Chapter 7: Skjallstrom

It had been a day’s journey since he last saw the beasthunters in Arrenfaeld. Night had come, grown late as he slept under a drooped, furtive tree, and now twilight was spent, though the light of day--far off--was yet to heed him. So Ulf awoke shortly after midnight, keen on trudging forward, and crept off into that old darkness.

The realm, in all its girth and savage sprawls, had stranded him to its outlands in the midstwhile, where low fields forbade Arakvan’s frost for a brief, timid mile. Though same as all things before that fractured land, they faltered, and the grass soon grew loose and wild, oscillating spectrally so. Hills ruptured the plains like tumors, and diseased afore them the earth descried its own wither. The swards grayed, but a lushness anew throbbed between their sway like creatures behind a curtain. Rifts slithered through the earth, descending deep into tundras of old stone; gateways to the world below. Most were shallow and tightened into sharp nooks only, though some were far-reaching, and at their bottom was only blackness. All the while--as native moss wrestled critters into shallow graves, silhouettes prowled hilltops, and birds cried with an offset frenzy--the gales for which Arakvan was known and feared proved more imposing than all.

Whether earthbound and stubbed or beaconed high, trees and fields and beasts alike succumbed to the great call of wind. The land rattled to a near tremor with each gust, and with each gust was a silver glow. It was as if it were a playground of wraiths, cutting out pale swabs in the grass and singing with a desperate melancholy. Under every draft the earth cried its ghostly wail, moaning with such thunder one would imagine the very dirt itself begged the breeze to die. The gales stabbed and shrieked, rode over cliffs and echoed up their crevices, ceaseless, lashing viciously. It carried wood and mud in white rides. It bowed rock and met it to the whirlwind. It howled blood out from frail ears. It was a set of fingers sliding through hair; the hushed words of a scorned lover; it was the hurt, eternal soul of Arakvan, and nowhere was its frost escaped.

Never was it fiercer than at night’s zenith, and swarmed in shadow Ulf met its first bite from atop a mound of crumbled rock. He felt the cold fill the cracks of his battle scars. It was harsh indeed, but the White Gargantan had taught him what it meant to freeze, and so unperturbed and unflinching in the face of its mammoth thrust, Arakvan’s might could only flap his cloak. Then he marched on, and the wind curved to swallow him within its dark wail.

So it’s true what they tell, thought Ulf in passing. Here, the sun spits frost.

Through endless plains of white grass aloft he trekked. The moon was stark, radiating her haunt of bleak cerulean that did softly gloss the realm in its eerie sheet, but Ulf weaved through it when it came thick. The moon was indeed a sight, as in Arakvinin air it was no spectator from the stars, but a massive, stalking eye, oppressive in its grandeur, that claimed the world as its lantern to be lit and snuffed at whim. It bore sideburns of black, and Ulf wondered if perhaps even that wondrous, terrible giant of a moon could not dissuade the crush of night. From its brilliance, the tips of the ghost grass silvered, and the fields became a tide of resplendent white.

Up from the infinite dips the land sported came a fluorescent glaze from far, far below. From some distant light-caught moss did it emanate, low in the underearth entries, but at night its glimmer was spanning and beyond contest. Hubs of hot air, they hung over rifts like fertile limes or a crass evergreen, and under the shine of those uncanny springs rode dusts; shivering like insects at such a buzz they made the air tremble--misted in cold neon.

The weakest of Arakvan’s wilderness huddled by these wayward lanterns, stashing themselves away by its warm alarm. To Ulf they were a plain vulnerability, an err of nature, though he imagined there lived many in Arakvan who trembled before light itself. They were spared by his blade, if only because they lacked the meat to earn its cut. Toadrigs, carilhorns, fostbars and lesser flock assembled like prides before the watering hole, leeching off the only wells night could not devour.

It was indeed at night, though--when the skies stayed gray and star-swarmed, adrift with feathered clouds--that winged silhouettes darted airborne. Their shrieks were horrendous affronts to human ears and their forms huge and taloned, and surely the razor red of their sights caught anything they thought they could kill, but Ulf heard the bat of wings and low he drew, like a black rock amidst dark plains.

Onward he trekked, until night waned and he crossed the first wicked border of the Whilderwheats: a pair of trees, with white roots, long, twisting bodies that wrapped tight and delved inward as if demented by the arcane, and branches of hurt maroon, scythed out from the black of their trunks. In the peripheral, where more trees strangled stone and bent out from jagged gaps in the rockside, the visage was a constant, and the effect a malaise that trailed each eye that found it for miles on.

