Fate - First Reply Shifting Winds [Eretejva]

[Sigrith]

Eretejva Tundra
Beyond the realm of Indeholm
A year ago...

HAW

HAW

Black feathers filtered across a sky pregnant with clouds. Grey was the color of the realm as far as the eye could see - the short winter days casting Eretejva into a realm of perpetual cold and petulant storms.

HAW HAW HAAAAAA-ERE THE WIND BREAKS ON FALLING STONE!

A pair of eyes, broken in their color from one another, tracked the progress of the creature above, boots crunching softly through fresh snow. Here the peaks of a short mountain range cast themselves down, down, down into a deep and forlorn darkness. It was a place known as Aragath's Breath, where an old Nordenfiir King gave his life in a fit of delirium that he believed to be salvation. Somewhere down in that fathomless gorge lay his bones, far beyond the reach of his people to burn. It was rumored his Svalen, a hulking beast of white with a great, gaping scar that ran the length of his spine, still lurked. Still captured the minds of those too weak to fight against his raging neurosis, to toss themselves over the edge into the same fate.

The Nordenfiir avoided this place out of a wariness earned over the years. For decades men, women, and kulean had been lost in the mists and the storms that plagued Aragath's Breath, never to return or to be found. The bridge that once supported the keen boots and paws of traveling Hunters, Traders, and Rangers, that had once provided a short-cut across the ravine to save nearly three days time otherwise, lay abandoned.

But it was not forgotten.

HAW HAW

The Witch released a slow breath and stepped forward through its fog, making way across the precipice toward the bridge in the distance. There was something here, whispering on the eddies of energy that only the Witches seemed capable to perceive, and she wasn't convinced it was a ghost.

 

[Sigrith]

Bump. Changing from private to Fate - open for a reply.

 

[Kol]

The whispers had brought him here.

Their laughter had echoed in his skull day and night for weeks, the horrid sound keeping him awake for days on end until he had finally deigned to travel south. Even then their cackles had only been replaced by wide feral grins staring down at him.

Even as he moved through the fog they surrounded Kol. Thirteen of them had made themselves known to him, lurking with their eyeless cheshire teeth in the air.

Most would have called their presence a sign of madness, most would have called him insane for even speaking of them. Yet over the years they had never lead him wrong. It was the whispers that had allowed him to carve a river through the Blight, they who had allowed him to survive the Father of Wyrms. Who was he to doubt them now?

"I have come." He said as he came to the edge of the fog, his broken eyes slowly looking towards the closest grin. "But why?"

Kol's voice was a bare rasp, the damage of the Wyrm's ice still lingering in his walking corpse of a body.

The grin did not speak, they never did. It only grew wider.

A press of wind suddenly flowed over him, and what was obscured by fog cleared for half a breath. A bridge lingered just beyond, though Kol saw it for only a second before once more it was swallowed in a sea of white.

The Sorcerer frowned for a moment, and then stepped forward. He still did not understand.

Sigrith

 

[Sigrith]

Walking through the mists left the tundra Witch with a deep feeling of deja vu. She'd been here before, perhaps in her dreams, listless in a sea of frigid clouds. Feeling the crunch of snow beneath her boots, a vague wind billowing now in no particular direction. The eddies of the mountains tumbled chaotically, giving no guidance and whispering in nonsensical hymns.

Sigrith breathed deeply as her path lead her along the ice and snow-laden ground, no path to follow and only an open expanse of pale grey on white to draft her own.

She found herself at the precipice of the gorge, standing before the bridge.

It creaked and swayed a haunted memory of ages and lives past. These weren't her own reminiscings but that of the lost souls trapped here, incapable of finding their way out. Caught in the winds between the realms. Purpose escaped her, but curiosity was as strong as the cold. With a long breath left billowing in clouds before her lips, Sigrith stepped forward to embark across the bridge, unaware of the entity closing in at the other side, well beyond her vision through the fog.

