A Betrayal of Storms by Ben Alderson

Chapter 22

Iwoke before Erix and felt nothing but relief. The moment my eyes crept open and the realisation of what had happened returned to my conscious I itched to clamber out of the bed and get some fresh air.

I dressed, on quiet feet, and slipped from the home all without Erix even stirring from his position. My eyes lingered, only for a moment, on the slow rise and fall of his broad chest, and the way his breath whistled out of his parted mouth.

He was my distraction, but now I needed a distraction from him, and seeing Berrow in daylight was the perfect thing to stop my mind wandering to his touch and how my lips felt sensitive.

The world beyond the home was white and endless. A light flurry of snow fell from the thick clouds above, not a single one allowing a slip of sunlight through. It was hard to tell the time of day without knowing where the sun was in the sky.

I stepped out into the street, footsteps blurred behind me in moments as fresh snow filled the divots I made with my boots. It was cold. Freezing. So much so that my teeth chattered in my jaws, threatening to shatter if I did not stop. But I cared little for my own discomfort as the muffled daylight gave view to the true vision of Berrow, one I could hardly imagine having arrived in the dead of night.

Homes weighed heavy by timeless bouts of snow and ice. It was hard to imagine anyone having lived here, only the frozen, frigid air brave enough to tenant the empty and ruined homes that stood around me.

I walked up the street, footsteps muffled as though I walked on clouds of cotton. Not even the wrapping of my arms around my chest could keep the cold at bay.

The worst part of this place was the silence. Not a sound dared shatter the peace of the frozen village, which gave way to my mind's own roaring of thought.

On I moved, trying to make sense of what life in Berrow would have been like, and in a way, it reminded me of Grove. Home, small yet cluttered, a place for working people whom did not get the benefit of wealth of coin, only wealth of life.

Skeletons of trees, bark black with frostbite, haunted the sides of streets like guardians of death. Waiting and watching. And what unsettled me the most was the lack of wildlife. Birds did not fly through the tense air, nor were there signs of prints across the ground from deer or rabbit, creatures I would have expected to see thriving among the ruins of a village like Berrow.

And it soon became clear why.

At the end of the street the houses and buildings simply stopped, giving way to a view that snatched my breath away. Beside the ruins of winter, there was one great difference between this place and Grove. Grove was not built on the precipice of a cliff. Berrow was.

Winds whipped around me, tugging at the black strands of hair and at the unfortunate bits of loose material I wore. One moment the street was ongoing and the next it stopped, the memory of an old stone wall before me, almost invisible above inches of thick, white snow; and beyond it was a view unfathomed and unimaginable, as though the God Altar punched down from the skies, carving a crater into the earth so deep and wide that I could see from here to the coastal line at the far edges of the Icethorn Court.

I raised a hand to my brow, trying to stop the fat flakes from ruining the vision before me as I looked over the land for as far as my eyes would allow. Far ahead a crown of mountains proudly stood from the ground like the edges of jagged teeth, each topped with grey, white and black. From here they looked small enough to pick up, but my heart knew that they were each a grand size that would take days, if not weeks to climb to the peak. The land beneath me was bursting with fields, forests and hills, each covered in the white of winter, but a blanket of different shades. Patches of deep ivory gave way to the dark of coal and the pure, glistening sheets of moonlight silver.