Ulf stayed low, striding squat in the underbrush below the claim of cliffs and crossing fields with a haste that fed him speeding to the next sward, where nature defied definition, and grasses towered with their endless waver, floating grasp. The Whilderwheats were long and empty, graced seldom but solely by the feral, but carrying on meant its enduring for weeks more.

Old, worn moans bounded up from deep down in the rifts, like an aged smith’s mutterings who from iron smelted that earth’s core, while from all around echoed howls and the hymns of unseen horrors. The grass smothered each scream then shot it out fettered and wrong, and so sound too numbered among the ranks of the enemy.

Trusting only his feet and the firmness of dirt beneath them, Ulf joined Arakvan’s spectors; floating, striding, moving without weight. But the land was loud and wounded, and sans some lament Ulf quickly was made foreign by his held tongue. The moon, in some strange, awful manner, knew he did not belong, and against him it beamed a blinding blue that bade him downward. Through dried gulley and rotted grove he tread, finding paths etched in stone and roads of wheat--frosted--and mint, of a green too sheer and petals too toothed. Staying away from the light, he stalked swiftly, skillfully, and within hours had become naught but another Arakvinin predator.

That cool, jittering night, despite all its wails and wraiths, was a solace to him. Among the darkness he could breathe easy, and beyond the colour of day things were of a perfect clarity. There was him, the path winding forward, all that hungered to entrench it and all that would die in its dirt. Almost all that there was to be known was unknown to that dark stranger, yet Ulf understood the rules of their game. Hunters would hunt for thrill and flesh, prey would hide in sweat and blood, the wind would strike cold and the grass would drown the slain, as the moon cursed all below it to die undone. The land’s terrors were not known, but they were understood perfectly, and thus in a realm of tremendous dread, Ulf found great comfort indeed. Without words, without thought, with only the true thrust of his blade to guide him, that cloaked outlander aligned with the swards’ spooks, and from hour to hour he carried on.

At last, after what felt an eternity in the glow of the rifts and the silver of the plains, dawn fell over the Whilderwheats. An amber flame took the horizon, sparkled like an infant star, then stretched itself into the low skies. The clouds softened and through them came an air of chilled orange, until the heavens were taken by the waking sun. The cold light from below dispersed, the wails subsided, and the fields teemed with waking life. Blairhogs trot joyously from divot to crest. Undvarks sang their grating songs from atop the Redcress arbors. Chase ensued across the valley; some playful as others ended in chews. Ulf, still, was witness to it all.

What drew near was driven back by his growl. What reached far was severed by his blade. The graver threats that could not be persuaded with a swift bloodlet or a fierce call searched for him, though from sward to sward they found no tracks to follow, no scent to sniff out, and no form to catch in the thirst of their eyes. He moved with the wind itself, and as quickly as each gust wisped past, the shadow of Ulf was elsewhere.

Onward he carried, undetected, though with shins stinging from endless stone stores in his path and a stomach growling, unquenched yet. Even his eyes, tempered yet unadapted to the pale haunt of that land, ached under early daylight. Then the clouds that remained darkened, caught the amber of day in their folds and swallowed it, and gathered strong. Strong and deep, until soon the tender dawn was fanged by storm clouds.

Looking high with the smell of a sweet pungency in his snout, Ulf frowned and pulled his cloak high. The world grayed like an ill midnight, then hail snapped downward. First it only announced itself, as the frail scampered underground, then it came in torrents. The sound was a deafening batter and in the bliss of that disquiet Ulf hardly noticed as the mud beneath him turned to puddles. Askew in the filth were beetles, maggots, the weaker and more drab, flushed together above ground.

To Arakvan, he was a stranger, and so hail was a disbanding shout. It commanded him to widdle away or drown, but in a learned defiance he pressed onward--broke to a chase--then settled when a beast at last came into sight upon the low bracken of his route. The creature was deer-like, if deers had a web of antlers on their crown, second arms--mighty and long--stretching over their front legs, and hooves that ended in stabs. Its fur was of a pale grey and from its rear floated a black tail of loose wisps. They were prey still, but in the Whilderwheats even the stag’s flesh could not come so easy. It was a fostbar. It was beautiful, but here its sighting meant only that supper drew near.

With it were two others; a mate and a fawn. The fawn slowed their trot just enough to allow Ulf to slink in behind them. It had been over a day since he ate anything other than jubburries; an infant berry of sour insides. Yet it was not hunger that brought Ulf creeping behind the fostbars, but rather a keen insight. He knew with a storm came a new, worse class of predator; one that could brave hail and lightning and fill its belly unaltered. Only the native fauna could be accustomed to it, understand how to evade it and elude even the worst of hail itself. So Ulf followed the family of fostbars, over cliff and plain, as they led him towards their home, albeit further east than he intended. He passed south for a while, knowing his route left him, but pressing on with the certainty that the rain would render him worse than a detour alone.

