FIC: But Neither Fire nor Iron Told Upon Them 2/3 (Nathan/Toki, PG-13)
TO: puella-improba
FROM: Your Secret Valentine
Continued from Part 1...
Title: But Neither Fire nor Iron Told Upon Them
Pairing: Nathan/Toki
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When Nathan’s people are attacked by strange foes, he must journey up the mountain to find their source. On the way he picks up an unexpected companion.
Warnings: Historical sexism? Not much else
Timeline: Viking AU
*****
In the morning the storm had passed and as they emerged from the slice they were greeted by a mackerel sky, the dome of it seeming high and distant. The air was clean and crisp, as it often was after a heavy snow, and Nathan could see for miles, straight across the valley like it were a close neighbor. The further mountains were no longer a hazy chain of grey mist but several distinct peaks and fallows, the rock there looking darker than the mountain of Nathan’s people. Beyond the front set of hills and mountains there was a thin trailing of white smoke drifting in the air, disappearing into the blue ether.
“The fire mountain,” Toki said as he came out to stand beside Nathan.
Nathan could hardly imagine a mountain made of fire, or what that would even look like. Further asking brought awkward and accented attempts at description of flame that was more like water, that dripped and shifted, rolling over rocks like pitch. Nathan finally gave up, waving a hand to silence the boy, getting only impressions of things found in the bedtime stories of children, and he couldn’t help but think that at least some of this was Toki’s overactive imagination.
Nathan would have to go and see this mountain for himself, one day. If it was even one tenth of how Toki described it, it sounded…brutal.
The two of them continued their journey up the mountain the brisk morning air, the path all the more treacherous for the snow and ice that had built up on the stone the night before. Crossings had to be more carefully taken, and Nathan shifted awkwardly along gaps, his lumbering form even more inelegant.
More than once, Nathan saw Toki hesitate, the smaller man turning back to watch Nathan make his way over a gap, or along a wall.
On a flat face of rock, with only a slender ledge of rock to guide them, Nathan put the ball of his foot down on what appeared to be stone, but the instant he put his weight on it, he came to find that it had been ice. He felt his weight slip out from under him, the world spinning dizzily. He only had half a heartbeat to lament this ignoble end, wondering if there was any room in Valhalla for a warrior so bold and bumbling as to kill himself on clear ice, for at least he’d still died in service of his people.
But then a hand snatched his wrist, gripping it with an iron determination, holding onto him like a metal band around a barrel, enough that the bones grated together painfully. There was a sharp tug as Nathan reeled backwards, his other foot still on the edge, and when he dared to look up he saw Toki looking down at him with huge eyes and harried hair.
The boy was leaned out over a crest of rock, above the ledge that Nathan was traveling along, one hand white fisted around the jagged edge of that rock, and the other now holding Nathan from falling, arm stretched out to the limit.
Surprised would have been a generous term. Nathan was no flimsy weight, and Toki was skinny from a life of inconsistent food. But as the headman hung back from the mountain at a terrifying angle, his weight and life depending on the determination of one malnourished young man, Nathan could see the cords of muscle bunched in Toki’s arm, the black fur of his wolf pelt curving around the ball of his shoulder.
With all of his might, Toki was holding Nathan to the cliff face.
Nathan swallowed with a click.
Toki’s hand tightened even more, fingers digging into Nathan’s skin, and with painful effort he slowly began to drag the huge warrior back towards the rock. Nathan lifted his other arm, trying to be careful to not unbalance himself, reaching out until he could grab hold. He pulled himself in, getting both foot back on solid ground, and he felt Toki release him.
For a long moment, the two of them just breathed hard, gulping the freezing air that whistled by them and their hearts racing. Nathan’s forehead was pressed to cold stone, and his heart seemed set to lumber out of his chest, thumping away like a devastating drumbeat.
Finally, when he felt he had breath to speak, he said: “…thank you.”
It was a bare, base thing to offer to a man who’d just saved his life, but it was all his dry tongue had to offer.
They continued on, and Nathan was grateful when the ledge opened up again, making a walkable path that began to lead inward, away from the cliff of the northern face.
