Dragon Tale 09 – Portal
19 0 0
X
Reading Options
Font Size
A- 15px A+
Width
Reset
X
Table of Contents
Loading... please wait.

After the battle, I stole a lantern, carved the sealing runes into its base and shoveled Salamander and some ash from the bonfire into the container. I locked the glass door shut with some twisted wire. Then I headed deeper into the wilderness with the spirit in tow, to interrogate it.

I woke up the next morning hungry but more or less myself, Salamander still within its cage. In truth I couldn’t say how much the spirit truly feared me, but it was with surprising ease that it told me the things I wanted to know.

I asked about my curse and Salamander elaborated on its effects. I asked about its true source and Salamander pointed to Nidhogg, its master. I asked about Nidhogg and I was told of a passage, deep within the Kvenfjall, that would lead me to the world eater’s domain.

The way forward seemed clear. I stole what supplies I needed and I started my trek into the mountains. I was probably the hardest journey of my life. Not the path itself, but the road that led up to it. I felt as if I was starving for the perpetual hunger in my gutt, despite the regular meals I forced myself to eat. Weeks on end, I avoided towns and had to confront that, one way or another, I would likely not return from this trip. That even if I somehow found Nidhogg and got what I wanted, knew I would not be able to leave Niflheim the same way I entered it. In a way, I took that time to steel myself. The shock of finding that spear in my hand had awoken a grim sort of determination within me.

The mountains, the Kvenfjall, had a queer beauty to them. The peeks reached high, which the foothills and much of their bodies were shrouded in a perpetual mist. It was thin at first, but became thicker as I hiked closer. It took startlingly little time for it to quilt the air around me. It acted almost like a blinder, hiding that which laid to my side but always keeping the path forward in view. It also came with a feeling of profound loneliness. Or perhaps it forced me to confront the loneliness that was already within my heart. I struggled to remember the last person I had seen, much less had a proper conversation with. It had certainly been week. It may even have been been months.

That was the real trick of those mists. They brought with them a timeless quality that made it impossible to track the minutes, hours or days. It allowed the mind to wander to other things. Things like the good and evil I had done as a Valkyrie. The people I had protected, or hurt, and how they might have fared, once I left them.

Another topic of interest were the other Valkyries. Both the ones I had met and the warriors as a whole. Those like Fenja who lived and died as heroes in defense against the dragons. Those like Grendel and worse, who lorded over cities until they were slain by other Valkyries. Those like myself, or the girl who once held my spear, who lived long enough and fought hard enough to become something else.

That led to contemplating my reasons, for doing what I was doing now. I would have liked to think that I did it for them, but the mist forced me to concede that was a fantasy. I did certainly fought for others for a time. Perhaps even most of my career as a Valkyrie could be characterized as such. But this final mission was solely my own and undertaken only for myself.

I thought of friends and family as well. Few though that had remained, they were the ones I had left behind. I lost, I think, a great deal in that mist. I can no longer recall what drove me to leave my home or why I chose to settle where I did. I suspect that shame played a role in my decision. Even so, I still cherish those few memories I hold onto. They, I still remember. The smiles and the tears. The laughter and the childish fear. It was much the same in the mist, a bitter-sweet regret with which I looked back on a kinder time in my life. I treasured those memories, but I didn’t allow myself to dwell in them. I moved forward, always forward.

Isolated though they were, the mountains were not barren. Many Dragonkin had become trapped within the mists, an addition defense against interlopers like myself. These monsters were sluggish compared to their kin, as if they were drunk on their surroundings, but in truth I wasn’t in much better shape myself.

The worst of the lot was a river serpent, as wide around as my waist and lurking out of sight on a ford. It was crafty and tried to overpower my flames with a deluge of water. The explosion of steam was so strong that it knocked me into the water, where more water exploded into more steam. It surely cooked for the trouble, but I nearly drowned on wet air as I struggled to free myself from the expanding cloud. In ignoble end for a girl who forgot her drive.

A warrior with a hammer that can move the earth beneath her feet.

Once I had run out of other topics to consider, I was forced to turn my reflection inward. To consider my motivations and examine the changes to my body. I now had the shadows of scales where my arm had nearly been severed. Close examination revealed similar markings on the sites of other wounds, but none so blatant as there. I had fangs of a sort and my fingers felt somehow harder, as if their tips could rake through stone. My cloak had a hunger to it now that it didn’t always possess. My hunger, no doubt. It was something that at times needed to be actively repressed, else it eat away at yet more of my humanity.

And then of course there was my tail. Distinctly draconic, it was, where it met my lower back, about as wide as my thigh, though the weight was distributed differently. It had golden scales with a red tint to their edges. It felt a shockingly natural an extension to my body.

The incident in the river had left me with the beginnings of horns. I could feel them, under my temples, stretching but not piercing the skin. My eyes, too, had changed further. Not only did they visibly glow, but at times they seemed reptilian, shifting from round to pointed and back again, as if changing in the reflection of whatever light bounced from them.

I truly have no idea how long I was in those mountains. I think I scarcely rested while among those peaks, but I could just as easily have dozed for days at a time. However long it was, it felt like an eternity.

It was therefore with muted disbelief that I reached the end of my long journey and stood before a portal to another place. It wasn’t that there was some grand gateway or door before me, nor was there an arcane bore within the air. The path simply passed between two rocks in a manner than obscured the way forward. Once I passed between those rocks, I was somewhere else very far away.

I stood on a sandy beach of grey sand. Snow drifted in the air but did not collect on the ground, nor were there many clouds in the sky. It was nighttime and the few clouds present framed a spectacular view. Twin moons, the smaller pale yet bright and the larger shifting, first red, then green, then purple, then blue, onto the next colour in sequence as the minutes passed by.

Salamander’s lantern-turned-caged rattled as it spoke, “Welcome to Niflheim.”

0