A Feast for Pan
A Sword & Sorcery tale and a link in the Chain Story
Greetings traveler!
I’ve been invited to contribute to Michael A. Stackpole’s collaborative publishing project, the Chain Story, where different authors write stories in their own worlds which all contain a shared story element.
You can learn about how the Chain Story works, read from the first link in the story, or begin with “A Feast for Pan,” which is set before the events of my on-going serial novel SOIL.
You can either download the PDF, EPUB, or read the tale right here in this article.
IN THE WASTES, ALL ARE FODDER FOR PAN.
Hromgir and Arvid of Clan Sparrow are on the run after a raid gone wrong. Braving the frozen wastes of the northern coast, they must reach the mountain pass to escape the Wystran riders close on their heels.
Hiding from the riders, they take shelter in the depths of a strange cave, unearthing otherworldly horrors better left buried....
PARKR DIED IN HROMGIR’S ARMS as they slept. Though sleep was not the word for what men did beneath the white, winking stars on the frigid coast of the North Sea. ‘Twas more akin to stillness. Stasis. Awaiting the sun’s gentle touch come morn, or the grip of Pan’s serpent fingers.
Hromgir pried open his eyes, blinked away the hoarfrost from their lids, wiggled his numb toes. Stiff flesh pressed against his exposed chest and thighs; dead weight stealing what little heat remained in him. Dead he would have been, too, if not for Arvid, the hairy bastard hugging his back.
Above the heap of furs, where he lay mashed between a mound of sleeping bodies embedded in the pit of dug out snow, Hromgir stilled his breath in time with the silence lingering between crunches in the frost, the faint ring of mail. He flexed his fingers, curled them into fists, breaking up the ice which seemed to clog his veins. His fingertips tingled, burned. Stiff leather groaned as a man bent over the mound and closed his gloved hand round the hem of the furs. Hromgir drew his dirk, only moving as his Wystran pursuer moved. Arvid unlatched his chilly fingers from Hromgir’s waist, his muscles snapping taut, poised to strike.
How many of us had survived the night? Hromgir thought, as his blood again began to simmer. His arms and legs ached, stark and reluctant. But his heart thumped slowly, steadily. How many soldiers stand over us?
The Wystran whipped free the furs, a spray of frost rising like fog over the sea, billowing as a sail in the morning gust. Searing sunlight branded Hromgir’s wide open eyes. He neither trembled nor twitched—for a moment he let the cold take him, as if his spirit sought Pan’s shadowed vale alongside Parkr.
“Dead!” said the soldier, swinging round on his heels. “The whole lot of ‘em, froze in the night. Just as the captain said.”
The troupe laughed, reveling in their easy victory. There were nine voices. At least, Hromgir mused, the striders would die in battle. As will these Wystran dogs. Pan will feast well this morn…
Behind the Wystran’s back, Hromgir and his kinsmen rose like revenants beneath the high noon. Teeth bared in a silent snarl, Hromgir lunged at the soldier and drove his dirk through both linen coif and warm flesh into the base of the wretch’s skull.
Seven others bounded past him, sliding dirks and game knives into throats and groins. Arvid coiled his bulging, tattooed arms round a man’s neck.
Hromgir’s prey slumped before him, dead even before the stream of steaming blood spouting from his neck spattered the snow. Hromgir drew the soldier’s broadsword, tossed the body aside, and charged barefoot over the hard-packed snow toward the Wystran scouts.
Another soldier made for Arvid, wading through the sudden chaos of ringing steel and the screams of the dying, his spear lifted in a thoughtless hope of saving his comrade. Hromgir lunged, bringing the Wystran broadsword over his shoulder and dropping its heavy blade onto the soldier’s helm, cleaving the cur from skull to breastbone.
Hromgir grimaced as he freed his blade, pain gnawing at his limbs, chill siphoning life from his inflamed, swollen feet. His eyes passed over the camp turned killing field; Nine Wystrans lay dead in the snow, stained scarlet. Naught but six striders remained of the dozen who had survived the shipwreck of the previous day. Three had been cut down, three had frozen. Too many wounds, and too many warm hands withheld by ingrained insecurities.
