The Jarl's Son, Chapter 18-1
The Serpent and the Bear, Part 1
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Looking to start from the beginning? Read Chapter 1-1 here.
Despite mortal man’s insistence on his understanding of such things, the higher forces of fate and destiny often proved themselves strange and inscrutable. Many believe they guide mortal man down predetermined paths, the will of gods nudging them along their way. Others rejected such ideas as esoteric flights of fancy; some of the many choices people made to explain aspects of their world which they did not understand. Yet none possessed knowledge enough of the complex inner workings of existence to speak on it with true certainty, for the reality of these truths lay well beyond their ken. For all that man had come to know, he remained ignorant in the face of creation Thus do doubt and uncertainty creep in.
Gaiur long harbored such feelings of doubt, even before the deaths of her husband and child. Reverence was the way of the people of Valdun, her isolated birthplace far to the north, nestled against the frigid glacial rim of the seemingly endless Glimmerfrost. They believed in the gods, as well as the spirits of forest, beast, and land. They showed reverence. Offered sacrifice. Toiled hard to eke out their livings in the surrounding valleys, canyons, and the dangerous dark of the Wolfwood.
Yet hardship and tragedy remained constants in their lives. Disease. Long winters. Deadly blizzards. The greatwolves which gave the Wolfwood its name. These threats never let them be. They merely receded for a time, always waiting to strike that small and stubborn community when they were least prepared for it. For all their reverence, the gods seemed determined to overlook them, or so it felt to Gaiur. A feeling which amplified on the day of her tragedy, when a hungry greatwolf attacked the village in the midst of a harsh winter and took the lives of those she loved most.
She held to that belief for a very long time. Kept it close to her heart, the nucleus of her soul. She never believed the gods were merciful. To her mind, they struck her as indifferent. Man was simply too small to pay any real mind. He was short lived, and ultimately insignificant. She simply couldn’t see why they would take interest in a creature such as that.
Events across recent years began to sway that belief. Her ordeal in Jötungatt, where her connection with Renald was forged, was her first step along this new path. A new purpose had been laid before her, a destiny which she was now meant to follow.
Follow it, she had. Over many leagues and many years, Gaiur and Varro had sought out and slain dozens of wicked creatures. Some few of these were men; brigands, dastards, rapists, but they were the exception. The rule was darker, more sinister, and wholly insidious. Shadowy entities, wretched wraiths, the sorts of vile monsters that stalk the darkness of the world, the mind, and the soul. Creatures like the impish strangler that harried the trader Jerrin, and even more loathsome things, such as the shadow adder sent to torture poor Erik.
Hunting such creatures wasn’t glamorous. The work was lonesome. The roads traveled, arduous and long. Varro made for good companionship, as did Hunin when he deigned to stick around, but their company could only be so fulfilling. Much as she loved her animals, Gaiur knew that for all her assurances that she was used to this itinerant life, the solitude weighed on her.
That weight only grew when the nightmare of the Red Bear came. She was used to such dreams by now. Those forces which gifted her with the ability to sense the dark and loathsome things skulking in the shadows often sent her such dreams to point her down a certain path. Yet this was different. Viciously savage, it assailed her with the violence of brutal men rather than images of the victim attached to lingering feelings of their struggle. What’s more, it was devoid of that luring sensation which she’d since come to call the draw, that guiding gift which allowed her to see her purpose through. And then there was the approaching anniversary of her late child’s birth to contend with as well, a child who shared a name with the boy she was sent to save. Little wonder that she nearly broke so many times when trying to help the Jarl’s son.
She hadn’t expected to find a place of solace amid her new purpose, a light to drive back the black moods. Marten had truly surprised her. Their attraction blossomed quickly, and she’d begun to be swayed by his honorable manner and good charms without her realizing. Soon, that reality was made apparent to her, and she found herself every bit as smitten with him as she had been with Varro so many years prior.
Then, on a night of thunder, wind, and rain, that was taken from her too.
