yeti

Bothvar Beorcolsson

The man with one eye sits chained to an iron throne, imprisoned in a dark, mysterious tower that has risen in a city of gold, but the gold itself has become tainted and cold. Ice now takes over the once warm haven. Sitting atop the throne is a man with long horns and a chilling stare with a wicked smile.

I shoot up from my sleep, drenched in sweat. Who was that on the throne? What was that the throne of? That man in the prison, I have seen him in other dreams. What does it all mean?

“You, okay?” I turn to see Amalasontha giving me a worried look.

I nod. “It was only a dream.”

“Be careful, Bothvar. Dreams are rarely only dreams.”

I shake off the terrible feeling I have. “We should get going.”

She only shrugs. After we wake up Blue-Eyes and get ready we eat and continue on in the darkness. Neither says a word, but I can feel their pain. Tonna did not deserve to die like that. The Bone Eaters need to be wiped from this land. They are a plague and are better off dead.

The night is dark, and the sky is dominated by clouds, cloaking the moons and stars. The dark makes sight limited. And the cold seems to creep in as we travel. The snow doesn’t help with how deep it is. But neither of us complain.

We just keep moving forward at a steady pace. I had to slow down for Amalasontha. It is surprising how slow the Valkyrie and Bone Eaters are. I do not know how they have survived this long with such delayed reactions and pitiful speed. Surely, I haven’t become that much faster to merit such an enormous gap between us. It couldn’t have been more than a hundred days at best, right? I wish I would’ve kept a better track.

We break for food and fire to warm. I prepare a fire by chopping down a dying tree and lifting the entire tree up on my shoulder, dragging it to our little campsite. Amalasontha just stares at me with complete shock.

“You’ve grown strong, Beorcolsson. I don’t know how you have grown so strong, but it is impressive. Despite that, you do not have to cut down an entire tree to feed a small fire,” she says. Leave it to a woman to care about how many trees I chopped down. Why does it matter? The tree was dying anyway.

I decide to ignore it and chop the tree into little pieces before I start a big fire. I hear Amalasontha mutter under her breath as clear as if she spoke the words out loud. “Men… Everything always has to be grand.”

“Women…” I mutter loud enough for her to hear. “Always complaining.”

She looks up at me in surprise. Her eyes narrow. She lets out a sigh and looks over at Blue-Eyes, who huddles close to the fire, hands wrapped around her knees. She is still so sad. Death seems to be something all three of us share now. I look over at Amalasontha and I notice the pain in her eyes as she too seems to huddle, mirroring Blue-Eyes. “I am sorry about Tonna. She deserved better. But she fought bravely and has earned an honorable death.”

The woman looks up at me with hard eyes. “There is more to life than honor and death. Tonna was too young to die. She deserved to live. You men seek death as if it is the greatest honor one could have, but there is no honor in death. Only the end of the journey. You’re foolish if you think otherwise. Only service in life brings honor upon your death.”

“Perhaps. But at least we can avenge our dead and bring honor in life,” I say in a bitter tone.

“And what will that achieve? It’ll only continue the cycle of killing and death. I know I want the Bone Eaters to suffer more than we’ve already caused. But the more I think about it, the more I’ve come to realize that it’ll only continue the cycle. They killed our daughters, so we want to kill their sons. What do you think will happen when we follow through?” she asks.

“What if you wipe them out entirely? If no one is left alive, then they cannot seek revenge. That’s what I did to the fiends in the mountains who killed Blue-Eyes’ family. I killed every last one of them, and I intend to do the same to the elves who killed Thorkel.”

“Did it bring them back?”

“No…”

“Are you going to kill all the elves?” she asks.

“No… Not all of them deserve to die. Only the ones on that ship,” I say.

“And what about their children? Will you kill them too? Surely, they will want to exact the same revenge you will exact on their fathers.”

“They have that right to do so, I suppose.”

“And what about the elf who killed your brother? Would it make a difference if you knew his father was murdered by a Kraken?” she asks.

