Kerron narrowed his eyes and a sheen of starlight ran across the edge
of his knife. He lowered himself deeper into his crouch and tightened
his leg muscles in preparation for the leap forward they would soon
have to take. The bear, massive and white, like a living mound of snow,
made a low growl, very much like that of a dog. The growl an animal
made before an attack was launched. The lips of the beast drew upwards
and over an array of pointed white teeth and slavering pink gums. A
sliver of drool coursed from the gaping maw. The moment was soon.
Kerron tensed for the leap. He knew from experience that the bear would
be much faster and immeasurably stronger than he. He could not possibly
hope to bring it down in hand-to-hand combat. All he could do was hope
to make it through the next few seconds alive.
Snow had been the world of Kerron and Salazar for the past three months of travelling through the black night of winter. Snow, ice and cold. More than anything, cold. The coldness consumed their every thought and action. No matter how much they wrapped themselves up, the coldness found a way in. The smallest moment of warmth from a fire was treasured as if it were a tiny jewel. After a month of coldness so intense Kerron thought he would surely never survive another hour of it, it was not so much that he adapted to the freezing temperatures than simply became numb to them. It had simply become a part of his life, one so integral he could only vaguely remember what it used to be like to be warm. It was not Kerron's first experience with snow- even in the comparative warmth and light of the penumbra, the Great Path would sometimes skirt northwards into icier climes, and all darksiders knew that to the north was an isle of eternal ice and snow, a place of myth and legend that none dared tread.
The night of black winter was far brighter than he had expected it to be. He had always imagined that to be trapped in the centre of night was to be in a completely light-less environment, like stumbling around with your eyes closed, which is why he had always thought the journey must surely be impossible. But in point of fact, when the clouds parted the night sky was full of stars. Kerron realized that he had never truly seen the stars at all- he had spent most of his life just outside the penumbra, where the light of the sun still dimmed the majority of the stars, but here in the depth of night, as far from the sun as it was possible to be, entire constellations were splashed in the heavens above. He could still see the stars he was familiar with, shining more brightly than they ever had before, but now he saw that they were but a fraction of the beauty that the firmament held. A multitude of other points of light sparkled, sometimes in a great wash of light so thick it appeared as a mighty band. In those many quiet times when their dogs were resting, huddled next to the cooling embers of their cooking fire, he would lie on his back, wrapped in many skins, and stare at the sky in wonder. He would forget the cold, forget his quest, and be lost in the stars. He would often feel as though he were staring down on the constellations as if from a great height, was floating amongst them, and that if he reached out and touched them he would be able to scatter them away like the fine white dust they appeared to be. At other times, as he sat in the cart as it rocked gently over the snow-covered hills, he would attempt to draw the constellations as they appeared in this new formation, sure that the information would be valuable to any future travelers who attempted to navigate their way through the frozen wastes the way he and his fellow journeyman now attempted to do. He made multiple charcoal-on-skin sketches of the points of light and would sometimes draw lines between them, attempting to make images from the way the stars connected, as had been done by navigators throughout the ages.
They had kept to the Great Path on their journey, so the terrain they now passed through was ground that Kerron had crossed twenty times before, and Salazar thirty. But while it should have seemed familiar, the land was almost entirely transformed by endless snowdrifts and great walls of ice that had formed over it. On occasion Kerron did recognize a mountain range or a distinctive rock protruding from the snow, and thought to himself that it was as though the land they knew so well was a ghost that lay under the surface of this new world, only momentarily peeking out from beneath the skin to haunt them with memories of other times- as though time itself was a place you could go to. For the rest of the trip, they crossed an endless icy wasteland of tundra and snowdrifts. That's when they could see the land at all- frequent whiteouts would engulf them and bring visibility down to only a few metres as icy snow burned their skin. But while they used the stars to guide them at most times, even without sight they could still travel due west using Salazar's compass, and breaks in the weather would give them a chance to reorient themselves to stay on the Great Path (which generally ran true west anyway, as was it's nature and purpose).