The mountain itself was made up of two peaks, one lower in the south, and a final one that rose even higher to the north. The path that Nathan’s people frequented didn’t even go up to the southern peak, ending at a plateau beneath a sheer wall leading up to said peak. The path that he and Toki now took began to twist its way into the mountain, emerging finally into an unexpected plain of snow, the peaks of the mountain stretching up on either side of them.
Nathan was shocked to realize they were basically at the southern peak, the top of it only a hundred feet or so above them. The northern wall went even higher, ascending towards the clouds, but in between the two peaks, where the bridge of the mountain met, there was a relatively flat, open space, which curved away from them, the snow leading to the ledges that, in the spring, would bring melt to their rivers.
Nathan had never been so high up in his life.
“…huh,” he said.
Toki, meanwhile, crunched out into the snow, then came to a stop, his body freezing in that way that screamed alert, and Nathan, too, went tense. He relaxed some when he realized what Toki saw: a mountain goat. It seemed like there were several around here, grazing on lichen on the rocks, or the errant weed, grown tough and ragged in the harsh climate. One of them was closer to the ground than the others, its tail wiggling to scatter some fallen snow from its back.
Toki reached back behind himself, grabbing the hilt of his sword. Nathan raised an eyebrow, wondering what he intended to do with that, and was soon informed. For all the grace and precise ability Toki seemed to possess when it came to hunting birds, he seemed to lack it in equal measure when hunting larger game. He ran through the snow, lifting his sword up above his head.
The goat perked up at the obvious sound, and before Toki had even gotten within ten feet of it, the hairy little beast had calmly hopped up the rock, away from potential attack. Toki came to a slow stop, lowering his sword so that the tip dragged in the snow, and Nathan couldn’t help but chuckle.
“You won’t catch it like that,” he said, crossing burly arms over the barrel of his chest. Toki looked back over his shoulder at him.
“Whyyyy?” the boy asked, voice stretching in a whine. Nathan shook his head, beginning to walk over.
“A sword is to hunt men,” he explained, gesturing to the weakened blade that Toki had made for himself. “It’s a poor tool for hunting game - poorer still to try and outrun them. They have four legs - you have but two. No, to catch a creature like that, you gotta known its strengths, and its weakness.”
Toki was still pouting up at him.
“Whats strengths? Whats weaknesses?”
Nathan looked up at the goats consideringly. To be fair, his method of hunting wasn’t that far off from Toki’s. It was Pickles who schemed and came up with traps and snares, who threw his daggers to debilitate, or Skwisgaar who could move through the tree tops like a Ljósálfar, tracking prey without sound.
Nathan wasn’t like that. He wasn’t silent, nor was he meant for traps. He hunted his prey to exhaustion, across the boundless reaches of their thinly wooded valley, following it as a steady jog, an unrelenting force. The deer was faster, could outrun him, but in the snow he could follow its tracks easily, and soon enough he would come upon it once more. And once more, the deer would spring to action, dashing out of his reach.
But each time he came upon it, that dash would be less spry, less eager. Finally, their long race would deteriorate to the deer keeping ahead of him by but a few bounds. Still, Nathan would come. He was relentless and undaunted, and though he was not swift he could hunt a deer to exhaustion across the relatively flat ground of their valley. By the time the chase ended, the deer would collapse, laying docile in the snow, and Nathan would smash its skull quickly and mercifully, and his people would eat.
That method would not work here. The goats were mostly all above them, and the ones on the ground could easily climb up long before he or Toki got to them. It was not an even playing field - open ground that could be hunted across.
Nathan lightly turned the handle of his mace in his hand, thumb rubbing over the wood.
“If we wanna eat one of them,” he replied to Toki. “We gotta be quicker than it. We gotta…” Nathan grumbled, trying to think of what Pickles would say. “We gotta outthink it.”
Toki pouted.
“I am nots good at thinkings,” he said, that slightly petulant whine in his voice that Nathan thought should annoy him. Instead, he found himself huffing a small, fond laugh. He reached out, clapping his hand on top of the smaller man’s head.
“You and me both,” he admitted. Nathan knew his own strengths, and they were considerable, but he wasn’t someone who liked to talk and theorize. Words always got messed up and crumbly in his mouth, where they were strong and powerful in his head.
As for Toki, it was clear that the boy had his own problems.