An hour drained past as he minded his steps with caution, but the rain only grew fiercer.

Mud dragged him back. Hail beat him low. When the fostbars at last led him to the base of the Lunga’ar, he felt a quiet relief. The river was wide, rushing, mustering a rapid violence under the fed hail, though it meant he was further than before, and something other than a longer sward was a joy to behold. A fog draped the river but it remained a shallow crossing, despite its speed. From the rocks stacked high at its side, he leapt, splashing in the weakest depth of its other end and parting the fog for a brief moment, before it regenerated itself and obscured the Lunga’ar’s secrets once again. Ulf felt the need to pause a second, while sulfur filled his nose, but quickly reminded himself the river was not his concern, and the fostbars would not await him.

In just under another hour the mates and their fawn at last arrived home, or at least in some kindred shelter. The earth dimpled and a stream filled its crack. At either side were more Redcress arbors, protruding out crookedly from the great stone borders of the drop, though under them was a worthy shelter that obscured all the stream below its maroon maze. At its end, a cave more akin to a passage formed, and in it the fostbars filed to rest and slumber, and for a moment elude the hail.

Ulf knew even a creature as timid as the fostbar would defend its home if a stranger knocked, and in the violence of a storm the desperate beast would have to die. He stalked along the cliffed canopy, reaching stone just above where they laid. Then he stopped, listened close, as a greater splash under a longer fall caught his ear. Swift, Ulf found the crevice. From its slit he watched the fostbars sleep, heard them snore. They seemed so tranquil even in hail. With grace, even when their fur was matted and drenched. The fawn seemed only a ball of hair, cuddled tight by the doe and shivering in its sleep.

Frowning, Ulf Eldric grabbed the hilt to that thin, wicked blade at his hip. He searched for a landing amidst the fostbars, but the puddle directly below him snapped away his sight. Ulf saw it for only an instant; with only a glance, but it was enough to omit that immediate pull to militancy that had so long kept him breathing. There was his reflection, blurred amidst the ripples and by it he felt betrayed. He was a shadow; a storm’s sharp stranger, with hard eyes aimed down. Ulf forgot himself in that gaze. It had been so long since he last saw who he was, what his long way south had made him. Creases had wedged themselves alow his eyes from so many nights spent out of bed, far from any right rest. His wounds from long ago were dry cracks, and their dull shade seemed to tighten his face in scrutiny; hollow the memory of its visage. In the beat of rain he was glitched, until only a black, hairless, robed phantom remained to return his watch. When, he wondered, had he become a man of season? Which kill--which loss had fulfilled this vision before him? What strike of the blade had swayed his heart cold?

Then he saw the family again. The fawn still shivered, its meek little head scrounging deeper into the fur of its mother. The doe still embraced it, unawake but ever loving. The other laid closer to the entrance, so proud of its kin it truly believed the sting of its hoof could repel even a feeble predator. Pride would be its death. There they were, in clean puddles, with only one another to fill the cold of their cave. And there he crept, a thing of shade upon the roof, visiting in the storm.

His hand at last fell away from the hilt. Ulf turned, laid onto his back, clasped his fingers together at his waist, and squinted up to the hail while it pounded his skin into rock. The force stripped his head of its hood and the wetness sogged his strength, softened his stature. Glaring high, he watched the clouds darken as midday died out, as if some answer was buried in those undying folds of air. The screech of hail was everywhere, drowning out every other thing, and in that madness Ulf closed his eyes, failing to find any comfort. But after minutes of tensed endurance, his ears soothed, opened wide again, and just under him, beneath stone, like the heartbeat of a mouse in the wall, he heard the fostbars snore.

Ulf sighed deeply then, though rest he did, with an unease and some calm alike.

An hour again passed, while he sprawled below the storm. Some distant howl too near to preserve slumber shook the cave. With a haste the fostbars emptied out and mantled up the sides of their alley, through the Redcress arbors with gentle leaps. Ulf rested longer, hearing them scuttle away east and letting them gain a distance so as not to feel chased. A chased creature took risks, and a daring guide was not one worth following. After minutes were spent, he lumbered up, collected himself and gazed off to where the howl had emerged: back west. The fields were quiet, weak from rain, and their shadows fled before the steam of his eye.