The cart they had stolen from the lightsiders had changed significantly since the beginning of its journey into the night. They had encountered a small tribe of night-dwellers a month into their flight away from the Shada lake and made a few choice trades. Their horses and some of the weapons they had found in the cart, they traded for a pack of timber huskies, giant dogs that were adapted to the cold and loved to pull. This was their most important trade, as their horses would not have survived for more than a few hours in these low temperatures, but it was the natural habit of the dogs- along with their cousins the ice wolves which they sometimes heard howling on nights when the mood hung heavy and bloated in the sky. They also swapped their cartwheels for skis, and Salazar had set up an ingenious system by which the wheels of the cart could be quickly restored without having to remove the skis (which travelled on the undercarriage of the cart) for those times when the path was not covered in snow- often a strip of frozen earth or sheet of solid ice showed through where a snowdrift had been blown away by the harsh winds, and they needed wheels in order to temporarily to traverse it. They had also stripped down most of the cart to make it as light as possible, and built a hansom seat in the front so they could drive the huskies from the seat. All the cart now carried was fuel for fires, dried foodstuffs, and blankets for warmth.
Apart from the occasional snowdrift or unexpected ice lake that would need to be circled or carefully traversed, they were generally making very rapid progress across the dark night as the skis whispered over ground below. The seemingly endless endurance of the timber huskies meant they could travel at high speeds across the smooth snow for much longer than a horse could have conveyed them, and so they outpaced the turn of the globe towards the sun at a rate that Kerron would not have believed were he not there to experience it himself. When they passed the landmark of the Hooked-nose Crag, something Kerron's tribe would not be passing for many months, Kerron was filled with hope. He calculated that if they could keep their pace up, they were approximately halfway through their journey, and would be through the darkness of black winter within another two months. What at first seemed daunting, then impossible, now seemed a genuine possibility. A long hard haul, to be sure, but as they became used to the weather and learned to spot obstacles before they reached them so that they could be circumnavigated rather than crossed, their progress quickened and, while still certainly the most difficult endeavour Kerron had ever undertaken, he found himself, in those quiet moments when the snow-scape drifted endlessly in all directions as it faded into the eternal night and the stars shone down on him, content in a way he had never felt before. For the first time in his life, he felt he had a purpose, had something to achieve and was drawing from a well of persistence he'd never known he had in order to overcome what stood between him and that achievement. It felt good.
Food was a problem. Not so much for the two travelers: they had dried fruit and meat, and in spite of the inhospitable environment there was still wildlife to eat: fish from holes cut in the ice covering the lakes and streams, and strange, fat flightless birds that Salazar took easily with his bow. No, the problem was the many dogs that pulled them- their appetite was voracious and it was difficult to ever have enough food for them- if they chose to stop and fish for as long as it took to gather enough for the dogs to eat they would never make any forward progress at all. They had hit on an inelegant but effective strategy- they had started hunting the huge bears they sometimes saw roaming the frozen land. The dogs themselves instinctively stayed away from the giant creatures, but were happy to feast on them until nothing remained but bone if given a fresh body. And so, whenever the opportunity presented itself, they stopped to hunt bear.
Which is how Kerron found himself facing off against a behemoth that was roughly the size of the cart which they traveled in. The cart itself was parked, with the dogs, at the centre of a frozen lake that was behind where Kerron now stood, at the edge of a snow bank, not ten feet from the bear that he had cornered, in a manner of speaking, by slowly walking towards it over the past hour, not allowing it to go in any other direction. The bear itself, while deadly, was not naturally aggressive, and would go out of its way to avoid a confrontation until backed into a corner. It had tried to get around Kerron many times, but he had moved to block it, and through a series of movements across the ice lake he had eventually backed it into the drift, and now it was getting angry. It would avoid a conflict if it could, but when it could not, it was more than capable of defending itself- or getting small humans like him out of the way. Now that he had backed it into a corner, it was going to get it's way out, and now that he had made the beast agitated, it was going to make a point of getting out through him.
The moment came. With a final snarl, the bear ran forward. Kerron had been waiting for it to finally attack, and was ready. He hurled himself sideways into the snowbank, shoving himself deep into the snow. The bear was temporarily put off guard and slid on the ice where it had charged him, but it was a creature of the snow and soon adjusted, it's claws digging into the thick ice of the lake. It was now beside Kerron and it turned towards him, standing up onto it's two hind legs, rearing up to bellow a roar that shook the snow itself.