Speed wasn’t one of them, though, Nathan thought. What he lacked in planning, he made up for in his spry movement - something quite similar to Skwisgaar, Nathan admitted. Errantly, he wondered if the blademaster would deign to teach Toki, if Nathan brought him back with him.
He shook his head of the thought, returning to the matter at hand.
He gestured to the mountain side.
“You can climb the mountain just as good as they can,” he pointed out.
Toki shook his head.
“Sos? Doesn’t mean I can catches one. An’ evens if I did, we just goes tumbling down!”
Nathan snorted.
“Yeah - to me,” he pointed out. He lifted his mace. “Don’t try to catch them. Just knock ‘em down, I’ll take ‘em out.” Teamwork. Pickles would be proud of him.
Of course, saying it was easier than doing it. The mountainside was treacherous and still icy from the storm, and for the goats this was familiar territory. Nathan had Toki begin to climb the ridges far away from the herd, so that he could come across horizontally - hopefully chasing them to the side, as opposed to further up the rock. The goal wasn’t necessarily to get close to the goat so much as it was to force the animal to move in a direction it didn’t want to, or at a less than optimal speed, so that it would lose its footing.
All they had to do was get it to fall.
While the goats had the advantage of knowing the territory, they also had the disadvantage of not having had large predators up this high. They browsed the scrub that grew in the lee of the peaks, which was higher than wolves would ever come, and far higher than a bear would attempt. For the most part, they lived a life uninterrupted by the concerns of other prey animals, and thus, they weren’t accustomed to fear.
They didn’t have the good sense to scatter as Toki stalked them, viewing him and Nathan as little more than an inconvenience, rather than the genuine threat they were.
There were several false starts, and a rather steep learning curve as the two of them figured out how best to herd a mountain goat, but they were too hungry to even consider losing. The goats let Toki get far closer than was safe, and when it came down to it, all they needed was one false step.
In the end, it was a yearling goat, not as adept on its feet as its elders, that made the mistake of trotted out onto gravel. The fall it took was not considerable, a spill their kind was used to making as they journeyed over their rocky home. It bleated, wriggling its legs in the air and shifting the roll back over, but before it could find its feet once more, the heavy thud of Nathan’s quick steps were the short prelude to the thud of his mace, and the goat ceased to live before it even had any idea it was in danger.
Up the rock, Toki crowed in victory, hands thrusting up into the air and thus losing his purchase. He tumbled down with a squawk only to be caught by Nathan, blinking up at the huge man with wide pale eyes, a little snow fox confused by its own foolishness.
Nathan couldn’t help but laugh.
They found a ledge of rock that jutted out from the taller peak, providing a reasonable stretch of dry slate rock beneath it, and dragged their kill over. Toki had nothing but his sword, but Nathan had his skinning knife on his belt, and he set to disemboweling and bleeding their meal while Toki had the unenviable task of finding enough dry scrub to start a fire.
It wasn’t easy work, and by the time they were situated in their camp, it was long past sundown. The storm had cleared the overhanging clouds out the night before, leaving for an open, bright sky, the northern river swimming along in greens and flashes of purple against the white run of the stars. The colors echoed off the mirror of the snow, giving them plenty of light as they enjoyed their feast.
They cooked and ate the limbs first, both of them tucking in ravenously, and it was only once he’d gone through most of his haunch that Nathan began to talk, ruminating without purpose on his hird and their hunts. He started by just telling stories, amusing anecdotes of times they’d failed or won by chance, and moved on to talking about their strengths, how they hunted down prey together.
“Whats about the other one?” Toki asked, his squirrelly little face dotted with blood.
“Other one?” Nathan replied with a grunt.
“Ja. You talks about Pickle an’ his traps, and Skwisgaar wids his sword-” There was a little petulant jealousy there, at that, before he continued. “But yous sez there ams four of you. What about the other one? Umm… Moidaface.”
“Oh, Murderface.” Nathan nodded, finally realizing what Toki was getting at. “He’s…not really good at anything.”
Toki’s brow just creased, looking confused.
“I dunno.” Nathan shrugged his broad shoulders, and he would never cop to the fond smile that tugged at his lips then. “He’s just…there, you know?”
No, it became apparent. Toki didn’t know.
