The Jarl's Son, Chapter 4-1
Guidance, Part 1
Upon revealing her plan to consult a friend about Erik’s condition, it took Gaiur some time before she was able to once more convince Marten and the Jarl to let her begin her work. Both men were reluctant to leave upon her proclamation, and not without good reason. They worried for the child, as a brother and a father should. The thought of someone attuned with the arcane ways of magic contacting some otherworldly beast gravely concerned them.
However, much to her surprise, Jarl Ostock came around rather quickly. She expected otherwise given his initial resistance to her presence, but Marten was far more adamant in his insistence that they be allowed to stay. She guessed it was likely some mixture of worry and lingering shame for the accusations which had been leveled against him - she’d need to ask him more about that later. Whatever his reasons may be, it didn’t change the fact that their presence would make it far more difficult to reach out to her ally. The ritual she planned to enact required deep concentration, and she couldn’t manage that if she constantly had to sate the man’s curiosity or calm his fears.
Luckily, the Jarl recognized this. “Let’s leave her to her work, Marten,” he whispered, and he gave his older son’s shoulder a firm squeeze.
At last, Marten relented. Replying with naught more than a nod, he turned and stepped past his father to leave the room. Jarl Ostock followed soon after, but not before one last plea to Gaiur.
“Save him,” he said. “Please, whatever it takes, save my boy.”
Gaiur lowered her russet eyes, then looked over her shoulder at the fitfully sleeping boy. Dark haired, fair skinned, and likely blue eyed, though she’d yet to see his eyes. His lids remained tightly shut even through his wild flailing during her examination, but both his father and his brother shared the same icy blue irises. It was easy to imagine young Erik would, too, and easier still to overlap the imagined appearance of her own lost son upon him. After a long moment, she nodded. Then, with her silent promise given, Jarl Ostock shut the door behind him as he left.
Now that the men were gone, Gaiur quietly took a chair from the opposite side of the room and set it beside Erik’s bed. It was a hefty thing of foreign design, with legs and a frame crafted from dense hardwood. The backing, legs, and crossbeams of the chair were carved with intricate designs of the sea including fish, whales, and cresting waves; but what truly gave it away as a foreigner’s work were its cushions. Stenisian furniture was often made entirely of wood. If there was padding of some kind, it usually came in the form of furs or wool. This chair, however, had stuffed leather cushions bolted to the seat and the seatback with large brass rivets.
Among the Stenisians, it was the sort of furnishing that only a wealthy and connected man like the Jarl could afford. Gaiur was thankful for those connections as she settled into that chair. The leather cushions creaked just a little beneath her weight, and she let out a soft hum as she sank into their plushness. Comfort like this was a world removed from the rocks, logs, and hard packed ground that usually made up her seating options while traveling the countryside. For a moment she felt as if she might start to fall asleep then and there, which wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing in this situation, but she willed herself to stay awake a bit longer.
Since she first started following her destiny as a hunter of those things which stalk the darkness, Gaiur had called upon her friend on three prior occasions. In so doing, she learned that sleep was a required part of contacting him. However, simply allowing herself to slip into an afternoon doze wouldn’t be enough on its own. Connections needed to be drawn between herself and her otherworldly companion first, and doing that required her to maintain a certain level of focus as she drifted off. Losing that focus meant the connection between them would be interrupted, preventing him from being able to cross over into the material world from the realm which he called home.
There were ways to make contact easier, such as conducting the ritual at night during a full moon, or drawing on the magic of her axe as she fell asleep so it could act as a beacon for him, but those wouldn’t help if she didn’t start the process the right way. Besides, there was no full moon tonight, so she had little reason to wait until nightfall. Reaching behind the chair, she retrieved her axe from where she propped it against the wall and set it down in her lap. She let the head rest on her thigh, the piercing point at its back directed away from her torso. Then she laid her hands upon the blade, closed her eyes, and breathed deep.
At first, the metal was cool against her skin, and its slight chill seeped pleasantly into her palms and fingers. Heat soon began to fill the axe’s head, but not the sort which comes from a body’s warmth chasing away metal’s surface cool. This was different, it came from deep within the weapon itself. Gaiur could feel how it differed, the way grew and radiated out like a flame that burned with intense heat, yet wouldn’t burn her. It reverberated through the metal, an energy which thrummed from deep within. She felt it in her hands, and from her hands it went into her body. She heard it in her soul, and from her soul it reached into her mind as she formed the silvery image of the one she sought.
Small and gray furred, with an underside of white. Sapphire-eyed and vulpine, with a bushy tail that glowed like the moon. Chittery and talkative, serious when need be, and chipper as often as he could be.
Sleep followed soon after. However, while it came quickly, it didn’t come easily. As she drifted into the warm dark, Gaiur felt a gentile tug at the back of her consciousness. She turned to face it, and in the distance she saw a solitary mote of soft orange light. It was then joined by another, and then a third after that. More and more and more, until the motes became flames, and the flames became infernos. Her heart stopped and she sucked in a gasping breath, only to find that her heart wasn’t beating and she couldn’t breathe. She looked around, tried to see where she was, then realized she couldn’t because she had no body.
