The Idol In The Snow

Eldritch fantasy horror in the frozen peaks of Northreach

I’ve never considered myself much of a writer. Here’s an attempt at changing that.

This is a new piece of short fiction inspired by my own personal hexcrawl/setting “Northreach.”

I hope you enjoy it - what follows is definitely not for children. It’s violent, there’s murder, blood, strange…appendages, and so forth.

Reader discretion is advised.

If you enjoy it (or don’t), I’d love to hear why.

All writers who publish their work in any format aren’t just writing for themselves, so the more feedback I get, the more useful/entertaining I hope to be to you, my readers -

All of whom I am extremely grateful for.

- CG

Full art at the end of the story…

The snow came down around them like a living thing - it howled, twisted, turned.

Here in the upper reaches of the Stonecrowns, the weather itself could be a man’s worst enemy - that was if the Thenn didn’t get you first.

“Too few if something goes wrong,” Vain thought. “And something almost always does.”

He was tall, his face hidden under a wrap of wolverine fur - a heavy, lined longcoat worn over top of his mail. Thick gloves with sheep’s wool lining gripped the worn, greasy leather of his longsword where it sat ready in a scabbard used enough to make the cow-hide shine with age.

Vain looked across the small bowl of stone, a depression between jagged ridges that did little against the snow and wind. Fallyn stood across from him, some fifty-odd yards away, looking around for any sign of trouble. A smaller man than Vain, but doubly dangerous with his blade, his skills forged as a bravo and sellsword far to the east, in the port town of Greyharbor.

From here, he could not see the man’s grey eyes, but he knew they were sharply scanning the edge of the small, unnaturally round valley they stood in. 

The five others with them were uniformed, all wearing matching blacks, a blue armband emblazoned with the sign used by the Ancient Order of Thanes to denote membership. One wore a white gold torc outside the high collar of his uniform, spreading oak leaves and acorns, a sign of his command here. All were masked with black leather face coverings lined with fleece against the biting cold of the mountains.

It appeared they had found something there, in the center of the depression. They were animated, pawing the snow with gloved hands away like animals from whatever they were looking at.

Vain gave the hand sign, “alert” across to Fallyn. A wasted gesture, he knew, but it was habit. 

He walked closer to where the Thanes worked excitedly, clearing snow and stone away from something formless rising up from its white blanket of frost. Perhaps three feet in height, and vaguely man-shaped.

They continued to work and Vain felt a trickle of cold sweat despite the freezing air.

“Something best left undisturbed.” He saw immediately its origin - the strange, thorn-like lettering of the Firstborn, who the Thanes referred to as the “Ur-people,” spread across its form. 

Burnt wood lashed together with ancient, rotting leather. Antler and bone woven to form a torso with far too many arms, terminating in long hands and fingers fashioned from withered and gnarled branches.

Its phallus jutted up from legs folded beneath it as a man might do at a campfire, and careful excavation revealed its previous origin - part of a large serpent of the type sometimes seen in spring and summer down in the Green Basin, its jaws agape, fangs long gone to time and entropy.

In front of the effigy was a heavy stone bowl, and Vain knew somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind that in its time it had been a receptacle for untold gallons of human blood. 

“We should go,” he said to Eirik, the commander. 

His eyes were incredulous. His voice was thick with the accent of the highborn of Riksted, marking him far to the north of his raising. “Are you mad? This is what we’ve come all this way for!”

He returned to his comrades, speaking to them rapidly in High Tongue. Vain could only pick up words and phrases here and there.

“Ikon.”

“Falling stars.”

“Blood ritual.”

Vain cast his gaze back to their pack animals, where three pitiful forms huddled against that merciless knife edge of the wind - they were all that had survived of their Thenn prisoners - bought at a heavy price from a rival tribe. 

He understood now their purpose.

His gaze returned to the Thanes, who had now cleared the entire small area surrounding the idol, and to the frost-chip eyes of Eirik who was looking at him intently.

“Now you know.”

“Now I know.”

“To witness what is about to happen here is a great privilege, Vain, especially for one so low-born. You are about to watch the most ancient history of this world, here, living again, in our present time.”

“Lucky me.”

“Lucky you. Go. Bring the prisoners.”

Vain paused long enough for an unspoken question to rise on the cold wind.

“Need I remind you of our arrangement? Need I remind you of the terms of failure, Vain?”

Another pause. “No.”

He walked back across the expanse of the stone bowl, its rough edges rising up to a grey sky, and thought about the eyes of his wife. The laughter of his little son. He set his heart harder than the jagged rocks of the Snowcrowns.