“He came with us when the men from the south started to move into our territories. It’s not like he can’t fight, he just…doesn’t, most of the time. But he helped us - all of our warriors - fight them back. He was good with his axe. Just…annoying as fuck. He wouldn’t fucking leave me alone, and he started coming on our hunting parties, like we fucking invited him. Acting like we were buddies or something. This was before Skwisgaar joined the people, so it was just Pickles and I, back then. He was annoying and loud and smelly… He scared off all the prey. But somehow, I dunno. We just started bringing home more meat.”
Toki didn’t say anything, just looked quizzical. Nathan shrugged defensively.
“I dunno. It just works. When he’s with us, we’re just…better. We just are. So he’s part of my hird now.” Even if he was an irritating, smelly, self-important dickhole. He was their irritating, smelly, self-important dickhole, it seemed, and Nathan, so taciturn and singular as a child, would never have predicted being so surrounded by others now, as an adult.
He never would have predicted that he’d like it. Or that now, separated from them all, he was…lonely.
He glanced across the small fire at Toki, who was trying to set up another cut of meat to roast, the tip of his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth as he did so.
Nathan was glad he’d brought the boy. Despite himself, he was glad.
That night, when they were bedded down, Nathan took the spot closer to the outside, his broad form the shield it was always meant to be, his back well aware of the smaller body just behind him. Under his protection.
*****
Nathan woke in the middle of the night, and he never figured out why.
There was no sound. The whole of the mountain seemed hushed, like the forest after the snow, only the faintest of crystalline sounds, the sounds of the snow, and even the birds reverent of this moment.
The mountain was silent, and at first, Nathan lay there without an ounce of tension, a beast of a man but at total rest, at peace, his belly still full of goat and a strange warmth in the center of his chest that told him that everything was alright. Everything was good, and he had no need to worry.
That, however, was before the veil of dreams left him, and he woke enough to be suspicious. He pushed himself up quickly, glancing around. He turned immediately to check on Toki, something uncomfortably like worry sticking in his throat, and he felt himself growl when he saw the boy was missing. Nathan’s muscles bunched, promising a hard and painful death to anything that had dared to trespass against him, taking what was his to protect.
He grabbed his mace, pushing himself to his feet and skulking out from under the ledge, having to bend over to avoid hitting his head on the rock above him. He straightened once clear of it, green eyes searching the expanse of the lee.
He didn’t have to look long.
The air was clear and the snow undisturbed save for their footsteps, and a fresh set led directly away from their camp. There was nothing at all to obscure Toki, and Nathan found him immediately.
At first, there was relief. The boy was just sitting in the snow like a fool - nothing attacking him, safe as could be, but likely to freeze to death when he should be sleeping behind Nathan, where he was safer as could be. The relief was quickly subsumed by irritation and the determination to march out into the snow and demand to know what Toki thought he was doing, but that feeling, too, passed, and just as quickly, taken over completely by confusion.
For Toki was sitting in the snow, his calves folded under him, and as he lifted a hand a tendril of light from the sky diverted from its flow, a stream diverging from a great river, and trickled down towards him. It snaked down through the air, dripping over unseen rocks and forming limitless waterfalls. It twisted and writhed like a ribbon, curling down and twisting around Toki’s outstretched fingers, danced around his fingertips without touching, and bounced away just as quick as the boy reached for it.
Toki laughed, a bell of a sound, clear and bright as it echoed off of the rocks, and the light seemed to giggle with him. He lifted both arms outward, palms up, a man at worship before the gods, or maybe something even more primal - the first ice and fire of Ginnungagap, the primordial elements that formed all that was, before even Odin and Vili and Vé defeated Ymir and made the world.
The light came to him, to his command, and the sky played with Toki as if it were a kitten and not the heavens themselves, fire sparkling along the ridges of his skin, embers bursting in tiny shots of starlight. Briefly, Nathan realized that Toki had lit all of their fires, even when the kindling he found was poor or wet, and the fire burned regardless. Belatedly, Nathan realized he’d never seen a flint or stick to bring the first spark. He’d just assumed that Toki had had one, too busy thinking of other things, doing other things, to concern himself with what he considered the rote task of starting the fire - something he always left to Pickles.