"Now!" Kerron yelled in fear, his voice lost in the roar of noise emitting from the throat of the bear.
Higher up the bank, Salazar had been waiting for the bear to expose it's neck, and was ready with an arrow. He let fly and the arrow sang over Kerron's head and embedded itself deeply into the neck of the bear. The beast cried out in pain and batted the shaft of the arrow from its neck, cracking it off at the skin. Salazar had been aiming for the artery that ran up the side of the neck- blood should have been flowing strongly, but was not. Salazar had missed his mark and the bear seemed more annoyed than wounded. With one mighty paw strike it sent Kerron flying off of the snowbank and sliding onto the ice. Fortunately for him it was the back of the paw and he was not gored open from head to toe. Unfortunately for Salazar the bear had changed it's focus of attention to him and it leapt up the snowbank in two huge bounds, bringing itself right in front of him, mouth gaping wide for a bite.
Kerron did as Salazar had trained him- still lying on the ice, shaking his head to clear it after the shocking blow he had taken from both the paw and his impact on the ice, he flipped the knife in his hand so that the blade was in his fingers and the handle was held out in front of him. He bought his hand back to the side of his head so that the knife point lay parallel to his eyes, sighted it, and then threw it as hard as he could. The blade spun in the air and arced slightly to the left of his target, but the bear was so huge it was difficult to miss entirely, and the knife thudded firmly into the white flank of the bear, just above its left rear leg.
The beast let loose a guttural howl of pain. It was not a mortal blow, but it was enough to distract the animal from its target for a moment, which was all Salazar needed. In one motion he dropped his bow, drew his sword from it's scabbard and ran it's serrated edge along the neck of the bear, using the motion to leap to the side and slide down the bank, using his weight to drag the sword through skin and tissue as he went. The bear thrashed wildly as blood poured from the huge hole he had opened below it's jaw, and the animal fell backwards down the bank, it's massive bulk tumbling right past where Salazar had dived, almost rolling over him. Salazar pulled up and away, putting a much distance as he could between him and the dying mountain of flesh.
The bear was no longer a threat, and it groaned mournfully as its life blood spilled steaming onto the ice sheet. Salazar jogged in a wide circle around the beast to come and stand next to where Kerron had now gotten up, and together they watched the last slow life breath of their hunt come to a gasping, terrible conclusion.
Later, sitting around a campfire as they skinned the animal and cut off hunks of flesh which they threw to the dogs which bayed hungrily just outside the circle of light, Salazar boiled some water and asked Kerron to cut off a few choice cuts of meat to make bear stew. He had taken his gloves off in order to work with the bloody meat, and it was all he could do not to plunge his hands into the still-warm body in the hope of warming them up. Hot steam came pouring out of the carcass, and in spite of the awful smell Kerron luxuriated in the warmth of it.
"Throw away the liver. It's poisonous." Salazar said as he watched Kerron carefully to make sure he was cutting correctly- this was a new skill for his young friend, one of many he had been learning as part of this long journey. They had become good friends during their months alone together, bonded in a way that only two souls tempered by the same hard circumstances can become. Kerron looked up to Salazar but did not idolize him, in fact considered him the first adult he had ever thought of as a friend. Salazar recognized that behind Kerron's shy demeanor was a core of strength and endurance that he had come to respect and could see slowly being tempered by the elements into something much stronger. "And try and keep the pelt as a single large piece. We should be able to dry it out and use it as another blanket. It kept that beast warm in this godforsaken cold, it can do the same for us."
They sat by the fire and ate the bear stew while their pack of timber huskies pulled the remaining bones of the bear into the darkness to gnaw on and fight over. It was a huge feast even for the seemingly endless appetites of the dogs, and they would be happier after they had rested. Kerron too felt the pull of sleep on his eyes.
"Look how far we've come." Salazar said. Kerron sleepily looked back across the snow lake, and saw the thick line cut through the snow by their passage, extending back east as far as he could see. He whistled in appreciation of their efforts.