Half of the survivors were of the Clan Corsair, who had made their riches raiding more temperate eastern climes and, for reasons known only to the gods, were notoriously afeared by the sight of a naked man. Clan Sparrow, Hromgir’s clan, knew no such boundary. You had to touch—be touched—if you wished to live through a bitter night on the brumal Kaldean coast. Parkr had frozen quick once the briny squalls intoned their loathsome lament. The boy shivered and chattered before the sun had set, his stubborn hands wrapped round his ribs, then went still. ‘Twas a shame, the boy was the only Corsair whom Hromgir respected. Just last night, the boy had thrust his blade between a knight’s plates at the very moment the knight meant to bring down his halberd on Hromgir’s head.
“How far?” asked Arvid, who had kept Hromgir alive through countless harsh nights. His long, black beard was crusted with hoarfrost and blood.
“A league behind, maybe two.” Hromgir said, donning his woolen leggings. The three Corsairs averted their eyes. “There shall be blood ‘fore dusk, my brother.”
Arvid clasped Hromgir’s hand, his sword belt dangling in his opposing grip. “We’ll die as we lived.”
Hromgir nodded, donning his dented half-helm. “Aye.”
“I shall not die on foreign shores,” proclaimed Basba, warchief of the Corsairs. “Will you lay down your arms so easily, Sparrows?”
Arvid and Hromgir ignored the brute’s blustering. Yet the third of the remaining Sparrows bristled, his hairless cheeks taut with youthful bravado. “Watch yer tongue! You dinnae ken these lands as do the Sparrows! Mine Da and his ‘fore him slayed and pillaged this country all their lives. You’d do best keepin’ that fat mouth shut!”
Basba’s face lit up as a northern star in the dawn. He turned his sweltering glare upon Hromgir. “Tell yer whelp to hold his tongue.” Looking at his brother Corsairs, Basba laughed, nodded toward the boy. “Look at him! I can see the milk from his ma’s teat still drippin’ from his lips!” They yipped and howled like a pack of cackling hyenas.
Hromgir squinted as the sun fully crested the Guardians to the east, and brutal rays reflected off the glittering field. “Peace, Torkel,” he said over his shoulder to the boy, his eyes never leaving Basba’s gaze. “We’ve a long flight ahead of us.”
They did not burn the bodies. No time. The roll of thunderous hooves crackled on the near horizon. Pursued by Pan’s ghastly grip and a hundred Wystran calvarymen, any pyre they raised would be for the lot of them. Running signified hope. A slim hope, only delaying the inevitable, but hope nonetheless. If they reached the mountain pass by nightfall, vanished into the narrow canyon ascending into the Shins beyond the Guardians, six men could outrun a hundred.
A prayer flitted across Hromgir’s lips as he trod the uneven terrain, ice crunching and compacting beneath every step. Ghosts of the unburned were doomed to forever wander the land, until Pan devoured them. Hromgir prayed to the All-Seeing that He recognized the needs of the living, and would show mercy to the dead.
The Gallows God saw all, but his fickle compassion was never assured; temperamental as a spring rain in this foreign land. Shall the drizzle fall and be on its way? Or will the wind spurn their way and muddy the path with lashing torrents of despair?
By afternoon, the trees arrived with the swell of the mountain’s rising slopes. Firs, spruce, a scattering of barren oaks and maples, and bits of southern trees that rode in the cracks of the leather soles worn by the native southerners. The pallid sky remained painfully indifferent, caught between another brewing storm and the flickering sunlight, as clouds soared inland upon bitter zephyrs.
The sun drifted towards the amber horizon. The mountain pass was too far. When he found himself aboard his jarl’s longship, Hromgir knew he might never again set foot on the green spring grasses of Skjöldwe, that he would likely perish in the lands settled in ancient times by their exiled forebears.
“End of the line, methinks,” said Arvid, standing atop a boulder, a hand lifted to his brow to shield against the glare, surveying the track behind them. “Horsemen are a league or so behind. They’ll catch us within the hour.”
