Jonathan’s still-damp clothes started to refreeze almost as soon as he stopped channeling fire, and by the time he was clear of the waterfall’s spray, his hair and the scraps of hair on his chin were thick with frost. However, none of that was as bad as the deep snow. It slowed him down with every step. By the time he was almost to the stand of trees, the snow was up to his waist, and every step forward was a struggle. What had looked to be a wide-open field had turned into a frigid slog, and even if his clothes hadn’t been reduced to mere rags, he certainly wasn’t dressed for such weather.
He was miserable, but he didn’t dare to pull any more fire from the flask. When that ran out, he was a dead man.
In the lee of the trees, the amount of wind-blown snow was reduced to a fine dusting. Jonathan busied himself gathering firewood with numb fingers near a cluster of boulders that he hoped he could turn into some kind of shelter from the wind once he’d warmed up.
It was slow work, building not just a stack of firewood to burn but more set aside to feed it as it grew. With that much snow, almost everything he found was either too big to use or too small, and it took some time to amass a pile of twigs and branches large enough to matter. Only after that was done did he steal a spark from the powder flask to set it alight.
The pine needles caught immediately, and the twigs shortly after. Then, the fire spread quickly, but there was only the shadow of warmth he’d felt before when he’d been channeling the fire directly into his body. So, shivering, he decided to try that again, but on his first attempt, he almost snuffed the fire as he drew too greedily from it.
“Damn it!” he cursed in frustration as he stopped and started to carefully tend to the flames again. “For years, I’m surrounded by so much fire it almost kills me, and now this?”
Jonathan spent the next few minutes trying to figure out what he could do to appease the Gods in the face of such a perverse punishment but came up with nothing. Trying to stay alive in the face of all this probably counted as defiance of their will, but even so, he wouldn’t give in. He could, after all, say that he was being tested just as easily as he could say that he was being punished until more signs revealed themselves.
While he dwelt in self-pity, he studied the bites and goblin claw marks on his legs. None of them looked too deep, and all of them had stopped bleeding, but they all had an angry red color to them. If worst came to worst, the only sort of healing he had access to was fire. Still, for now, he hoped that prayer would be enough as he sat shivering by the fire, recounting all the reasons he still had to live. The secret of dwarven powder and his father’s opinion of him ranked high on the list, but no matter how he looked at it, revenge was high on his list too. Whether that was in the form of giving the realms of men insight into how they could throw off the shackles of dwarven oppression or something more violent depended on his mood. Still, he was sure that there needed to be retribution.
Now he lacked the energy for anything more than thought, though, and all he could do was focus on building up his little campfire and siphoning off a thin stream of heat to warm his blood. It was only when his pile of kindling started to get low, and he got up to get more, that he realized it was beginning to get dark.
His heart instantly sank. Even though he was finally warm and dry, there was no way he could keep this going all night. In desperation, he looked around, grabbed the smallest branch he could from a partially buried deadfall, and brought it over to the fire. Such a large piece of wood almost smothered his little fire completely, but soon enough, the branch caught. Then Jonathan had the opposite problem. If he wasn’t careful, this much wood could easily burn out of control and burn down all the nearby trees and probably him with it.
As the branch started to blaze up, Jonathan maintained calm and dumped most of the excess heat into the nearby rock crevice he’d been planning to sleep in any way. The rock probably wouldn’t hold the heat for very long, but it would at least melt away the snow and give him a place to build a bed.
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Jonathan started stripping the dry branches for their needles and using his knife, he began to cut down thick needled green branches that he could use to cover over the exposed side of the crevice to provide him some shelter and once the snow had disappeared entirely, he started to put piles of needles on the rocky shelf that was just big enough to fit him.
By the time that was done, night had arrived in earnest, and with the clouds, the only light present was his thin flickering firelight. Jonathan reached into his bag and searched blindly for one of his remaining glow stone shards, but the only rock in the sack had no light at all to it, so he put it back and sighed in frustration.