 

[Kol]

The Sorcerer walked in the Witches path, each grin hanging in the air whispering a thousand words.

He could practically feel the ebb of lost souls within the air, the tide of their lives rushing around as the Dark Gods snapped and grasped towards them. The voices in his head urged him to consume, to take, to grasp what he needed.

Kol ignored them.

There was always greed among the Dark Gods, always a need for something. It was those voices that were often the loudest, yet they were hardly the most insidious. It was the most silent ones that he had to watch out for, those that spoke to him of futures that might yet be.

As Kol reached the beginnings of the bridge he looked down, a frown touching his face. His gaze swept upwards towards the bridge as it slowly shifted, swaying with Sigrith's steps. A frown touched his face, and he noticed only one of the cheshire grins widen.

An unease settled over Kol. It was rare to see only one of the Gods smile at him, rarer still for the others not to notice.

What was this?

The Sorcerer hesitated for a moment more, then stepped onto the bridge and into the fog.

 

[Sigrith]

Half a dozen steps across and nearly a thousand more to go, Sigrith felt the shift of the bridge. A quaking, a slight lean - perhaps brought on by the wind? She persisted, pushing forward with another step, and another. The creaking of the planks and the groan of the ropes - as ageless as the sounds of the mountains, as the wails of the souls trapped in the icy abyss below.

A gale blew in at her back, urging her forward in a flurry of ice particles that would have stung at more sensitive skin. Sigrith obeyed, her progress losing the listless nature of wandering and pressing into something of purpose.

Another quake.

Another.

It fell in rhythm with her own steps and became her timing stamp.

A shiver across the tension.

A shadow in the grey.

At first she thought perhaps the squall was playing tricks on her eyes, but as the shadow persisted and formed more and more into the shape of a man, Sigrith found herself at an impasse between surprise and confusion.

What were the chances of another person walking out across this bridge, in a place and landscape that only the touched of mind dare traveled? Perhaps a warlock of the northern wastes she'd heard described by the elder witches of the coven. Following on the whispers of spirits like herself?

Several yards from the center of the bridge, Sigrith came to a stop. There was no telling if this old bridge could support two people, or if this other was of peaceful demeanor. The spike of hackles running the length of her spine wasn't helping.

 

[Kol]

Kol stopped, his head cocking to the side beneath his hood. The ragged cloth seemed to shift as the wind drove across the bridge and over the two northerners. The rickety wood and the ancient rope seemed to creak and shift, rocking them back and forth.

The grins within the air seemed to have grown even smaller, their lipless fangs hiding as the Witch across from him came into view within the fog.

None of them disappeared completely, not this time. It was rare for them to go entirely, but it was clear that most were ill-at-ease for some reason. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and as the woman came into clear focus the whispering...stopped.

She did not look familiar, yet she could only have been of the Tundra. No southerner would wear such a garb, and any who dared would not have made it here. A frown touched the Nordwiir's lips, his fingers flittering at his side for a few seconds as the board beneath his feet creaked.

Behind the woman that one chesire grin widened, growing above her head and peering down at her with an eyeless smirk. "Who are you?"

The Sorcerer asked, his voice a bare rasp.

 

[Sigrith]

Weird, mismatched eyes stared at the stranger through the gale. Sigrith felt the proverbial hackles of her spirit stand straight on end, needling her spine with every instinct of threat she knew how to feel. Though only a Nord, as some might say, her own senses could also be said to have grown beyond the realm of those she called kin. The winds of the realms and the whispers of the leylines could only be heard and understood by a few.

Odd that they should call her so strongly here only to meet this man halfway. And here their whispers fell silent, overtaken by the winds and his voice.

"Duvstrih," she answered, offering the name the wilds had given her, and she paused before asking for his own identity in return. The moment wavered in a weird howl through the crags of ice gaping far below them, a shudder seemed to issue upwards from the abyss. Sigrith blinked, felt her vision shift, lost sight of the man in the snow for just a moment and when he came back into view he appeared to be raising his weapon and preparing to slice it through the support rope of the bridge.

