It was cold, so very cold. Snowflakes and ice crystals hung on his
eyelashes, and his breath was visible through the frost. Every time he
breathed in it felt as though he had betrayed his body as thousands of
molecules of cold invaded his system and chilled him to the core. His very
bones felt as though they had turned to ice, his flesh to snow, and his
blood to frigid water. He had become winter, and in every moment he froze
himself to death.
He wandered, lost in the endless cold. Somewhere, out in the dark, bleak winter, something was calling to him. Something was offering him an escape from this hell. Something wanted him to come to it...
Yes, it said, come to me. I will save you. I will lead you home.
I will show you the way out...
***
Perenolde awoke suddenly. He was still shivering from the nonexistent cold. He looked around. The warmth of the ship's interior filled him and steadied his pounding heart. He brushed the blankets away, stood, stretched, and walked to the porthole. The sun was not yet visible over the mountains that formed the far-off shore, but the sky had already grown lighter. Telling himself that he would have to rise soon anyway, he yawned, stretched again, and went to his trunk.
In addition to their individual gifts, Uther had brought them food, drink and clothing to last them their voyage. Perenolde donned a drab brown pair of trousers and a blue and white sailor's shirt, and stepped into the pair of black captain's boots he had selected from Watertown's local cobbler shop. He searched around in the trunk and finally closed his hands around a round object. He pulled it out and fastened it on his shirt. He grabbed a three-sided hat off of a hook on the wall and placed it on his head, and then he exited the cabin.
Next, Perenolde went to the supply closet. This was the hold beneath the cabin level that housed all of the food. Swinging the trapdoor of the hold open, Perenolde surveyed his options: all manner of dried bread, a large bag of fruit and vegetables, already nearly emptied, and a small case that had contained salted and dried meats, of which nothing remained. He selected an armful of hard biscuits from the bread supplies and an orange from the fruit bag, and, closing the trapdoor with his foot, he turned around and headed up to the deck.
By now the skies were quite bright, and any moment the sun would once again be bearing down on his head. He sat on a barrel and looked around as he ate his breakfast. They had now been a week and a half at sea, and the line of the shore had slowly dropped away from them. In the distance, the snowcapped peaks of northern Lordaeron could barely be seen, and once the sun rose above them, they would become invisible. The lock on the helm had kept their course during the night, and the rudder had not broken free, thankfully. Perenolde pulled out a compass and verified what the helm had shown - they were still on course directly north. They were following the course that Arthas had taken, since Uther was sure the boy knew something about the plague. Uther had also hoped they would bring the boy back, but Perenolde doubted they would see him again. Arthas had left from a port farther east than they, from the very northern shore of Lordaeron, and because of the Steadfast's superior speed, they would likely pass him in the night and reach the lands of the north first, having never seen the wayward prince's ships.
Perenolde put the last bite of biscuit into his mouth and pulled a knife from his belt to slice the orange. His routine morning duties finished - the checking of course and compass, the staring blankly at the vanishing shoreline - Perenolde's thoughts returned to the dream. It still lived in his memory, but like all dreams, it had already faded somewhat. He did not remember where he had been, only the strange voice and the unimaginable cold. The very memory caused him to shiver involuntarily.
The sound of footsteps interrupted his thoughts. He looked up to see Sir Frederick climb up to the deck. Perenolde called a good morning to the other knight, who nodded in acknowledgement and sat down on a crate on the far side of the deck. Perenolde recalled to mind the man's story.
Frederick, Duke of Wintermaul, had been the knight whom Sage Truthbearer had sent on his little quest, if Perenolde recalled correctly, whom had not come yet back when he had spoken with Sage at Rockdale. After the disaster at Stratholme, the Silver Hand had arrived to ease the pains of the populace. According to the story, Frederick had emerged from the forestlands at the sight of his fellow knights, having narrowly eluded the undead that stalked the wilderness for several days. Rather than welcome back the returning hero, however, the people of Stratholme (those that were left) feared that Frederick was infected with the plague, and attempted to slay him before he could become another of the monsters they had seen. When Frederick's fellow paladins protected him, the citizens accused them of being in league with the undead armies, and drove the Silver Hand away with the classic torches and pitchforks.
