Nights Of Winter
Nights of Winter
Hello my dear readers, it has been some time and for that I am sorry. To announce my return I decided to do something a bit different. It’s Thursday, and Thursday means it’s time for a story.
Some time ago I wrote a story titled Days Of Fire that was Al fighting in a desert to protect something, someone really. This is the sequel to that tale where we learn a bit more about what is going on and see Urk’s participation in this tale.
If you did not read Days Of Fire you can read it, or re-read it in the Fragments of Fiction section here: https://www.swallaceworks.com/fragments-of-fiction/days-of-fire
I do hope you like this sequel if you like Urk, action and a frosty evening I suspect you’ll enjoy part one.
Also I didn’t think “Nights Of Ice” sounded very good so instead I present to you.
—-
Darkness and Ice
It was the taste of lightning that drew Urkjorman from his slumber. Even before the words of Al’rashal drifted into his ears he knew the sun had dipped beyond the horizon.
“Your turn,” said Al simply as she leaned forward to offer a hand.
Urk took her much slimmer, softer, and smaller hand and allowed himself to be hauled onto his hooves. Her strength always amazed him, even though it should not have. He’d seen Al perform several feats of great strength since they’d been together but it touched him with wonder just the same.
“What?” asked Al, as her lips twisted into a smile between embarrassment and appreciation.
“Admiring your beauty,” answered Urk.
Al swatted his arm. “Well admire it as I trot to bed.”
Urk took her hand again as she moved to walk away. “Tend the fire well this eve, it will be cold.”
“It’s cold every night Urk.”
Urk inhaled, the thin whiff of lightning from earlier was now chased by a touch of ice and darkness. “No, it will be cold as it has not been before. We cannot afford the heat to falter.”
Al’rashal couldn’t smell magic like he could be she had long learned to trust his intuition. She nodded, all playfulness gone as she hurried deeper into the cave.
Urk watched her go, admiring her both as a woman and a warrior before stepping from the cave into the creeping darkness that heralded the night.
It wasn’t too cold, at first. The volcanic ash retained a great deal of the day’s heat and impeded the chill of the night for the first hour. With the second hour the last of the day’s heat had faded and Urk could see his breath carried away by a chill wind. All about him the sound of scuttling and slithering things digging into the ash before it be it became to cold to burrow entered the air. In the third hour following sunset things grew challenging. His breath had gone from barely visible wisps to thick clouds and frost crept across the volcanic sands to blanket the world in white. In the fourth hour came howling winds hunting for warmth.
As a minotaur Urk was a large hairy creature raised in the frigid low lands at the bottom of the world. As a servant of Judenkai, the Lord Of Winter, he had a fragment of that icy radiance in his breast. However even with both those benefits his body could not fight off the chill brought on by the frost crawling across his fur. If he lived long enough the divine fragment in his breast may make him immune to even this terrible cold, but such a day was a long ways off if it ever came at all. Tonight he would have to endure.
The sound of frost grinding under tread lumbered into Urkjorman’s ears. He shifted his weight from hoof to hoof and twisted his neck left and right. Both to loosen the tight knot his muscles had become and to better track the new sounds. His ears strained against the winds’ force and volume but soon he pulled the sound from the air once more. There.
Slowly the origin of the sound drew closer, though not in anything like a direct path. It would draw closer, stop, move away, then stop, move to the side, then stop again. Like a boar rooting in the mud it wandered closer and closer with the unhurried pace of a thing that had no predators. Be you hunter or scavenger? wondered Urkjorman.
The area before the cave had become a swirling vortex of ice that turned the near by rocky crags into echoes of what they were in the day, and hid the dunes further away behind a wall of white. It would have been blinding to most creatures, and nearly blinding to Urk but he was a minotaur. It was said the minotaur had been sealed in a labyrinth of true darkness long ago, so the goddess of monsters gave them eyes that saw not just with light, but with heat. So it was Urk could tell when the creature stepped beyond the distant dunes from the way its immense body heat filled the air about it.
The creature plodded into view and drew the more concerning with each unhurried step. It was almost five feet at the shoulder and nearly ten around. Its squat scaled head had eyes hooded by a crest of bones and it possessed a broad beak. Its forelimbs were thick as Urk’s thighs and ended in shovel like claws smeared white and black from tearing through the frozen earth of the ash plains. Its tail was long as its body, thick as its legs and ended in a growth of bone, round like a hammer on one side and sharp like a pick on the other. Most alarming, however, was the thick overlapping plates that covered its back, not just because they would be difficult to break but because Urk could see the heat of smaller creatures trapped beneath them. Trapped and slowly dying as their heat faded away.
An ashsnapper, thought Urk. He’d heard of such creatures prowling the Doufoul Wastes but this was his first time seeing one.
The creature stopped and looked up at the minotaur. It punched its fore limbs into the earth kicking up thick clouds of frost and flexed the overlapping plates on its back so it looked like a forest of spikes.
Urk recognized a threat display when he saw one. You may threaten but not pass.
Urk drew himself to his full and considerable height. Raising his ax overhead he bellowed, challenging both the air and the creature before him. A fraction of divine radiance poured into his roar magnifying it in volume and menace. The ashsnapper would know now, that Urk would answer violence with violence.
The two locked gazes as though their will was a physical thing to press against each other. With every heave of his chest thick puffs of mist blasted from Urk’s nostrils in stark contrast to the fog rolling from between the ashsnapper’s spines.
The howling wind swept the powdery snow into the air creating a wall of frost between Urk and the monster. At once the ashsnapper pulled its armored plates tight and charged. Propelled by massive forelimbs the creature covered the icy ground with surprising speed.
For others having something so massive bearing down on them might have been paralyzing, but Urkjorman was a minotaur and he always met a charge with one of his own. The snow and ice being swept between them would have been blinding but the glow of the ashsnapper’s body heat was like a bonfire charging through the night. When it was only one or two strides away Urk prepared to swing his ax and was almost knocked from his hooves as the flat side of the creatures’ tail crashed into him.
Pain radiated from the cracked ribs of his chest like lightning burning through tree bark. The blow was so astoundingly fast and painful that Urk almost failed to bring his ax up in time to deflect the second swing of the tail and prevent the pointed edge from sinking into his flesh. An explosion of air and blood flew from Urk’s mouth as the ashsnapper collided with him. The world turned into a tumbling spiral of white and black.
—-
Things are about to get quite troublesome for our minotaur, just how troublesome remains to be seen. Next month you shall see the conclusion, see you then.
Take care my dear readers.
~ S. Wallace