Acid and Ice (Traveler and Vi)

[Lady Vi]

Days had passed since the first Calling and Herja was running out of firewood. She woke to sallow light dripping down through the cracks in the walls like pitch on the charred timbers. With midwinter approaching, the small woman was having a hard time keeping herself alive. Food and water were simple matters. The invaders had left so much behind; nearly every house that had not been burned waited with jars full of dried berries and larders full of meat. In the first day the witch had even found bread that was only a little stale. Clean water was plentiful thanks to the ignorant foreigners 'poisoning' the charnel pit rather than the freshwater spring that served as a well. Each morning since the Calling Herja had left her burned out building and gathered food and water for the day, but more importantly: she gathered wood. Temperatures were dropping dangerously low even in the daytime. At night a man could freeze without proper furs and while she had a whole village-worth of bedding, the witch was more concerned with keeping her fire lit.

The fire kept her hopes alive, not only her body. Gazing into the flames she could see... Everything. Possibilities spidered out like cracks in the bones she burned and in them she saw what could be. What WOULD be. If she could only wait, the invader would find her and she could appeal to his greed and ambition. Of course, waiting required patience and that was not a quality that game naturally to the witch-woman. The Matrons insisted that patience would be learned but Herja had not yet had the time.

At 23 years old, Herja was the youngest of her people's mages. The children and teens trained, naturally, but there was a test of mastery to pass before one could be called a mage. Herja had passed at eighteen. It was quite the scandal at the time, the runt earning her title... Childhood illness had left Herja significantly smaller than her clansmen, and even smaller than the invaders that plagued the countryside. She stood at a scant five feet tall, her lithe form dwarfed in bearskin coats that would always be too big. While all her countrymen were pale things, the witch might have been a flake of frost. Her hair was bleached white from the arctic sun and her long nights of vigil had drained color from her face. Dark circles rested under her too-large eyes. Perhaps tonight she would... No. Herja shook her head to dispel the thought. Sleep would mean death, should the outlander come in the night. He was close. She had seen it in the bones and cinders.

Again she returned to her safe little shack. It's walls were charred from the attack, but sturdy. Warding them against the Nightspawn had taken hours, but she knew that her work would hold. This burned out cottage was perhaps the safest place on the continent at the moment. Now she just had to hope that her invader made it this far. As night fell too soon the pale woman added more fuel to her little fire, placed her hunting blade across her knees, and waited.

 

[Traveler]

Demons roamed this land.

Night was their mistress; when the sun's rays ceased to touch the earth tendrils of mist seeped upwards, announcing the pending arrival of those ungodly creatures that seemed to grow stronger with every human life they spilled onto the ground. Gaelen Marquist had seen enough of his fellow warriors perish in the last few days to question the sanity of their Sovereign's orders. Cleansing this land of the demons, and of the people who worshiped them, was a task only suited to the Seraphim. Surely mortal men had no chance against such an unholy legion.

He paused at the top of the hill and looked down into quiet village. Another of his Sovereign's warriors must have come through here recently. The scent of smoke and death was still fresh, but the cold had slowed the stench and the streets were not strewn with charred bodies or signs of the raids, not like most of the other towns he had passed through. His left arm was wrapped tightly to his side. The clumsy attempt at bandaging himself was made more so by the fact that he had to use his off hand to bind and tie the wound on his arm, and the burn that accompanied the demon's fire spittle across his forearm had gone from a numb ache to an infuriating itch that Gaelen feared meant the end of his sword wielding days.

But... if he had to choke out every last demon and its worshipper by hand he would. The breeze caught strands of his long sandy hair and blew them across the noble bridge of his nose. His braid had begun to loosen; the leather and chain mail he had worn was stained with blood and the green gore that seeped from the ungodly when they died. Surely, he thought, I must appear like some walking dead, ungodly thing myself.

He could not go back. Gaelen knew to return unvictorious was to return to his education. The man-god who ruled his homeland was jealous, and for good reason. Every soldier who went on this quest made am oath, and if the Sovereign made his soldiers swear an oath, he made his knights swear doubly.

Gaelen's place among the noblemen who led the unfortunate guaranteed that the Marqist family would not have to put their women in the lottery for twenty-five years. That was twenty-five years that they did not have to fear the chance their daughters would be dragged to the border and offered to the demon king, in exchange for his promise not to cross into their lands. The next hundred drawings would not claim a maiden from his clan. Gaelen's presence among the Warriors sent to kill the demon king and his ilk was a small price to pay.

And if the quest was successful, there would be no more lottery. No more sacrifices.

He shivered. Night was fast approaching, and already the frost had begun to cover his short, dark beard. He closed his eyes as he stood there and remembered, for one brief moment of peace, the way it felt to walk into his family manor. He remembered the sounds of laughter and the happy bark of greeting from his deerhound. The scent of fried bread...

His eyes opened. The scent was real. Someone was in the village. People meant heat, food, possibly clean water. With a new resolve he began to move, and steadily descended into the village that housed Herja.

Fate and Destiny smiled as they would two threads together and then knit them into their tapestry. It had begun.

