"They found him, far out on the ice, torn to pieces, as is the way with those whom the spirits have punished for refusing to observe the customs of their forefathers. And the son, who was bound to the sledge, had not been touched, but he had died of fright."
~ Artuk, Who Did All Forbidden Things
(Knud Rasmussen [compiler], "Eskimo Folk-Tales")
Lincoln Sea, northwest of Greenland, 1980
Arluk struggled with the weight of the walrus's carcass. The ropes dug into his right shoulder and burned. Step by excruciating step, the hunter dragged the rickety sled behind him. The Inuit's wide, sealskin kamik crunched into a thin layer of snow that wafted idly across the sea ice. Sweat poured into his eyes, while an ice formed of snot and labored exhalations clung to his bushy whiskers. Arluk damned his aching muscles, the arthritic pains familiar to any man of late middle age. He should not have had to tackle a seal hunt alone, but nearly all left of the able-bodied Nakotiqa tribesmen had succumbed to sickness. The others had abandoned their territory long ago to seek work among the white man, vanishing into their cities and ships, forsaking the old ways—and the ways of Arluk's folk were older than most.
Other Inuit tribes would also say "stranger than most." Few had dealings with the inbred Nakotiqa, who were called, variously, in the inconsistent tongues of the Arctic folk "those not like us." They were among the most remote tribes and dwelt the furthest north, roaming the ice bridging Greenland and Ellesmere Island, rarely journeying further south than the Robeson Channel. The persistence of the missionaries who discovered them during the Great War would subdue their most peculiar traditions, but even after converting to the white man's faith, Arluk's people remained alone. If the anthropologists of the day endeavored to pay the insular tribe more attention, they'd have discovered a fathomless heritage, older even than the extinct Tuniit folk who preceded the Inuit, as ancient as the stones and structures buried beneath kilometers of ice and just as unfamiliar to modern scholarship. The prehistoric Nakotiqa mingled with the giant Tuniit and later, the Eskimos as to make their own features and language nigh-indistinguishable from their Arctic neighbors. But a careful observer might note the golden cast to the flesh of a rare few of them, the curly Assyrian thickness of some of the men's beards, or the flowing tawny locks of their most coveted women. This theoretical onlooker, being most fortunate, might have chanced upon the unusual presence among the Nakotiqa of eyes tinted a muted emerald or grey, of which a bearer was born but once in many, many generations.
If such notions ever occurred to Arluk, he paid them no heed. The hunter was a practical man, and jaded. Despite the badgering of his wife, he paid scant service to the prayers taught to his parents and grandparents by bullying missionaries. Likewise, he rarely heeded the rites crucial to placating the spirits and souls which every Nakotiqa knew to dwell in the land, the winds, and the animals. The quest for meat was Arluk's reality, and the walrus would provide so much of it, along with lamp oil, leather, and bone. Besides, the blubbery beast was already mortally wounded when the huntsman stumbled across it, by a bear that most likely limped away worse off than its intended prey. Let the bear worry about the walrus's spirit, thought Arluk. He had more realistic concerns, like how to haul the 1800 kilogram carcass home on a sleigh that was already uncertain to sustain the weight of a few seals. Even should he manage the load, Arluk would likely be very late in returning home, many hours into the darkest part of the night. A less stubborn man would have forsaken the task as impossible.
Save for a sturdy steel knife, Arluk was unarmed, having broken his spear leveraging the walrus onto his sled. The hunter winced when he noticed the transport's right runner was bent at a slight outward angle beneath the weight of his impractical cargo. As he heaved and pulled, Arluk lamented the loss of the tribe's sled dogs, who over the past decade had run off starved; or were eaten themselves as times grew ever leaner and desperate for the Nakotiqa. The man remained undeterred, however. He was lucky indeed to find this prize and the snow was light enough that he only needed to keep the runners oiled to make sufficient progress back to the camp. It was but a few kilometers, and the impending night would be alight with the aurora. The lack of dogs, a broken spear, and the bent runner were mere setbacks. At least, they were minor concerns compared to the possibility that the bear might return—after licking its own wounds—to claim its wounded prey. A bear who likewise left limping tracks and a trail of blood droplets in the same general direction Arluk was headed.
