Staring down a mountain cliff in high winds; holding your comrade, helpless, as his life gushed out; the desolation in a beggar's eyes, no good with stumps for legs. The cold of the stars, the keen loneliness of a thousand years from home...
A single horrible thought, stretched on the ice of time, held Marcellus together in the bleakness. Blind, dumb, a single keening lamentation. Great forces stirred in the years that he could not feel. One would set him free, quite by accident.
Slip of a girl, shivering child of the Other-land, she met the Devourer in his citadel. They warred with the power of hurricanes, and both disappeared from the ken of mortal men. As the Empty God vanished, so did his delicate runes of power. Days passed without the fresh mana to support them. Finally, ice cracked, walls broke under their weight, and men tumbled out of the horrible no-place where they had laid in timeless agony.
Marcellus landed face first in the hallway amidst a shower of frost, naked and cold beyond comprehension. His blood struggled to pump along thick veins, and he could not feel finger or ear. The ebony mercenary forced himself up, swaying like a drunkard, to survey the fortress. Ruin, abandoned, and creaking under strain. Remains of men and equipment lay scattered at random; the men were thoroughly gnawed on, old corpses. No way to judge time by their decay, not in the arctic climate. Could have been two days or two years.
-Good Athos, what happened? How long was I gone?-
He knew a story of a man who once stumbled into a Havoc storm, and emerged whole from the other side nearly four hundred years later.
-Dammit. I need fire. Food. I'll freeze.-
Urgently, he stumbled back to his dojo for flint and tinder. Ransacked of all weapons, but his trusty cache still waited under the hearthstones. He tossed chunks of bedding down to start the fire, started it, and basked in the warmth. Whatever spells maintained the fortress failed, letting in the brutal northern winds to howl along the catacombs.
Not long after Marcellus managed to scavenge winter gear in his size from a corpse, other men trickled into his dojo, lured by the fire. At the sounds of approach he stuffed a last bite of hard bread in his mouth and shoved the rest away deep in his gear. -Screw sharing.-
Each arrival told the same story through chattering teeth: assassins meant for the Empty God. Eaten in turn, thrown into a coldness that lasted forever and yet only a blink, and suddenly spit out here.
“What do you think he used us for?” one asked.
“Food,” growled another, “or spare parts. Maybe he kept us like a squirrel keeps nuts, hidden away in case of sudden need.”
“Athos preserve us,” prayed Marcellus. “Now more than ever.”
“What the hell happened here?” asked the first.
“The invasion never happened.” The one speaking seemed familiar. Scarred face, smooth features of Elsian lords.
With a start, the Blademaster recognized a former student.
“I swear I saw it with my own two eyes. Athos himself appeared in the sky, a star of flame and fury, and assaulted the Empty God. We were betrayed by our own Lord. He called upon us to aid him, and so many of us just....died. Crumbled from the inside out. Wizards, officers, foot men. All dead. His runes flared so bright – if I hadn't dived into a snow bank they would have blinded me, and I could still see them through my eyelids. Boom. Athos disappeared...and so few of us were left.”
“We should never have signed up for a god,” growled the second. “Like he would care for our fates. That's why I tried to kill him. I was one of the first, back when the Empty Armies were proper pirates!”
“Fat lot of good assassination did anyone here,” the first pointed out. “After the fight, everyone who could, split. Rather take their chances with the cold. A bunch of us got together to go and take down the bastard who robbed us of everything but...I don't see any of the others here.”
-Great Athos, you answered my prayers. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.- His could rest in peace. Now he could focus on survival.
Freed from its magics, the fortress coasted on the churny froth of the Fault. Two great floes suddenly crashed into it, a movement of only a few feet but with entire islands of mass behind them. The edifice shook, a section crumbled, and the earthquake threw the band of men to the floor.
“What the Pits is that?!” whimpered the former student.
Swallowing against his dry throat, the Blademaster spoke. “We are not on solid land here. You, Pirate. What tricks do you have to get out of here alive?”
“This close to the Edge, mate, you're guaranteed to waltz into a Havoc storm trying to hoof it out of here. 'Less you got a Havoc compass on you?” The man leered.
At blinks of confusion, the pirate scoffed. “What, you sea-blind morons didn't think we sailed into Havoc blind did you?!”
“What's it look like?” Marcellus pressed.
“About so big, circular. Big compass full of quicksilver with markers on the side for depth. The chaos pulls quicksilver towards it, so shallow is safety.”
“I'll find one.” The Blademaster saddled up. No way in the Pits he would count on these ripe bastards leaving his gear alone.
“I'm coming with!” interjected the pirate. “You ain't leaving me behind.”