 

[Lady Vi]

A trance was easy to achieve in the deathly stillness. No bustling villagers made noise, no children's joyful shrieks to distract her. Herja ate a small meal of salted elk and a handful of sweet berries, dried to black pebbles that stuck to her teeth. The texture was a mildly irritating reminder of other winters, more pleasant winters... They had spent the dark week not too far from this burned out village in a comfortable cavern. The hot springs were scalding but glorious, even if the other women made snide comments about her stunted body. A bitter wind sliced through the ruined building and Herja would have given her left hand to be in those springs again, warm and carelessly drunk.

"Soon enough." She mumbled the foreign tongue awkwardly, the words sticking even worse than the berries had. Her clansmates had thought her stupid for bothering to learn the barbaric grunting that these southerners called a language. Thank the spirits that she was so stupid.

Sighing softly, the white-haired woman squared her shoulders against the sorrow that threatened to overwhelm her. This little valley was not the only one left a burnt husk. Between the invaders and the Mage's desperate gambit, there were no more jolly little towns. There were no more people... The only survivors were scattered, fleeing like fish from a net that had already closed around them. That first night, Herja had sought out the living in her visions. She saw a boy scarcely old enough for a beard charging the Nightspawn that threatened his wounded comrade. She watched the bile foam from his mouth and saw him form his mother's name as he died screaming. She saw the last Matron facing into the void only to die when her Called creature slipped it's leash. She saw too many others in the flames, but the tears did nothing to blur this vision. The last she had seen that night was a bearded southern man, fleeing with so many others. He was wounded and covered in filth, staggering over the tundra in darkness. Nightspawn pursued Gaelan in numbers that turned the witch's stomach but he dodged their claws with surprising skill. Herja found herself silently cheering him on, praying that this one would live. Invaders or not, no one deserved the agony that these horrors brought. And with that thought, Herja sinned. She doubted very much that it was a sin to defy the rules of war when the warriors were all dead, but she couldn't help but wonder if her gods would see it the same. Reaching through the flames, she felt for the cold burn that the Nightspawn carried at their centers. It was far too much to take them all, but she could turn one or two away. So much effort... Herja collapsed without even knowing if her 'pet' had survived.

He was easy enough to find in the morning, trudging silently through the wasted remnants. She had watched him through the fire and formulated a plan. Or perhaps the spirits had given her the plan; it was far too mad for a mortal mind, and yet it seemed to be the only option that the fates left to her.

And so the little woman found herself waiting impatiently for the soldier. She lit her fire and watched him through trance-blacked eyes every day, stopping only when he found a moment to rest. She watched him now cresting the hill and surveying the town. She watched as he spotted the smoke from her fire and staggered closer. She watched the way he cradled his wounded arm as he pushed at her door. She watched as he saw her, unmoving at the fire. Was that really her? Hunched and shivering with those horrid dark circles and sunken cheeks? She could not move, but Herja heard her own voice as if from the vision and not with her ears:

"Kill me and you will die. Follow me and be made a king." The words echoed through her skull, breaking the trance abruptly. A heachache spiked through her, fading as quickly as it had come. "I have prepared herbs and clean bandages for your wounded arm."

 

[Traveler]

It was unbarred, and for a moment he thought that he had made a mistake. Surely a person with a fire and shelter would bar the door against the demons of the night? But then he pushed the door open further and saw her, sitting in the middle of the room with a stillness that reminded him of Death. He took two shallow breaths through flared nostrils, testing the air for the scent of decay, but even in the cold he smelled none from within. The child - or was it an elder? - her skin was thin and sallow, the darkness under her eyes and in the hollows of her cheeks made her seem mummified. Her hair was also white, making it difficult to tell if she had been scared to death or was decades old.

Was. Had been. The figure looked like it had been there for too long to be alive.

A shiver across those thin shoulders testified to the girl's mortality. She lived, though how much longer was still up to debate. Those eyes were dark, like caverns leading to the abyss. They reminded him of the soulless eyes of the demon warriors who killed his men and had pursued him. Perhaps they had learned a new trick and was now pretending to be a child to trick him into their trap.

"Kill me and you will die. Follow me and be made a king. I have prepared herbs and clean bandages for your wounded arm."

Gaelen startled, despite the fact that he had been completely focused on the home's inhabitant. His breath hissed through his teeth as he simultaneously calculated her prediction and his predicament. A low, rueful chuckle escaped despite his pain and the oddly unsettling girl before him.

"Kill you?" He shuffled to the side and drew the door completely closed. It made no sense to waste good heat. "You look half dead already. I have no reason to kill a child...or an elder." His breath felt like it was becoming more difficult to draw. The difference between the sharp, thin air outside and the warmer, scented air in the cabin was almost cloying. He was still so surprised at finding her here that it never occurred to him to question her ability with his language. He had expected someone ready to fight, not a frail creature seated on the ground.

"I have no desire to be a king," only to live. He leaned against the wall and surveyed the little abode. "Let me rest here, a few hours. I won't harm you...then I shall be on my way and you will have your peace from me, child. You have nothing to fear from me, unless you are a demon or a witch, and you look like neither..." though, he did think that she seemed odd. Perhaps she was a figment of his imagination. Perhaps he was hallucinating, and closer to Death that he had thought. He closed his eyes for a moment, just to rest, and found himself sliding down the wall to sit against it with his legs stretched out before him. "Just a few hours."