Halfway to the camp, the sea ice sloped upward, rising to the north. Arluk strove to remain south of the rise on relatively flat terrain. It was on the crest of the rise he caught site of the bear. While his heart seemed to creep up his throat, Arluk drew his knife. A year ago, the Inuit had traded a narwhal horn for the stainless steel blade, to one of the white roughnecks who worked on the oil rig a kilometer north of where he now stood rooted with shaky legs. The bear, for its part, reared awkwardly upon its hind legs, facing not the Inuit hunter and his corpulent burden, but away toward the foreigners' superstructure. For a few seconds, Arluk had thoughts that wavered between fending off what ought to be a severely wounded bear and running for his life. He decided, simply, to wait and see what his legs would do when the bear finally caught scent of the bloated pinniped's corpse. There was an impasse of several minutes in which Arluk waited for the giant white carnivore to turn its gaze away from the aurora-lit horizon, drop to all fours and charge down toward him. It never did, and the hunter soon realized it never would. He had never seen a bear stand on its hind legs for so long and remain motionless. Something was not right.
Knife still drawn, Arluk left the sled and cautiously stomped up the crest to the immobile bear. As the rise steepened, the hunter was forced to lean into it for balance. Fortunately, the night was clear and the air still. The curious hunter pressed upward, cautious but no longer scared of the animal who stood as if stuffed and displayed in a white man's lodge. The lights of the blazing sky played across the hide of the bear, which the Inuit realized was sheathed in crystalline ice.
Arluk dropped his knife. There was ilisiinneq on the wind—dark magic, darker spirits.
The seasoned hunter finally followed the gaze of the frozen bear, whose expression showed nary a hint of the animal's legendary defiance or ferocity. Her wide eyes and snarling muzzle were petrified in something comparable to fright, as if the animal recognized a predator even more formidable than she.
When he finally beheld the tilted ruin of the Blæst Gående rig, Arluk, a practical man, bowed and sang in the old tongue for the bear's spirit. He sang reluctantly for the men of the oil platform, too. Though he suspected them accountable for their fate, Arluk feared their lingering tupilaq were certain to frighten off the local game. Beyond the ruined oil platform, far to the north, far beyond the limit of the hunter's keen sight, tore a screech akin to a herd of besieged mammoths trumpeting in unison. It was a sound Arluk recognized and had not heard in 15 years. He ran toward his camp, leaving the dead walrus behind.
---
It had been ages since another being touched its mind as Rlim Shaikorth did to Gamera now. Behold, Oh Kurmara! It had used an ancient variant of the super monster's name. Mine is the cold that extinguishes suns! Not the Black Guardian, nor any power in the cosmos will prevent the white death I unleash on this world. I am he who even the gods may not oppose!
Gamera had been subject to both the White Worm's freezing helix and its insufferable boasting eons ago. Rlim Shaikorth was a connoisseur of the black wizards of lost Hyperborea, he pried from them a thousand secrets of the arcane before devouring them utterly—their flesh, their souls, and their eldritch essences. A side effect of the monster's insatiable appetites was to be infused with the tatters and scraps of its victims' personas. While the mind of an Old One was generally incomprehensible and alien, Rlim Shaikorth's was one of the few contaminated by the attitudes of humankind. It allowed the White Worm to make itself understood to mortals and mortal sympathizers like Gamera. In ages past, shortly after it had been the agent of Gamera's eons-long oblivion, the terrible annelid had inadvertently revealed to a mortal magician the source of its own undoing. Perhaps it would do so now, perhaps not. The guardian tortoise would not make the same mistake in either case—it had nothing it wanted to "say" to the Old One anyway. Its job was to execute it.
Rlim Shaikorth crawled, stretching and contracting its segmented bulk toward the glacier into whose face its foe was embedded. A lipless, smiling maw bisected the flat disk of the White Worm's face, its crimson eyes, resembling globular blood clots, leaked gore as if they were tears. Has the Elds' pet truly fallen to the least of my abilities? it shouted directly into Gamera's mind, undecided whether or not the chelonian demigod had survived its attack. When Gamera did not stir, the Old One's telepathic soliloquy was aimed at nothing specific, save the land and the stars themselves.
Hearken Forgotten Ones! Attend Ulthar and Hagarg Ryonis, if your sluggish minds yet pierce the Wall of Sleep! It is your progeny I have again vanquished! No longer have you a power in this world. I am healed, and will set upon your garden green a white death, an eternal frost wherever my light is cast!