Unsatisfied, he turned and pursued again. After an hour more faded and the clouds darkened, it became difficult to discern night’s approach from their number. In the obscurity and through their fear, the distance between him and the fostbars heightened, until again a scream like a fevered roar rattled over the plains. Only this time it drew from the east, and so Ulf hastened to a sprint.

He tore across the sodden mounds with ardor of a reluctant, needing sort. Through the rain he hurried and past trees he slipped, then the realm opened wide and the valley ran quiet, as if even the bugs had migrated beyond. The stink struck his nose before he witnessed the red luster coating the grass, but, entranced, he stared at it anyway like some unbelieving fool. With heavy steps, Ulf came to stand over that flattened earth. His boots swamped with lifeblood. His gaze, once steeped, grew fierce and unkind again.

There laid the fostbars, atop the grime of their insides and stomped dirt. The male was torn in half, with snapped ribs arching into the mud and legs spasmed askew. The doe was still panting its last breaths, though three gashes great enough to tear out its heart hewed the right core. Her high arms were drained; sucked dry. The fawn curled up near her hindlegs, gushing at the throat with its spine snapped back. Its tiny head was bitten clean off, but the other two still had eyes to gape hollow at heaven.

Ulf unsheathed his blade. The bodies were slaughtered, though hardly feasted on, rendering this a sport killing. Large claws that crush bone with a grip, teeth that seep veins of their colour, a power that can tear a fostbar in two, with an evil that dines only where its lust yearns to. This particular creature--some mighty stalker of the storm--happened to yearn for the baby’s skull rather than the wholeness of the father’s meat. Ulf scouted the perimeter, knowing in an instant he was standing in the leftovers of a seasoned Arakvinin killer. It was not hungry in the least, he knew. It was only bored. In the wounds were caught ashen plumes and on the fawn’s neck stringed an oily ichor.

This was a sylvan aetroll, he wagered, and it claimed the storm itself as its hunting ground.

With one quick, hefty cleave, Ulf denied the doe its misery. Then the family was joined together once more, in their triangle of decay, with a bloodied pond as a last, cold, embrace. Then the hail hit harder, and their bond was flushed into the dirt.

“You were wrong again…” said Ulf, in quaking softness.

The tracks of the aetroll were wide and heavy, clawed and winged. They killed the grass they breached, and their trail of conquest led east still. Drying his blade on its victim, Ulf sheathed the crude thing and carried on unafraid. Over the southward Bulwark’s Trail it tramped, then through an untold expanse of hackneyed wheats that killed hours more, until the light behind the clouds was gone, and dusk was undeniable. Now there would occur a predatory overlap; when the night fiends and the sons of the storm both emerged to feed. The result would be a calamity of sound and slaughter that Arakvan itself would harken, though, ironic as it was, Ulf was nowhere safer than in the shadow of the sylvan aetroll. The scent of tar was its maim against the land, and any who valued life--fierce or frail--knew to tread far from that horrid reek. But the fostbars were not so wise, and Ulf was not so forgiving as to let his guides rot without first drenching his blade.

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Yet the rain, too, was vengeful. Begging disbelief, the torrents grew wilder still. The hail fell like sidelong pebbles that cut up the earth. A boom of thunder cracked, jolted all of Arakvan like some growl of a world’s stomach, then lingered, as while elsewhere thunder was a snap, in Arakvan it was a curse; long and cruel. Tremors tore the realm awry. That explosive pound was the only voice that could quell the hail, and quell it did, before resounding far, far beyond that with a warcry that was only murderous.

Now Ulf did indeed scowl, for he understood that this was no mere storm. Drawing his hood low over his eyes, he quickened his pace before the scream of the Skjallstrom. So it was called, in the name of one of the All-Father’s sons. The tale told of Skjal, a young and sly libertus, who left earth and its creations and his good noble father to live among the clouds. He wished to be as free as wind, though in abandoning earth the All-Father cursed and forbade his son from ever returning. So Skjal grew wrathful, sprouting lightning down across the land he once tended. It was told that each crack of thunder was Skjal’s anguished plea to his father to free him from the clouds, and the particularly powerful, barbaric storms that followed the thunder were named in his memory; as if believers truly thought that might appease him and spare them his fury. It did not. Arakvan was marred by many things, though few were as unforgivingly monstrous as the Skjallstrom.

In an instant, Ulf wished the hail would persist forever, for what came after made even black, drowning skies seem like the stuff of a clear day.