“Fine. Don't expect me to slow down.”
So the entire motley crew set out into the precarious interior of the fort. When one slipped on the ice and broke his leg, Marcellus did not even look back. He had no loyalty to these criminals. They scavenged up and down, looting at will, for several hours without success. Constant creaks of the ice set nerves on edge. The floor rocked back and forth, leaving them to wonder just how much of the solidity they took for granted was the Empty God's magic.
As they crossed one of the great antechambers, way lit only by their own torches against the dark, another floe crashed into the fortress not a hundred feet away. The roof shattered.
Marcellus had just enough time to curse before a boulder four times his height plowed down. It caught his right arm, swung out in the beginning of his futile, evasive leap, and crushed the limb into the floor. The rest of him jerked down from raw impact, plowing into the ground.
The feeling of his arm being crushed was a tornado ravaging his brain for one terrible second, pain beyond pain, and then nothing at all. His body convulsed, shock almost instant, and the cold waited for its cue to freeze him into a solid corpse.
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He tried to shift, but hot knives in his shattered collarbone stopped that.
“Bad luck, mate.” The pirate spoke, still whole.
Far above, the ceiling had collapsed inwards, several chunks precariously pushed together. A set of legs protruded from underneath another boulder, another casualty.
“I guess you won't need these then.” The pirate proceeded to loot the stricken Blademaster of his gear. “You're looking a little slowed down.”
“F...fuck you...” gasped Marcellus.
With a final laugh, the crew abandoned him to the cold and wind. Snowflakes coasted down the new sky light and lighted merrily on his nose. Every heartbeat pulsed more blood out of his wound. No feeling at all from his arm; just a horrible gap. Thoughts fought in slow motion, a barrage of pain, fear, and survival instincts all dunked in glacial waters.
-Better lucky than good. I lasted long enough to see the Devourer gone, at least. Guess my streak couldn't last forever.-
Funny, how death could come in so many flavors. He found himself remembering one brush so close he'd tasted Athos' heaven, an arrow in his gut a decade ago. Nasty wound, festering. That death burned, devoured from within like the coals from a fire jammed into his throat. This one shivered, cold and distant and sluggish. Eventually the shivers stopped, and all Marcellus could hear was his heart beating away what warmth remained.
**********
As the sun rose and fell, so too flesh and the Other rolled together in the frozen Edge, so close to the endless Havoc. Life and death strung out and blurred. Two souls floated in the most delicate balance, that twilight where body and spirit melded in a kiss before final separation. Mortal Marcellus could only hang by his fingertips to his body, refusing the dark with all his might.
The other soul padded on blistered paws. He was an old wolf, fur ragged and muscles twisted, a pack alpha who outlived his pack. A beastman shaman would have guided him to the Totema, but the Devourer aboded no competition in the world of spirits. The old wolf wandered the floes, not quite alive enough for procreation and a new pack; not quite dead enough to give up and rest.
Alpha wolf caught a scent - wounded prey. Still warm enough to strip its flesh before it froze. Tracking intently, he glided over the gaps between floes without trouble. He passed a smelly motley pack that prepared to trek the ice; when he finished eating the wounded prey, he would track these foolish and ill-prepared creatures. Around fallen boulders, a black, blood-covered giant lay pinned and helpless. The wolf licked dry chops.
-I will take the prey's body and make it my own. Then I will have the strength for a new pack and not fade away.-
So little left of its body, fragments that Alpha forced to the fore. Sharp teeth appeared in the air, followed by a silver-furred snout and rhuemy eyes. Behind that hovered the broiling shadow of the spirit, too scattered to manifest.
Teeth bared, Alpha bit down.
Marcellus forced his good arm up, and his hand caught the muzzle in its grip. The man could not feel his fingers to care as the teeth carved in. He rasped, "I won't go that easy."
-I will be renewed,- replied Alpha, implacable.
They locked eyes, and recognition flitted between them. Kindred souls, sharing some inborn steel to preserve against all odds. To survive.
"Live..."
-Renew.-
Their spirits latched onto the other, seeking to drain the opponent for their own food, and met equal match. The fight threw sickly shadows across the antechamber, flashes of red and green. For long seconds, they wrangled, deadlocked.
"Dammit..."
-Too strong.-
They respected each other, at least, as death would claim them both.
Yet the Other called to Alpha, fanning the Totema spark in him. A new idea flared. A wolf could not complete it, but one of the Totems could.
-Strong, dark man, would you take my essence as your own? Would you share a soul-bond with me, bound eternal, so that we both shall live?-
"Sounds like a quick slide to the Pits..."
