I
Wet snow crunched under his sandaled foot, sliding heavily down the eroding rock face into the brush below. Behind him, the airy bluffs of the un-christened mountains which cauterised the peninsula before him from the known lands beyond quivered soundlessly in the thin air, splintered, offended with cold. The teetering, rock-ridden passes cut through the cliff-sides like folds in a fat man's belly, narrow and icy, offering no promise of foliage; only the frost-whitened skeletons of trees and the open howl of the wind. They were young, nihilistic peaks; and in their youth they forgave few mistakes.
But they were behind him now. He vagranted no longer in the company of eagles, stood no longer above the yawning chasms and coulee formations where the clouds pooled beneath him like lakes of frothing white. The rock had become smashed, un-proud, tumbled and fallen, as the glaciers which strangled their lofts turned to streams and trickles and falls of rushing water. Even now, rivulets flowed prettily between his ankles, droplets ticked from the salivating lip of melting snow, trickling into the broken, preliminary edge of forest-land which cut upwards through the fractured stone in rows of pines like feathered combs. The north-east horizon sprawled wide open – hazy with mist, a gorgeous, savage world.
He had lost all concept of time. How long he'd travelled, how far. He had become disciplined. He ate little, drank little, observed coolly as his body craved nourishment – chewed strips of rawhide cord to assuage hunger while his stomach sucked emptily in his belly like a shallow drain. He'd thread strange lands underfoot – abandoned, ancient cities where the ghosts of exhumed civilisations had peered at him from the shadows of window-panes. Crossed flat wastes of white sand without any clear cardinal orientation. Huddled close to his campfire sleeping gitfully through the sounds and calls of beasts foreign to his ear. A forest, where the trees grew so high their timbres vanished into the clouds and their roots tore the ground asunder them like savaged flesh. The mountains. Sometimes, the cliffs sang to him in the night, and laughed, and when he woke their tors had shifted into odd angles and the very geography around him had been maimed.
Belts heavy with packs, satchels, water-skins, swung tight to his hips and chest. High on his back perched his ruck; blanket and bedroll, flat yuean bread and salted jerky, bags of rice and nuts, tools, knives. Tied down against this with heavy leather was an old and unpolished shield of tarnished bronze, and wood. His neck and most of his face were scarved, long, Hylian ears curled under frayed bandanas. His fists, gloved. Everything about him was weathered from travelling, seemed to come apart at the seams. His body was sheathed in muscle and trimmed of all superfluous material – trimmed to preserve its host, burning everything into the blast-furnace of digestion to fuel its terrible momentum. The Eye of Din (for He, too, knew Din) had barely risen in the east and pre-morning mists hovered about him as he made his way down the steppe. The morning was quiet – except for the gurgling of streams, and the gurgling of his belly, which were deafening in the shadow of peace. Far below, in the tree-line, the birds could be heard. Crows, rraaawking their atonal caws.
But nothing seemed new to him... this kingdom, cut off from the world continent... he had seen these pines, these bluffs, this steppe; in his dreams. Dreams of a girl, a golden haired siren who wept alone, a ray of light alone in shadow – dreams of love, and lust, which lit inside his belly like the striking of matches so that he snapped awake before dawn, that the echoes of malnourishment rang hollow from his skull. They came more frequently, now, the dreams – they lit against his eyes even as he walked, came to him while he lay awake – visions of gold, of sex, of beauty, obsession.
Dreams of shapes. Of triangles.
And dark dreams. Nightmares. Apocalyptic visions of red... and black...
He shuddered reflexively, and made his way down the mountain side with renewed vigour. He had come at least, and his dreams lay before him like ripened fruits. The breeze kicked up behind him – shedding flakes from the slick drifts of snow which piled about. They both travelled north-east on the same compass. The wind must dream, too, he thought.