“We never should have joined you on this damned expedition!” Basba roared. “Bloody cowards; the lot of you!”
The other two Corsairs seemed not to share their warchief’s fire. Their faces had gone gray, eyes haunted, as had young Torkel’s. Some folk faced Pan with courage, others, with steaming piss running down their legs to freeze in their boots.
Their luck had all but run out; ghostly feet could reach the pass ‘fore nightfall. But Hromgir had never relied upon such forces so flimsy as luck.
‘Twas said his father, Black Thorm, had been hexed by a vengeful troll, who used his wily seidr spells to woo away Thorm’s beauteous Hamingja and all those who might have attached themselves to his yet unborn sons. As the last living son of Thorm, Hromgir always paid more reverence to the Fylgja, his guiding spirit.
Their pursuers penetrated the horizon. A dark mass of horses writhed in the distance. Hromgir squinted up at the sloping, ivory capped rocks, scrutinizing darkling gaps between swollen, knobby boles.
“There!” He pointed to a black shadow flooding the bottom of a gully. “A cave. We’ll vanish till nightfall, then head to the pass by cover of night!”
Arvid laughed and clapped Hromgir upon the back. “This man always knows the path!”
“Pan’s breath...” Basba murmured. “we’ll have nowhere to run—the Wystrans will butcher us in there!”
“We have nowhere to run, now,” Hromgir said, trudging toward the cave.
“Die in the dark, then!” Basba waved his men to follow and headed west, away from the Sparrows, away from the Wystrans, away from that ice-cursed pit. “May Pan’s fetid maw close upon you, grind you to dust!”
* * *
The galloping of the Wystran horses tolled through the cavern, reverberating across the denticulate limestone walls and the rippled, jagged ceiling. Yet the chill abated not long after the light of day disappeared behind them; the stone beneath their sore heels radiated warmth.
The Sparrow Clan striders stumbled through the dark, swaying and skidding with every step. Hromgir led, his hand planted on a wall, for what meager direction it offered. They needed not pass through the cave, only hide within its shadows until the Wystrans took their search elsewhere.
He had overheard prisoners speak of the frigid highlands, fishermen they had locked in a shed, when the Sparrows and Corsairs seized control of a seaside estate days before the wreck.
“Keep digging,” one fisher had whispered, as the waxing moon reached its zenith, “then we’ll grab Kari and Ingrin and the bairns and we’ll make for the Shins. The bloody bastards will never find us!”
The other man scoffed. “Ye’re mad. Ain’t no one but rakes and outcasts in those parts.”
They must have thought Hromgir asleep outside. He had always snored prematurely whilst merely drifting. ‘Twas all there was to the fishermens’ half-brained plan; Hromgir’s axe left the other halves as crimson-gray heaps of meat on the ground. Sparrows never take risks, not even with simple fisherfolk.
How much time had passed in the suffocating dark of the cave, Hromgir did not know, but as he rounded a sharp corner, the band was met with a lurid scarlet glow emanating from just ahead. Hromgir squinted, nearly blinded by the sudden light. He raised a fist signaling the troupe to slow, then drew his bearded axe. Arvid’s arming sword slid free from its sheath; Torkel brandished his spear. Hromgir met Arvid’s eyes. The bearded man nodded and they skulked into the next chamber in tandem.
The passage opened into a circular room not much larger than that of a yurt. Against the rear wall slept an old man, so decrepit that Hromgir mistook him for a corpse, upon a bundle of furs, his labored breath wheezing through his wide, near toothless mouth. He was naked, aside from the tattered rag wrapped round his eyes, the withered folds of his flesh glistening with sweat.
Clutched in gnarled hands to his frail chest was a golden shard, set with a massive, luminescent ruby. A burning light spilled from its hellish eye. A smooth sweeping edge flowed into a jagged break; ‘twas but a piece of a fragmented whole.
“Tarru...” the old man gasped, trembling in the midst of his dream. “Tarru-syn... bastard.”
