Toryg stood at the foot of the mountain; it was the small hours before dawn, and the one hindrance dividing him from home sat before him. At his back, the cancerous growth that had become colloquially known as the Tower of Babil loomed in blessed stillness; the Alliance and Scions had seen to silencing it. Garlemald about it was equally quiet, though less blessed for it.
The massif rose before him in a great grey smear up to the eternally-overcast sky, ending in the blunt-ended Bannister Rock at its peak.
Gone were his leathers and greatcoat and cuirass, replaced with weatherproofed climbing gear. His gunblade he'd kept, its harness and mooring hooks strapped over the climber's pack he wore. Hung from his wrists by their straps were matched climbing-axes; his boots now fit with spikes at toe, sole, and heel.
He waited for the very first hint of lightening to turn the sky from a roiling grey and black to simple grey, then off-white of day before setting the axes to stone. The first day he climbed eight bells, setting pitons and fall-leads every dozen or so yalms just for safety's sake. When dusk began to settle over the land, he set two anchor-points and hung his hammock and slept, praying to the Twelve whom he didn't appreciably believe in to keep him from tumbling to his end.
That night, as he hung several hundreds of yalms up the mountain face, he dreamed. He dreamed of his brother Yeshu, who had one year drawn the lot for playing Greatfather Yule one year when Toryg was a cub, and went about the village passing gifts from hand to hand. Yeshu had saved a most precious gift for his youngest sibling, a karakul made from the very wool of the selfsame beast their village kept. Yeshu had passed away two years after of the same wasting disease that would have ended their mother's life. The dream made him weep as he slept, but he remembered it more for his brother playacting as Greatfather Yule than his dying.
The second day came and went uneventfully; the third, as he gained altitude, where the air became thin and a chore to take in, his instincts took hold, and the method he'd learned as a cub to keep his breath came to mind; through the nose deep into the lungs, out through the mouth. All the same, there were periods he became light-headed as he ascended, and had to stop for a handful of moments. It wasn't until, climbing and setting pitons well after dark, his axe swung and struck nothing but free air that he panicked.
His other axe was well-anchored, but the brief jolt it gave him did not register in his mind as 'I have reached the top' until his hand hit stone. He had gained the Shelf at last. However much he'd wanted to start across the high dale for what remained of his home village, he was exhausted, and did not favor his chances of finding it in the dark. So, he made camp on—thankfully—solid ground. Sleep was slow in coming and fitful, but hadn't it always?
Dawn of the fourth day brought with it an anxiousness, not quite an anxiety, but an eagerness to get up and go, to get where he intended to be. He made himself pack slowly, methodically.
The dale spread out white and wide before him, a plane of snow crusted over with ice blown down from the north in the night; the wind blew but in spurts and whistling gusts that sent skirls of powder spiraling into the air to land again unseen amidst the tundra. Here and there stands of evergreens and deciduous trees devoid of leaves grew from the otherwise unbroken fall of snow. Far off, he thought he could hear the keening cry of a bull elk calling to its fellows.
He was, at long last, home.
Midday came and went before he saw something in the distance, a sort of unnatural hillock of snow that rose in a gentle slope far taller than a drift should have. He made his way for it, taking care to move slowly and breathe evenly.
As he drew closer, he knew that he had found what he sought. The hillock was seemingly topped with a trio of lashed-together logs; the remains of the great firepit at the center of the village of the clan Ivara. Smaller mounds spread out along one side of it were obviously collapsed yurts long since buried. At the far end lay the ice-encrusted remains of the longhouse, where had dwelt himself and all his closest kin, where his mother had led from her seat as Queen.
At the sight, he felt a tightening in his chest and throat that had nothing to do with altitude.
Ice crunched brittlely underfoot as he trod towards the longhouse. From the long porch-like front deck, he moved with plodding footsteps heavy with foreboding. What if what he sought was not, in fact, within? What if the spirits of the land were mistaken, and his mother's staff was gone, or broken, and not simply sleeping as they had assured him? The questions came in a merciless wave until he arrived at the broken-in door. It hung listing to one side by a single hinge; a curious line had been drawn in the snow on the floor from the wind pushing it open and shut in some recent gale, making a corner drag on the powder in a clean arc.
Reaching out, his gloved hand pressed upon the door and he moved inside. Within, all was burnt and frosted over in its abandoned state, but that is not what he saw. To Toryg's eyes, it looked for a shining, warm moment, as if the intervening years had not happened at all. At the center of the longhouse was another firepit, a miniature cousin to the one outside. Tables lined either side of the pit, with space between themselves and it for passage. At the far end sat the wooden throne carved of ironwood, resplendent in its rustic appearance, etched with elk and karakul and sigils of ancient runes. The hall was empty, but for that barest of moments, Toryg saw it as it had been, captured in memory when he was so very young.