Dreams became a solace after the Red Bear took her, short lived though they were. Sleep was something often denied her as she was dragged along with his warband, her clothing tattered and torn into a mess of filthy rags. She would sleep when and where she could, but she was lucky to get so much as an hour before her captors struck her with a closed fist or the haft of a weapon to wake her. Whether this was merely a preferred form of torture, or was done with some higher purpose in mind, she couldn’t tell; but the fourth day of her capture came with a notable change. After three days of being beaten anytime she was caught dozing, the reavers at last allowed her to sleep and dream.
She found herself facing the scene of the Red Bear’s reavers slaughtering the nameless village again. The familiar dream played out, showing Gaiur nothing she hadn’t already seen. The only difference was the Red Bear himself, who stood out sharply against every other figure present. Then the dream ended. Gaiur woke with the dawn, and her forced deprivation resumed until the eighth day of her capture, where she was permitted sleep once more.
Just as before she found herself in the nameless village, a passive, spectral observer to the violent slaughter that had been committed there. Men were gutted, dismembered, or put to the flame with burning arrows. The elderly were run down, either hacked to pieces or trampled underfoot. None, not even children or livestock, were spared in this gory culling.
None save the pregnant woman who lay on her back in the bloody soil, with all four limbs staked to the ground. The target of a mysterious ritual conducted by the Red Bear, the evidence of which still marked her body: ancient runes drawn in the blood of the village’s other birthing age women, all of whom were freshly slain for the sake of that vile act.
When the nightmare first came to her, Gaiur hadn’t seen the young woman. It used to be that it began outside of the village, and the scene would fill in as the flames from the reavers’ arrows spread. The woman and the ritual wouldn’t appear until the fifth or sixth time the nightmare repeated. Now Gaiur saw it every time, and the dream began with her looking over the exact spot where the foul deed would take place.
Nothing else changed, though. The dream played out as it always had; the Red Bear conducted his ritual as his reavers razed the village, and when they left, that poor pregnant woman would be the only one left alive. A harrowing sight, to be certain. It left Gaiur with a pang of disgust, though not because of the scene itself. Rather, it was a personal disgust, self loathing over the fact she’d seen the savage event play out enough times to grow used to it.
The dream would end soon. The reavers withdrew, the town burned, and the woman wept at her feet. In a few short moments the fires would dim and her tears would quiet. The dream would fade into blackness, and that blackness would be chased off as she opened her eyes and awoke.
Something happened, then, that Gaiur did not expect. Until then she’d stood rooted in place, as had been the case the last few times the dream repeated. She’d never interacted with it, nor had she been able to try. While not true of all dream spaces, as both personal experience and Renald’s teachings had shown her, she was nigh formless here, little more than a half-seen silhouette. Even she struggled to make out her own features, to say nothing of the players in the dream. That changed with the utterance of three short words.
“Who are you?” came the quivering voice of the woman bound below her.
Gaiur faced her, one of the few ways she could move in this space, and found the woman looking back at her. Fear filled her piercing blue eyes, and Gaiur wondered if the pregnant woman actually saw her. If so, that would explain the fright. She doubtless appeared as a shadowy apparition, the very sort she was tasked to hunt.
Suddenly, the terrified woman scrambled backwards. It was a small movement at first, little more than a scooch. That was all her bindings would allow, but when she tried again a moment later, the blood softened soil allowed three of the narrow stakes tethering her to slip free. Only the one tied to her left ankle remained, its hold strong enough to make her slip and smear yet more mud upon herself. Naturally, this made her struggle more desperate.
Howling for Gaiur to stay away, the frightened woman hurled a clump of bloody mud in her direction. However, when the filthy ball splattered against some unseen object before it even reached her half-formed body, Gaiur realized that she’d never been the target. Something else was there, invisible to her eyes, invisible to the dream. Whatever it was tugged at the remaining binding, and another mud ball splattered against the unseen form just before it pulled that last stake free.
This had never happened before. Ever since Gaiur was shown the ritual this poor pregnant woman was forced to endure, the dream ended with nothing else to show her. That was true even when Renald met her here, back when she communed with him in the house of Jarl Ostock. Both believed that was because it had nothing left to show her, an idea which held true when she was drawn back into the dream a mere handful of days prior. Yet now there was suddenly more?