“What’s he got, there?” Arvid whispered, his eyes grown suddenly feverish.
Hromgir knew what notion had taken his kinsman. He pointed to a blackened, gnarled stave carved of blackthorn propped against the wall. “Arvid! He’s a seidr-man! We must not wake him.”
The moment Arvid scoffed, the old man choked and hacked a sopping cough. Hromgir snapped his wary gaze to the frail sleeper, whose snores simmered back into a steady cadence.
The corner of Arvid’s mouth pointed into a slant grin. “My grandmother could wrestle this lout to the ground. I know not what manner of arcane treasure he holds, but ‘tis clearly keeping him warm. With that in hand, we shall travel through the night unhindered by Winter’s grasp!”
Hromgir considered that. The whole cave was warm, and he had begun to reek like a devil, covered head to toes in hides and furs. “Fine. But we need not kill the poor bastard.”
“Goin’ soft, my brother? Would be a mercy, really. Cold shall claim him soon enough.”
“Sod off.” Hromgir sneered, but perhaps Arvid had a point. They had seen too much death since the sea claimed their longship, and Hromgir grew weary. “Ma always said—never cross a seidr-man. They hold grudges and wreak havoc upon those who wrong them.”
Arvid shrugged. “All the more reason to split his skull.” He crouched, stalked closer over a stretch of long seconds, then reached for the golden shard. Again the old man convulsed, foam spewing from his cracked lips. Arvid blanched and withdrew his probing fingers.
Hromgir glared at his kinsman, then turned toward the ruby glow of their prize. “I’ll bloody do it, then.”
A bead of sweat wept down his forehead, his eyes aching as if he were gazing upon a snowfield at the height of noon. Creeping closer, he sucked in a breath as he laid hands on the fragment, deftly sliding it free from its bearer’s fevered grip. The gleaming metal thrummed with heat, as if the fires in which it had been forged yet blazed within. Hromgir gazed into the eye of the ruby and the heat flooded through his fingers into his very core.
He blinked, and found himself careening down a shadowed tunnel, round like a bottomless well. Hromgir landed painfully upon his feet in a green meadow, overlooking a vale of rolling, golden grains. A gentle breeze licked the nape of his neck, beckoning a percussive roll of jitters along his spine.
Swinging his head round, Hromgir searched for Arvid, and Torkel. They were gone. Rather, he was gone. Vertigo washed over him as he thrashed about, lulling to and fro as would a drunkard searching for his lost coin purse.
“You took my crown...” rumbled a sonorous voice behind him.
Hromgir froze, then turned. A tall grey-bearded man in flowing lavender robes, tied with a cerulean sash, stood before him. His incensed eyes were flashing emeralds and upon his forehead opened a third eye, glowing white hot. ‘Twas the sleeping seidr-man, manifested in all his true glory, his smoldering wrath.
“I—I shall give it back!” Hromgir held out the fragment, growing so hot it burned the flesh of his palm. “I dinnae want the damned thing!”
“You shall not!” the sorcerer boomed, shaking the earth beneath their feet. “I am at last free of Tarru-syn. In gratitude will I now impart upon you the wisdom required to break the curse you have inherited.”
“Curse? What bloody curse?”
“The curse of Nurjin, a god not of this world.” The earth trembled; the seidr-man stared over Hromgir’s shoulder at something in the distance which lay beyond mortal sight. “Listen now, for we have little time: I plucked this fragment from another world. I sought it for its sorcerous power, but I misjudged its enchantments. Where the fragment goes, contradiction follows. If you hope to survive, you must pass it on.”
“What?” Panic seized in Hromgir’s chest. He never understood sorcery and had no desire to. When the druids visited his village in Skjöldwe, he instead visited ol’ Yana at her alehouse and drank until the druids moved on.
“Pass it on, foolish interloper...” the seidr-man echoed, his form shimmered as a mirage, then melted away, along with the rest of the vivid landscape. “And run.”
Hromgir blinked. Again he stood in the shadowed cave before an empty bedroll.