Lightning split the atmosphere, shattering the storm and drawing fissures through the clouds. They came as massive, blinding stems of bright power. Their sizzle was a violet, though the propensity of underearth fumes hugged the skies, heated each bolt as they breached Arakvinin air, and brought them down in a white red that left inked craters in their wake. Like some devilish orchestra of shrieks and swats, the hiss of lightning was a constant and the crash of its strike was a strident quake that left life twitching until the next fell down. Some unnatural nerve in the underearth caught each aggress, carried each bolt underground and reverbed its vibration for miles. In the onslaught of red light, madness seized the land in a choking fist. The rain filled shallow rifts, though when it trespassed into those with great depth it fell far and ended only when it bashed against its alien flora. The rain, in that remarkable space, did not belong, so when it met plantlife its touch was an acid and all below it sogged and dissolved. Burning fast, their smokes climbed high; revamped by the hail rather than dispersed. When the fumes slithered above ground, the lightning’s glow filled them, and cardinal fogs broiled out from below.

Such natural violence recalled Ulf to the Gargantan and its blizzards that left bodies mangled and frostbit. It was a charming reminder, and though the Skjallstrom was a terrible, violent beast that proved the apex predator of that fractured land, it would do naught to spare the sylvan aetroll who thought itself its lord.

Onwards still, he carried. His gaze only hardened as the cold grew stronger. Through a wooded terrace he crept, then up a steep cliff, to spot an old wreck called Fjordrun at its other end. Massacred by the storm, Fjordrun was made more lowly than it already was. An old hamlet once, some time past the land was ruined and, straight beneath its homes, gave in.

In the formation of a masticated star, the earth itself sank. Once a low hill, Fjordrun became a gaping tundra. The hamlet collapsed to the rift’s base, killing all inside it and anything below. Only a pedestal of rock and moss at its dead center remained, with a dilapidated shack atop it, slanted and battered. Along the outermost edges of the drop were ruins; old porches, half-sundered, and ajar posts with nothing to wield sticking out from mounds of debris. From his height, Ulf perceived the star of Fjordrun. Its depth was mountainous, and so the risk of reaching its center was tremendous. Up from the descent came that cardinal smog like its own grounded storm. At its bottom were piles upon piles of cleft wood, rotten bodies impaled upon stalagmites, and the tawdry remnants of fences and boards, with ramshackle roofs of hay laying browned in shadow. The sight was appalling, a damnable, hellish desecration of ruin cursed and devoid of its colour, as if the All-Father himself smote Fjordrun for their sins.

In cautious approach, Ulf pondered what sins such a modest, backroad town could accomplish, before settling on the decision that the All-Father, if he were true, was nothing other than merciless. It was then fitting that a creature as equally unkind as the aetroll had made this its home. When he drew near the ledge, he reconsidered, seeing the great leap of shadow before him and knowing that this place was always its home: the aetroll had crawled up from Fjordrun’s dead star, and the bodies dropped down to it were its first taste of clean blood.

There was indeed a time where a drop so horrible would cause him fret, but Ulf had seen a thousand drops and each time denied them his life, so unhesitant he sought the star’s still standing heart, alongside the shack slumped atop it. A Saldark pine stood leaning over the chasm, and up its crooked trump crawled Ulf. The bark was soaked, but his steps stayed true, and soon he was crouched in its branched head. From there, he leaned back and braced himself, then dove outward. The gap proved greater, and for a moment he was airborne staring down into demise amidst red fogs. Seeing that great pit, Ulf could not summon spite even as his heart raced, but instead simply frowned. He caught the roots at the pedestal’s edge, though they nearly broke off in supporting his weight. Their wood was slick, but his hands were firm, and up he crept until the summit was under his feet.

Facing the last home standing, he sniffed and filled his nose with tar. The aetroll had been, though this house remained closed and boarded. Too strong to be hindered by wood alone, Ulf wagered there was no scent so sweet to lure the beast inside. On reaching its door, he realized he would be the first to enter this home since Fjordrun fell. Surely, the raiders could not breach its gap. His blade slid under each of the three boards blocking the window, and one by one popped them with enough force to litter the ground with nails. An elbow shattered the glass and like a bagman he rolled through.

A hole in the roof filled the floor in a thin layer of rainwater that made each step a splash. A table was overturned, a bed was propped against the door, broken pottery and shards of chilled clay hazarded the floorboards. White scratchings traced the walls; nail-made. A couple old bones laid in cracked bowls or bent shelves, but all were picked clean. The only thing that remained upright was a stool adjacent from the door. Beside it laid an old woodchopping axe, and just out of reach from it was a corpse. It was a man, stretched sickly, pale, and with maggots living in his rotten flesh. So ravenous they were, that the dorsum of his back was opened and his spine showed through.