Gamera was trapped. It needed to protect its head and limbs from the White Worm, which were, save its left leg, incapable of reaching very far out of its shell, wedged as it was in the glacier. Worse, it needed to fuel and reignite its inner fire. While its arcane organs could harness electromagnetic waves enabling it to sense its prey or levitate, their main function was to ionize Gamera's flames, providing its jet propulsion and devastating weaponry.
Rlim Shaikorth coiled and from the tip of its tail extended a thin, whip-like tentacle. As the Old One gurgled a susurrus hauntingly reminiscent of crude words, the extracted appendage writhed and traced a symbol in the frigid night air. A glyph formed, black and yet somehow brilliant, suspended as if branded into the flesh of space. The abominable annelid culminated its echoing chant with a noisome keen comparable to an eagle inhaling a hurricane.
As the White Worm's voice trailed and the blasphemous symbol dissipated, the mountain of ice in which Gamera was embedded began to shake, then slowly collapse in on itself. The glacier had come alive and was slurping down the shelled morsel in its lips, not stopping until it had seemingly sucked in its own face as well. When the Black Guardian was wholly enveloped, the icy cliff sealed its fracture of a mouth and then rumbled rhythmically, as if chewing.
Gamera felt the crush of the ice mountain even through its bio-metallic shell. The masticating glacier formed sharp interior teeth which bit down upon, but failed to pierce, its carapace. On its underside, however, the icy fangs relentlessly drilled at the turtle-like monster's more vulnerable plastron, and gouged their way through. Before its internal processes broke down and its supernatural abilities failed, the super monster felt Rlim Shaikorth turn dismissively and wriggle away to the south, and its own green life's blood pour down into whatever crevices the glacier retained.
---
Arluk, exhausted from his run across the bleak vastness, reached the edge of the Nakotiqa camp and collapsed. As his startled tribesfolk gathered around his prostate form, the hunter muttered, "ilisiinneq on the air! The Devil's envoy! We must leave!" Believing him possessed, they brought him to the igloo of Oogroq, the nomads' chief.
Amid a flurry of questions and suspicions, Oogroq sent the agitated tribesfolk away and tended to the feverish hunter. As he chanted magical words of healing, the old man prepared a fire and a cauldron of herbs. Scented smoke swirled into a small hole in the dome's ceiling. The flames crackled and cast their dancing light on the interior of the headman's snow house. Revealed within were the tanned hides of caribou and muskoxen, thoroughly covered with curvilinear sigils and crude figures in red dye. Lengths of driftwood and pieces of bone were similarly etched. The Nakotiqa chief, who also fulfilled the role of angakkuq, or shaman, kept woven baskets of effects, the contents of which his people ascribed a range of inscrutable origins and uses. While the Nakotiqa had converted to the white man's savior generations ago—even their wrinkled headman bore a crucifix—none were wholly divorced from their ancestors' beliefs.
The continuation of Arluk's ramblings preceded the opening of his eyes. Oogroq took stock of the hunter's delirious words as he gradually coaxed his patient to consciousness. "And the Devil's envoy returns…" groaned Arluk before he sat up, eyes widened, in a cold sweat.
"You have heard the voice of the Destroyer," charged Oogroq, who jabbed his long, bony finger to Arluk's bare chest—just above the middle-aged Inuit's pale, spearhead-shaped birthmark. The hunter, now fully cognizant, took quick stock of his surroundings. He lay upon the igloo's raised sleeping area, which was covered in furs. The headman, Arluk noticed, was now garbed in the archaic trappings of an angakkuq. Though he hadn't cast aside his crucifix, Oogroq had covered his craggy face with red glyphs, had wrapped his arms and throat with entwined fetishes of bone and soapstone, and gripped an inscribed whalebone rod. Over his shoulders the aged shaman had draped a yellowing white pelt. The dead creature's scalp and upper jaw formed a hood, and Arluk gaped with revulsion at its deformity. Its curved fangs were far crueler than a bear's. Affixed to the fore of the animal's oversized crown was what resembled a narwhal's spiraling tooth. The cape further betrayed the seemingly non-ursine origins of the hide, for dangling at its edges were strips of what were once six, not four, clawed legs.