"...what are you doing?!"

At that same moment, he'd experience the same vision of the woman mirroring her own, longsword raised high over her head.

A blast of wind whipped through the air, the bridge snapped beneath them and dumped them down into the glacial ravine.

 

[Kol]

"Stop!" Kol reached out a hand just as the woman seemed to raise her sword and swipe it through the rope holding up the bridge.

An odd magic swirled around his hand for just a brief second, as if he were about to reach to stop her. Yet as he moved he felt the power suddenly break and dissipate, the wide grin behind Sigrith widening furiously.

Then he fell.

Kol did not know how long he fell, where he fell to. The bridge snapped beneath his feet, dumping him into a void of nothingness. The whispers in his mind seemed to disappear, the eyeless grins that surrounded him dissipated in an instant, and all that surrounded him was a vast fog that seemed to carry on for a thousand miles.

He fell, and fell, and fell.

Then he didn't.

Kol found himself standing on solid ground, but not on the snow dusted earth of the Tundra. Not on the bare bedrock found on the Isles. Instead he stood on grass, filled with color and life the likes of which he had only seen in the southlands.

Fog still clung to the air around him, but he could see the grass extend outwards, rolling down a small hillside below.

His head turned, lips thinning as he found nothing but silence. The grins were gone, the Dark Gods quiet in his mind. The Sorcerer frowned, and then called out. "Hello?"

 

[Sigrith]

White. White. Whiteness surrounded her. Sigrith felt the lurch of her heart as the air beneath her feet peeled her in and the fathoms of the abyss devoured her. She saw grey, flashes of blue. Then black.

...

...

A gentle breeze shuddered across a peaceful landscape. It was cold but the ground beneath her was warm. Green. Her vision was filled with green. A gentle whine sounded from her throat and as her eyes focused she found that she was looking at paws instead of her hands. Paws colored the deepest of obsidian, slashed by mingling fronds of grass. Sigrith leaned up and carefully pushed herself to all fours.

Finding herself in her beast form without memory of shifting was far less unsettling than the landscape that greeted her. Nowhere in all of Eretejva except for the Pale King's Sanctuary far, far to the north had she ever seen this much green. The wolf lowered her head, scenting the air, mismatched eyes scanning her surroundings for any clue of her location.

Was she dreaming?

Was she dead?

The spirits did not whisper here.

Perhaps because they did not have a song to follow. The Tundra Witches conducted their esoteric power from many founts, and their song was one of their more beautiful controls.

Sigrith filled her lungs and released them through a long and eerie howl into the silent reaches.

 

[Kol]

His head snapped to the side as a howl tore through the fog. It seemed to echo and resound within his ears, singing out loudly as though a thousand wolves surrounded him. Kols felt his skin crawl, fingers tightening slightly as he looked down at his hand.

Confusion pulled across his feature for a brief moment.

The Sorcerer opened his palm, drew up his sleeve, searching. His hand slowly ran over his forearm, then reached to touch his face. He felt none of the scars that should have been there, saw none of the lines that bisected his flesh.

His flesh was as though he'd been born anew.

What the hell was this place?

The Dark Gods were silent. His body was not his own.

Kol frowned slightly as the howl died down, his hand coming up to draw away the hood for a moment. Head turned, and slowly his feet followed. The Sorcerer stepped slowly, moving through the grass as he tread towards where he thought the sound had come from.

Through the fog, a wolf came into view.

 

[Sigrith]

Sigrith looked out into the rolling fog, contemplating the utter silence surrounding her. There was no sound of nature, nor whispers of the winds between the realms. Despite her call to the spirits, she remained stalled in a void. It was ... unsettling, to say the least. If nothing else, the spiritual sensation of nothing reminded her only of her days before joining the witches.

Back when she was the one that didn't belong.