And Nathan knew what this was. He knew it to be the craft of the völvas in his village, the seiðkonas who communed with the elements themselves, who could walk in the dreams of men and steal their breath, who could divine the future or tell the past from touch alone. Who brewed the tonics that saved the lives of warriors when infection set in, or came in the middle of the night to deliver a child before a woman even knew she was about to labor.
Seiðr. The art of the witch women, mysterious and unknown to men - a part of their world and undeniably powerful, but something to be shunned by men who did not need to sneak around. Who did not need to shrivel and shirk the open glory of battle, and instead work their arcane powers of trickery and falsehoods.
“Ergi,” Nathan said, and the light stopped, Toki turning to look at him with those big eyes, a mockery of innocence. Nathan snarled.
“Niðingr!” he cried, adding insult to insult, and part of him hoped that Toki would rise to the challenge - would show himself to be a man and not some weakling effeminate witch. Part of Nathan hoped that Toki would take the offense intended and come to fight him, reclaim his honor and prove himself to be the man that Nathan had taken him as.
Not the coward that Nathan could never hope to bring back to his people.
But Toki’s expression just crumpled, something sad and pathetic, and the light receded back into the sky, back to where it should be, and Toki did nothing but rise to his feet, looking as if he meant to make peace instead of battle. Something Nathan couldn’t forgive.
Nathan turned around quickly, stalking back to their camp with angry strides, his hands already curled in fists. The bitter burn of betrayal scoured the back of his throat, set him seething. He wanted something to hit, something to punch until it bled, until bone and breath shattered under his blows.
For he had been betrayed. All this time, Toki had been a seiðmaðr - a witch man. A man who’d abandoned his honor and his pride, descending to the ways of a woman, unskilled in battle and too weak to face her foes head on. Fine enough, Nathan considered, for a woman. Indeed, what else was she to do? Nathan valued the words of his völvas, even if he found them somewhat strange and frightening, the way their eyes always seemed to know things that he didn’t.
Fine enough for women, but it was not meant for men. To learn such an art a man must strip himself of his bravery, strip himself of his very manhood, and engage in trickery. The art of those who could not stand tall and bare before their enemy, who could not fight face to face, with no falsehoods between them. The art of those who had to sneak in behind closed doors, slip in through the crack in a window or through the flap of a tent. Those who poisoned in the night, who laced a dagger neatly between ribs.
Those who had no honor at all, and would never reach the hallowed halls.
Someone like that… Someone like that could never be brought back to Nathan’s village. Someone like that could never be his friend, his brother in battle. Someone like that could never be of his hird, and the feeling of hurt was not one that Nathan dealt well with.
Anger was so much easier.
He snatched up his fur and the few supplies he’d brought with him. He didn’t even bother to clean off his skinning knife, just shoved it into the wedge of his belt. He snatched his pack up, the anger mounting in each motion, flowing freely through him, burning in his muscles.
“Nathans-” Toki’s voice came from behind him, but Nathan had no patience for it.
He picked up several pieces of meat that had been cut from the carcass and cooked the night before, wrapping them in the pelt from the skinned goat before he shoved them into his pack. He turned around, slinging the pack over his shoulder.
“Nathans wait-”
“Get out of my way,” Nathan growled down at him, his voice dangerous, but Toki either didn’t recognize it or was a fool because he came to stand directly in front of him.
“Please, Nathans, I wasn’t doings nothing wrong, I promise-”
“Ergi witch,” Nathan bit out, another harsh insult, the pain snapping out as fire, and still some small part of him hoped to see anger on Toki’s face. Hoped to see the boy lash out, snarl and spit. Hoped to see him want to fight, to earn back his honor.
But Toki just looked wounded, like some pathetic forest animal, and the way that made Nathan feel awful wasn’t something he wanted to inspect.
“Get away from me-” He shoved Toki aside, stalking past him.
“Wait!” Toki grabbed for him, a monumental mistake, and Nathan rounded on him instantly, arm slapping him away and sending Toki falling back into the snow and utterly at Nathan’s mercy. The boy lay there before him, at his feet, and Nathan still had his mace in his other hand. In that moment, Toki had no recourse.
But Nathan had no true desire to bash the smaller man’s head in, and that, that weakness, that cursed affection that mired every human interaction, that had driven him to stay away from others before Pickles had wandered so blithely in, felt like a bur in his heart. It felt like the curse that it was, and Nathan hated it.