Arluk had seen the cloak before when he was a younger man, 25 years or so ago. Oogroq had donned it when allaying a curse upon the military men who drove the Nakotiqa off one of their territories so a great weather and radar station could be built. The curse didn't work, of course, and the skeptical Arluk dismissed the mantle, repellent as it was, as a clever product of taxidermy, or the skin of mutant warped by the white man's poisons. Long had the no-nonsense hunter regarded the labors of the angakkuq as so much sleight-of-hand and trickery. For now, though, it was hard to dismiss the old man. Arluk was speechless as the shaman stood over him, showing in a crazed smile teeth which contrasted Oogroq's painted face.
"Answer, you idiot!" shrieked Oogroq. His voice sounded like a wheezing muskox.
"I want to go to my wife," answered Arluk, "and we need to leave this place. All of us" The hunter attempted to rise from the shaman's bed of furs. Falling back on his elbows, he said, "to the north, I heard its cry! It sounded like…"
"Ssshhh," hissed the angakkuq, who waved his arms and clutched his crucifix. The beads and charms about him clinked and rattled. "Say not its name, fool! You would give it power or bring it upon us."
"It toppled the fortress of the oil men," Arluk calmly replied. "It is already upon us."
The Nakotiqa headman seemed to consider this for a moment, then glowered at Arluk. "You don't know anything," he said, prodding Arluk with his finger to accentuate each syllable. "Do you remember when the foreigners came to us, fifteen years ago, and what they wanted of us?"
"I do. And the consequences," recalled Arluk, "the white fire, and those caught near it left shadows of ash. What that foreigner wanted of us was absurd, that is, until…"
"Until you saw IT with your own stupid eyes! Ha ha ha!" cackled Oogroq before a coughing fit struck him. This time it was the shaman's turn to lie down, as Arluk, summoning his strength, stood and embraced the ailing old man. The hunter gently lowered the costumed angakkuq to the bed of furs while Oogroq repaid him with several raps of the whalebone wand to Arluk's shoulders and back. "I am… FINE," rasped the shaman. Blood dribbled from his mouth down his chin.
"Father," pleaded Arluk, "please rest while I make us ready to leave. The old magic won't do us any good now."
Oogroq lay on his back, betraying his human frailty and sickness for all the fearsomeness of his garb. He smacked his son again with the wand, this time just below the knee. As the hunter yelped in pain and lost his balance, Oogroq said, "I am still the chief, boy! And you will do as I ask. You have said our gods dance to a new tune? Know that the song surges from the throats of the eldest chorus." The shaman muttered a word of power and gestured with the whalebone rod.
"What…" was all Arluk managed to come back with before he felt a fog upon his mind and a great weight upon his shoulders. His smarting leg, where his father had struck him, felt as if its bones were made of broken glass. Arluk dared not stand, and the chief's words formed vivid pictures in the mist before his eyes.
"Know my son, what you have ever suspected," intoned the old man in the commanding voice of the man he was so many decades ago, "that once Kalaallit Nunaat was blanketed in warm forests, and the foreigner who named it Grænland did so not, as the tale holds, because he wanted to lure settlers, but because he dreamt of its distant past. Maybe the Old Ones who yet sleep in the black gulfs below the ice reached him in dreams, I know not.
"Upon this once green land trod a race of gold giants, who, owing to their sorcery, we might as well call gods. Among them lurked our ancestors, who had migrated southwest from dying Lomar at the world's scalp. The gold giants built great cities and wielded powerful charms against the monsters of the depths. But even they, mere generations removed from the divinities who stole unto the earth, even they needed the secret names to work their magic!
"In Lomar, we had been chosen by the Great Spirits to learn the Nakotiqa for which we are named. These teachings encompass the breadth of time—from the blind chaos that spawned the world to the silent void that will someday swallow souls and stars—and countless eras between. In exchange we allowed the Great Spirits to borrow our skins, as their own forms were but thoughts.
"While the giants of this new land trod upon us and enslaved us, treated us as beasts—they begged for our wisdom out the corners of their mouths. We would not give up every secret; the starry lore of Yith and Yuggoth, the snake people, the Shan wasps and the primal shapers on the other side of the earth. Their mysteries we kept. The forbidden names we did share. Though I will not repeat them now, they are known by such epithets as 'Sleeper of N'kai,' 'The Thousand Eyes,' 'The Source of Uncleanliness,' 'The Spider God,' and more besides. There was a price for our help, and in time we became the giants' masters! We took some of the golden ones as consorts and others we seduced to our forms of worship. After the patchwork offspring of the Lier-in-Wait fell in battle, it was by our discretion that the children of the Eld kept the Old Ones at peace. It was truly a golden age.
