The wind whipped relentlessly at our faces, sending our hair scattering in its’ onslaught. Even with our faces partially covered in animal skin wrappings, we still began to feel the sting of the cold in our eyes and on our foreheads. It was slow going for some time, with us occasionally pausing to rest and warm up by huddling together. Fortunately, conditions eased up and our path began to smooth out after hours of dogged persistence.
It was a few more hours of winding mountain path before we were eventually forced to stop and rest for the day. We tried to make a clear area, sheltered by a small opening in the mountain wall, and kindled a small fire. It wasn’t a good sign that things were so cold that we resorted to that, but we were still tired from our long trek across Corynth. With that in addition to today, we were prioritizing a comfortable rest. If we played our cards right, we wouldn’t need to do this regularly, only occasionally.
The next day, the path split along the center. We found ourselves hugging the right side of the mountain as a huge drop off opened up to our left. The paths on either side of the cliff face became more and more narrow, such that our pace slowed to a crawl as we attempted to navigate a now perilous ledge. We hugged our faces to the cliff wall and shuffled along the edge, counting our lucky stars that the wind seemed to be blocked in this location.
“Try not to look down!” I called, without looking at Al. I had snuck a glance at my feet, only to be rewarded with a rush of fear that put me slightly off balance. The pitiless valley floor almost seemed to beckon at me, daring me to stare at it further. I pressed my face into the cliff wall and forced myself onward. It was a nerve-wracking hour and a half that we spent in that vulnerable position before things finally widened out.
Gasping with breath that we didn’t remember holding, we shuffled safely onto the suddenly widening path, the two sides of the mountains joined together once again. We rested there for a bit, before I turned to him and queried:
“Do you hear anything ominous?”
Al shook his head and replied:
“Nothing but wind and a few falling rocks. I couldn’t hear much during the windstorm at the very beginning, though. They teach us to try to tune loud noises out, which keeps us from going deaf, but consistently sifting through the loud noises for something quieter is beyond my abilities.”
“You think that the others can handle the ledge we just crossed?”
He thought for a moment before answering:
“If we strap Eithan to you, I think Lynn and Victor can handle it, so long as they don’t look down. I would be most worried about Hope, but she is pretty coordinated for her age. She should be able to make it.”
I agreed, but even the thought of one of them falling to their deaths caught in my stomach like lead.
“We’ll have to face much worse than this if we want to survive.” I mutter under my breath. He nodded, the grim comment sending both of us into pensive silence.
We forged onwards and eventually found more shelter from the elements in the form of a closed off overpass. It was almost as though the path had tunneled into a new cave, though there was only a thin rock overhang, connected to a wall, that our trail was leading under. We needed to break off some of the hanging icicles that barred the entrance to the miniature cave, before ducking into the enclosure. It soon became dark enough that we needed to turn on our lantern as we navigated the twists and turns of the impromptu passageway. We were unwilling to talk too much, for fear of antagonizing any hidden enemies, so we suffered through the eerie silence for a very long time.
I was almost grateful when things started to open again, and we started to find ourselves walking along a flat and wide mountain path with a large opening on our left. In between ice formations that dripped down from the overhang above us, we could see a broad and snowy valley below us, and we stopped to admire the view for a bit.
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I had never seen anything quite like it before. Black rock jutted out between large patches of white and blue within the countryside surrounding us. Multiple mountains stood tall across the way, but it seemed like the whole land had stopped to converged at the low point beneath us. Looking down, I even spotted a few dots of green that looked like trees, but I couldn’t imagine what kinds of trees would grow in these conditions. Some light snow had begun to fall, reflecting the midafternoon sunlight that filtered through grey clouds above us. The wind had slowed from a howl to a mere whisper, like the whole world had decided to finally rest.
Eventually, we tore our eyes from the scenery and went on our way. Daylight was wasting and we had a job to do. We were blessed, though, and these conditions persisted for the rest of the day. It was only as twilight began to nibble on the edges of our daylight, that Al threw up his hand and began to concentrate. I stopped and waited patiently for him to speak, which he finally did:
“75 yards further ahead. I hear…footsteps? They don’t sound like a Neidyr, though. Maybe another person?”
