(Author's note: The following is set last year, prior to Ivanya's arrival in Rhy'Din.)

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"You know that sound. We hear it in the summers, when the great glaciers carve their way South, a groaning as they slide against each other with the Northern winds moaning around them. The echoes of their abrasions rolling off the mountainsides with as much impact as the Storm Lord's rumblings, ear-splitting cracks and crunches.

That sound did not belong beneath the ground, but he knew what it meant. He could feel the ill of it beneath the soles of his feet, the way we feel it now, spreading like plague.

The mountain was dying."

The listeners huddled in a tight knot, the reality of the skald's words plainly apparent in pale faces taut with anxiety, the wide, round eyes that reflected the delicate light from the smokeless fire they clustered around. Around them, the camp bustled, and children like these would have been underfoot. The adults moved around them, indistinguishable and dark, a shadow-puppet theatre making hasty preparations for a transient break in their march.

The storyteller glanced away from his audience, towards a lone figure seated beside a fire of his own, the enormous, dark contours of his trell wolf stretched out in the trampled snow beside him

"Sturl," a timid almost-whisper from one of the children, a prompt for more of the tale. They needed the distraction as much as he did.

"So, beneath the ground they had him, in their great city of Nioavellir?"

———

Fine silt filtered through a crack in the ceiling, glimpsed transiently in a shaft of pale rock-light. He felt it pepper his skin, fine and gritty as the sand at the coast, and wondered how long it would be before the whole mountain toppled, caved in on the warren of tunnels and spilt its snowy peaks into the valley in an avalanche of rock and ice.

It would have been a fine time to abandon that cruel mistress, hope, but she never quite eluded his grasp. He'd leave pessimism, wizened old crone that she was, to the Elders.

Outside his cell, deep beneath the mountain, came the slap of leather soles on uncarpeted hallways, all in such haste, and he strained to hear the voices, squinted toward the faintly limned doorway, held his breath. No one stopped to free him. What was one Alfar to them' It wasn't as if they'd planned anything but an unremarkable death for him anyway.

Again the tremble, and this time it was no ephemeral rumble. Somewhere deep below the rock was sinking.

Blindly he touched a raw-scraped palm to the wall. Big hands, broad across and long in the fingers. Strong enough to break the flimsy bone of the scurrying rock-rats that'd cast him down here into the dark, starving him of all but stagnant air and the sulphur stinking water that drip-drip-dripped, maddening and incessant. Through the calloused pads he sought to feel, learn what secrets the rock held, but all it allowed him was the bitter taste of suffering. Had he been a spiteful creature he might have found small comfort in the knowledge that his captors, so acutely connected to the rock they tunnelled, would be suffering too.

The Alfar was no juvenile to harbour such malice though. He was in his prime, though old for his caste at almost nine and twenty, a practical veteran of wars he'd been born into. The Stonedwellers were only men and women, no different to the villagers he and his fellows protected, and warrior or no, he had no appetite for vengeance.

Pushing upright and careful not to pitch forwards in a tangle of chains and manacles, he shuffled towards the doorway, feeling his way on bare feet. They'd left him naked but for a breechclout, more for the sake of humiliation than anything else, but down here where the water steamed in vast subterranean lakes, he did not feel the cold. Not as he did up in the hard, bright world above.

The chains brought him up short of the door by several feet, held taut as he leaned his weight - no small thing - into the metal at wrists and ankles. There he waited until the next stampede, but though he roared himself hoarse calling for release, none heard him. Their screams drowned him stridently, left him cursing an unspecific mother and glaring with the kind of murderous intent he usually reserved for battle at the damned door. If he could just get someone to hear him"but then what? He'd be as likely to die in the crush as any of the cunning little runts, unless he could find a route out.

The light edging the door began to fade.

The cell had none of its own illumination, but out in the hallways beyond, the phosphorescence of the rocks had been gently, artfully mastered by the denizens of the underground city to spill out as brightly as any torch. The inevitable absence of light did little to buoy his spirits. The death was crawling higher. Would be at ground level before long, and then it really would be too late.

"Mother damn you all. What have you done?" He whispered as the pure, staggering darkness of the underground became complete. He had only a small handful of moments to decide he misliked the sepulchral feel that it left behind, that he did not want to die entombed in stone, before the mountain groaned again, and the bedrock split so noisily that it pealed down the tunnels like thunder. The ceiling caved, impaling the floor of the cell with stalactites like lazily thrown spears. Beneath him, the vibrations reached a violent peak, and he fell, sprawling, bones jarred (because big men fell hard) and rock pelting down upon him.

He never saw the piece which detached itself and fell, cracking a heavy blow against his skull and rendering him unconscious.

———————————

"Was he buried then?" One of the youngsters asked, impatiently straining towards where Sturl sat cross-legged, as if he'd grasp an ankle and shake it if the skald left them waiting longer.