To the right of his curl and before Ulf’s feet was an open trunk on its side. Uninterested, Ulf traced his fingers along its edge. Within were old parchments, an unruly dagger, some carved model of a knight, chalk, and a fist-sized arachnid that had webbed within. Ulf grabbed the spider by its leg and lobbed it behind him, then slapped away its webs. In its silk was a hairbrush, and when in his hand Ulf paused for a time, tracing its balsa handle and the little bristles fit for a child’s hair. He pulled off the webbing. The hairbrush slowed his mind and eased the squint of his gaze. When he saw it, his eyes were elsewhere, and his fingers came delicate around it, for only a moment. Ulf frowned, realizing then the seconds it stole, and chucked the thing aside. Picking up the parchment and thumbing through, he found a letter left amidst the blank sheets, scrawled in charcoal.

I die here, this is what is. No food, beast outside. Can’t make the gap. It’s been days breaking teeth on old bone and eating the worms under the floor. All-Father save me, I am your servant. If my dear Jennette finds this, know I think of you to warm me in this cold place. Know your memory keeps me brave beneath the creature. Light is fading. I do not know if I will live another night. My belly feels like it’s bleeding. I hope you live, Jennette. I hope the underearth didn’t swallow you like your mother. I couldn’t save her, either. Can’t save myself. Now I starve. Sorry state, but it is mine to face. I hope I can keep your memory when I go. I hope I do not forget. Do not forget. Do not forget. I hope I do not forget-

Ulf lost interest and discarded the paper. The dead man’s daughter was no less so, surely. Now he was maggot food. Standing, he looked over that overturned corpse again. The face was bearded and sunken, and the eyes were wide with terror. Too old to escape, this man had made his shack a tomb, and so inability buried him. He was unworthy of care. Yet somehow, this incompetent corpse held his focus. Some shame in its dead gaze or desperation in its cold fingers stalled him. Here was a father, who failed. In fear, he starved, and now a stranger unearthed his story like some lackluster bedtime tale to be told then forgotten. For the first time in a while, Ulf’s frown subsided. He did not smile certainly, and it was nothing as ugly as a scowl, but deadpan he was enthralled to the father’s limp form. The maggots filled his eyes and their tiny chews scratched his ears, and, for only an instant, Ulf’s mouth fell agape.

Then he recalled who he was--where he was, and shook the thought from his head. Returned to his usual sternness, Ulf crouched near the stool, rolled the body on its back and observed it. An amulet hung around the father’s neck, so with a fist he tore it off. Rising, Ulf ripped the silver pendant from the necklace and dropped the rest back on the corpse’s chest disinterestedly, then pocketing the silver. For all he knew, this was no victim. This was a fearful cur who let his wife die and did not risk himself to find his daughter again. This was nothing other than another weak-willed whelp, deserving only of dismissal. And dismiss him Ulf did, carrying his attention back to the entrance so quickly it was as if the sight disturbed him. The silver was his, the story no one’s, and greater matters begged heed, so Ulf clambered through the window again and abandoned the tomb to the rain.

Hail’s bite was a needed calibration. He had soothed in discovery, and ease in this realm--like every other--meant a fool’s death. Ulf raised his head to embrace the cold of hail, hear the thunder, see the flash of lightning, feel its tremors through the earth. It was a discomfort, though it calmed him, and ready again he dropped his narrow gaze to the gap.

The leap was meagre, and the moss swab at its other end would keep him rooted. Yet the Skjallstrom aged fast, and the air had smogged grey. Hail lashed away the world’s colour. There was, for a time too long, only shifting shades of black, the white gusts between, and the sudden shocks of returning lightning. They, their electric raids, and the fogs from below brought red to that shade-soused abyss, but still did Ulf leap with only his own instinct in only the night’s darkness. He caught the moss, though it tore, and quickly he swung himself against the rockface. Dangling over death, he thought back to the father at Fjordrun’s heart, who for this paltry scare elected to starve. Coward! he hissed, before lifting his legs--with the strength of his arms alone--into higher footholds, then mounting the cliff. Thunder boomed to announce his arrival. Lightning lent its gleam to cast his silhouette red.

Ulf took two steps further, then hit a hard stop. His body tensed, his head tilted to accommodate the dig of his ears: a stomp sounded low just within their grasp. Then another, then two more after; deeper, fiercer, with a stirring fury crashing them into the dirt. A fevered roar--sullen but perverse--buckled the cardinal fogs aside. The stink of tar took the air.

The sylvan aetroll had come.