Now, it was desolate. Tables overturned, fire long burned to ashes and dashed to nothing, the throne shattered and cast to the corners of the dais upon which it had sat. Nowhere was there a sign that any soul had crossed the threshold over the years.
Setting his jaw to the emptiness and silence, Toryg moved towards the dais, the iced floorboards creaking under his weight as he passed. Standing at the foot of it, he looked at the broken throne; tears burned his eyes, but he refused them leave to fall. Slowly he knelt, and as he had seen the Queen's guards do, bowed his head and raised his left hand, and with only a minor hitch in his voice said, "Hail to Thee, Ivara, Mother to Clan; I beg Thy leave of Thy house."
There was no answer, but he rose all the same; silence brooked consent, it seemed. He gained the dais, heading for the door to the chambers behind. Here, he saw no moment frozen in time, merely frozen. Off the short hallway from the doorway, there were some seven rooms. One such was his own, he knew. The rest were those of his siblings, Yeshu, Kajn, and Tjifn, the small dining area connected to the kitchen and their parent's master bedroom. Toryg's father, Tolmir, had ruled only in the kitchen, where he kept court over pot and pan, providing meals shared with his family over laughter and long talks. Through the empty kitchen he walked, stopping only once. Over the stone fireplace hung his father's gunblade; weathered and nicked though it was, it was a deadly piece of steel.
Again, Toryg raised his left hand, but remained standing; for among equals, there was no kneeling.
"Hail, Father; I knew thee not as much as I would have liked. Thy wisdom as a man I but wish I could have had over these long days. So it goes." That said, he moved on, leaving his father's weapon where it still hung.
To the master bedroom his feet carried him. The dark within was neither comforting nor familiar. There was the large bed where Queen and consort had slept and loved, a wardrobe, a standing washbasin now long since frozen over.
From the side of his pack, Toryg took a torch and struck it alight. Shadows flickered and capered on the walls as he moved; place to place and object to object, seeking the staff that Ivara had held nearly to her dying day.
Carefully, as not to disturb overmuch the final resting place of anything within, he rifled through clothes and long chests, pulled back the crumbled green coverlet on the bed, and even under the bed itself. He found nothing but bitter dust and frost.
As he knelt on the floor before the bed, his head bowed in defeat, he felt within him a sudden surge as of anger, yet dulled by determination. Calming his breath, slowly, he clasped his hands. Softly, he began to speak.
"O, Winds, I beg of thee, do lead me to the branch that thou hast touched and given to the Ivara of eld."
When his voice died, a gentle breeze picked up outside and seemingly found a crack in the longhouse's timbers. The gust pushed at him, and picked up a smattering of frost crystals besides as it blew back out of the chamber. He rose and followed.
Led back outside, Toryg saw evidence of the gust's passage, divots in the frost on the floor and walls. He stood in open air again, blinking against the assault of diffuse sunlight stinging his eyes. The zephyr he sought was twirling and curling over a point some distance from the great firepit at the center of the village. Eyes wide despite the glare, he stared in awe. A feeling of desperation fell over him, and he could contain himself no longer.
Sprinting with some speed despite the ice and the awkward spiked boots, he dropped to his knees and began scrabbling at the skin of ice where the gust had shown him. Piles of snow and chunks of ice he cast aside until his gloved fingertips touched something with no give, which brought from Toryg a moment of pause. Hands shaking, he pushed aside the powder until he could make out the solid form of a wooden bole lain buried in the snow.
Finally, before him lay bared his mother's staff. It seemed to have been grown from a sapling rather than carved, nurtured and kept healthy by its wielders long past. Broad, dark green leaves shining like leather adorned the head of the staff as if freshly sprouted. Toryg took it up in both hands, touching the haft to his brow as relief flooded him. The spirits had led him true after all. He felt, in that moment, as if a tremendous weight was seeping out of him, as if a mouth had opened in his body and released a slow but deep sigh.
He stayed sitting that way for a handful of moments. Around him, the wind seemed to be growing in volume, but he felt nothing of its passing. Slowly, with dawning realization, he could discern words through the wind, muffled as if by distance. Looking up, he saw them. Shapes in the near-distance indistinct and blurred, but there. They seemed to be growing closer with each moment. He did not notice the threads of bluish-white that exuded from him to the very air, flowing from snow to wind to rock to snow again.
Nor did he notice the gaseous crimson and black light exiting his back from between his shoulders.
The shapes in the snow drew closer, their features becoming clearer, and he knew them at last. Every face he knew. Here a cousin, there a neighbor, hither his sister Tjifn and her daughter Liljn, thither other, familiar faces of friends from the village long since killed in the Imperial attack nigh on three decades before. They stood facing him, their mouths moving, but he could not understand them.
"I…I don't…" he began, and tried to rise, but movement in the thronged shapes made him stop. They were parting for one of their number. The last of them moved apart, and Toryg's eyes shot wide open.