“What’s happened?” Arvid shouted in Hromgir’s ear. “What did you see?”
Arvid’s face was draped with dismay. Torkel stared slack-jawed at Hromgir, as if he were a draugr conjured from the depths of a traumatic past.
A tremor shook the dark earth, skittered up their legs. Dust and debris fell from the ceiling. The silence of a tomb swallowed the chamber for an instant, which seemed to the striders an eternity in passing.
The cavern lurched like a ship listing starboard upon swelling seas. A massive form burst from the rear wall of the cavern, spraying them with sharp shards of limestone, stinging Hromgir’s raised forearm with the fury of a swarm of disturbed hornets.
Hromgir and Arvid shrank away from the incongruous, shadowy mass bloating to fill the chamber. Gazing into twelve vacuous eyes, the threads of Hromgir’s reality frayed, his window into the waking world shattered. His thoughts churned into a paradoxical swill of hope for survival, and of hopeless acceptance that his spirit was forfeit to demoniac powers beyond his ken.
The mass subsumed Torkel, swallowing him in a cloud of blackened smoke, filling the cavern with the skittering din of chitinous plates crashing upon themselves, clicking and chirping like a bat hunting beetles in the night.
The boy screamed, high and shrill, the sloughing of his innards splashing upon the warm stone like a slavering waterfall in the wastes of Pan. Hromgir and Arvid fled without thought for honor or rightness. The chthonic monstrosity at their backs was anathema to both. They ran back the way they had come, back towards the swarm of their mounted pursuers. Better it would be, to die on the edge of Wystran swords, than to fall into the maw of that nameless terror.
Time was an obscure notion, fleeting and dimly observed as Hromgir and Arvid sprinted blindly up the serpentine cavern. Behind them jeered the splinter of bones and the sucking of marrow. Somewhere in the distance, or perhaps in the back of Hromgir’s mind, ghastly laughter bounced wall to wall, wet echoes upon the jagged stone.
By the grace of the Gallows God—or perhaps in spite of His wrath—the striders emerged upon the twilit snow fields, washed with the silver glow of a full, coruscating moon. The thunder of hooves rumbled not far down the track. With no time to breathe nor devise a plan, they could only run farther up the slope towards the mountain pass, away from the Wystrans... away from the horror lurking beneath the ground.
Every breath cinched knots in Hromgir’s lungs, his legs thickening to senseless, turgid sacks of fermented bones and sour blood. Wind scraped at his umber eyes, sliced between the hairs of his furs, the fibers of his underlain linens. Yet the chill refused to bite, cold passed closed-mouth round Hromgir’s hulking, panting form.
Sweat pooled beneath his arms, wet stains bloomed upon his hairy chest. In their frantic flight, the striders ascended a mile of steep, snowy tracks ‘fore Hromgir took note of the orb surrounding them, warming them.
Exhausted and breathless, they stopped in a clearing, the cries of angry men and the stomp of hardy horses just beyond the trees and gaining. Hromgir glanced at his left hand, which had gone numb. The ruby embedded in Tarru-syn’s fragment shone as a signal fire atop a lighthouse, near blinding now that he stared into its nebulous glow. The flesh of his palm had turned red; crimson rilled down his wrist in thick rivulets to his elbow, then falling to dot the melting snow underfoot.
Hromgir swung round, searching for any sign of the shadowed beast that had consumed young Torkel.
Arvid started at Hromgir, bloodshot eyes wide with madness, his black beard drenched with green bile. He had stripped off his coat, wore only his tunic beneath a leathern cuirass coated with old iron scale. “What did the old man say to you?” he demanded, gripping the hilt of his arming sword. “What did he command?”
Hromgir could not believe his ears. “You think me a traitor? ‘Twas you who wanted this damned thing—not I!”
“Tell me what he said...” Arvid drew his blade. “Both ye were mutterin’ nonsense ‘fore he vanished! Ye’re clutching the infernal thing as if it were yer firstborn son!”