And the one who inspired it.
“…stay away from me,” he warned, disliking how tired the words sounded. He turned away, walking off into the snow and not looking back as he headed for the higher peak, hoping to find a path up. To kill whatever monsters threatened his people and return to them, and forget about all of this.
His warning echoed in his ribs, and it felt less like a threat and more like plea.
Nathan smashed his mace into a rock as he passed it.
*****
For awhile, Nathan just fumed. He stomped around the mountainside, looking for a path that didn’t seem to exist.
Nathan grumbled, searching around the rise of the higher peak, coming nearly to the edge of the plain formed in the lee before he located what looked to be a way up. He began his trek in the pre-dawn hours, still tired and only having had a few hours of sleep, but he was eager to get this over with. He wanted to be back down in his hut, warmed by his fire and the bodies of women eager to bed him. He wanted to be back where he could be silent and listen to the tales of laughter by his men, the clink of their cups as mead flowed, thick and sweet as honey, and everything made sense.
He was so tired of this mountain and its secrets, and the discomfort that came every time he thought of Toki’s face.
It only occurred to him, as the sun was lighting the sky and the mountainside, that he really had no idea if he was even chasing the right thing. It was Toki who’d told him it was the draugar, the dishonored dead, who’d attacked his men, and Toki who’d told him where he could find them. And Nathan, like a fool, had believed him. Without a beat of hesitance, he’d assumed the truth of Toki’s words, even knowing he was from the heretic tribe. He hadn’t even questioned it.
And now his foolhardiness was clear to see, revealed to all the world: a fool up a mountain with no idea what he was doing.
He felt like the sun dawned on him, lit him up, and let every creature in the valley and down at the base see him, shining its light on his humiliation, and surely even the squirrels were chittering their laughter, the birds singing their mocking songs, all about him.
He pressed his forehead to cold stone and took a moment to breathe.
The climb from here was in some ways worse and in some ways better. There was less of an obvious ‘path’ to walk, but the wall was less sheer overall, making for less nerve-wracking moments of dizzying vertigo. By the time the sun was setting, Nathan wasn’t sure how much progress he’d really made. He came to a ledge that looked down over the lee, some one hundred feet below.
He ate a few strips of goat meat and settled in to sleep. His rest was fitful and uneasy, and he woke up feeling just as tired as he had when he went to sleep. He wondered where Toki was, if the stupid kid was alright, and hated himself for wondering. He continued his climb, uncertain now if he’d find anything upon reaching the peak, but having come this far, he decided he might as well finish what he’d started.
At the very least, when he returned empty handed to his people, he could tell them that he’d thoroughly searched the mountain.
He huffed at his own idiocy, though, when he realized that he hadn’t finished searching the hunting path, where the hunting party would have been attacked. Where their bodies were, and Nathan wouldn’t even be able to return and tell the people that their bodies had been burned, given good rites.
He’d been a true fool, a true rube, and now the consequences of his gullibility would be plain for all to see.
It was not a thought that sat well with Nathan, a proud man on the best of days. He rested uneasily, and his journey up the taller peak was full of fits and stops, uncertainty dogging his usually confident steps, and yet his stubbornness wouldn’t allow him to give up and go home.
He would see this to its completion. If he was going to be a fool, he was going to be the fool in full, for better that than to admit to his mistake.
Two days up from the lee, however, he received clemency.
He reached a crag in the rocks, moving through them to another gamboling plain, reasonably level at one end and then sweeping off downward at the other. The slope was deceptive, Nathan knew. It appeared to scoop away at an even incline, but Nathan knew that if he stepped over towards the drop off, he would find it more sudden than it looked. If the snow shifted under him, it would be all too easy to stumble or fall, and once down he would be rolling with no chance of stopping. He stayed on the level area and looked around, searching for nothing in particular besides any sign of foulness.
He found it quite rapidly, and unexpectedly.
He was peering into what appeared to be a varmint hole, burrowed into what loose rock there was, when the scent of fetid, rotting flesh assaulted him. It was not the sour scent that came with old meat, ready to be thrown to the dogs, but rather, something even older than that. A body laid out in the summer sun for days on end, until the peak of the scent had faded, the flesh sloughed off and the intestines puddled and melted. It was the scent of meat gone dry with age, the scent of dirt, almost, and the cottony wool of desiccation.