Why Frederick had chosen to join this quest, having endured such hardships already, was a mystery to Perenolde. The Duke was now on a mission to help save the people that had tried to kill him. While Perenolde respected the devotion the man showed, he wondered if perhaps everything wasn't all right in the man's head.
Perenolde looked out again at the faint shoreline. If one looked hard enough, he could see that it ended abruptly several miles ahead. At some point that day, the Steadfast would bid its familiar home shores goodbye and enter the unknown seas of the north. Not for the first time, Perenolde wondered what adventures awaited them up there, at the top of the world. Would they succeed? Would they fail? Would all of them return, or would the Steadfast come home minus a portion of its crew?
Or would they be coming back at all?
A bright light lit up the sky; the sun had risen. As if on cue, more footsteps sounded from below - Lawdron and Morte had awoken. For the first time that morning, Perenolde looked up. The skies were clear, the only clouds far-off and light. A breeze from the south caused the sails to billow.
He pushed his emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant, from his mind, and tossed the orange aside; it rolled off into a corner, and would probably fall overboard during the course of the day. It was time to work. Perenolde stood and gripped the helm.
***
That day, the twelfth since leaving Watertown, the Steadfast bid friendly shores farewell for good and entered the cold, northern seas. Chill winds pushed them northward - welcoming us, Perenolde often wondered, or preventing our escape? - and they began to note small blocks of ice floating upon the ocean's face. The water itself seemed to grow less friendly as waves rose to lift the ship many feet above the surface and drop it again carelessly into the surf. A dim, gray fog descended over the seas ahead of them, hiding the horizon. The skies darkened overhead as thick cloud formations emerged to block out the sun even in the middle of the day, and only the cawing of the gulls gave sign as to night or day.
It was the gulls, in fact, that probably saved the ship from a violent death at the hands of an iceberg. After the ship's third day in the northern seas, it occurred to the crew that land must still be nearby, if out of sight, for the gulls to keep within audible distance of the ship by day and disappear by night. Due to this revelation, Lawdron and Perenolde kept an eye out for the gulls' home, were it ice or earth, and thus scouted a particularly dangerous stretch of ice and avoided it, skirting round the edge of what they would later see was a chain of deadly icebergs, any one of which capable to tearing large holes in the Steadfast.
Perenolde guided the ship west of the ice chain, which at first the crew considered quite wonderful. However, it later occurred to Morte (and he shared it with everyone) that Arthas' flotilla would have sailed east of the deadly strip of bergs and thus was now separated from the Steadfast by a fairly large (for it had by then widened) and extremely treacherous area of water. Lawdron later confirmed this when he scouted from the crow's nest a vessel across the chain and a significant distance south of their position. Perenolde attempted to explain that this was just as likely a lone fishing vessel as one of Arthas' ships, but the pessimistic Morte would not hear it.
On the nineteenth day, an incident occurred which instilled in Perenolde and his crew a lasting image of the land they would soon enter. The water, at this point, had been getting steadily more shallow as the days wore on (although the dark fog that gripped the horizon still masked any land), and the sea floor was now mostly visible beyond the apparent murk. What had struck Perenolde up to this point was the complete lack of undersea life, for he had seen neither carp nor crab, living or dead, since the Lordaeron coast had disappeared behind them a week before.
On this day, however, at one of the many times every day when Lawdron was peering over the side, he called Perenolde away from the helm, claiming there was something the older man had to see. Lawdron pointed into the depths as Perenolde reached his side. At first the captain saw nothing; then, only a few fragmented pieces of long, white stone. Presently, however, as more and more of the pieces came into view, he realized that they were not stones at all.
"It's a skeleton," he whispered. The creature was as long as the ship, and as broad it seemed, and it appeared to possess a pair of skeletal wings which, in life, would have been wide enough in span to cover several ships in a line. They floated on, and other corpses came into view, some as large as the first, others as small as a man or a large shark.
"I remember hearing stories, when I was a child, that when dragons and other great beasts grew tired of being alive, they went to the far north to die," Lawdron said.
"I've heard that story as well," Perenolde assented. "This bone-yard obviously contributed to the myth. Explains why we haven't seen any fish, too - these beasts, whatever they were, kept them away."
"Captain," Lawdron said slowly, "if even the fish stay are smart enough to stay away from here, why are we going through it?"