“He wasn’t.”

She raises a single eyebrow. “Are you so sure?”

“I… no. I suppose it could’ve happened.”

She gives me a sad smile. A tear wets her eye. “As much as it pains me, Tonna is dead. I love her dearly, but it will not do her any good to kill every Bone Eater I find as much as I want to. Instead, I chose to do what she thought was right. I choose to help a lost cub find a new home, just as you are doing now. Killing them will only make me like them. I’m tired of killing. Of war. Of battle. My hands are soaked with the blood of all those my blade has ended. I see them in my sleep when I can get any. Heed my advice so you don’t follow my path. It only leads to pain and suffering.”

Neither of us say another word as we sit here in silence and eat. Soon, we begin our journey again as the day arrives. It does not bring the sun with it; instead, clouds continue to rule the sky. But the mountains are in sight. It is not far.

It takes us much of the morning to get there, but we arrive and start our ascent up the mountain.

“Shouldn’t be far,” she says, and she’s right. We reach a wide path that takes us into a conclave of yeti. They watch us wearily, but there seems to be familiarity when they look at Amalasontha. She walks forward, towards a yeti woman. I can hear what she says when she speaks with her hands. She tells the yeti woman that we have journeyed a long way to bring a child who lost her tribe home.

The yeti woman looks up at me and Blue-Eyes and she nods. She tells Amalasontha they will take the child and raise her as their own. I set Blue-Eyes down and kneel before her, bringing our eyes together. I tell her with my hands that she needs to stay here with them and they will be her family now. This will be her home.

Tears well up in her eyes as she tells me she doesn’t want to stay here. She wants to go with me and be a part of my tribe. My heart breaks a little more as I tell her she can’t. She must stay here with her own people. With them, she will be safe. She argues with me and tells me she will be safe with me. I shake my head no. I tell her where I go, death follows. That is no place for a child. I tell her this isn’t goodbye. I promise her that we will see each other again. We are just parting ways for the moment. She says she understands. I smile and tell her to be strong and grow into a fierce warrior like her father, Longhorn. Be proud to be his daughter. Be fearless like him. She nods and hugs me. She tells me she will be the fiercest warrior there is. I smile and tell her I know she will.

We finally part ways. I take one last look at Blue-Eyes as the yeti woman takes her in.

“You did the right thing,” Amalasontha says once we leave the mountain.

“It wasn’t easy,” I say looking back at the lonely peak. “It never is.”

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Bothvar Beorcolsson

The ax comes slicing through the air hunting for my throat. My hesitation is going to be the death of me.

By the gods…

He is slow. I move out of the way of his slash as easily as if a newborn baby threw it. I jump to my left as another one bursts through a shrub with his ax slamming down from over his head. My sword goes through his neck. I heard his footsteps getting closer. He is just as slow as the other one.

A smile forms on my face and fear shows in the skin wearer’s eyes. I charge him as he holds his shield up to defend himself. My ax breaks through the shield and slices him in half. I’m covered in his blood as it sprays out like a geyser while his torso and legs fall apart.

Three steps away, another one charges into the opening and my blade seeks its throat and finds it, severing it without him realizing he’s dead until his head is separated from his body.

The snow is red as I bathe in their blood. I lose myself in my all-consuming hunger for death. I feel unstoppable.

I’ll kill them all. Every last one of them. I’ll hunt each one and collect their heads. Three of them stop as they see the death and carnage in my past. They trade looks as my ax chops while a fourth one charges me. I spin away from his pathetic overhand chop while my sword twirls in my hand to a reverse grip and stabs him in the heart through his back.

By the time the three others decide to charge me, I’m already inside the first one’s guard my sword swipes up, slicing him from balls to head as the separate halves fall from each other, leaving twin waterfalls of blood spraying out.

The second Bone Eater, who wears the upper half of a bear’s head like a helm, entire face contorts in horror. I make sure it’s permanently contorted that way as I sever his head from his body. His bear helm falls in a separate direction from his head. The third gets his iron sword up in time so I can slice through it with my own sword, my blade digging a trench from his shoulder all the way down to the opposite hip.

