He’d expected it to be the worst thing he’d ever tasted, and it was certainly up there, but it still wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. After Jonathan held his nose and managed to choke down a few tentative bites of the greasy burned meat, and he didn’t die, he greedily wolfed down the rest. Without salt or spices, it tasted like a gamey mutton more than anything, and the gristle-filled meat was just the sort of waste cut that his father would have fed to his hounds at Shaw manor. So, he had to chew it far longer than he would have liked to make it digestible.
Even considering all that, it wasn’t much worse than some of the stews the dwarves had fed him the last few years. Only the knowledge of where it came from made it truly disgusting, but right now, Jonathan couldn’t afford to think about that. If he was as picky an eater as his family always teased him for being, he would starve to death. So he ate as much as he’d butchered, but when his stomach tried to tell him to go back for more, he buried the corpse in a snow bank, so he wouldn’t be tempted by seconds. Once that goblin was gone, he had no idea where his next meal would come from, so even though the food was disgusting, he would have to savor it until he could find something better.
He spent the rest of the day picking at the scabs on his wounded leg as he tried to decide how concerned he should be about the spreading redness, gathering more firewood, and insulating his tiny stone hovel. Last night he had almost frozen to death, and tonight he had no wish to repeat the experience.
The night was still miserable, of course, and he spent much of his time awake, but this time it lacked the sense of lethal inevitability, giving Jonathan time to think and plan. His list of resources was small, but as long as neither the infection nor the weather grew worse, and as long as he found something to shoot with his brand before his goblin putrefied, then he was at least he was no longer in any danger of dying. Those were slender threads to hang his life on, but he had no choice. He had no idea if winter was only going to get worse because it had just arrived or if spring was coming any day now. So, there was no sense worrying about it.
Instead, he fell asleep worrying about the things he needed to do. He needed a warmer place to sleep, more firewood to warm it, and some source of food, of course. More than any of those things, though, what he really needed was some idea of where he was and where he needed to go.
He dreamed that night of goblins chasing him through blizzards. He channeled fire to fight them until he had no warmth left at all and was left as an icy statue, standing alone in the slowly rising snow. As frightening as that was to wake up to, the second dream of the night, where the goblin he’d eaten tried to force its way out of him as the skin around his wound started to blister and transform into goblin flesh, was the real nightmare.
After that, sleep was lost to him, and he just lay there waiting for dawn.
The morning was just as cold, but the iron skies and the lonely snowflakes that landed on him as he built a fire promised that things would only get worse as the day wore on. Jonathan decided not to go too far from his camp to gather firewood today, and he was glad he did so because once the snow started falling in earnest, he couldn’t see more than two dozen feet in any direction. Even going to the lake by the waterfall would be an impossible distance in weather like this. He made do, though, and braved the snow between intervals to warm himself up by his fire between rounds of bringing back more wood than he could possibly use in one day or maybe even two.
Very slowly, he was building himself up a stockpile. He was going to make it, he told himself. That is how much of the next two days went. He occasionally heard wolves, and once he thought he heard a train whistle echoing in the distance, giving him hope that civilization wasn’t so far away. Slowly but surely, though, his activities became less ambitious, and the distances he walked became smaller as his leg started to ache more. By the fifth night, there was nothing for it, and he decided that he was going to have to use the fire healing trick that Erkom had taught him so long ago. He’d been dreading it because all he remembered of the experience was pain, but his leg was hurting all the time now, and if he didn’t do something, he worried he might lose his leg or worse.
So, with a trembling hand on a cold morning, he cleaned his knife, then he held it up as he poured heat into it from the flickering bed of embers in front of him. He kept this up until it was red-hot because he was in no hurry for what came next: lancing the whitish boil at the heart of his red, swollen wound. Goblins were filthy creatures. It was no surprise to Jonathan that the bite had gotten infected. After all, Kaspov had told him that as many dwarves died after they battled them as they did during the battle itself, but Jonathan had never put two and two together until he was on the receiving end.
“Ollasa guide my hand,” he whispered. It was the smallest and most recent of his prayers, but he added it to the pile just the same.