The wolf emitted a muted rumble, ears suddenly flicking back as a noise finally reached them. Sigrith turned to see the same man from the bridge slowly break through the fog and felt an innate sense of unease settle over her. The wolf issued a low growl, hackles frilling lightly along its back. She was big, even compared to the larger wolves of the Tundra, and looked to be a young adult dire wolf with a thick pelt of pitch.

"What have you done?" Her snarl sent a shiver through the landscape.

 

[Kol]

The wolf was larger than any he had ever seen. There were not many on the Lost Isles, not anymore, but a few packs had managed to survive and even thrive. Those tended to be more slight, quicker, and like everything else in his home they were...aberrations of what they had once been.

This one, despite it's size was more normal, though the eyes were a tell of something else. Something familiar clung to them, somethin-

A voice snarled out, and recognition suddenly dawned on his features. Lips thinned, and he took half a step back as he fumbled for the air with his right hand. No dagger came as it should have, no magic winding it's way into his palm. A frown pulled across his features, and he bit back. "Me?"

Indignation clung to his tone.

"You cut the rope." He said as he pointed a finger towards the wolf.

Was she a Skinshaper? There were dozens among his people, those who could break and bind their flesh to animals. Yet she was no Nordwiir, that much he was certain of. "You cursed us to this place."

The Sorcerer stared, his eyes hard.

 

[Sigrith]

"I did not," the wolf snarled back, snapping her fangs in his general direction, "my sword is at rest."

Sigrith watched him a moment longer, intuition telling her that his accusation was one of the same shock and horror as her own. If not he, nor she, than who? Or perhaps the better question was ... what? She seemed to calm, the glint of her fangs receding behind her maw and the hackles along her spine lowering.

"It doesn't matter now. We're here, in the rift," though she couldn't say she agreed with the sentiment that they were cursed ... or that they were stuck, "and we will never leave if we make no effort to find a way out."

Where there exists a way in there always existed a way out, but sometimes the nature of the paths were not one in the same. The wolf issued a light chuff, eyeing the man with tethered suspicion. Sigrith didn't make an effort to judge people at first impression, but his look was strangely foreign despite the fact that he clearly belonged in the tundra. She couldn't place it, though she suspected one of the myriad stories told by her sisterwitches would reveal a clue.

"Let us make peace and find our way together..."

 

[Kol]

The Sorcerer stared at the wolf for a second, wondering, considering.

Had she really not cut the rope? It was difficult to read the facial expressions of a wolf. There was still feeling behind them, but...well he was no ken to animals. Lips thinned for a brief moment as he sneered slightly, and then he simply nodded his head. "Very well."

Briefly once more he tried to call upon the magics within his veins. Fingers grasped at the air, and where a dagger should have been nothing appeared. Frustration flickered over his features, gaze flickered to the smooth skin of his forearms.

It felt so...wrong.

Briefly he wondered what he looked like, what his face appeared to be without the marring of the Frost Wyrm's breath. His head shook as he banished the vain thought, eyes turning towards the wolf and the rolling grasslands behind her.

"What are you?" He decided to ask finally. "Not a Skinshaper I think."

Not this far south

 

[Sigrith]

Of all the questions he could ask, that was it? Sigrith blinked at him, ears folding back as she gave pause on the answer. So often she struggled with her identity given the many choices she had to answer with.

Seventh daughter of Jorn Thurna of Hjerim.

A Nord exile.

A wolf changling.

She decided on the one that held the most meaning to her, "A witch." Simple enough. Sigrith did not ask him the same question in return, but shifted in her stance and turned her nose to the air again. In this form her sense of smell was far stronger, though never so strong as her mother's ilk: the Nordenfiir.

There were no scents beyond their own to distinguish that she could tell, which was troubling to say the lease. How could a realm like this lack such a thing? Not even the grass had a discernible scent to it, which brought her to think that this was not everything it seemed. They already knew something was amiss here, discovering the nature would be their best bet to finding a way out.