-Not damnation. Life. Renewal. A new pack. I promise.-
Marcellus glanced down to his bloodied body below. When had he left it to hover as a ghost? Only the most tenuous thread tied him to that cold, still flesh. Nothing short of a miracle could bring him back now.
In the end, his need to live overpowered his faith.
"Do it, wolf."
Alpha abandoned his body, letting the last bits spatter to the ground. He placed a paw across Marcellus' breast and tethered himself to that heart-rhythm. On his own, Alpha discovered what the shamans would have taught: Totema, the protectors, lived in symbiosis with their tribes. If the tribe died, the Totema lost its anchor and disappeared...but so long as even one loyal pack mate survived, so did the Totema.
-I, the Alpha wolf, accept this man as my pack.-
Outside, the sky began to heave and storm – Havoc come to call. Raw tides of creation bathe the fortress, scrubbing away its clean lines in pockets of fire, ice, lightning and wind which fought like siblings. They combined to give birth to strange geometries, creatures of madness and whirlwinds, and split an instant later, killing everything inside with vacuum.
Human flesh could not withstand the tides, and the flows scrubbed away the signs of the Empty Armies. Yet the burgeoning Totema saw another way, riding the flow and diverting its currents, safe in lands where humankind would meet their doom.
-A new pack.-
The Totema smiled to himself. Already the human's knowledge filled him, expanding him beyond Alpha's animal ever-present. This family would be strong. It would need a name.
-I will be Arctic Howl, and Marcellus Howl will be the alpha of my pack.-
**********
Marcellus woke in blissful ease. Stomach full, muscles relaxed, aches gone. A serenity of simple life and simple pleasure replaced that horrible guilt and blood-thirst that drove every moment in the Fault. Despite the feeling of having slept for a good while, he couldn't dredge up a single nightmare. Familiar tundra smells and sounds filtered in - distant water, thousands of bugs buzzing in their frantic orgy of food and sex, the tantalizing whiff of a hare not too far off.
He shifted, finding himself in a bed of shed fur, and his stomach protested. We just ate! it protested. Sleep! Rest until we're hungry again. Enjoy the sun!
A well-chewed bundle of bones and fur a dozen feet away crawled with flies. The sun caught on pools of fetid water full of summer tundra grasses. At least it wasn't winter!
Then his memories reactivated, and Marcellus leaped to his feet. -Athos' balls, where am I? How in the Pits did I make it out of the Fault?!-
The Blade was naked except for his right arm...
An arm covered in a wolf's coat, a mixture of dark gray and dirty white, all the way to his shoulder. The hand sported stubby claws and rough skin where a paw would have its pads. It twitched with him, curled into a fist at his command, and flexed rock hard muscles under the fur. It refused to admit that it did not belong to him, answering orders in perfect obedience.
-Oh, Athos! What did I agree to?! Look what that beast did to me! -
His entire body thrummed like a primed race steed. Smells awful and sublime rolled through him, shoving into constant awareness where a human's nose mattered little. His ears picked up the caribou across the valley from the sharp clack of their hooves on the rocks.
-I'm beastman.-
The one mark that damned you in every nation, far more than piety to Athos and skin color. Norhill, when it existed, actively hunted beastmen. Elsia enslaved them. Yantra, far to the south, forbid them to breed and cut off the genitalia of any who disagreed. Lydia treated them best – day laborers and sweatshop peons. There were no beastman Blademasters.
The Totema wolf settled onto the canvas of the Blade's skin as a liquid tattoo, sitting on his chest and wagging his tail.
"You have damned me!" spat the Blademaster, fists clenched. Regardless of present circumstances, he would not refer to himself as ex-Blademaster. Not after more than twenty years of work and blood!
-What i have taken, I have paid for in full. In time, your eyes will open,- replied Arctic Howl.
"With what have you paid?!"
-Renewed flesh. Blessing of the wolf. Lessons that your old mind yet refuses to accept. We are bound, body and soul, yet your heart still rejects me. You shall be only beastman until it opens. Beware the things that you let fester in your shadow.-
Arctic could hear the other Totema now, and they taught him so many new things. His pack alpha stewed in anger, but would come to understand in time. He departed from the mercenary's skin to listen to the chorus of spirits old and wise.
Marcellus watched the tattoo fade away and bellowed his frustration to the sky. The noise scared off the caribou. Then he sighed.
He was a survivor. More over, he was well off in Lydia. If he could find a quiet way to access his holdings and found a Wizard willing to stay mum...better to have one good arm than two blasphemous ones.
With no immediate options but to accept the cryptic words of his new Totema (whatever that devilish bargain truly entailed), he gathered his wits and began the hike east to civilization.