Nathan gagged, and two eyes opened in the furrow, sending him stumbling back.
His hand went to his handle of his mace immediately, the weapon latched into his belt, and he watched with wide eyes as a skeletal hand emerged from the earth, bone clawing against rock and, unevenly, with great disgrace, a body scratched its way out. The head was largely naught but skull, strips of old flesh and the silvery white shine of tendons clinging to lichen colored bone. Its shoulders and chest, too, revealed little other than bone, moss growing in the joints, and Nathan flinched in instinctive horror when the corpse broke its own shoulder coming out of the burrow.
He pulled his mace out then fully, after fumbling for half a heartbeat, and whatever shock and horror was put to seconds, warriors instincts to the fore.
Horrific and maligned as it was, Nathan didn’t fear the monster. He feared nothing, and as it came out, pushed itself to stand on meatless heels, Nathan braced himself in the snow, ready to fight.
It might have been a monster, but Nathan was a berzerker, and he had nothing to fear from the dead.
It came at him shambling, all of its movements unnatural. Nathan swung his mace with all the power in his massive arms, the bulbous head of the weapon hitting the weakened bone like a sledgehammer, shattering it immediately and leaving half of its ribcage as nothing more than splinters on the snow. There was no flesh to pad the blow, none of the elasticity of life, and the bones were dry and brittle.
Nathan smirked - this would be easier than he thought. Indeed, how had such a thing even managed to take down one of his warriors, let alone five?
The draugr glanced down at itself, as if it had eyes to inspect, then it looked back up at Nathan, and continued its plodding progress, disaffected by the wound, and Nathan’s smirk fell. It was already dead - a killing blow meant nothing to it.
Nathan snarled, baring his teeth as he took a few steps back, keeping a steady distance between himself and the draugr. His next blow hit its humerus, shattering the upper arm even as the creature tried to lift it out towards him. The rest of its arm fell to the snow, leaving only a stub rotating out of the shoulder.
Nathan didn’t stop, that time. He just continued to swing his mace, hitting its opposite shoulder, slamming into its pelvis. Soon enough, it collapsed to its knees, and Nathan took his next swing to its head, removing the skull completely and cracking it into pieces.
He felt, surely, that without a head, the beast would be destroyed.
But it had moved without a heart, without a brain. The skull meant as little to it as a finger or toe, and Nathan watched in disbelief as it tried to shamble to its feet once more, despite every broken bone and shattered appendage that Nathan had doled out.
He resumed his attack, this time with breathless enthusiasm, hitting it again and again, reducing it to pieces, and it was in the midst of this that he saw the arm that he’d first disembodied. It was crawling through the snow towards him, pulling itself with its fingertips.
“The fuck!” Nathan roared. He brought his mace down on the hand, obliterating it, only to feel the fingers of the other hand beginning to tug on the leather thongs of his other boot. His whole skin shivered and he leapt back, sending his mace swinging like a bat, knocking it away.
Nathan spent the next several minutes just smashing the skeleton to little pieces, hitting every bit that was more then a few inches complete. He brought his mace down again and again, hefting it back up into the air and dashing the next portion apart.
But the time he was done, his muscles were burning, and he was a bit out of breath. The skeleton was completely scattered, every pieces of itself smashed up, but Nathan noticed that a single finger joint, a single knuckle, was trying to inch its way through the snow, still horrifically animate.
“Ugh,” he spat, making a face. The skeleton was no real threat to him now, in such small pieces that it couldn’t no longer amble or crawl in any fashion, but Nathan knew he wouldn’t be making camp here that night. Maybe the shards would slowly wiggle their way over, an inch at a time, and crawl inside his furs while he slept.
He shuddered at the thought, and he was lifting his mace, straightening himself, when he saw the second one. Then the third.
He swallowed, raising himself up to his full height, and he looked around the sloped plain, eyes ticking from one to the next, finding some six or seven draugar all crouched and waiting, watching, their clawed hands gripping the stone. They were above him, around him, and their eyeless sockets looked straight into him, one with a mountain posy blooming out of one hole, a blanch of color against stained and dirty bone.