He needed every scrap of bravery he could put his hands on for what came next because he was practically hyperventilating when he stabbed himself with his fiery knife. Instantly the wound deflated as white-green puss poured out, but the sickening smell of cooked meat was followed almost immediately by scents that made him gag. As awful as all those sensations were, it was only by focusing on them that he could ignore the awful pain he was inflicting on himself as he moved the tip of the knife around the abscess in a crude attempt to sterilize the wound.
The whole thing lasted only a few seconds, and afterward, he scrubbed the area down with clean snow, but even so, he was shocked by how painful it had been. It was worse than the bite itself!
Jonathan slept more than he had before the next couple of days, and slowly but surely, his firewood pile began to diminish. That wasn’t what finally prompted him to rise from his sick bed and go hunting, though. It was that he was practically out of goblin. As disgusting as it was to think about, he’d eaten everything worth eating off that skinny little bastard, and now he was left with the scraps. Those might feed him another day or two, but they would be even more disgusting than the parts he’d already cooked.
“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do about that,” he asked himself, looking at his leg.
He’d been feeling a little better, but he was still undeniably weak, and the last thing he needed to do was to traipse through the snowy mountains in rags, looking for something to shoot. He supposed that he could always go for another swim. He was pretty sure that two goblins fell into the water with him, not just one. That meant there had to be another partially frozen corpse somewhere in the pool, right?
Somehow that idea sounded even worse than hunting did, though. At least with hunting, there was a chance he would find something worth eating, but in the water, the best he would do was goblin, and even that wasn’t guaranteed.
He sat there for some time thinking about how best to solve this problem but came up with no easy answers. Finally, after hours of thought, it was the confluence of all three ideas that offered him a potential solution. If he had some string and a hook, he could try fishing, but with his only bait being the remains of a corpse, he didn’t think he’d have much luck. Unless he went fishing on land, of course.
The first thing that Jonathan did was carefully reload the brand in the same order he’d taken it apart. He’d never done it before, but he’d watched others do it plenty of times, and the hardest part seemed to be to figure out the amount of powder. Only once he was reasonably sure he had a working weapon did he butcher the remains of the corpse and scatter it around the area that he could see from a rock outcropping that was a natural hunter’s blind. It was far enough from his camp that was upwind from his fire but still close enough that he could pull some heat from it to stay warm.
After that, he waited all day, taking only brief breaks to restock his fire, but nothing came to sniff around his bait. Unwilling to collect it and give up, Johnathan continued waiting after the sunset, and the wind picked up, and it was then that he saw his first possible prey nosing around the food. He’d hoped for a wolf or maybe a small bear, but what he saw instead was a fox. It was a small target, but Jonathan didn’t have a choice. He waited for the thing to get closer and to stop moving as it nibbled on a morsel of frozen flesh, and then, in the thin moonlight, he pulled the trigger.
The weapon rang out, and for a moment, he was blinded by dwarvish fire, but when the spots from the sudden flash disappeared, there was no fox to be seen. Since he doubted that he’d blown it to pieces, he had to assume he’d missed it. Briefly, Jonathan kicked himself for not trying to kill it with fire magic instead, but the range had been too extreme, and the source of the fire was too weak to do much. In the dark, he picked up as many of his pieces of bait as he could find and brought them back to camp to bury them in the snow. He would try again tomorrow.
At least, that was the plan. Jonathan went to sleep as he always did after draining the last of the fire from his campfire, and just like every night, he woke up several times because of cold and nightmares. Tonight though, when he woke to what he thought were the sounds of a nightmare, it had followed him into the waking world. While he lay there, he could hear the growling and snarling of several wolves within feet of where he lay as they dug through his campsite, looking for anything to eat.
He was terrified, but more than that, he was deeply frustrated as he realized he hadn’t reloaded his brand, and with the fire out, there was only one source of power he could draw upon to wield against the beasts. He lay there for several long seconds, trying to decide if he should let possible food get away or if he should use the last of his dwarvish powder to bring at least one of them down. It was an impossible decision, but nonetheless, it was one that still had to be made.
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