I leave a trail of mangled Bone Eater bodies as I hunt them down. Reveling in death and carnage. I’m completely covered in their blood. My blades hunger for more death. I get lost in this primal hunger to kill.

But when I turn to look around, horror takes over at what I see. The Valkyrie have been spread out fighting an overwhelming number of Bone Eaters. But what makes my stomach churn is the sight of Tonna lying on the ground with a Bone Eater’s teeth digging into the flesh of her neck. Blue-Eyes cowers in fear as she clings to a tree.

The next thing I remember was my blades dismembering the corpse of the Bone Eater. I’m surrounded by his dead kin. Others of his kind flee in terror as I roar out, but they can’t run from me. I chase them down and slaughter every last one of them. The last one begs for his life. I make his last moments a complete nightmare. He dies from a thousand cuts.

As the rage slowly cools down in my blood, I drop to my knees and howl out the last of it. I clean my blades off in what little white snow I can find before I find the others gathered around the dead body of Tonna. Amalasontha kneels over her, clenching her limp hand as she weeps for losing her daughter. Blue-Eyes cries as well as she looks down at the dead Valkyrie that I once considered a friend. The forest floor has become a graveyard of dead bodies. Mostly Bone Eaters, but some Valkyrie lie here and there. “My daughter. My baby girl. Don’t leave me. A mother is not supposed to live beyond her child. This is not how it is supposed to be.”

Another person I cared about died because of me. If I wasn’t so lost in my hunger for death I would’ve been here where I could’ve saved her. It is my fault, and I will remember her along with Thorkel, Varin, Styrkar, Saksis, Longhorn, White-hair, and Short-Snubs. The list of lives I failed to save continues to grow. Why do the gods continue to curse me?

She looks up at me. Fear and grief in her eyes. “What kind of man are you? Even asking, I know the answer… You’re the bringer of death. But I cannot blame you for Tonna’s death. No. Not you.”

Her eyes travel across the forest of corpses. I follow her gaze to the sight of the bloody mess. I hate them. “I will make the Bone Eaters pay. They will all suffer!”

“They have suffered. None who attacked left with their lives,” she says as wolves stalk out from the forest and begin to feast on the corpses of the Bone Eaters. “Fetch our dead and bring them home. We will not let the wolves feed on them, but they can have the Bone Eaters. I hope they leave none of their wretched taint in our woods.”

“You can’t trust the Wolves,” I growl, glaring at them. If it wasn’t for Blue-Eyes, I’d have half a mind to kill them, too. The Wolves have always been the enemies of the Kraken Clan. They betrayed us and killed my forefathers long ago. I hate them.

“Do not let your blind hate lead you to the wrong path. The Wolf Clan was never your enemy,” she says.

“And yet the wolves only watched as we fought the Bone Eaters. They only come now that the fighting is over. Cowards,” I say, gritting my teeth.

“Perhaps,” she says, turning back to me as her daughter’s body is carried off. She reaches out to her. Tears stream down her blood-stained face. She puts a hand on one of her warrior’s shoulders. “Tell Dasyra and Amalgunda to prepare them for the funeral rituals for when I return.”

“Where are you going, mother?” the Valkyrie asks.

“I will honor my daughter’s last wishes and help the yeti child find a new home. I’ll lead the man to the other yetis to the south,” Amalasontha says. The younger woman warrior nods, puts her fist against her chest, and runs off with the rest.

I go to Blue-Eyes who stares off behind the fleeting Valkyrie soldiers. My hand rests on her shoulder. She looks up at me with wet eyes. It’s becoming harder and harder to see the differences between her people and mine.

I pick Blue-Eyes up and put her on my back. “Let’s be off then.” “I don’t know about you, but I need to clean and change or I’ll freeze to death. There is a cabin to the south of here on our way to the mountains. We can stop there, clean, and rest for a night before going on,” she says. I agree, reluctantly.

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