Beyond Winter’s Veil

Yan had been walking with his back to winter for several days, but winter was catching up. The level of cold that winter brought to this new land was a depth he had little experience with. He’d spent the previous winter on a fur bed in a cabin as an old woman nursed him through the fever his first true winter had given him.

Yan had come up from the south, escaping the scourge of cannibals that were destroying his tribe’s villages. He was unprepared when his village was attacked, not that it would have made a difference, they were outnumbered by men and they were unprepared for the level of barbarism. Having no family remaining, Yan grabbed his satchel and ran into the woods.

The woods never seem to end. Yan walked in them until the smoke from his burning village was gone from view. He kept walking, walking until the air turned cold. Still he walked. He had nowhere to go to or return to.

A year into walking is when he first saw it, a mass of dark storms on the horizon that he would learn was called winter.

The first year he was unprepared for the trials that winter carried. It wasn’t long until Yan felt the first bite of cold. Entrapped in a storm, he tried to wait it out, but winter was patient and relentless. His first attempt to hunt for food ended up with him collapsing due to cold, dying on a snowdrift.

He was found by the woods witch, Brada. She took him home. It was weeks before he fully awoke with little memory of the incident. It took a couple of months for him to get his strength back. Brada was kind and told him of safe and fair villages even further north. She gave him supplies and Yan set back out in search of a new home, with people and the possibility for a life.

Now, almost a year later, winter approached again. Yan followed the path that the witch had laid out for him. Was he almost there?

Winter was a few miles at his back. Mist already forming around him, its frigid cold drawn to the heat of his body. The howls from the wind seemed to be masking the cries and screams of men as winter’s bitter cold bore down on him.

Yan heard rocks fall underfoot and a slight clanking from the wind behind him. Against his better judgement he turned and peered into the growing fog, waiting to see what it held. Behind the blinding white fog he saw a shadow move. The shadow was massive. A towering human form at one moment and a shadowy round mass at the next, yet moving forward toward him.

The mists parted as Yan glimpsed his pursuer. A massive bear lumbered from the mist, its white fur splashed with black and red paint, its shoulders clad in iron spiked armor, blood around its ferocious mouth. It had a chain in its mouth and it appeared to have been purposely blinded. An empty leather saddle was strapped to its back. What manner of man or creature would call this monster a steed.

Yan was unprepared to fight a dark bear, much less a massive white one. He wore minimal furs and leathers and carried only an obsidian tipped spear. He turned and he ran. He ran up the embankment in front of him as the bear sniffed and shambled in his direction, grunting and growling.

Beyond the embankment, a mile across a valley Yan saw the city the witch had told him of. Walls of stone tacked high with a massive gate. Above them, logs longer than any tree Yan had ever seen, running high, creating an impossibly tall fence atop the rock walls. The city stood like a citadel against the mountains beyond the valley. It was a possible safe haven, but a mile away.

The monstrous white bear caught Yan’s scent and started to quickly move up the embankment. Yan knew he had two choices. To run or to fight.

The white bear moved forward and Yan saw his chance. He leaped from the top of the embankment, spear held high. His spear pierced the bear right through the hump in its shoulders. The bear let out an unnatural scream. A scream of pain? A warning? No. A call. A call to arms.

The bear weaved back and forth as Yan ran back to the top of the embankment and down the other side.

Winter had moved closer and hidden in its whistling winds more howls and screams. An army of shadows in the mists screaming with a blood lust Yan had never dreamed in his worst nightmares.

Yan ran. Across the valley he ran. He looked back. The mists split atop of the embankment behind him as another bear came to view. This bear, also white, also painted black and red, also with a bloody maw, bore a rider. The rider wore little other than a leather loincloth and matching iron spiked shoulder armor. The rider’s skin was black. Not black like the southern peoples of the sun, blackened from cold, his skin frozen and dead from an endless exposure to winter’s harsh burn.

Again Yan ran. He did not look back but he heard the scream from the rider, an unnatural call to arms. He heard the screams from the mist replying, the clacking of iron, the roars of the painted white bears. Yan ran toward the wood and rock citadel, still a ways away.

In the forward distance, horns blared from the citadel as pyres of fire began to light up on its walkways. The city was preparing for a battle, a battle with the frozen dead army that rode the white bears, and Yan was in between.