Would there really be another person in these mountains? I looked quizzically at Al, and he just shrugged. I signaled to him, and we silently creeped forward towards the bend in the path. Following it, the path eventually began to straighten out. Further down, we noticed a shaggy humanoid figure slowly ambling further away from us. We exchanged glances and began to follow the man. He was slightly shorter than me, though clearly built with serious muscle. He was also extremely hairy, but it made sense to be dressed in animal furs if you wanted to survive in this climate. We tracked him for a bit, and I waffled over whether I wanted to signal him or otherwise.
On the one hand, a friendly face would go a long way towards ensuring our survival, but I was leery of taking too many chances. I had decided to shadow him and try to take his measure, but I noticed something slightly off about him. He walked with a slight hunch in his back, and I thought I noticed something in his hands glinting in the fading light. I unconsciously got a little closer to the man to try to check. He suddenly stopped. And turned.
His skin, I realized with a shock, was an icy blue but his body was mostly covered in white hair. A shock of terror ran through me when I realized he – or it – possessed no face. There was only a singular, dark hole where his face should be, like a great ditch had been dug where its’ features were supposed to be and only an endless void had been left in its’ place. That void was surrounded with unevenly separated sections of its’ face, like it had been carved out by an angry miner. From that twisted burrow came a long and deep groan. And then, it was on me.
I barely managed to bring my swords up in time to block the incoming slash. I got only a fleeting glimpse of the attacker’s weapons before it used the momentum of its’ first strike to follow up with a dizzying onslaught of merciless slices. Its’ nails were claws of dull silver, and they dimly reflected the waning daylight as they plunged towards my face, forcing me to desperately defend.
I was on the backfoot from the first blow, but it couldn’t keep this pace up forever. I defended myself as best as I could for a while, taking a shallow scratch to the right cheek, before the creature finally slowed down. It was just for a beat, but I felt the moment where the momentum shifted and capitalized, blocking a strike, and moving inward to plant my foot right in its’ midriff. It gave a surprisingly human grunt and was forced backward. I took the opportunity to catch my breath and study my opponent. I was tired from my hasty defense, but I could see that the fiend was even worse off from its’ relentless attack, the monster’s shoulders rising and falling as it inhaled throatily.
I didn’t give it much time to recover, and was quickly on the offense myself, sending out probing strikes and feints to test my opponent’s defense. My weapons were longer, but I noticed that its’ arms were longer than a normal human’s, so our reaches were somewhat similar. It parried my strikes with seeming ease and didn’t easily fall for my feints, so it understood tactics. I managed to score a shallow cut along its’ arm in retaliation, but it was soon firing back with well-placed strikes of its’ own.
It struck with an animal’s ferocity but a human’s cunning, and I found these attacks harder to deal with, as it weaved a net with its’ attacks that had an intelligence and a speed that were deeply troublesome. A dodged vertical slash was followed up with a kick to the midsection that I tried to circle around. It grazed me anyways, putting me off balance enough that I was frantic in blocking the next string of attacks. I turned away a diagonal slice, only to receive three claw marks on my arm, the beast’s natural weapons digging through the layers of extra cloth to find skin.
It was driving me in circles, my blood spattering the cavern floor. My arm blazing with the pain of the cuts and the force of the blows. The path was fortunately wide enough that I was barely able to duck and weave around the storm of blows, at a serious speed advantage but trying to answer back. I found little success. A well-placed horizontal slash forced me to violently jump backwards to avoid being disemboweled. The only problem was that I jumped right back into the wall. Totally cornered, the beast smelled blood and drove its’ claws right toward my face in a ruthless stabbing attack.
Exactly according to plan.
As the creature closed the distance between us, I had sneakily dug my swords into the rock wall. Had it tempered its’ aggression, it would have noticed this and pulled back, but it was too busy preparing for the killing blow. It was totally surprised when my feet suddenly lifted off the ground and drove directly toward its’ midsection. It tried to cut off its’ momentum and avoid the two-footed kick, but I had put my whole body into this attack. I hit it with devastating force, sending it flying backwards towards the edge of the cliff. However, it managed to arrest its’ momentum enough that the force of the kick was blunted. It strained to get back on the ground and stumbled to a halt right at the edge of the cliff, arms flailing to try to catch its’ balance.
And Al came out from the side and kicked it right in the stomach. The extra force sent the off-balance fiend right over the edge, and I managed to run over in time to see the beast’s body break on the wintery ground of the valley below.