yet sharp and hot in the autumn air.
The worms of the bh’ritsi tell me that the animal met its fate only one day past, dearest, the Rhelman reasoned. And the proliferation of the flies speaks less of death and the absence of carrion birds than it does of an evil most foul. This sulphuric stench is the spoor of this evil. And the scent leads south. Into the wind.
He knotted a fist in Featherfoot’s silken mane.
A very mighty evil indeed.
The carcass behind them, the empty sky above them, Runningwolf urged the great amber to a trot, then to a run. Southward they sped.
Southward.
Into the wind.
Death, the boy remembers being told, comes in many forms and along many paths. His own end will come of cold, he knows, of the white pitilessness of winter – and he knows also that it will come soon. He feels nothing – neither pai
n nor cold. He cannot move. He is only conscious enough to know his heart is failing, his blood but a feeble trickle in his veins. Darkness swells about his spirit, enfolding him in a black unfeeling embrace. One by one, he calmly fares well his mother, his father, his grandfather, his grandmothers, his uncle, his cousins, his many friends. He wonders how they will remember him, what they will say of his life, what will be said of his death.
And then his heart beats one last time and falls still. The blood in him freezes. His spirit detaches from his flesh, hovering above his snow-dusted body, a faint and fragile luminescence, like the fabled coloured lights of distant northern nights. He gazes upon his own corpse, so small, so insubstantial, so very inconsequential. He wonders if he will be remembered at all.
And then he is aware of another thing. A light. Bright and white. Nearing from the north. Bold and so very beautiful. And a voice comes to him like wind in the trees, like a song in the night.
“Abbawontandontas.”
The boy feels his spirit smile, and he is at ease – for he to whom no spirit guide came in life would soon have one in death.
As they progressed southward the stench of rancid death grew in its putrescence, its pestilence, and man and mount came upon more and more hideously mutilated remains of hapless buffalo. The brutalized beasts lay upon ruined grasses in heaps of festering flesh, swarming with filthy bh’ritsi, the carcasses first appearing singly, then in pairs and threes and fours, then in small clusters, then in larger ones, and lastly upon a slaughterground of hundreds, perhaps thousands – an entire herd utterly destroyed. Similar to the ravaged state of the first carcass, all had been gutted, savaged, ripped apart, left to rot. And though there was no sense to the slaughter, there was yet purpose, and that purpose was pleasure – the twisted pleasure found by things fell and foul in the act of killing, in the maiming of beauty, in the wanton destruction of life.
Runningwolf brought Featherfoot to a slow gait. He viewed the scene through dark heated eyes. The amber huffed and snorted in instinctive repugnance, in revulsion, in wary fear. Runningwolf held him by the mane, steadying him. The stench of sulphur was like fire in the air.