DRAGON AGE
Unsung
When darkness comes, and swallows light,
Heed our words, and we shall rise
-The Ballad of Ayesleigh, 5:20 Exalted
Chapter One: The Wilder and the Wanderer
The blizzard roared on, a freezing maelstrom that turned visibility to almost nothing in any direction you cared to name, an eddying swirl of white on tundra-white that played tricks on the eyes, the screaming gales blasting the white flakes into the Wilder's face, tearing at the heavy furs he had wrapped himself in to defy the elements. The wind drove at him, the blizzard endeavoured to bring him to his knees, and on the Wilder struggled, his legs leaden, his heart resolved. His Flatblade, Wolfslayer, was a weight both unwelcome and reassuring on his back as his hide-wrapped feet plunged again and again into the deep, powdery snow. His powerful shoulders worked back and forth as his arms pumped in a desperate effort to gain momentum. Futility tried to settle on him like a vulture on a corpse, but he fought it away with his certainty and his belief. He doubted not the words of the Shaman. He heeded, and he learned, and he acted when called upon.
He pushed himself harder as the ground began to climb. Here he could see grey stone peeking through the deep snow, used it to pick out the edge of the incline he was now climbing. He was ascending a shallow ridge; with that knowledge firmly in mind, he could go about not falling off it when he reached the top.
He had never been this far south before, had seen the wastes from a distance, but never entered them, never ventured beyond the southernmost edge of his his homeland in what the Fereldian folk called the Korcari Wilds. North, yes; into the temperate country of Ferelden, even as far as what had once, long ago been the Dales, but never into the forbidding wastes. When it had become inevitable that he would journey here, he had gone to one of the older warriors, who had led a party this way when he had seen fewer summers. He had asked about the strange, nomadic peoples that toiled here, and whether there was truth to the tales of strange and savage beasts that stalked the floes.
Vasall had replied, with regards to the nomads, 'They are hostile. Trust me.' and pointed to a knotted white scar at the curve of his left shoulder that often ailed him. With regards to creatures great and small he replied he had never seen any, but when night fell, and if the winds settled, he could hear their calls and cries, mournful and terrifying as the wind itself.
So the Flatblade too had journeyed to the wastes.
He had travelled far, found himself restless in the swamplands. He had met with almost universal alienation amongst those not of the Chasind, had got on surprisingly well with a party of Dalish who themselves had travelled far from their clan, and encountered many things, and still found himself restless, and so he felt an uneasy fascination with his surroundings. He longed, against Vasall's advice, to contact the nomads, to learn why they travelled where they did, why they eked out their existence in this frozen hell when there were warmer climes only days travel away. He found their existence both bleak and strangely enticing; to move ever forwards, exploring a land that was their own but that they barely knew; a land that ever-changed with each new snowfall, each thawing. An infinite, empty space in which to learn and grow; timeless.
But he also knew that he was probably romanticising it. It would simply be another way to live a hard life plagued by exterior threats and punished by the elements.
Then all thought was banished because he had reached the top of the low ridge and was peering down at a basin. Hard, frozen earth, half-submerged in water, melted snow. And at the bottom of this...this crater, lay a form, deathly still, and he knew that he had found the Wanderer from his dream.
It was eerie, this feature in the featureless. The strangest sight he had ever seen, and that included the ancient Werewolf for which his blade was named. It was as though something white-hot had struck the snow. Steam still rose as though from a cooking-pot, as though the form at its deepest point was protected by spirits. He too was soaking wet from the slurry of disintegrated snow, a miracle his mouth and nose were uncovered and that he hadn't drowned. Or at least, the Chasind Wilder hoped he had not. Legends told of fireballs that had fallen from the sky in ancient times, creating a great flash of light, a thunderous din, and similar craters, but he had seen no indication of such things, and if that were the case, then how would the Wanderer be in one piece if he was struck?
The Wilder descended the ridge at a much faster rate than he had moved in days, as though the snow through which he waded had relinquished its hold on his legs, ready to give up this secret thing that it had protected. He reached the lip of the crater and found it deeper and wider than it had looked from higher up, the whiteness surrounding it playing havoc with his depth perception.