She stood as she had been in the time before sickness had tried to claim her. Tall, a slim woman whose svelte shape belied a tangible strength, white fur marred only by the selfsame black stripes Toryg himself bore, and a long, flowing mane of snowy tresses. From under a serene brow, Toryg's own aquamarine eyes peered out at him.
"M…mother…" Toryg husked the word, his throat aching with the passage of wind. His eyes burned, the tears begging to be released. He still would not give them leave to fall.
Queen Ivara, the last ruler of her clan, approached her last living child. He could see through her as through a fog, but her form was definite, nigh tangible by his guess.
"Mother, I tried…" he began again, but he could say no more. Ivara stood over him, and slowly, knelt in the snow before him, wrapping him up in her arms, guiding his head to her breast. Around them, the susurrus of his relatives and neighbors speaking in their indiscernible patter rose, but still, he could make out no words.
As his mother held him, Toryg heard her voice in the cup of his ear for the first time in thirty years, calm, soothing, but also pleading.
"You must let us go, my son. You cannot live with us kept captive within you any longer, and we cannot rest until the parts of us you have kept are rejoined with us in the lifestream." Toryg's head rose, dismay written on his face.
"But I must keep the memory of our people alive! Without you—" And he looked around at his clan and back up to his mother. "—all of you, I am nothing! No clan, no kin, no…no love of same, how am I to keep our legacy?"
With a mother's patience and gentle chiding, his mother, his Queen said, "You are our legacy, my son. On you alone rests our future. Your memory alone must suffice. Imperfect though it may be, you must make your own path. Let us go, so we may, at last, know full and true peace." Ivara kissed his brow, and it was with all the years of longing and loneliness that he felt, at last, the one thing in all the world he had wanted more than anything: love beyond words, love from family and friends unspoken but felt. It nearly broke him, but digging deep, he uttered the words he knew he had to ask.
"H-how do I let you go?"
Ivara reached to where her son grasped her staff, and held her fingers firmly over his.
"You must send us; you must perform a Wake."
Toryg looked up at her, the dismay and terror he felt in that moment supplanted by acceptance. Slowly, his eyes shut, the faint trace of his tears finally ran down his cheeks. He nodded, and Ivara rose, allowing him to stand, which he did in wobbling fits and starts. Off in the distance, a seeming rumble of thunder billowed over the dale.
Toryg stood in the circle of his family, his clan, looking into an many faces he could, finally settling on that of his mother where she stood in the snow, expectant. Shifting the staff to his left hand, he stood erect but with head bowed as if in prayer.
Finally, he began to speak, and his voice was steadier than before; firm, but humbled before his kin.
"O, Stone underfoot. O, Winds above. O, River that flows. O, Trees that grow. O, Beasts of the tundra above and below." As he spoke, he poured his own aether into the staff in his grasp, which now glowed with a soft but soothing white light. "Guide these, my kin, my clan, my Queen, to the Stream of Life. Give them succor at the clearing at the end of the path. Bring these, my family to final peace, and the rest to which they deserve."
As Toryg raised the staff, a harsh sound shattered the still; a roar not unlike that of a Steppe baras from a throat several dozen times multiplied in scope. Starting at the noise, the spell dissipated, and those souls around him, too, turned towards it. Another roar broke forth, and his kin closest to it rushed away in a panic, surging around and behind him.
What he saw as they parted….
It did indeed look like a baras, but any resemblance to the great cat of the Azim Steppe stopped there. A coat of fur black as midnight on a moonless eve was marred by jagged stripes of blood-crimson from head to foot. From its back a pair of membranous wings sprouted where shoulder met body. Tufts of white mane could be seen from under the helm it wore. The helm itself was familiar—but then, it would be. Hadn't he killed its owner some ten years ago for the slaughter and enslavement of his clan and himself? From the eyeslit of the great cermet helm, a pair of bloodred eyes glared in malevolent hatred of the one standing between itself and its prey.
From somewhere within himself, a voice seemed to pipe up, and he knew the beast's name.
The forceful guardian….
The Griever….
Toryg stood in stunned silence, the staff of Ivara all but forgotten in his hand as its head dropped to the ground. From somewhere else, another voice was calling to him.
"Please, my son, you must protect us!" He looked around and back and his mother stood with arms held out in a shielding gesture to her clan where they stood at her back, shifting and moving on the verge of panic. "It is beyond any of us!"
The beast began slowly padding towards the gathered souls, the sounds of its footsteps massive in the still air. Toryg turned back to face it. Just as slowly, he dipped his shoulder, and unslung first one strap and then the other of his travel-pack, letting it drop from his back. He grasped the grip of his gunblade, and with a deliberate motion, draw it from its hooks, and letting it hang by his side, threw it straight up into the air.