"Because we've got to get to the other side," said Morte, who had been listening nearby. He went to the helm and grabbed the wheel; Perenolde had at one point forced them all to learn to steer the vessel so that he would be able to stop and sleep when he grew tired. "I say, Captain, you shouldn't leave the helm unattended - you'll sail us smack into a glacier."
***
On the evening of the twenty-first day, Perenolde was shaken from his bunk by a large jolt; the ship, it seemed, had stopped moving. He had only just retired to the cabin (having entrusted the helm to Lawdron), and had not yet been asleep. He brushed aside the blanket, wrapped himself in a cloak and made his way hastily to the deck. The scene at the helm was comical; Lawdron had been thrown on his face by the crash, and his shirt had torn from being stretched over the wheel. He was dazedly pulling himself to his feet as Perenolde emerged onto the deck.
"What have we hit?" he called.
"Boy," Morte yelled from somewhere, "What've you gotten us into now?"
"Nothing," the young man said quietly. "I was about to call... I saw land..." He was pointing. Many yards away, land came up out of the water - real land made of dirt, not more of the foul ice - and beyond the shoreline, trees.
"I just saw it," Lawdron continued. "The fog..."
"Bloody hell," said Frederick, who was looking over the side. "We've run aground!"
Perenolde smacked his forehead in annoyance. Of course! The steadily shallowing waters, the slight slope of the sea floor - though the shore itself was far off still, the ship's belly had scraped the bottom and come to rest. He groaned. With the force they struck with, there was doubtlessly now a hole somewhere near the supply hold - and that was assuming the whole side of the ship had not cracked apart.
Upon returning to the cabin area, Perenolde's fears were confirmed. Water was quickly streaming in from underneath the door to the closet. The bread - all that remained of their food - would be rendered inedible. Worse, they would have to abandon the ship completely until it could be repaired - if it ever could be. Sighing in frustration, Perenolde returned to the deck and faced his three crew members, who had gathered in a semicircle to await his verdict.
"Gather your things," he told them. "We're abandoning the ship." They nodded grimly and filed past him - though they did not always approve of him as a person, they accepted Jaina's appointment of him as their Captain, if for no other reason than that taking the ship had been his idea - and began to disappear below deck.
"Wait," he called. They stopped and looked back at him.
"Bring your weapons," he told them.
***
He wandered, lost in the endless cold. Somewhere, out in the dark, bleak winter, something was calling to him. Something was offering him an escape from this hell. Something wanted him to come to it...
Yes, it said, come to me. I will save you. I will lead you home.
I will show you the way out...
***
Perenolde awoke suddenly. He was still shivering from the nonexistent cold. He looked around. The warmth of the ship's interior filled him and steadied his pounding heart. He brushed the blankets away, stood, stretched, and walked to the porthole. The sun was not yet visible over the mountains that formed the far-off shore, but the sky had already grown lighter. Telling himself that he would have to rise soon anyway, he yawned, stretched again, and went to his trunk.
In addition to their individual gifts, Uther had brought them food, drink and clothing to last them their voyage. Perenolde donned a drab brown pair of trousers and a blue and white sailor's shirt, and stepped into the pair of black captain's boots he had selected from Watertown's local cobbler shop. He searched around in the trunk and finally closed his hands around a round object. He pulled it out and fastened it on his shirt. He grabbed a three-sided hat off of a hook on the wall and placed it on his head, and then he exited the cabin.
Next, Perenolde went to the supply closet. This was the hold beneath the cabin level that housed all of the food. Swinging the trapdoor of the hold open, Perenolde surveyed his options: all manner of dried bread, a large bag of fruit and vegetables, already nearly emptied, and a small case that had contained salted and dried meats, of which nothing remained. He selected an armful of hard biscuits from the bread supplies and an orange from the fruit bag, and, closing the trapdoor with his foot, he turned around and headed up to the deck.