And as he peered across the crater's breadth, he saw the dark, blizzard-distorted shapes of two others. They were already descending the far side, shuffling down, enrobed in garments of what had to be bearskin. One wore a full pelt, the bear's head and face forming a kind of headdress. They had full, dark beards and thick black hair, and were armed; one with a hammer, the haft of thick, gnarled wood, the head a roughly-shaped rock, affixed tightly to it with leather straps; the other a jagged sword of a black metal that the Wilder had never seen before. They were making for the Wanderer, their dark eyes filled with curiosity and greed.
The Wilder began to descend the steep side of the crater towards the centre also, and their eyes fixed onto him. His hand found the hilt of Wolfslayer and drew it in one swift motion. It shone dully. As he passed into the steam he felt warmth for the first time since his home, and it was strangely welcoming in this bizarre place and situation. Holding the great two-handed sword before him, he approached the sprawled Wanderer protectively.
The nomads divided and spread to his flanks. He twitched the point of the Flatblade towards one, then the other, and for a moment honestly believed that they would leave peacefully.
And they struck. At this distance he could see that the sword with which the nomad to his right was armed was not metal at all, but seemed strangely transluscent. Like the 'glass' they prized in Antiva, but black, and riven with spirals of dark brown, and tiny imperfections. It was this nomad that lunged, whiplike, thinking the Wilder's weapon unwieldy. Wolfslayer dipped and swept up the blade of black glass so that it flailed harmlessly over his head. Then, as calmly, the Wilder removed the arm at the elbow by deftly twirling the Flatblade so that it arced one hundred and eighty degrees. The severed limb spun away, the sword clutched in its dead grasp; blood gouted and spattered the snow; and the nomad screamed and staggered back, falling onto the sloping snowdrift at his back, his boots splashing in the melting snow.
The nomad with the hammer screamed, a battle-cry unearthly and angry and terrible, and the hammer swept in from his left side. He stepped back and nearly tripped on the Wanderer, unmoving and unknowing beneath them. He found his footing in time to lunge inside the back-swing of the hammer and shoulder-charge his opponent. The man was knocked into the snow, and met a hissing, spitting death as the Wilder inverted his sword and slammed it down into the earth, through the nomad's torso, the point crunching through bone and organ and spine beneath. More dark red to stain the snow. The Wilder spun to find his first, disarmed assailant and found he had fled into the safety of the blizzard. Time to take his leave, lest vengeful tribesmen come calling.
He looked to the Wanderer, stowing his sword in the sheath upon his back, and crouched next to the figure. He was garbed in clothes inappropriate for the weather – leather armour, all over. A black cloak with a hood. There were sheaths upon his back, but they contained no weapons – two of them, right for daggers. A third, smaller scabbard at his waist, for a knife. This remained, a hilt wrapped in hide, an opal set into the hilt.
He was breathing, the Wilder deduced, and with that he removed the top layer of hides he was wearing – he had several layers – and wrapped the unconscious figure in it, then began to haul the man onto his shoulders, when the other nomad tackled him. In his left hand, the one still attached, he had a bone knife, and using his weight to drive the Wilder onto his back into the snow, he now thrust it down towards his eyes. The Wilder grasped his wrist firmly and began to drive it away, but the nomad had been waiting in the blizzard, and had achieved total surprise, and the Wilder found it hard to drive him off. However, the nomad had one arm, and that was a self-evident advantage – pain and blood-loss had been numbed and slowed by the intense cold, and had only served to enrage his foe, but it would not last forever.
With a mighty heave he managed to turn the man onto his back so that he was on top of the struggle. He drove his right fist hard into the nomad's face again and again until his hand went limp, then he relieved him of his blade and drove it into his belly, under the ribs, and upward to pierce the heart. A rush of warm blood, and the nomad shuddered and went still.
"Idiot." muttered the Wilder, his voice like stone grinding on stone. He pushed himself away from the second dead man, and turned back to the Wanderer from his dream. He dragged the man onto his shoulders, found his bearings in the way Vasall had taught him, and was about to leave the strange crater when he noticed something glinting in the slush, something pressed deep by the weight of the Wanderer. It was an amulet; A silver pendant on a silver chain. He set down the Wanderer and retrieved it. It splashed a little when he shook it by his ear, and he stowed it in a pouch within his hide garments. Then he retrieved his unconscious charge and began his journey north to his Korcari home.