Glass Winter | Ch. II

Sevt heard a stream in his sleep. He smelled grass. The trees rustled. A memory came into focus of a long log cabin against a verdant drape from somewhere high above, its door opening onto a small clearing and its creek. Birds flew overhead with their song, and a golden-haired woman watched the water. A child in her arms shared her blue eyes.

The dream dissolved into cold. Darkness broken only by a crackling flame in Sevt’s periphery. A bonfire had been lit to keep him warm, but the winds were seeing against it.

“How do you know it’s a memory?” He would soon be asked.

“A part of it matches what I see in my waking hours.”

“Which part?”

Only one. Golden hair, billowing in the wind.

“It’s my only anchor to the real world. The only reason I have to keep moving…”

His rescuer was not local to the snowy barrens, that much was clear. His skin was almost as dusky as the permanent night overhead, and his speech would be broken by cadences and sounds unfamiliar to Sevt’s language. The rescuer was older. Sevt had not been a young man for many years himself, but to him Quinart was an elder; resting on the opposite side of the fire in a fur coat, pearly eyes, a silvering beard that framed an oval visage, surrounded by huskies resembling wolves rather than dogs. His was a presence sublime.

“This your staff?”

He had jested after finding Sevt laying almost crushed beneath the bear, dragging him out.

“Heard it ‘clatter, clatter’ down the mountain. You should’ve known my excitement upon learning of another soul in a place like this!”

“Why’d you assume my tongue?”

Quinart looked up from one of his dogs. He seemed glad to see the other awake.

“Only egg-skins I’ve ever met spoke in either your tongue or the kal’ren. Lucky guess, it was, between the two. How’re you feeling?”

Egg-skins?

“I… find it hard to move.”

“And you shouldn’t. I think a bone or two may be broken, you were all mangled and twitchy when I pulled you out from under that beast. I’ve laid some support on your ribs, just to be sure. Your foot will be gone soon, too.”

“What?”

Sevt looked down. His right foot, which had experienced unnatural pain when last he was lucid, felt nothing at all. Both looked normal under the covers, and moving them about did not prove to be difficult.

“What did you do…?”

“Nothing yet, but it’s beyond repair. It’s freezed too much…”

“You mean frozen?”

“Yes. I don’t know the body as much as a man of health does, but any man can know a gone limb when they see one. I waited until you were awake to discuss it further.”

It all came flooding back. The dancing lights, the glass castle…

“I have to get up.”

“Woah, now.”

A flash of pain in his foot as Sevt tried and failed to stand, falling back on his bedroll. Two of the huskies bounded their way over as Quinart inspected the injuries. Sevt was face-to-face with soft-tongued wolves, wet noses ridged by furrowed eyes that knew the snows better than he ever would. And yet so gentle.

“They’re as close to wild as you’ll find them, but they’re not wolves.” Quinart removed the wrappings from Sevt’s right foot, “I can hardly remember much from before I was dropped in this cold desert. These dogs were always here, however. Like they were waiting for me.”

He scratched one, black with white underbelly, behind its ear.

“You like?”

“I can hardly recall a thing from before the snow. But it seems I prefer cats. These fellas are nice enough, however.”

“You don’t know the cats in this place.” Quinart sucked air with a hiss after exposing the foot to the cold. His gaze was fixed on something Sevt could not see. “And these are all girls. Save for the alpha, back there.”

He had indicated to his spot at the bonfire where two more of the huskies watched in silence as their master attended the stranger.

“Black one’s Laika. The one with the eyes by your side is Belka…”

Her eyes - one green, the other orange.

“…Strelka’s the older sister to these two, if you will. The fastest, despite her age. And the alpha’s Medved. He likes to observe from afar. They’re all his wives.”

“Huh?”

“His harem.”

Sevt looked down again at his foot and saw a needle of ice slowly pushing itself through the flesh. With a jolt he withdrew the leg, sending Laika into a barking frenzy.

“Frozen, like I said. With enough pressure, like when you stand, some areas of the foot are even painful.”

“You’re a wisecrack, aren’t ya?” Sevt felt for his dirk, absent from his belt, before crawling off the bedroll and across the snow, “I’m to be eaten then, aren’t I? Feed the scraps to your bitches here before travelling onward?”

“If you’d reacted to the needle I’d have stopped. So far, it’s proven my point, the foot needs to be amputated.”

Quinart circled round the fire to his sled, retrieving a strip of some meat which he tossed in Sevt’s lap.