"No," he replied, an indulgent smile peeking briefly from amidst the bristle of his brindling beard. "He wasn't buried. You see, the warrior was a hard headed man. So hard headed that you could probably take an axe to his head and it'd be the blade that broke, not his great, thick skull."

The children laughed meekly at that, partially in relief that the hero of the tale had not suffered an even more unremarkable death than his captors had planned for him. Partially because after weeks of relentless travel, of terror at what was killing the land they tried to flee, they needed that small release.

Unbeknownst to them, their thick-skulled hero sat not a great distance away, minding his own fire, half an ear on the story. He'd heard better skalds in his time, but he appreciated Sturl's honesty in the telling, the lack of embellishment, and most of all for withholding his name. He did not crave the kind of attention it would bring him, did not wish to disappoint those who would come to expect greatness of him which he could not fulfil. The Alfar in such stories were all great leaders, Magnars and Chieftains whose strength of character had seen them elected in the usual manner, by common consent of their people. Ivanya Sigurdson, a common, unranked warrior had no ambition to be anything more than he was.

"How did he escape then?" The same childish voice, spokesperson for the little assembly of youngsters. "Did he snap his chains and break down the door?"

"Have you ever known an Alfar strong enough to break metal?" Sturl asked, scoffing, though not unkindly. And of course they hadn't. Particularly not the strange alloys that the Stonedwellers forged. Metals that were lightweight, and held a keener edge than anything the Alfar smiths had been able to produce. "I will tell you how he escaped?" he went on, leaning forwards for effect, letting his eyes grow wide as if in the confiding of a great and extraordinary secret. ?"tomorrow night. Now it is late, and I've had enough of you pests. Go on, be gone," he snarled, without real malice, and sent them off to their carers amidst disappointed whining.

Ivanya watched them flee with eyes like an ever-winter sky, quicksilver brought to life by the pale luminosity of the fire.

Once, he might have encouraged Sturl, their amateur skald, in his child-herding, but he was too brittle to go about it with any honesty, and they would feel the malcontent, the forced nature of it. Empathy was a way of life for the Alfar. Lies were pointless. Lies, when the minds of his fellows were so deeply entwined with his own were a waste of everyone's time.

He was not surprised when Sturl joined him at his fire a short time later, and offered the older man what was left of his rations. They'd no warmth left to them by now, but food was a precious commodity, and if it was offered, a man was wise not to question. The skald grunted his appreciation and plucked meat from the bone of the hare's hind leg with a look of avid concentration.

"You know, the Magnar made a count of them the other day," Sturl told him once the meat was gone, and all that was left to do was suck the grease from his fingers. "The children I mean. Two an' thirty. That's it. And we're losing more every day. Women, we got maybe twice that many."

Ivanya turned to regard his clansman, the heavy, pale blonde braids swinging low across his back, weighed down with rune-worked metal and leather. Sturl had him pinioned with the kind of look which meant he would not let the subject rest, obdurate as a trell wolf with a haunch of deer. He knew what he wanted. Could feel the push-push of it, blunt and tactless, but he couldn't let himself be swayed like the rest of them

"It's two weeks to the coast," he replied, baritenor pitched quiet and his breath like steam on the air. His voice sounded rough from lack of use. "We can make it."

Sturl groaned so loudly it sounded almost indecent, and a spike of irritation prickled out of him towards the younger Alfar. "Ivanya, I don't know how you're doing it, or why, but this won't do you any good. It's a head-f*ck of epic proportions and that's all. We can't make it that far. Listen to your brothers."

The truth was, he had. The men of his caste were closely bonded, as only men who fought back to back with unremitting faith in one another could. So he knew full well that it was their desire to cease what they considered a futile march. Wait there on Iskerryon's slopes with their wolves and die in a land they called home. Die fighting, not running.

It was nothing short of extraordinary for one Alfar to be so differing of mind and they longed to bring him back into the fold. Could not understand what had happened to leave him so far removed.

"So long as there are women and children left, it is our duty to try. We may not succeed in saving all of them, there may be only a handful left, but it is pride and selfishness which would hold us here and see them die with us." When he saw that Sturl began to take offence, he stayed him with an imploring look, the faint crows feet deepening in his wind-weathered face. "We are not extinct yet, brother. Have hope. The Magnar sees the sense in this, trust in his decision.?

A battle of wills went on between them then, and though in the end no fists were thrown, no bruises stamped upon skin, Ivanya felt mentally exhausted. He was a large creature, brute with strength and indefatigable physically, but lately it had been hard to cling to his lady hope. He felt almost bereft of her. Sturl sighed and left him, leaving him to his idealist thoughts as if he'd abdicated his senses, but Ivanya knew his friend had won.

Sturl hadn't come to insult him. Only to be reassured that one of them still had hope.

While that remained, survival might not simply be a fantasy.