"Now look ahead." said Salazar with gravity.
Kerron revolved his head from one side to the other and looked to the west.
"What do you see?"
Kerron could see, underneath the snow, the impression of a road, extending westward.
"I see the Great Path."
Salazar had the beginnings of a smile at the corner of his lips. "...and at the end of it?"
Kerron followed the path with his eyes until it met a line of pale blue. It was the deepest shade of mushroom blue, but the line between earth and sky was, for the first time that Kerron could remember seeing since their flight into darkness, definitely perceptible.
"Is that... the horizon?"
"Yes. It's faint, but the light you see is the light of the sun, and will only get brighter as we move forward. The snows should start to recede soon." Salazar's face bloomed into a full smile. "We've come around the world, Kerron."
The night of black winter was far brighter than he had expected it to be. He had always imagined that to be trapped in the centre of night was to be in a completely light-less environment, like stumbling around with your eyes closed, which is why he had always thought the journey must surely be impossible. But in point of fact, when the clouds parted the night sky was full of stars. Kerron realized that he had never truly seen the stars at all- he had spent most of his life just outside the penumbra, where the light of the sun still dimmed the majority of the stars, but here in the depth of night, as far from the sun as it was possible to be, entire constellations were splashed in the heavens above. He could still see the stars he was familiar with, shining more brightly than they ever had before, but now he saw that they were but a fraction of the beauty that the firmament held. A multitude of other points of light sparkled, sometimes in a great wash of light so thick it appeared as a mighty band. In those many quiet times when their dogs were resting, huddled next to the cooling embers of their cooking fire, he would lie on his back, wrapped in many skins, and stare at the sky in wonder. He would forget the cold, forget his quest, and be lost in the stars. He would often feel as though he were staring down on the constellations as if from a great height, was floating amongst them, and that if he reached out and touched them he would be able to scatter them away like the fine white dust they appeared to be. At other times, as he sat in the cart as it rocked gently over the snow-covered hills, he would attempt to draw the constellations as they appeared in this new formation, sure that the information would be valuable to any future travelers who attempted to navigate their way through the frozen wastes the way he and his fellow journeyman now attempted to do. He made multiple charcoal-on-skin sketches of the points of light and would sometimes draw lines between them, attempting to make images from the way the stars connected, as had been done by navigators throughout the ages.
They had kept to the Great Path on their journey, so the terrain they now passed through was ground that Kerron had crossed twenty times before, and Salazar thirty. But while it should have seemed familiar, the land was almost entirely transformed by endless snowdrifts and great walls of ice that had formed over it. On occasion Kerron did recognize a mountain range or a distinctive rock protruding from the snow, and thought to himself that it was as though the land they knew so well was a ghost that lay under the surface of this new world, only momentarily peeking out from beneath the skin to haunt them with memories of other times- as though time itself was a place you could go to. For the rest of the trip, they crossed an endless icy wasteland of tundra and snowdrifts. That's when they could see the land at all- frequent whiteouts would engulf them and bring visibility down to only a few metres as icy snow burned their skin. But while they used the stars to guide them at most times, even without sight they could still travel due west using Salazar's compass, and breaks in the weather would give them a chance to reorient themselves to stay on the Great Path (which generally ran true west anyway, as was it's nature and purpose).
The cart they had stolen from the lightsiders had changed significantly since the beginning of its journey into the night. They had encountered a small tribe of night-dwellers a month into their flight away from the Shada lake and made a few choice trades. Their horses and some of the weapons they had found in the cart, they traded for a pack of timber huskies, giant dogs that were adapted to the cold and loved to pull. This was their most important trade, as their horses would not have survived for more than a few hours in these low temperatures, but it was the natural habit of the dogs- along with their cousins the ice wolves which they sometimes heard howling on nights when the mood hung heavy and bloated in the sky. They also swapped their cartwheels for skis, and Salazar had set up an ingenious system by which the wheels of the cart could be quickly restored without having to remove the skis (which travelled on the undercarriage of the cart) for those times when the path was not covered in snow- often a strip of frozen earth or sheet of solid ice showed through where a snowdrift had been blown away by the harsh winds, and they needed wheels in order to temporarily to traverse it. They had also stripped down most of the cart to make it as light as possible, and built a hansom seat in the front so they could drive the huskies from the seat. All the cart now carried was fuel for fires, dried foodstuffs, and blankets for warmth.