“From the white bear. Dried it and all while you were out, now you can eat. My dogs want for naught, they’re fed.”

Belka licked her chops.

I cannot stay here for long…

“You’ve nurtured and saved me. I thank you for that. Now I need to be off.”

Balancing on his second foot, Sevt pushed himself up, pocketing the bear strip.

“Not all things come so quickly…” Quinart was readying to help should the other collapse.

“I apologise, but I must be off. To each their own in this place.”

“That much is true. But you haven’t been here for long, have you? And you know not where you are going.”

Sevt had been limping over to the sled where he assumed his effects were kept, but stopped, “You’re a deductive one.”

“The flame in your lantern is fading, though it reeks not of charcoal or fat. Even if you’ve been feeding it with seal blubber you, like myself many years ago, landed in the frozen barren yet to discover all else that lies ahead. Unless you, of course, know where else you can go?”

“I follow the dancing lights.”

He’s opened the staff?

Pulling it off the sled Sevt saw that it was unscathed.

What’s the harm at this point?

There had been nobody else to speak to. Sevt told Quinart of the dreams and the glass castle he was beckoned to by the lights. The story did not seem to surprise.

“Prophetic dreams exist. I know. But it is not much to stake your life on.”

“When a man’s lost, he stakes his life on whatever dream gives him hope. It’s a barren, as you’ve said, I’ve nowhere else to go.”

“Then you’ll return to your ‘Faith’?”

I’d already forgotten I told him about her.

Medved and Strelka, their eyes mere blue glints in the shadows, watched the stranger in silence.

“I know all there is to know about faith, Sevt. I’ve barrelled across these plains with only faith and hope as impetus, many days. And I, too, once dreamed of the ‘dancing lights’. And they told me of the glass castle, much as they tell you.”

Isn’t that interesting?

“So, why’re you still here? You gave up, you did?”

“I stopped dreaming. You can call that giving up, if you wish.”

“It is. And you know…” Sevt found his dirk, “…for a bright sod in the darkness you’re a real downer? You’ve got a sled and a marriage of dogs to help you and you’re saying this ‘dream’ is unattainable?”

Bastard of the lowest sort…

“It’s the only fucking hope you and I have of making it out of a frozen barren that doesn’t give you the time to sit and think about your position before you’re fighting for another chance at life again. I don’t know if Faith is a wife or a sister, or an old memory of a mother, but whoever she is she’s all I have pushing me forward. I’ll meet her again. And I’ll make it out of this cold.”

Quinart was smiling. Sevt was insulting him and yet he was smiling.

“What’s up now?”

“I don’t believe you’ve understood it yet. Oh… and you do with age. In time.” Quinart looked to the skies, “You’re not a young man anymore but, it’s about time I told another human being of the merits of dancing while still in the storm.”

Sevt followed the other’s eyes. There were lights in the heavens. Undulating curtains of green and blue, phasing in and out sight. Laika was barking again, Belka panted, the couple kept their silence.

“Faith is with you even now, my friend. Of that, I’m sure.”

It was breathtaking. And after the dogs had calmed themselves, so quiet, despite the momentous movement above. So quiet.

“You’re yet to live long, as I have lived long.” Quinart was rummaging around, “You’ll be damaged as you already have been. You might even be broken and face terror greater than what you might have conceived possible. But you’ll live. You’d better hope you will.”

“Where will you be going?”

The words tumbled out. Sevt looked to the other who shrugged with a sigh.

“By fate our paths, for now, have come together. The wood for this sled did not come from nothing, and it is there that the lights are directing you now.”

Swimming across the sky they were making their way…

“…up north. With these foreign stars you create your own north, but there you’ll find the vales and forests so cold you’ll forget what you are feeling now. A small community of stranded like yourself have made up residence on a rise overlooking the woods just under the Mountain Wall. Some dream, others, like myself, have made their place here. Do you want to go on, on your own, or do you wish to stop by?”

Sevt did not rush to his decision. He watched the lights, he let Belka lick his fingers. He did not tell Quinart of what he had dreamed before the cabin and the creek. He did not mention the gaping darkness that awaited him, the bounding of feet across his bed, the tingle of a thousand crawlers across his arms and legs. The gaping darkness that awaited him…

Sevt withdrew his hand from the dog. But in the end, he made himself scratch its ears.

“I’ll follow the lights. And as it currently stands, I’ll follow you.”