The demon exacted its petty revenge in Ayrin's dreams. They were horrible things of fire and blood, dark nightmares that Ayrin woke from in fear. His heart leapt through his chest and his breath came cold and sharp, cutting off what would have been a scream.
He opened his eyes and was met by the grey-brown sky. The canvas shelter stretched out above him, shuddering in the wind and cold. He crawled wearily from his blankets to find the northerners already awake and the camp half disassembled. Ayrin looked out across the north, regarding it bitterly. The blank, overcast sky and blue-white fields of snow and ice broken by hard, dark stone. Had it really taken so long for its beauty to wear off?
He turned back to the camp. Isiri was only just waking, stirring with a childlike yawn as she shuffled off the thick blanket. Some boyish, unburdened part of Ayrin's mind was struck by how close the two had been sleeping, dwelling on it while he watched her waking, stretching, and rolling up the bedding. The thoughts were dragged from Ayrin's head by the cold wind, whipped up and carried into the distance. Ayrin's near-constant grimace returned as the weather set in and the weariness of travel caught up with him. His feet ached and blistered from walking. His skin was half numb from the cold. His thumb itched where he had cut it last night, evidence of last night's troubles showed itself in the dried blood smearing his thumb. He cleaned it off quickly.
The elderly northerners checked Isiri's wounds while Ayrin and Ashkr silently reheated what food still remained from the previous night. The group ate quickly, or as quick as they could when sharing three bowls between five. When they were finished, they dismantled what remained of the camp and prepared to set off.
This time, Isiri was not lashed to the sledge. Ayrin understood why: The northerners had lead the two southerners eastward so far, the journey having taken them a day past their original destination. The northerners had seen Ayrin and Isiri to the war road and that it was more than generous on their part.
Isiri could walk on her own, it was simply too difficult to have her walk alone when her constant bouts of lunacy meant she needed to be led by hand at all times. It would be safer for her on the sledge but Ayrin didn't have the luxury of that particular option any longer. He reckoned he could lash together a particularly simple sledge if he had to and he planned to do so as soon as he came upon any trees.
The northerners let Aryin keep two pairs of their snowshoes, they were simple things of sticks and corded sinew. Ashkr said that she could make more with ease. The knife, Ayrin was allowed to keep. A gift from the northerners. Though there was more practicality than generosity to the gift-giving. The two southerners simply wouldn't survive without such a basic tool. The northerners sacrificed small portions of their food, dried and otherwise, for the southerners.
They were well-enough stocked with supplies but Ayrin had another worry. Isiri. He watched her warily as she lay among the supplies. She had a sort of drunkenness about her but was mostly conscious. In the space of it took for Ayrin to blink she had faded into a stupor once again, muttering softly in a singsong voice. Ayrin heard the fading words of a verse of some ages-old nursery rhyme. "...Goblin in the kitchen! Throw the salt, throw the steel. Goblin in the kitchen! Through the door, at his heel."
Ayrin caught himself smiling a little. He had heard that particular one before, singing it himself when he was young. A memory came to him of a game of guards and goblins by a broken stone bridge somewhere near home. He took a slow breath, his small smile disappearing. Home. So far away. He looked over to the south and found nothing but flat ground and the low, grey stone road rolling in the direction he was told was homeward. It didn't look like it would take him home, just somewhere equally as cold and remote.
Ayrin felt a tap on his shoulder and span suddenly. Ashkr was behind him, gesturing up to the previous night's camp. "Blankets." She ordered simply.
Days ago, that would have seemed like too few words to convey any information but now, through exposure to Ashkr's specific mannerisms and by paying a great deal of attention, Ayrin understood it plain as day. The blankets had been left in the camp and he, being the only person not currently occupied with a job, was being asked to retrieve them.
Ayrin clambered down from the raised road. He was halfway down when his legs gave way and he stumbled. Ayrin cried out as he fell, drawing exclamations of shock from the northerners. Pain rippled up his legs as his shins seemed to find every stone along his fall. Childish, half-heard laughter echoed from nowhere across nothing, no more than a whisper on the rising wind. It faded into as soon as it came, leaving Ayrin sore and cold in the snow.