A horn sounded below. Horses neighed and snorted. Swords scraped from scabbards, and mail rattled as soldiers dismounted to trudge through dense drifts. Loathsome gusts howled o’erhead. Trees bent to the heavens’ frosty exhalation, screaming their lamentations as boughs snapped and fell limp.
Hromgir stepped back, his hand falling to his axe. “What madness has taken you?”
Arvid did not hear, his scowl told as much. He said naught else as he pressed the flat of his blade to his forehead, then leveled the tip at Hromgir’s heart.
His eyes boiling in their sockets, Hromgir freed the axe from his belt and took a fighting stance, cursing his companion for his servitude to impulse. Arvid had always charged headlong, led by whatever thought first spawned in his dense skull.
“I’ll lay down my blade if you lay down the gold,” Arvid growled. “Leave it here to be buried in the ice, and we may escape the Wystrans together.”
Hromgir groaned. He held his fist out in front of him, clenched his teeth and engaged every sapped muscle in his body to unfurl the fingers gripping Tarru-syn’s fragment. His fist was like stone, the burning shard entombed in his sealed fist. He threw down his hand to hang limp at his side. “I cannot! ‘Tis a curse, Arvid, you must believe me!”
His kinsman roared and lunged with a vicious thrust. Wounded—in spirit and in body—Hromgir bared his teeth and met the reckless charge with a cleaving sweep of his bearded axe.
They exchanged blows, trading glancing cuts and desperate parries. Arvid heaved a wide slash at Hromgir’s chest. He caught the blade in the beard of his axe, twisted to trap it, but with only one hand to fight, failed to overcome his kinsman’s strength.
Arvid rotated his grip, clutched the end of his blade with his off hand pulled to lever the axe from Hromgir’s grasp. He snarled as the oaken haft slid and pricked his palms with protruding splinters, yet he maintained his hold on the axe with one sprained finger by the ring hammered into the butt of the haft.
Hromgir spat a curse at the Gallows God for sealing a seidr-spawned curse into his off-hand. Regardless of where it came from, the All-Seeing was Lord of Magic.
He drove a heel into Arvid’s shin and sent his closed fist smashing into Arvid’s stained teeth.
Arvid stumbled, nearly slipping in the slush, spat a steaming crimson glob from his frothing mouth.
Panting, exhausted, Hromgir raised his axe over his head and cried out: “Yield, my brother, we fight for naught!”
“The enemy approaches our backs. Yet ‘twas your blade I should have been watching, all this time...”
“Dammit, fool! What’s gotten into you? How many winters have I watched your back?” As the words left Hromgir’s mouth, his fist quivered in tune with the fragment’s whispered command. A warm gust emanated from the ruby. Arvid’s mad gaze honed in on its source, his face sinking sallow in hunger.
Hromgir recalled the seidr-man’s words: Where the fragment goes... contradiction follows.’
“Give it to me...” Arvid’s voice caught in his throat. “Or I shall pry it from your cold hands.” Sword raised high, he bounded toward Hromgir, revealing the cadre of armored Wystrans three paces behind.
Hromgir yelled to warn his kinsman of the danger, but the bastard Tarru-syn, whomever the hell that was, had cast its glamours and poisoned Arvid’s reason. Blinded to all but the lustrous ruby in Hromgir’s grasp, the Wystrans broadswords lanced through his back. Arvid tumbled to the earth, writhing and bleeding in the mud. He howled like a cat in heat, denied his desire by a bigger, heavier beast.
“Surrender, raider!” said the leading warrior, covered head to toe with thick padded trousers, gambeson, and steel plate decorated with sweeping, woven patterns. “In the name of King Vebjorn Varland, first of his name, you are to be placed in chains!”
Hromgir dropped his axe and sank to his knees. He raised his hand, glaring down at the accursed object fixed in his grasp.
“Whatever you still hold, drop it!” The warrior stood over him, casting his arrogant gaze upon Hromgir’s tangled, knotted mane. He knelt down and took hold of Hromgir’s wrist. “What’s this?”