Apart from the occasional snowdrift or unexpected ice lake that would need to be circled or carefully traversed, they were generally making very rapid progress across the dark night as the skis whispered over ground below. The seemingly endless endurance of the timber huskies meant they could travel at high speeds across the smooth snow for much longer than a horse could have conveyed them, and so they outpaced the turn of the globe towards the sun at a rate that Kerron would not have believed were he not there to experience it himself. When they passed the landmark of the Hooked-nose Crag, something Kerron's tribe would not be passing for many months, Kerron was filled with hope. He calculated that if they could keep their pace up, they were approximately halfway through their journey, and would be through the darkness of black winter within another two months. What at first seemed daunting, then impossible, now seemed a genuine possibility. A long hard haul, to be sure, but as they became used to the weather and learned to spot obstacles before they reached them so that they could be circumnavigated rather than crossed, their progress quickened and, while still certainly the most difficult endeavour Kerron had ever undertaken, he found himself, in those quiet moments when the snow-scape drifted endlessly in all directions as it faded into the eternal night and the stars shone down on him, content in a way he had never felt before. For the first time in his life, he felt he had a purpose, had something to achieve and was drawing from a well of persistence he'd never known he had in order to overcome what stood between him and that achievement. It felt good.
Food was a problem. Not so much for the two travelers: they had dried fruit and meat, and in spite of the inhospitable environment there was still wildlife to eat: fish from holes cut in the ice covering the lakes and streams, and strange, fat flightless birds that Salazar took easily with his bow. No, the problem was the many dogs that pulled them- their appetite was voracious and it was difficult to ever have enough food for them- if they chose to stop and fish for as long as it took to gather enough for the dogs to eat they would never make any forward progress at all. They had hit on an inelegant but effective strategy- they had started hunting the huge bears they sometimes saw roaming the frozen land. The dogs themselves instinctively stayed away from the giant creatures, but were happy to feast on them until nothing remained but bone if given a fresh body. And so, whenever the opportunity presented itself, they stopped to hunt bear.
Which is how Kerron found himself facing off against a behemoth that was roughly the size of the cart which they traveled in. The cart itself was parked, with the dogs, at the centre of a frozen lake that was behind where Kerron now stood, at the edge of a snow bank, not ten feet from the bear that he had cornered, in a manner of speaking, by slowly walking towards it over the past hour, not allowing it to go in any other direction. The bear itself, while deadly, was not naturally aggressive, and would go out of its way to avoid a confrontation until backed into a corner. It had tried to get around Kerron many times, but he had moved to block it, and through a series of movements across the ice lake he had eventually backed it into the drift, and now it was getting angry. It would avoid a conflict if it could, but when it could not, it was more than capable of defending itself- or getting small humans like him out of the way. Now that he had backed it into a corner, it was going to get it's way out, and now that he had made the beast agitated, it was going to make a point of getting out through him.
The moment came. With a final snarl, the bear ran forward. Kerron had been waiting for it to finally attack, and was ready. He hurled himself sideways into the snowbank, shoving himself deep into the snow. The bear was temporarily put off guard and slid on the ice where it had charged him, but it was a creature of the snow and soon adjusted, it's claws digging into the thick ice of the lake. It was now beside Kerron and it turned towards him, standing up onto it's two hind legs, rearing up to bellow a roar that shook the snow itself.
"Now!" Kerron yelled in fear, his voice lost in the roar of noise emitting from the throat of the bear.
Higher up the bank, Salazar had been waiting for the bear to expose it's neck, and was ready with an arrow. He let fly and the arrow sang over Kerron's head and embedded itself deeply into the neck of the bear. The beast cried out in pain and batted the shaft of the arrow from its neck, cracking it off at the skin. Salazar had been aiming for the artery that ran up the side of the neck- blood should have been flowing strongly, but was not. Salazar had missed his mark and the bear seemed more annoyed than wounded. With one mighty paw strike it sent Kerron flying off of the snowbank and sliding onto the ice. Fortunately for him it was the back of the paw and he was not gored open from head to toe. Unfortunately for Salazar the bear had changed it's focus of attention to him and it leapt up the snowbank in two huge bounds, bringing itself right in front of him, mouth gaping wide for a bite.