Turning a slow circle around the man, shifting from the ground to the air and back again, the wolf paused somewhere to the man's right. She wavered to the left and then back to the right before returning to where she'd initially stopped, "This way."

There seemed to be a faint undercurrent of cold air here, crisper than that of the rest of their surroundings in the way a cold current of water could be discerned from the rest. She followed it, keeping her pace trackable so as not to lose her new companion in the mist.

 

[Kol]

"Hrm." The answer was not a swift one, but curt. It was not dissimilar from what he would have said. After all what was he but a Sorcerer?

Some would call him a leader, others a Herald, but he himself never held such grand thoughts for himself. The Dark Gods had cursed him with their whispers, that did not make him something special, that did not make him something better. Even if they forced him to be.

He watched as she slowly circled him, half prepared for some sort of violence as she shifted her weight and moved. When no swift bite came he relaxed just a little though not enough to make him seem any less tense.

There was an extreme discomfort to this place, something he could not quite put into words. It had taken his magic, the curse of the voices, the eyeless grins...and yet it was all so unfamiliar. He was not often left with mystery, yet here it was in abundance.

When she made her call, Kol followed.

No other path lay before him, and such his steps tracked behind the wolf's.

He had no idea how long they walked, or even where they walked to, but slowly the grassland rolled beneath their feet. The fog still surrounded them, but after a time things began to change. From the grass rose a forest of stone, dozens upon dozens of pillars inlaid with thousands of intricate symbols and lines.

They seemed not carved, but natural, as though they had grown from the stone itself.

 

[Sigrith]

She walked in silent wonder as the landscape around them changed, but her eyes were less focused on what she was seeing, and more attuned to the how she was seeing it. The shift seemed to happen in a curious simultaneous loop - not a natural evolution of one biome to another where the grasses thinned to drier, airid soils. Instead it felt more as if she was walking into a loop of deja vu.

One moment they were in a grassland, the next they were here.

Like a dream.

The wolf gave a momentary pause as she considered this, then pressed on to continue moving through this forest of stone pillars.

For a time she gave little attention to them, intent on following the feeling of the current, but then she suddenly came to a halt. Mismatched eyes hovered in recognition over symbols of - "Fiirevik."

Her mother's native tongue. She stepped closer, inspecting the symbols, "I did not recognize any of the others, but this is Fiirevik," her gaze traveled up the height of the stone, "the words don't make any sense."

 

[Kol]

"I do not know what that is." It was a language of course, but he had never heard of it before. The Lost Isles were not exactly a place of education. What he had learned of the world beyond he had torn from books he'd found or minds that had offered it.

As well as the Dark Gods of course.

He looked at the Witch for a moment, watching her before returning his attention to the stone pillar she had stopped before. Lips thinned for a moment, and he glanced around at some of the other obelisks that forested the earth around them.

The runes on each of them were slightly different, not in mix, but composition. Each of them a different language, he noticed. "What are they? The words?"

They did not make sense, but perhaps they were only a piece of the puzzle.

 

[Sigrith]

"The native language of the Nordenfiir," Sigrith replied, taking a few steps back to better look at the pillar. She studied it in silence for a moment before slowly turning to walk around it. Every face of the pillar had more words, but that was all they were: words. There existed no meaningful sentence structure or thought.

"They are just words ... rock, tree, home, water, blade, strength, pelt, song, before, might, horizon ... even words like to and from." The wolf's eyes narrowed, "it's the full lexicon, I believe. Are there any languages you know on these pillars?"

 

[Kol]

Kol considered for a moment, glancing at the Witch for a few seconds. "Ah. We lost our written language on the Isles."

At least, that was what most thought. The truth was more complex. They still had the written word, but most of his kin simply did not ever bother to learn. It was the Dark Gods that had taught him, though of course that knowledge had been tainted.

It was their language that first marred his flesh.

The Nordwiir looked around for a few moments, glancing at the different pillars and wandering around. He did not find the language of his own people, perhaps the tongue too twisted for a place such as this.