He was torn; the last thing he wanted was to put out his only light. If he snuffed his fire, then it would save firewood, but then he would have to waste precious powder in the morning reigniting it. Though he spent a few minutes agonizing over it, there really wasn’t a choice in the end. He couldn’t let it burn unsupervised, or it would burn out of control. So, once he had crawled into the warm but itchy bed he made for himself, he pulled every last degree of warmth from the fire and dumped it into his bed before he finally drifted off to sleep.
Jonathan’s sleep was fitful, and he doubted he slept more than an hour at a time. Early in the night, it was fear that woke him. Fear that the fire had sparked up and was burning out of control, or fear that monsters had found his camp and the strange sounds he heard wasn’t the wind but goblins getting ready to attack. As the night progressed, though, his greatest enemy shifted from his imagination to the cold. Despite how uncomfortable it was, the bed he made was effective. Still, part of that effectiveness had been in basking in the heat of the rock he’d spent his last waking hours warming, and that warmth was now spent.
Shortly before sunrise, Jonathan could no longer sleep. It was too cold for that. He even dumped everything out of his burlap sack and used it as an impromptu blanket, but it didn’t help much, and in the end, all he could do was suffer and wait to die.
Fortunately, the sun rose before that happened, and Jonathan immediately got out of bed and kindled a new fire. At that moment, he didn’t even care that he was wasting another pinch of powder. All that mattered was feeling his fingers and toes again.
This time the fire came to life easier than last time, as he was less hesitant to use the large wood than before. Once he was warm again, he looked for better spots to spend the next night. It turned out that there really weren’t any. However, he did find a niche in the back of his shelter that he thought might be turned into a fireplace and chimney if he had some clay or mud to hold the stones together.
That idea would have to wait until later, though, because as he started to climb and explore, his body made it very clear that he was hungry. Maybe even starving. He struggled to think of the last time he’d eaten, and the best he could come up with was the albino fish that had made him sick, and that had been days ago. Before that, he’d had the remains of the engineer’s lunch over several days. At best, that was two meals in the last four days. Now that he’d kept himself from freezing to death, he needed to solve his next problem, or he’d never have the strength to hike back to civilization.
With one last longing look at the fire, Jonathan followed his old path to the lake to see if he could find some fish trapped in the ice he might be able to eat, or perhaps he would be able to spear some that had been made particularly sluggish by the cold. Alas, neither option proved likely. In the end, the only thing he could find that was remotely edible was the goblin that had bitten him trapped beneath the ice.
Once, a lifetime ago, Jonathan had asked Boriv if you could eat a goblin. Even though he’d forgotten many things between now and then, he’d never forgotten the old dwarf’s answer about how it tasted. “Like garbage boiled in acid,” he said ruefully to himself as he started chipping at the ice to get at the vile corpse.
Goblin was the very last thing he’d ever want to eat, but unfortunately, at the moment, there was no other option; it was this or starve, he told himself sternly as he fished out the corpse and did his best to gut it. As a boy, he’d gone on a few hunts with his father and brother. He understood the basics of how to skin and field dress a deer, but it seemed somehow more brutal when he was doing it to a creature that was the shape of a man. Jon kept expecting it to come to life and attack him, but instead, it just flopped limply as he started dragging it back to his little camp.
He was not looking forward to this next part but did it anyway. First, he pulled enough fire from the campfire to give him a nice bed of coals, and then cutting free some of the larger muscles in the legs, he skewered them on a sharpened stick and set about cooking them. At least it didn’t smell as bad as he’d feared, he thought to himself as he kept an eye out for any predators that might be tempted by the smell of cooked meat.
Up here in the daylight, he didn’t have to worry about trolls or goblins, at least during the day, but there still might be wolves or worse in a place like this. Jonathan had to grudgingly admit that he had a better chance against trolls in the deeps than he did against a bear in this winter wonderland. Here he was denied his one chance to wield fire.
That reminded him that he still had the brand, though, and reluctantly he moved away from his place by the fire to check it out and see if the water had ruined it or not. After a little trial and error, he opened the breach revealing the bullet, the wadding, and the water-soaked powder. He quickly wrapped the last bit in a bit of goblin skin and set it aside. If he could dry it out again, it might be useful, though not as useful as learning how to load and shoot this strange dwarven contraption.