Kerron did as Salazar had trained him- still lying on the ice, shaking his head to clear it after the shocking blow he had taken from both the paw and his impact on the ice, he flipped the knife in his hand so that the blade was in his fingers and the handle was held out in front of him. He bought his hand back to the side of his head so that the knife point lay parallel to his eyes, sighted it, and then threw it as hard as he could. The blade spun in the air and arced slightly to the left of his target, but the bear was so huge it was difficult to miss entirely, and the knife thudded firmly into the white flank of the bear, just above its left rear leg.
The beast let loose a guttural howl of pain. It was not a mortal blow, but it was enough to distract the animal from its target for a moment, which was all Salazar needed. In one motion he dropped his bow, drew his sword from it's scabbard and ran it's serrated edge along the neck of the bear, using the motion to leap to the side and slide down the bank, using his weight to drag the sword through skin and tissue as he went. The bear thrashed wildly as blood poured from the huge hole he had opened below it's jaw, and the animal fell backwards down the bank, it's massive bulk tumbling right past where Salazar had dived, almost rolling over him. Salazar pulled up and away, putting a much distance as he could between him and the dying mountain of flesh.
The bear was no longer a threat, and it groaned mournfully as its life blood spilled steaming onto the ice sheet. Salazar jogged in a wide circle around the beast to come and stand next to where Kerron had now gotten up, and together they watched the last slow life breath of their hunt come to a gasping, terrible conclusion.
Later, sitting around a campfire as they skinned the animal and cut off hunks of flesh which they threw to the dogs which bayed hungrily just outside the circle of light, Salazar boiled some water and asked Kerron to cut off a few choice cuts of meat to make bear stew. He had taken his gloves off in order to work with the bloody meat, and it was all he could do not to plunge his hands into the still-warm body in the hope of warming them up. Hot steam came pouring out of the carcass, and in spite of the awful smell Kerron luxuriated in the warmth of it.
"Throw away the liver. It's poisonous." Salazar said as he watched Kerron carefully to make sure he was cutting correctly- this was a new skill for his young friend, one of many he had been learning as part of this long journey. They had become good friends during their months alone together, bonded in a way that only two souls tempered by the same hard circumstances can become. Kerron looked up to Salazar but did not idolize him, in fact considered him the first adult he had ever thought of as a friend. Salazar recognized that behind Kerron's shy demeanor was a core of strength and endurance that he had come to respect and could see slowly being tempered by the elements into something much stronger. "And try and keep the pelt as a single large piece. We should be able to dry it out and use it as another blanket. It kept that beast warm in this godforsaken cold, it can do the same for us."
They sat by the fire and ate the bear stew while their pack of timber huskies pulled the remaining bones of the bear into the darkness to gnaw on and fight over. It was a huge feast even for the seemingly endless appetites of the dogs, and they would be happier after they had rested. Kerron too felt the pull of sleep on his eyes.
"Look how far we've come." Salazar said. Kerron sleepily looked back across the snow lake, and saw the thick line cut through the snow by their passage, extending back east as far as he could see. He whistled in appreciation of their efforts.
"Now look ahead." said Salazar with gravity.
Kerron revolved his head from one side to the other and looked to the west.
"What do you see?"
Kerron could see, underneath the snow, the impression of a road, extending westward.
"I see the Great Path."
Salazar had the beginnings of a smile at the corner of his lips. "...and at the end of it?"
Kerron followed the path with his eyes until it met a line of pale blue. It was the deepest shade of mushroom blue, but the line between earth and sky was, for the first time that Kerron could remember seeing since their flight into darkness, definitely perceptible.
"Is that... the horizon?"
"Yes. It's faint, but the light you see is the light of the sun, and will only get brighter as we move forward. The snows should start to recede soon." Salazar's face bloomed into a full smile. "We've come around the world, Kerron."
This is a 