The last Thenn dropped to her knees, blood spraying fan-like over the snow. The color was a bright red, alarming, shocking here in this colorless place. Vain wiped his hunting knife as the others held her arms, hanging her face-first over the bowl, directing the flow of blood.

She died swiftly, still trying to suck in air feebly through a ruined windpipe.

Vain looked on without feeling. He glanced to Fallyn, nearby, who was looking at him with flint in his gaze. Disapproving, but a hard man who knew the ways of this world were as unjust and hard as he was. It wasn’t the first time either of them had been involved in the death of someone undeserving.

Maybe they were anyway. Who knew what these Thenn had wrought on the lowland invaders they hated so much for trespassing on land they saw as theirs. It didn’t matter. It was a price to pay, and the Thanes had set it as high as they liked.

He would see his family again.

Vain waited expectantly, looking from one Thane to another as they raised their eyes skyward, holding their arms wide, stretched toward the bleak heavens. They stood thus for some time, until they, too, began to cast glances at one another.

They had given some kind of invocation. Vain assumed it was in the language of the Ur, the Firstborn - a flowing, yet harsh language, like broken glass sliding down a shale slope. 

“We should go,” he said again, breaking the uncertain silence. 

Eirik turned to him, eyes blazing now, a mad blue fire where there had been coldness before. Bloodlust and anger. He raised his hand, and Vain shrunk away, having seen enough of what the Thanes were capable to feel true fear at no more than a gesture.

Pressure. Intolerable, crushing, his chest feeling as though a cold hand had torn through the sternum and was tearing out veins and arteries. He saw his own blood, spattering the ground in thick droplets from his nose.
His eyes were closed against the pain, and he heard himself making sounds like an animal, unable to stop them or shut his mouth as the blood started from his tongue. He wept tears of it.

He would join his family now, wherever they were.

He had only wanted to see them again. Alive.

He had been willing to pay any price, take these men anywhere they wanted to go.

Kill anyone who would stand in their way, if only to see his woman, his boy, as he had known them. Not the grey husks laying on the board, faces and bodies ravaged by the Sickness.

The pressure ceased.

Fallyn, he thought. Fallyn has come to my aid against these unholy bastards. 

He looked up, the blackness at the corners of his vision receding. More blood. A great deal more, everywhere in thick, sticky ropes across the snow. The sun was going down, but he could see the last light glistening on intestines, wet shiny organs, slick bones and the whites of eyes frozen from torment and the cold. 

The diminutive idol was gone. In its place stood something from the darkest of legends. From the most terrible mind’s nightmares.

“From the most ancient history of this world, here, living again, in our present time…”

A massive thing of bone and antler, hide, branch, leather strap and charred wood. Eyes like the moon on a night cold enough to freeze children in their beds. It dripped ichor, motionless, except for the serpent moving back and forth from the thing’s groin, thick, powerful with corded muscle as it seemed to try to move forward, side to side, as though it wished to escape its bonds.

Vain looked up at it, half again the height of a man, oblong head of blackened and splintered wood thrust up into the growing dusk.

He fled.

Running as fast as his legs would take him, past the animals, past the rocks of the rim, heedlessly falling time and again, tearing his knees, his hands on exposed sharp rocks. He felt the bones of his foot break as he twisted his ankle in an unseen crack. He kept going, running in a jerking gait like an animal with one limb missing.

Out on the slopes of the range men call the Wyrmstones, he finally stopped - white showing from a wound in his shin where the bone came through. 

Night had come down completely, very still, and the moon shone down on the diamonds of snow and hoar-frost. 

He needed to get to Cold Watch, thought Vain. If he could reach there in a day, maybe two…

He felt the serpent’s bite in his shoulder, unheard. Felt the cable-like thickness of it loop around his neck. The sheer strength of it as his feet left the earth. His chest exploded in showering droplets that looked black in the moonlight.

He hoped the priests were right - and that he would see his family again. 


PS: I hoped you’ve enjoyed this grim little yarn - the setting, Northreach, you’ll be hearing more about.

I also want to write more fiction, in my own created worlds that some of you can then play in. Which should be next?

Company of the Fading Star, where doomed knights of a fallen order attempt to save the world from its inevitable decline into darkness?

Kal-Arath, my sundrenched sword and sorcery setting on the demon-ruled plains of The Kyrg?

Mournwatch (as yet unpublished) - a northern region torn apart by war to determine which Earl will sit the Saltstone Chair?

You decide!