This was wrong. Something had changed, she could feel it. An icy chill settled around her, driving off the heat of the surrounding fires. Cold was something she knew. Hailing from so far north, she’d grown intimately familiar with how it felt. She’d never felt a cold like this in the waking world, nor on any other occasion she experienced this nightmare. It permeated every part of her, made the space feel gray and lifeless, as if she were feeling stagnation itself. What had happened to cause this?
The world broke, and the Red Bear’s nightmare filled with an explosive sound like shattered glass. Taken aback by this turn of events, Gaiur realized she was now able to move freely as she took a surprised step backwards. All around her, a web of cracks spread throughout the nightmare. It was as if she were trapped inside a breaking bottle, only for the breakage to stop short.
“What madness is this?” she asked herself. Little did she know the answer would come from a voice she’d longed to hear.
“Gaiur!” he cried.
A chill ran throughout her body. Not the otherworldly cold of stagnation, which had quickly been sucked away upon the breaking of the dream, but the shiver of disbelief. It was impossible. Of all the places where he would find her, why would it be here? And yet she could not deny what she saw, for when she turned to face the calling voice, she beheld blue eyes, fair skin, and a beard and hair the color of red gold.
“Marten,” she choked out. Willing her feet to carry her forward, she fell into his arms and embraced him tightly. He was warm, and smelled of sweat, blood, and dirt; all things which told her he was real!
“A lovely reunion, but we cannot linger,” Renald exclaimed in a frantic tone as he scampered up to them. “This place has been made unstable by our entry. It could collapse on us at any moment, and none of us want to be here when that happens!”
He was right. Though it had slowed, the shattering caused by the entry of Marten and Renald hadn’t stopped as Gaiur had believed. New cracks had appeared above and around them. Fresh shards and splinters flaked away. Beneath them lay an empty black of such vastness and depth as to be incomprehensible. A hollow space, infinite dark, devoid of all sensation of presence. To exist there was to exist nowhere, forever adrift, eternally lost.
Once, for a brief moment, Gaiur awoke in that space between dreams. Few were aware of its existence, and fewer still survived being trapped there. She escaped that space due to Renald’s intervention. Had he not been there, she’d have been trapped in a realm of endless nothingness with naught to do but waiting around to die.
But where were they to go?
Renald doubtless had answers of his own, contingencies which they could follow in just these sorts of situations. That was Gaiur’s hope, at the least. Were they simply to wake, both she and Marten would return to their bodies and they would miss their chance to share what they’d learned, however little that might be.
Yet regardless of what plans the vulpine dream guide may have laid, it was Marten, not Renald, who made the final decision. As the nightmare of the razing continued to splinter and fall, he ignored Renald’s vehement protestations and forced his way past both Gaiur and the dream fox. She pursued him, though movement remained difficult with her body still half-formed like a spectre’s.
He made for the pregnant woman with purpose in his stride. The sort of purpose that spoke to recognition. “Does he know her?” Gaiur asked.
“I don’t know, but she saw him when we came here last night,” Renald replied.
“Last night,” Gaiur repeated. “So that’s why she acted differently, and why her bindings came loose.”
Renald tilted his head and frowned. “You saw Marten releasing her?”
Gaiur shook her head. “I only saw her recoil in fear and sling mud at something I couldn’t see. Now I know it was Marten.”
“Then you know about as much as I,” Renald sighed.
Thank you for reading.
The Jarl’s Son sees Gaiur the Valdunite return to embark on a new adventure and acts as the follow-up to my dark fantasy mystery tale, In the Giant’s Shadow. The previous story isn’t required reading to understand and enjoy this tale, but doing so will enhance the experience.
My first novella, In the Giant’s Shadow, is available for purchase! Lured to the sleepy farming community of Jötungatt by a mysterious white raven, Gaiur the Valdunite soon finds herself caught in a strange conspiracy of ritual murder and very real nightmares.
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