It had always started like this. Distant motes of light grew into raging fires that consumed buildings she couldn’t see before the fires grew. Panic set in as she tried to move about her surroundings, only to find she was a forced observer, devoid even of her own body. Lucidity was still hers. She could still remember and react, but never interact, never turn away from the horrors done upon the people of this nameless village by those wild men draped in the skins of beasts.
This was the seventh time she’d experienced this nightmare, and just as all the other times had been, this was the most complete of them all. This time she understood what the motes of fire she’d seen in the past actually were. As the villagers around her panicked and fled, the wildmen poured in to slaughter them. Many slung bows over their shoulders, while others remained in the back to loose their flaming arrows into the fleeing crowd. She hadn’t seen this early stage before. In every other instance, the nightmare began in the midst of the slaughter. This time it began with the burning of the town, and as the savage killers worked up to their full and bloody revelry, Gaiur saw their gore painted leader march into the village on the back of his great black horse.
He shouted commands, pointed in the direction of buildings and people, and his men dutifully set about their gruesome tasks. As before, the sights and smells of massacre washed over her, this time with far greater clarity than in the past. It was as if she could see every murder, every violation, happening at once. Men and boys had their bodies split and skewered. The old were hacked to pieces or left to burn. Women and girls were lined up before the bloodied warlord with his bearskin cloak, where they’d each be judged, marked, and then slain.
All except for one.
Gaiur knew what was coming. This part always sickened her to her core. A pregnant woman, stripped nude like the rest of them, was brought before the leader. However, instead of marking and killing this one, he had his men bind her hands to stakes in the ground. The woman cried and screamed as she berated them for their vileness. Gaiur had never been able to hear her words before. She spoke not with fear, but the defiance and rage of one who accepted death and wished nothing more than to curse those whom she was sure sought to violate her. Then, as before, the leader came down off his black steed to mark her body in an unsettlingly calm and reverential manner. He would not be killing this one as he had the others.
Something else new came to Gaiur’s attention. In the past, the woman’s face was hidden from her, either cast in shadow or hidden by the form of the leader. His actions were hidden in the same way. While she’d seen him mark her breasts, legs, and swollen belly with runes of blood, she’d never seen where that blood came from or what he did after. This time, she saw it all, and it made her want to retch.
The blood he marked her with was taken from the other women they’d slaughtered. Evidently, their deaths were part of whatever profane ritual he planned to conduct. As he drew the markings, the woman’s defiance at last turned to tears. She realized, as Gaiur had alongside her, that the warrior hadn’t sought her after all, but her unborn child. Venomous curses became desperate pleas, all of which went unheeded by the beast of a man. Then, once the runes were painted, he reached up to his neck and tore something that hung there away. Gaiur couldn’t see what it was, his meaty hand closed around it completely. Whatever the object, he reached between her legs with it, then placed it forcefully inside of her.
Somehow, the scream she gave in that moment was more agonizing to hear than the horrible death cries of those who’d been slaughtered before her. Pitching her head back as she cried, the woman’s face at last moved into the light. Contorted by pain and marred with blood and dirt, her beauty still showed through. Brown eyes, reddened by tears, glittered in the firelight as she turned her head back and forth, the only motion she could make with her limbs bound as they were. Tears tracked down fair cheeks, cutting trails in the mud and blood which caked her face and chestnut hair alike. Then, as she wept and screamed and cursed the savage invaders one last time, the leader and his men rose and did something unexpected.
Gaiur’s view remained fixed on that spot as the nightmare drew on. Soon the screaming died off, along with the remaining villagers. After that, the leader and his warriors withdrew, leaving the woman staked to the ground as the remains of her village burned around her. Why? They’d already gone to the effort to slaughter every other living thing in the village, be they man or livestock. They burned every house, sacrificed every woman, and even went so far as to use the blood of those slain to etch runes upon her body, so why leave her behind? What purpose did that serve?
Gaiur couldn’t say. She could guess at the motives of these savage men, but she knew naught of them or their goals beyond what she’d seen in the dream. Thus, these became yet more questions to add upon the growing pile, one which began when this nightmare first visited her in weeks past. Strange as this deepening riddle was, though, stranger still was the feeling which nagged at the back of Gaiur’s mind as she looked down at the weeping woman. Not disgust, she felt that in full for the actions of those malignant raiders. Rather, she felt a strange sense of recognition, as if she’d recently seen this woman somewhere.
Where, though? Who might she be that a solitary wanderer like Gaiur would recognize her from outside the nightmare? She wracked her brain and tried to place where she might’ve seen that face along her way, but to no avail. She couldn’t recall any woman she’d recently met who looked like her.
“My word, Gaiur, you certainly have a knack for dragging me to the most unpleasant of places when you have need of me, don’t you?”
Across the seven times Gaiur had experienced this nightmare, she’d never found herself able to move or look away from the events that it wanted her to see. Now, with the coming of that familiar voice, yappy yet dapper, that rule was broken. Turning the gaze of her formless dream body away from the woman, Gaiur was greeted by the gray fur, bushy tail, and sapphire eyes of Renald the fox, her erstwhile guide through the dream realms.
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.
Ooh this one was too short … or in other words, more more!
She sees that scene every time she summons Renard? Or is it every time she uses the axe?
It is good to see the fox again.