"But all ages turn, and the day came when the world upended, and the ice devoured the forests and cities of Kalaallit Nunaat. The golden giants who'd not mixed with us escaped to the sea. Many folk have come and gone from this land since. But we of the Nakotiqa remain, to keep the peace with Those Below, to use the wisdom of the Great Spirits. Do you understand?"
Arluk nodded, as the fog lifted from his mind and blood circulated once again in his bruised leg. Then Oogroq continued, "the end is nigh, and we have one last thing to do. Those of us who have remained here through the ages, who have resisted the temptations of the white man's world, we're worthy of joining the Great Spirits. The Destroyer and the Guardian, Fire and Ice, fight at the age's end, for our destiny. But the outcome is in doubt. Among the prophesies is one that says there, here, a savior will arise to tip the balance. One that bears a mark like a grey flame!" Oogroq drew himself up with inexplicable vigor and again prodded his son's bare chest. A subtle white aura seemed to envelope the bent old angakkuk. Arluk, astonished, felt as if every breath had flown from his lungs. The de-pigmented, spearhead shaped blotch on his chest could indeed be seen as a flame.
"What are we to do?" asked Arluk to the shaman, when again he found his voice. The hunter gazed pensively out the igloo's clear ice window. Though it was deadest night, and had begun to snow, the tribe loitered about awaiting word of Arluk's condition, or an explanation for what had horrified him so. The shaman glared daggers at his son, and with some sadness, as if he expected the hunter to know the obvious answer to his own question. Arluk looked inwardly, touched the birthmark over his heart, and found that he did.
---
Gamera was familiar with the sensation of swimming in a soup of its own green gore. While its instinct was to sleep, the Black Tortoise did not have much time. If it indulged in its regenerative hibernation now, it would lose the opportunity to escape its icy prison. It will have failed in the same manner, against the same opponent, as it had untold eons ago. Gamera could not leave its reemergence to chance, much less the caprice of its human "allies" who were just as likely to prefer it entombed, reemergence of the Old Ones notwithstanding. Gamera fell long ago in an age of powerful sorcerer-scientists, knowledgeable scholar-priests, and exalted god-kings. They understood the delicate foundation upon which their dominion lay. They recognized the enemy, and knew well their signs and omens. They mastered the rites that the Eld designed to keep the embattled Old Ones quiescent. The debased mortals of the modern age were ill-equipped for the cosmic storm on the horizon. The stars were right—diabolic, mind-blasting forces were in motion, tearing down the ramparts of the cosmos, ushering in an eternal, abominable night to supersede the dawn of a new, golden age for humankind. Gamera knew it was their last hope.
Gamera felt pain like a mortal organism, a characteristic its architects believed would make it a more conscious warrior. Its reaction to pain, however, was not like a biological creature. It had a limited capacity to suffer. Pain was a signal to the monster's brain to be cautious, but it did not cringe from its wounds. Nothing short of nigh-total bodily annihilation would force the demigod to shut down and sleep, though it was normally strategic to do so before then. In the state it was in, most of its supernal organs were defunct. Damaged as they were, Gamera could not hope to influence the world's electromagnetic energies—it could not levitate, generate heat, produce fire or plasma, nor could it sense the locality of its enemies. Gamera's effectiveness as a warrior was limited.
All the Black Guardian could do was bleed. Considering the nature of its prison, that might be enough.
A green slush had formed beneath Gamera's broken body. The dark magic of Rlim Shaikorth had faded and the glacier had reverted to its normal, inanimate state. The reptilian goliath was suspended upside-down. Wracked with pain, the crippled demigod extended its right forearm, barely forcing it through its warped limb cavity. Gamera's razor-sharp talon finally touched the point where the edges of its wrecked shell pressed up against the ice floor. It scratched, then clawed at the blood-softened ice beneath it. Before long, it had excavated enough to manipulate its right claw outside its shell. Time passed, and eventually Gamera was able to orient its entire body downward, bringing both claws into play. Then its head emerged, enabling it to gnaw at the deepening floor. As it dug, Gamera's warm blood discovered new cracks to flow into, further weakening the ice. The monster turtle persisted like this, following the green rivulets into the nadir of the glacier and, finally, beyond.
When it broke under the ice cap, Gamera felt cool, briny water flow around it. The Black Guardian of the North allowed itself to sink to the sea floor and succumbed to sleep.