Ayrin came to his feet with a groan, checking his legs. Scrapes and bruises, nothing serious. A little blood spattered the snow, red on white, so stark it hurt Ayrin's eyes. It took the space of a few level breaths for Ayrin to clear his head. Even when he did, it still took several more moments for him to Fully collect himself. His stumble up to the campsite was quick, if unsteady progress. Ayrin could feel the bruises that would soon form on his knees as he laboured up the steep sides of the rise.
Under the protection of the old stone walls, the wind seemed something distant. Without the ever-present cold, Ayrin felt calmer. Without the ever-present noise, Ayrin felt alone. No. Not alone, alone with the demon. It had shrunk to nearly nothing the night previous but even nearly-nothing still showed its presence contrasted with the quiet.
The demon slithered behind the doors of Ayrin's mind. Doors, Ayrin could feel, hung open a hair's breadth. It had never left, the demon was always there, waiting, watching. The voice had not returned though, Ayrin said a silent prayer for that.
Ayrin stepped into the centre of the camp and took the blanket in both arms. Folded as it was, it was still awkwardly large and surprisingly heavy. Ayrin hugged it close, the meagre warmth it gave him was a small comfort to his cold, aching body.
He stopped briefly at the camp, rubbing his sore legs gingerly. To the east, the sun rose, sitting lazily above the horizon. Ayrin looked at the glow, shielding his eyes from the blinding sun and admiring the change in colour. "Beautiful." Ayrin muttered under his breath, turning away.
Then a familiar darkness came to answer him. The demon's voice came whispering under the gates of his mind. "Stop, boy. Something wrong is on the wind."
Ayrin scowled. "Get back into your hole, bastard. I don't want to hear it." Ayrin hissed into the air. His thumb itched, the scar on his chest throbbed and his head ached. Ayrin turned, intent on descending hill.
"Shut up and look, boy." The demon growled back.
"Away with you." Ayrin spat.
Ozin sighed. "You will look, boy." The demon spoke surely in a soft voice, his words were definite, alive with confidence. Something changed in Ayrin in that moment, his muscles tightened suddenly in a rippling wave down his body. Fear rippled with it.
Ayrin struggled but the demon seemed ready this time. Ayrin's desperate defence of his own body was pitiful compared to the full might of the demon. He screamed in his mind but words turned slowly to silence as he realized the futility of it. The demon ignored him, as it rightly should have. A pup growling at a dire wolf is of little consequence.
Ayrin's body turned against the straining of his will, it turned eastward to the rising sun. A sun that suddenly shone too-bright in Ayrin's eyes. It was blinding, stabbing. It felt like steel nails hammered inch-by-inch into his head. The cold came next, bitter wind, an unbearable cold like ice, like death, like the howling abyss itself. Ayrin screamed for the pain to cease as his mind was assaulted by sudden, unbearable sensation but no relief came.
He was sure he was blinded by the sun. His world was light and pain. Once again, Ayrin felt that strange, leaning-in sensation from the previous night. The demon scowled and looked under the rising sun, to the roads stretching east. Ayrin was forced to follow his gaze.
The horizon was ablaze with dawn's fire, bright and painful to Ayrin. Full of nothing but stark white sunlight. But something stirred beneath it. Ayrin could make out metal and motion on the horizon. Ayrin would have taken a step back were he able. Instead, he simply stood motionless as the realisation finally struck him. He saw spear-points glinting in the morning light, arms and armour of a number of men. More men that Ayrin could count. No, not men. He could smell the faint traces of rot and death on the wind, a mere hint of a hint only barely noticeable to his heightened senses.
Ozin cursed as he smelt the air again. "Four foes. I know that foul air." The demon hissed. "Betrayer of Sarakar." He took another breath, his anger building. "Those wights," He began in explanation, "are of my once brother, Kar'nadaan, the first defector." Names, the demon spat, names and curses that were unfamiliar to the boy he spoke them to.
Ayrin did not care for the demon's words, his only wish was to leave before the army on the horizon found their small group. He busied himself by searching for some weakness in the familiar force that held him from his own body. All Ayrin could feel was Ozin's rage radiating from somewhere within him. It gave him something to work with. The anger was a bright beacon of fire that Ayrin could almost tangibly follow like a thread to somewhere in the heart of his being. Following it, he could feel his connection with the demon. He felt as though he could simply reach out and touch it.