Ulf drew his keen blade like a low flag of black intent, and murder would answer its sway. Outstretched at his side, the dark, wicked weapon caught lightning’s flash in its edge, and granted Ulf an evil arm of scarlet. His knees bent, his brows furrowed. An avid fluency took form under that black leather. Mercy, in all its temptation through fear and wear, was gone. Now there was only the hunt and the storm before him, and Ulf was learned to their ways. Here, the quicker, crueler claw would prove true, and there lived no fiend under the sun who could hate as ferally as Ulf Eldric.

But indeed, the aetroll was a worthy competitor. Out from the fogs blasted a mass of gnarled fur. Its tangled, twined hide made it vast, but demented, as scaled bands of black interceded it. The aetroll was a wrongful tempest of sheer onyx and infernal valor. A crane’s face, with a snout-like beak that drooped fangs and sprawled mandibles still wet with blood, found Ulf. With its wide, white eyes upon him, he was consumed by a bloodshot twitch. The thing’s arms were logs, and from its broad, spaced fingers--of which there were three per hand--ran four layers of nails, each longer and with a curve more crooked than the one before. It stood on two feet like a man, but those feet were trunks that wedged earth inward with every step. It stanced upon talons, heaved by broad thighs riveted in pale blue veins. Its core was skinned, without fur or flesh, revealing a dense rib cage that little skeletons fell captive within. The bone was a jade rock, but filth from old kills and lounges in putrid waters cloaked it in befouled grease. The limbs of the long dead parted between its great ribs to hang limp out from its gut. So long was their torment, much of what it devoured melted in the acids of its stomach and fused with its horrid form. So gigantic were its outer claws, old, stolen skin clung beneath them still. Under its arms ran a scaled webbing, and the aetroll, in that darkness, appeared winged. Hail had shagged the beast, but it was unfeeling to something as puny as the cold.

“At last…” said Ulf, with a whisper.

Insatiable was its desire to kill, so with a great burst of urge it lunged. The Northman dropped a hand to the dirt and pushed himself into a quick sprint. As the aetroll breached the air, Ulf slid low, and behind it he emerged with a blade soaked in its left ankle’s blood. The aetroll barreled through the fogs and, from its massive strike, blew into the rift of Fjordrun. Its raised arms slowed it to a glide, and the moment it caught the pedestal at that old hamlet’s heart, the aetroll kicked off into a soar. The rock exploded under its talons, and so in a wave of water and earth it returned to the cliffside like the dark soul of the storm. In raising his eyes to its plummet, Ulf watched the aetroll blanket Arakvan’s lightning. Its rim shone red.

It landed with a double-fisted pound that summoned a tremor worse than thunder. The land broke under its pummel, and from the cavity fell tides of dirt-strewn shock. It roared, furious, in finding Ulf was not a puddle beneath it, but coursing along its right side, under its strike, with new blood over his blade. With a prompt turn, Ulf slashed its spine, then, bracing himself, let the ruptured earth throw him into a great evade. Turning with pain on its back, the aetroll unleashed a furious swing, only to find its opponent a good distance from even the longest nail.

The aetroll trotted the gap into nothing and in seconds towered over the outlander. With a flurry of power, it descended against Ulf. A duck dropped him below the first, wide arch. The next came down for his head, but a roll put it behind him. Mud jumped under the fist, and that alone was quick enough to catch Ulf’s leap. The third was a clap of both swings meant to crush the Northman into goo, and learning from his low shifts, the aetroll aimed for his legs. But Ulf was faster again. He jumped, landed atop the closed fists as they unleashed their seismic clasp, and keeping his footing he devastated the aetroll’s jaw with a deep, mighty slash. Red spurted out and caked him in colour. Dark ichor dripped from the wound, and grabbing it the aetroll wailed and stumbled while Ulf leapt again. Only this time, he did not choose distance.

A menace as brisk as the wind, his phantom form crossed the mud and assailed the sylvan horror between its shrieks. His blade wisped over the thing’s wrist, then up through its broad waist to run blood over its thighs. It roared again, anguished, and threw an impulsive claw at its aggressor. But Ulf was seasoned, and no attack so poor would strike him true. He backstepped the swing, then rushed in behind its breeze, cutting straight through a vein on the leg of the sylvan fiend. The man moved like a ghost, fading in and out of touch and returning to suck dread, all the while swerving his ajar blade like a homing gust.

Terrorized, the white eyes of the aetroll grew impossibly wide as it bellowed its malice. Ulf beheld the stems of lightning reflect in that pale spot. His grip tightened.

