Distortions In Time: Book I

Wild Days

A broad, white plain of snow unmarked save by soft ridges formed by the ever capricious wind. No Jotunn had traversed this place for a long, long time. These were the long-forgotten paths, the white, frosty wastelands of the Utanheim. Of Jotunheim's Outer Realm, populated by no civilized kind except that of beasts and all wild things that are.

[...here...]

[...silences hold fast...]

[...but not entirely so...]

The wind whistles and howls as it rushes past unhindered and then it comes to a flat, blue-black sheet which spreads as far as the eye can see. White snow and blue-black ice meet a fair sky this morning – and the cold suns' pale light glow lightly on the fields of tunglblom [1] and ovarmorn [2] blossoms which grow along the edges of the Great Ice Shelf, the Svelshelf of the Utanheim.

[...the skies are empty...]

[...on Jotunheim...]

Look closer.

[...what is that call carried on the voice of the wind?]

Standing on the edge of the desert-like ice shelf, feet planted firmly, dwarfed on either side by two thurblakulfr [3], the ulfrbarn [4] braced himself into the wind. Black hair whipped forward like a tattered flag and bright, red eyes stared out over the short expanse of ice before him. Behind lay the Svelshelf – a vast plain of frozen cold beneath one's feet – rising to meet the blue horizon and the great cold suns edging up over the world as it seemed.

And before him... a few steps forward and his toes hung slightly over the edge of the Svelshelf and the rocks below it which hung downward. Downward. The ulfrbarn felt it – the pull – the nothingness calling – the Void –

This was the edge of his world.

"Not really," he answered himself, his unspoken thoughts, softly. Words whipped away with the wind into the Void never to return. "You know already, Storr-Fathir, do you not?" He asked the Pack-Father of the great thurblakulfr clan. "All the edges of this Realm have felt the weight of your paws."

...we roam far indeed...

...little one...

...our ancestors before and our descendants after us...

Hot breath accompanied by a short growl fanned over his neck in warning as the wild Jotunn runt craned his head and leaned over to look further down. Nothing met the eye. Nothing. Nothing but expanses of a blackness lit with stars and faint light and gaseous clouds.

The Void was nothing. It was empty. And yet... And yet, he knew (here, he shivered), it is not. It is always hungry. He remembered Elska's warnings and Mage Opna's curses. The Eybjarga is always hungry.

Edging back carefully, the ulfrbarn moved away, one step at a time. He was no one's fool.

He did not turn his back.

-0-0-0-

North of the Svalshelf, if the ancient maps in Utgard's Gothahus which the ulfrbarn had memorized so long ago were to be believed, a massive lake lay complete with an unreachable island toward one end of it. Sure enough after several short sun cycles, the pack arrived on the shores of Vithrivatn Lake. Around its edges, clumps of trees and bushes grew together as well as broad swathes of blakkgras [5]. There, on the west side of the expansive lake, the ulfrbarn cast a line for fish.

It was Hluti's old fishing stick which he had left behind with an old pack made of coarse sacking. Inside, the ulfrbarn had packed what the Hunter-Trader had left for him – a rather worn tinder box cracked at one end, an ironwood bowl and ladle-spoon blackened with fire heat, seven lumps of blakcol [6], two rough pieces of fabric which could be swathed about his middle, a ball of rough twine, a neat, round, grey whet stone and a small pocket-knife. The small-pocket knife was his own – fashioned from a bit of left-over jarnvithr stacked in Hluti's hut and sharpened on the whet stone. Everything was packed inside the course pack and then bound with its various straps about his chest digging into pale skin and boney shoulders.