By now the skies were quite bright, and any moment the sun would once again be bearing down on his head. He sat on a barrel and looked around as he ate his breakfast. They had now been a week and a half at sea, and the line of the shore had slowly dropped away from them. In the distance, the snowcapped peaks of northern Lordaeron could barely be seen, and once the sun rose above them, they would become invisible. The lock on the helm had kept their course during the night, and the rudder had not broken free, thankfully. Perenolde pulled out a compass and verified what the helm had shown - they were still on course directly north. They were following the course that Arthas had taken, since Uther was sure the boy knew something about the plague. Uther had also hoped they would bring the boy back, but Perenolde doubted they would see him again. Arthas had left from a port farther east than they, from the very northern shore of Lordaeron, and because of the Steadfast's superior speed, they would likely pass him in the night and reach the lands of the north first, having never seen the wayward prince's ships.
Perenolde put the last bite of biscuit into his mouth and pulled a knife from his belt to slice the orange. His routine morning duties finished - the checking of course and compass, the staring blankly at the vanishing shoreline - Perenolde's thoughts returned to the dream. It still lived in his memory, but like all dreams, it had already faded somewhat. He did not remember where he had been, only the strange voice and the unimaginable cold. The very memory caused him to shiver involuntarily.
The sound of footsteps interrupted his thoughts. He looked up to see Sir Frederick climb up to the deck. Perenolde called a good morning to the other knight, who nodded in acknowledgement and sat down on a crate on the far side of the deck. Perenolde recalled to mind the man's story.
Frederick, Duke of Wintermaul, had been the knight whom Sage Truthbearer had sent on his little quest, if Perenolde recalled correctly, whom had not come yet back when he had spoken with Sage at Rockdale. After the disaster at Stratholme, the Silver Hand had arrived to ease the pains of the populace. According to the story, Frederick had emerged from the forestlands at the sight of his fellow knights, having narrowly eluded the undead that stalked the wilderness for several days. Rather than welcome back the returning hero, however, the people of Stratholme (those that were left) feared that Frederick was infected with the plague, and attempted to slay him before he could become another of the monsters they had seen. When Frederick's fellow paladins protected him, the citizens accused them of being in league with the undead armies, and drove the Silver Hand away with the classic torches and pitchforks.
Why Frederick had chosen to join this quest, having endured such hardships already, was a mystery to Perenolde. The Duke was now on a mission to help save the people that had tried to kill him. While Perenolde respected the devotion the man showed, he wondered if perhaps everything wasn't all right in the man's head.
Perenolde looked out again at the faint shoreline. If one looked hard enough, he could see that it ended abruptly several miles ahead. At some point that day, the Steadfast would bid its familiar home shores goodbye and enter the unknown seas of the north. Not for the first time, Perenolde wondered what adventures awaited them up there, at the top of the world. Would they succeed? Would they fail? Would all of them return, or would the Steadfast come home minus a portion of its crew?
Or would they be coming back at all?
A bright light lit up the sky; the sun had risen. As if on cue, more footsteps sounded from below - Lawdron and Morte had awoken. For the first time that morning, Perenolde looked up. The skies were clear, the only clouds far-off and light. A breeze from the south caused the sails to billow.
He pushed his emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant, from his mind, and tossed the orange aside; it rolled off into a corner, and would probably fall overboard during the course of the day. It was time to work. Perenolde stood and gripped the helm.
***
That day, the twelfth since leaving Watertown, the Steadfast bid friendly shores farewell for good and entered the cold, northern seas. Chill winds pushed them northward - welcoming us, Perenolde often wondered, or preventing our escape? - and they began to note small blocks of ice floating upon the ocean's face. The water itself seemed to grow less friendly as waves rose to lift the ship many feet above the surface and drop it again carelessly into the surf. A dim, gray fog descended over the seas ahead of them, hiding the horizon. The skies darkened overhead as thick cloud formations emerged to block out the sun even in the middle of the day, and only the cawing of the gulls gave sign as to night or day.
It was the gulls, in fact, that probably saved the ship from a violent death at the hands of an iceberg. After the ship's third day in the northern seas, it occurred to the crew that land must still be nearby, if out of sight, for the gulls to keep within audible distance of the ship by day and disappear by night. Due to this revelation, Lawdron and Perenolde kept an eye out for the gulls' home, were it ice or earth, and thus scouted a particularly dangerous stretch of ice and avoided it, skirting round the edge of what they would later see was a chain of deadly icebergs, any one of which capable to tearing large holes in the Steadfast.