At first, Hromgir dared not to speak. A chain of his kinsman littered the wastes, clotted the sea. Then, something beneath the earth stirred. Far, but gaining. The wind ceased its tirade and everything within the heated globe surrounding him went deathly still.
“‘Tis the lost treasure of Tarru-syn, blessed by the Old God, Nurjin...” He kept his eyes upon the ground; he had never been much of a liar. “Why else would we risk our skins against your horsemen? For the scabbed, pock-marked women in your sorry hamlets? Nay...”
The warrior’s grip softened as he beheld the fragment, gazed into the smoldering eye of the ruby. “How much is this worth?”
“A castle? Two? Easily more valuable than my life.”
“Morgana’s tits...” the warrior’s voice took on a furtive, disbelieving air. “You’ve traveled all this way, and yet you’re warm to the touch.”
“Aye.” The ground shuddered, a tremor jolting up Hromgir’s thighs. “Leave me to the cold, and it shall be yours.” His eyes rolled to where Arvid lay in a pool of crimson, his body rigid, his mad, dead gaze fixed upon the treeline. “I’ve had my fill of the gods’ black magic.”
“I could simply cut your throat and be done with it.”
“Aye.” Hromgir looked up at the warrior, whose face had taken on the same pallor that had so swiftly taken hold over Arvid. “But this is a gift that must be given. Kill me, you sully your spirit. Let the cold take me, and you are blameless. Either way, I’m a dead man.”
The warrior thought about this for a time. Was it seconds, minutes... hours? Hromgir could not be sure. He felt his very spirit depended on the simultaneous, discordant strings of this warrior’s greed and benevolence, a near impossible chord found in men of war.
All Hromgir wanted was not to die while Tarru-syn’s seidr gripped his heart. ‘Twas said a man frozen to death without being burned was cursed to wander that land until he fell into the black depths of Pan, or until the end times filled the skies with soot. What black fate awaits me, should I die with such a fell relic clutched in mine fingers?
The soldiers bristled as one, surely detecting the alien movements beneath their feet. The Wystrans had arrived in the new world generations ago, descendants of Skjöldrúnnar explorers. They knew this land better than any Sparrow could hope to.
“Captain!” one called out.
“A moment!” the captain barked over his shoulder, then turned his sickened countenance again upon Hromgir. “Give it to me. And find a nice hole to freeze in, eh?”
Hromgir felt his grasp round the fragment loosen. He dropped it into the Wystran’s all-too-eager hands.
He scurried to his feet and made to leave when the warrior laughed. “Take your axe, strider. You bloody earned it!”
Struggling to a tremulous crouch, Hromgir took up the axe by the blade, backed away until he was sure the soldiers did not intend to draw their bows. He swung round and ran up the hill as fast as his numb, swollen feet would carry him. Leaving behind the globe of warmth, the rolling tumult of whipping winds again filled his ears, along with its frigid bite.
‘Twas only a few breaths passed before the thunder of shattered limestone quaked the earth. The keening wail of an incomprehensible shadow emerged onto the desecrated killing fields, claiming the spirits of a hundred Wystran soldiers.
Hromgir dared not to look back, swearing to himself he would never again gaze into the evil eye of unknowable seidr, of terrible black magic. Even as the indifferent sun pierced the eastern horizon on his flank, and his unfeeling, blackened feet bled and froze in his crunching boots, he ran up and up.
The Wystrans’ luck had rightly abandoned their chosen hosts the moment Hromgir laid hands on the seidr-man’s stolen treasure. But Hromgir had never cared for lady luck, who had long ago turned from him her alluring and cruel gaze.
The wind hiccuped and changed direction, bringing with it the floral redolence of a hundred fleeing Hamingja. A tremor shook the earth, like the rumbling belch of a sated god. The sweet scent was quickly snuffed out, replaced by a sickening malodor dragged along the deepening slopes upon the wailing winds. Yes… Hromgir despaired, as he fled on ghostly feet between the pale, haunted crags, rising like gnawed bones from a shallow grave, and into the mountain pass. Pan has feasted well this day.
Great, dark, strident, sorcerous, and bloody tale!