The weapon spun end over end towards the beast in an arc, and Toryg ran after it. The Griever broke forth in a plodding run, a growl building in its throat as the weapon landed in the ice point-down some yalms in front of it just as Toryg reached it. His hand went to the grip once again, and he dragged it from the powder with a ringing note of steel, turning as the beast pounced to slash at its face as it lunged. The staff hung forgotten in his off-hand.
The beast and the Hrothgar danced for some time, trading blows and evading others, the former pushing the latter back with each advance. Toryg roared back at its cries, wordless sounds of rage and hurt that broke the sounds of their fighting. Talons raked over him and wings battered him; he answered with cuts and fiery bursts from the blade itself. Sparks flew from cermet as Toryg struck at its face.
With a roar, the beast lunged, rushing him and bowling him over to the ground where he tumbled to a stop on his front. Dazed, Toryg did not notice while he struggled to rise that the beast had approached again and reared up on its hind legs, one paw raised and swiftly descending in an arc towards him.
He felt the impact rock his head aside, and saw with detached interest the spatter of blood that now stained the snow under him. Then the report from his cut face met his brain, and with a silent rictus, he rose to bring his gunblade in an answering crosswise slash over the beast's visor. By some chance, the tip of his blade found the red depth of an eye and blinded it in another spurt of red.
The two combatants broke apart, then, in a momentary reprieve. Through the haze of pain and fury, Toryg heard his mother calling.
"Trust the spirits!" She spoke with hand outstretched, pointing to the staff that he still held forgotten in his off-hand. "You cannot defeat its wrath with fury alone!"
Looking to the bole, Toryg noticed that the leaves themselves glowed now, a viridian light emanating from within. Awed, he looked at both it and his gunblade; the cylinder he had long since fired empty while the staff seemed to grow warmer, more vibrant in his grasp.
To himself, he said, "Together then," and set the blade to his shoulder in the classic ready position, while holding the staff out before him like a brand. He called out, "O, Winds! Strike mine foe with thy cutting strength!" And the wind answered, buffeting the beast even as it lunged for him as he spoke. It rolled to a stop some yalms distant, its wings hanging limp and obviously broken around it like a cloak.
"O, Stone! Break forth and batter mine enemy!" A boulder rose as from under the Griever, sending it and a spray of ice chunks and powdery snow flying as it brok the frost-crusted snowy ground. Like this, Toryg drove the beast back and back, closer to the far edge of the Shelf. As the Hrothgar sent spell after spell towards it, its efforts flagged in fits and starts as its injuries grew in number.
Finally, near the Shelf's edge, Toryg stood heaving breath. Blood trailed down his mouth where the beast's claws had raked him. Through all this, he felt strangely calm. The Griever struggled to rise and advance, peering with its remaining eye glowing with abject hate at the one who proved such a painful nuisance. Toryg raised the staff a final time.
"I abjure thee, monster," he said to it, and a blinding white light burst forth from the staff, a sphere of energy that harmed him not at all, but sent the Griever flying and flailing over the Shelf's edge. It fell from sight with a rapidly-dwindling roar that, after a moment, abruptly ceased.
Still gasping, Toryg's hand finally released their grip on both staff and gunblade, and he fell to the ground between them, collapsing onto his knees and hands. Unseen, the souls of his clan had approached, following to watch the battle between the last of their number and the creature his own hatred had borne.
A cool hand touched the back of his head, and he looked up at his mother. Her touch trailed to his face, and a brief flash and tingle there told him that Ivara had given him one final gift of healing. As her hand moved away, he reached up to feel it; it was still tender, but the flesh was knitted, and would scar over. It was a fitting reminder.
Ivara still held her hand out to him, but to help him up. "Please, by son. Send us to ourselves." Toryg stayed kneeling before her in the snow a moment longer, freezing in memory the shape of his mother's face. He wanted never again to forget what love looked like.
Taking her hand and pulling himself up, he plucked the staff from where it had fallen, and whispering his plea once again to the spirits of the land around them, gathered the spell into himself and through the staff.
"I love you, mother."
"I love you, my son."
They were the last words Toryg heard her say before he released the aether.
Another, gentler-glowing ball of light coalesced in the air over both Toryg and the soul-pieces of his clan. It flattened and expanded, becoming a disc, and then, with almost careless abandon, burst into sparks of blue light. Each spark flew to a soul, entered it, subsumed itself within them, and one by one, they, too, seemed to burst into points of light that floated up and up, motes like fireflies whose lights slowly went out.
A final spark finally entered the shape of his mother, and she, too, became an upward-moving shower of blue light.
Toryg slowly closed his eyes as the last lights finally dissipated, rejoining the lifestream with a faint crystalline tinkling. Not for the first time, he dropped to his knees.
There, in the first place he had known as home, at last, he could mourn.
The wind blew calmly, and not a soul heard him weep.