Perenolde guided the ship west of the ice chain, which at first the crew considered quite wonderful. However, it later occurred to Morte (and he shared it with everyone) that Arthas' flotilla would have sailed east of the deadly strip of bergs and thus was now separated from the Steadfast by a fairly large (for it had by then widened) and extremely treacherous area of water. Lawdron later confirmed this when he scouted from the crow's nest a vessel across the chain and a significant distance south of their position. Perenolde attempted to explain that this was just as likely a lone fishing vessel as one of Arthas' ships, but the pessimistic Morte would not hear it.
On the nineteenth day, an incident occurred which instilled in Perenolde and his crew a lasting image of the land they would soon enter. The water, at this point, had been getting steadily more shallow as the days wore on (although the dark fog that gripped the horizon still masked any land), and the sea floor was now mostly visible beyond the apparent murk. What had struck Perenolde up to this point was the complete lack of undersea life, for he had seen neither carp nor crab, living or dead, since the Lordaeron coast had disappeared behind them a week before.
On this day, however, at one of the many times every day when Lawdron was peering over the side, he called Perenolde away from the helm, claiming there was something the older man had to see. Lawdron pointed into the depths as Perenolde reached his side. At first the captain saw nothing; then, only a few fragmented pieces of long, white stone. Presently, however, as more and more of the pieces came into view, he realized that they were not stones at all.
"It's a skeleton," he whispered. The creature was as long as the ship, and as broad it seemed, and it appeared to possess a pair of skeletal wings which, in life, would have been wide enough in span to cover several ships in a line. They floated on, and other corpses came into view, some as large as the first, others as small as a man or a large shark.
"I remember hearing stories, when I was a child, that when dragons and other great beasts grew tired of being alive, they went to the far north to die," Lawdron said.
"I've heard that story as well," Perenolde assented. "This bone-yard obviously contributed to the myth. Explains why we haven't seen any fish, too - these beasts, whatever they were, kept them away."
"Captain," Lawdron said slowly, "if even the fish stay are smart enough to stay away from here, why are we going through it?"
"Because we've got to get to the other side," said Morte, who had been listening nearby. He went to the helm and grabbed the wheel; Perenolde had at one point forced them all to learn to steer the vessel so that he would be able to stop and sleep when he grew tired. "I say, Captain, you shouldn't leave the helm unattended - you'll sail us smack into a glacier."
***
On the evening of the twenty-first day, Perenolde was shaken from his bunk by a large jolt; the ship, it seemed, had stopped moving. He had only just retired to the cabin (having entrusted the helm to Lawdron), and had not yet been asleep. He brushed aside the blanket, wrapped himself in a cloak and made his way hastily to the deck. The scene at the helm was comical; Lawdron had been thrown on his face by the crash, and his shirt had torn from being stretched over the wheel. He was dazedly pulling himself to his feet as Perenolde emerged onto the deck.
"What have we hit?" he called.
"Boy," Morte yelled from somewhere, "What've you gotten us into now?"
"Nothing," the young man said quietly. "I was about to call... I saw land..." He was pointing. Many yards away, land came up out of the water - real land made of dirt, not more of the foul ice - and beyond the shoreline, trees.
"I just saw it," Lawdron continued. "The fog..."
"Bloody hell," said Frederick, who was looking over the side. "We've run aground!"
Perenolde smacked his forehead in annoyance. Of course! The steadily shallowing waters, the slight slope of the sea floor - though the shore itself was far off still, the ship's belly had scraped the bottom and come to rest. He groaned. With the force they struck with, there was doubtlessly now a hole somewhere near the supply hold - and that was assuming the whole side of the ship had not cracked apart.
Upon returning to the cabin area, Perenolde's fears were confirmed. Water was quickly streaming in from underneath the door to the closet. The bread - all that remained of their food - would be rendered inedible. Worse, they would have to abandon the ship completely until it could be repaired - if it ever could be. Sighing in frustration, Perenolde returned to the deck and faced his three crew members, who had gathered in a semicircle to await his verdict.
"Gather your things," he told them. "We're abandoning the ship." They nodded grimly and filed past him - though they did not always approve of him as a person, they accepted Jaina's appointment of him as their Captain, if for no other reason than that taking the ship had been his idea - and began to disappear below deck.
"Wait," he called. They stopped and looked back at him.
"Bring your weapons," he told them.
***