A double-armed sweep forced Ulf to a distance, and before it could be undone the aetroll turned and leapt. Its great jump brought it high, and from there its arms spread to glide it away. Ulf was unwilling to see this hunt dragged, so from his cloak he produced a dagger just as the leap began, and when the aetroll pierced low air, steel tore through its wing. Disoriented and off-balance, it fell like a confused comet. The aetroll scampered to its feet, but when it turned Ulf was already before it again.

He did not rush nor speak threats against the beast. Ulf only laid his blade bare, let the lightning fill it, and waited. Insulted, impossibly livid, and with a ruined wing, the aetroll roared again, but this time its wounds lessened it, and the thunder stole its sound. In hearing its own weakness, the beast grew fearful while the storm screamed around it. Aware, it felt each pelt of rain carry away its blood and saw each flash of lightning surrender its reddened form. In a moment, the sylvan aetroll had seen itself become a victim, and the thought enraged it.

It came to him with a barbaric strength, entirely unhinged. Colossal fists moved with such momentum and berth they shot rainfall into thick splashes. Wails echoed incessantly, flinging spit, ichor and blood into the mud erupting at its feet. Earth tore up with its every move, light molded around its every shift. When the thunder rumbled, it sang a long, ceaseless song of the aetroll’s anguish, and for a tense collection of seconds it did truly seem as if the storm had served that wicked monster.

But of what worth was rain and lightning, before Ulf Eldric of the North?

The aetroll’s defense was strong and angry, but also was it fast and unthought. Like a black landslide it encroached around Ulf, and like a breeze he surmounted it. Each arm that the aetroll raised fell again with a new gloss torn out from within it. Each scream was assailed until they subsided, and soon the aetroll--without knowing--came against its foe at a limp with low arms, and groans rather than roars. Bloodied and with a furless patchwork, the beast wobbled, until Ulf grew tired of the affair, and with a final few cleaves butchered the creature. His blade whipped its knee, pulled it down from its chest, then opened its neck wide. The aetroll collapsed at last, and from its throat leaked a horrid pond of lifeblood and oily saliva.

Twirling his blade, breathing deeply, Ulf wedged off the head of the aetroll. He picked it up from its wild hairs, paced towards the cliffside, then gazed down at its lifeless, bloodshot eyes of white. In that splintered snow, he saw again the fostbars that laid mauled in the grass. Suddenly, his chest dropped and all its adrenaline whisked out. Here was their killer, torn apart and opened from the inside, but still did they lay dead in that flattened grass.

And so of what worth was this? Ulf wondered, before chucking the aetroll’s skull into the gaping rift of Fjordrun, where so many homes and bodies stacked. On the headless corpse, he wiped his blade clean, let the rain peel away its reds, then sheathed it again.

Night was young yet. Still, there was much way to make and much killing to carry out. Disinterested again and with his mind already elsewhere, Ulf charted a path back south through the waning Skjallstrom. The sylvan aetroll, the fostbars, and ruined old Fjordrun would die in his tracks. The rain did well to steal his focus, until all beyond it was forgotten.

Through a spyglass of old ivory and atop a far cliff of shielded rock, however, lurked watchers who would not forget. Impressed, the pair of beasthunters observed Ulf’s departure; marveling at the great bulk of death left so casually in his wake.

“A sylvan aetroll,” said Horral, peering through the glass. “All-Father’s eyes…”

Eidrik heard, but held his cap low to cover his face from the storm and from Horral both, while he looked elsewhere. “He’s a killer, aye,” said Eidrik, feigning disinterest.

“More than that,” Horral chanted, to be heard over the storm. “It’d have took a dozen furrfiends to drop a thing like that. And here he comes, like a boy at last forced to chore.” He shook his head. “Marvelous…”

Eidrik stayed silent.

“Man like him…” Horral pressed on, consumed in sight. “He might just mean something. Given cause… he may well be a chance, Eidrik.”

“He’d never leave Galehaven,” warned Eidrik. “Just another runaway butcher.”

“You don’t believe that!” shouted Horral while thunder usurped his speech. He lowered the spyglass to look against his kin.

“Why wouldn’t I?” asked Eidrik. “He told it plain he’d kill us if he saw us again. Now here we stalk, miles from Eritle, from our reward, to play chase with some foreign cur.” He averted his gaze. “You’re chasing wind, Horral. And all you’ll get out of it is the cold.”

“Maybe,” he said, peering again. “Maybe, old friend. Or maybe this wind is what’ll drive our spark.” The old man smiled tenderly, watching Ulf’s silhouette stride into the unknown. “Just maybe, we’ve found our flame, at last.”

He watched a while longer, but Eidrik only frowned.

____