"This one." He said softly. "Anirian. Southrons."

Kol said, looking up at the pillar and studying some of the words. "It is the same as yours. A smattering of words."

His lips pursed for a moment.

"A forest of languages." His head turned, peering 'deeper' into the forest. "Perhaps only a part of the knowledge that can be found here."

Is that why the Dark Gods had brought him to that bridge? What had lead him to this place? What else did these pillars hold? Without another word Kol broke away from the Anirian Pillar and began to stalk deeper, the air seeming to cool as he moved through the forest.

The light seemed to grow dimmer as he wandered, the fog more thick, the pillars more distant.

 

[Sigrith]

One moment he was there, his voice echoing strangely through the pillars, the next he had vanished. The wolf looked up, alarmed, the flocking of her thick fur standing on end along her spine. This was not the place to wander off, to lose one another. The witch believed that they needed to stick together to find the best way out - seemed he didn't.

She snorted, casting her mismatched gaze once more about. They had become distracted here and perhaps that was the intent. Sigrith had lost the trail of the current she'd been tracking and now the eddies mixed weirdly here amidst the pillars. Muzzle to the ground helped her none - whatever scents should have been there were not. No footprints to follow. Nothing - as if he'd simply been a ghost.

Maybe he had.

Circling back around to the pillar of Fiirevik she assumed the same direction she'd been going prior, passing the with the stone of her left, and set her nose to the air again.

A subtle hint of the current swept in and so she resumed following it.

 

[Kol]

There was something within the mist.

Kol did not know what it was, he could not see it, he could not smell it, but it was there all the same. There was a flash of movement behind him, the quiet sense of something creeping into the consciousness of his mind.

The Sorcerer's skin seemed to prickle slightly, unscarred flesh rising in goosebumps. It was a feeling he was not used to, and he could hear his heart begin to thunder within his ears as he slowly continued to step forward. His eyes flickered from place to place, gazing through gaps in the stone pillars until suddenly something shifted.

A blur rushed from the mist.

It moved past Kol in an instant, a swipe of something rushing across his chest. He could feel something leave him, a sliver of something far more valuable than gold.

Before the Sorcerer could even open his mouth the blur disappeared into the fog once more, and like a newborn foal he fell onto the ground. His chest ached, his lungs burned, and yet no wound rested where the blur had touched him.

 

[Sigrith]

She walked for some time - which was to say, she walked long enough to not really know just how long it had been. Time seemed an arbitrary thing here, as much as anything else did; direction, energy, spirit, ether. Sigrith did not feel under threat so much as she did utterly baffled. Being lost was a state of mind, or so she had grown to find. There were always methods of finding one's barings.

But here it was something else entirely.

The wolf felt a faint gust of ... was it wind? brush past the guard hairs of her coat. Up ahead a shadowed figure, hunched against the ground. A few more steps and she recognized that figure as her companion stranger. But what was he doing ... better yet, how did he get ahead of her? Had she just walked in a giant circle?

She cast a wary glance around the immediate area, but little could be discerned through the fog.

"What happened?" Sigi asked after the man. Clearly something was wrong, but it was difficult to say just what -everything here felt wrong.

 

[Kol]

Kol clutched at his chest, though his fingers did not alleviate any of the pain that flared within his chest. The Sorcerer squeezed his eyes shut, a labored breath dragged into his lungs as he tried to get some semblance of his own strength back.

He heard the woman's voice, the strange witch who was a Wolf questioning him. Lips thinned for a moment, hating the moment of weakness that he couldn't draw away from. "Th-there was a..."

What was it?

Kol did not know how to describe it. The creature had been but a blur to him, a wisp that had formed from the fog and dragged away a piece of himself. He could feel it, the small slice of his own self that had been carved away by the creature.

"A creature of some sort, I don't know...it took..." He grimaced, looking up and drawing away his hood to look at the wolfish woman. "It took a piece of me."

With his magic he could have shown her, but it was gone in this place. "It came from the fog."