When he did, he blinked and was somewhere else. Ayrin stood in the cold, somewhere in the false-north that the demon had made of his mind. White snow surrounded him in the steep valley-walls and foothills on three sides and before him was the dark stone of mountains striking skyward from the earth. He was in his mind. He felt the softest touches of sensation against him, he was somewhere close to where he needed to be. Ayrin shivered and stepped deeper into the valley, his footing unsure on the deep, powdery snow.
The demon's words still echoed across the empty landscape, like the breath of the wind. "I watched as he slew his father's eldest just as Juron had done with Sarakar himself." Ayrin had stopped listening at the first words. The rest, ignored, faded into the soft music of the world. Ayrin pressed on with eyes downcast, now used to ignoring the demon's words after so long in the north. He stumbled over hidden stones and hard-packed ice.
Ayrin's face felt touched with warmth. It was as if he were standing by a fire on a cold day. Ayrin could not help but define the heat as something angry. It was the demon, Ayrin knew it. Sensation returned slowly, the heat, the cold, the nothing smell of the north. All of it building like a bucket filled drop-by-drop until the world felt real.
And then Ayrin was there. A hole at the cliff-like base of a mountain, a familiar place. Stairs wound up in the dark, into the stone. He had fought the demon and lost before this cliff, many months ago. He could still see the demon's crooked smile; he could almost feel the cold sting of rain.
With a nervous fake-breath, Ayrin approached the stone stairs. With a few more, he stepped into the embrace of the dark and felt the last of sensation return in full. He walked for what felt like hours. Until he saw lights ahead in the dark.
He emerged and saw the world through his own eyes. He took a step and moved. He was in control again. He took one look to the east before turning and running down the hill. It was a wonder he did not trip and fall on his frantic dash to the northerners. "Wights!" He called out breathlessly as he approached them. "Wights in the east." He threw his arms up to gesture in the direction of the coming army.
The northerners looked up, unalarmed. "White? Is white everywhere, southerner." Ashkr said with a smile. Her smile dropped considerably as Ayrin approached.
"We need to leave. There are wights. An army of them." Ayrin said.
The northerners simply stood there, understanding Ayrin's panic but not his words. Lysa and Haust were whispering between themselves. Ashkr helped Ayrin onto the road and snatched the blanket, stuffing it onto the sledge carelessly. "What is white? Is there danger?" She put a hand to her knife.
"Monsters." Ayrin said breathlessly. "Monsters in the east."
Ashkr paused, a visible shiver of fear running through her. Her knife was out in the open in a heartbeat, for all the good it would do her. She barked something in her language without even turning to Haust or Lysa. The bow was strung with practiced speed with an arrow cleanly nocked. "What monster?" Ashkr asked slowly.
"Wights." Ayrin said, his voice breaking as his own fear crawled into his guts. Ayrin could feel something else itching in the back of his mind. A sort of fearful impatience that felt distant from his own. The demon crept in on him with a voice of irritation.
"We must leave." It growled softly. "We don't have time for this." Ayrin's lips moved and words came out. Words that were not Ayrin's. Words in a tongue he did not understand. "Auh ben Dauthr." The demon spoke through Ayrin.
The northerners must have understood the words. They paled visibly, shaken. Ashkr shook his head absently. Haust knelt to bury her fingers in the earth, muttering.
Lysa seemed the least effected by the words. She pointed back the way they came. "Go West." She said.
"They will follow." The demon replied quickly. "They will follow." Ayrin echoed the words. Ashkr translated.
"We go south." Ashkr said immediately after her translation. She thought for a half-second. "No. They see feet in the snow." She was right, tracks were easy to spot on the straight, level roads.
"We have to go north then." The demon said with some small amusement. "We'll hide further north."
Ayrin relayed the demon's plan, adding: "we'll go north and then walk west when we're far enough away from them. We'll go to whatever town you were going to sell this at." He indicated the sledge of produce. "Then Isiri and I will go back south again."
Ashkr relayed the half-plan to the other northerners. "We go." She nodded. They climbed down from the road and set off north with a quiet determination and eyes cast to the east, watching for the approaching doom. They marched north, hoping to find safety.