Nathan adjusted his grip on his mace, frame braced.
The single draugr hadn’t been too dangerous, in the end, but it had taken considerable work to neutralize it, to make it no longer a threat, and even now Nathan didn’t know that the very shards might not try to chase him. Determined to bring death, no matter how slow. Inexorable.
Six or seven… He could turn his back on one, only to have its disembodied arm or leg sneak up on him. Indeed, hitting one without obliterating it might only mean that he turned one attacker into three or four smaller but just as deadly ones.
The living had the good sense to die when their head was removed or bashed in. The dead, not so. They would come for him regardless.
They began to crawl down from their perches, or stagger out of the crevices, all in varying states of decay. Two looked like the one he’d already defeated, all mossy bones and cracked skeleton, but the others all looked fresher, to varying degrees. The more flesh on the bones, the most difficult they’d be to shatter, Nathan knew, and cartilage may well hold up under his blows, even as he battered them.
He could fight like a demon, and still be dragged under by the slow but unstoppable weight of the storm. And still he had no intention of fleeing.
The first one to reach him was probably the one closest to life, wrinkled and decaying skin still stretched over rotted flesh. The odor was awful, considerably worse than the first corpse, but its remaining meat allowed it greater speed and dexterity than its dryer brethren.
It reached for him, not going for a blow, but rather just trying to grasp him, drag him into the grave with it, Nathan supposed, so that they could be alone together.
Nathan hit it across the face, the spikes on his mace smearing its cheek into mush, baring horrible teeth, and the release of death stench was sudden and overpowering, enough to make Nathan wretch. But he reigned his stomach in, lifting one foot to deliver a hard kick to the center of its chest, sending it falling back.
From there, he reeled to face the bony hand reaching for him, and he felt the warm rage of battle settle over him, pumping in his veins like liquid fire. That feeling, that comfort, the familiar feeling of battle and chasing the thrill of victory, lit him up, and at first, that feeling bolstered him.
He descended happily into the haze, letting it cloud him and make him clear both at once, a constantly moving, constantly fighting beast, and the berzerker flowed over his skin like a well worn jacket, something old and familiar and trusted. He fought them off, smashing them with his mace or kicking them back. With one of the skeletal ones, he brought his foot down on the skull after it had fallen with a satisfying crunch, bone splintering and flying everywhere, and he whirled to face his next attacker.
In battle, Nathan could not be dragged down. He could not be conquered. He was the mountain, unmoved by the storm no matter how hard it blew. He was a primal force all to his own, and as the minutes ticked by, the air filled with his roar, it seemed that, once more, nothing could touch him.
But even mountains can be conquered by waves, no matter how weak, so long as they are unending, and Nathan had never fought with foes that did not die. He went for their heads and their chests automatically, used to hitting those areas when fighting men, but to the draugar it was all the same. Head, chest, neck, arms, clavicle, foot. Every inch of them was dead, and every inch of them longed to bring him to the grave with them. Whether he smashed their little toe or their brain didn’t make any difference to them, and they kept coming.
As fiercely as Nathan fought, he would be overwhelmed. Somewhere beyond the battle haze, he knew this. Somewhere, growing in the back of his mind like a choking weed, he knew this to be true.
This must have been how his men died, down on the mountainside.
He spun around, smashing his mace into a corpse and sending it flying, tumbling down the slope and unable to stop, and Nathan grinned at that - he couldn’t kill it, but it would be a long, long climb to get back to him. But the fleeting victory cost him. He paused, and behind him a gnarled hand snatched out, tangled in his hair and dragged him back, the pull throwing him off balance. He flailed, feeling the world tip, knowing he was going down.
And knowing, when he did, he’d never get the chance to get back up again.
“Yaaah!” a voice cried out, a voice most definitely not of the dead, for they had no voices, and something clashed behind him, the tension on his hair releasing. Nathan reeled back up onto the flats of his feet, jerking around.
“Toki!” he exclaimed in surprise, seeing the young man swinging his sword at the now half-armed draugr, the limb severed at the elbow. Nathan felt his skin crawl and he clamored back around himself, reaching over his shoulder to tug at his hair. He yanked the still dangling, still clawing hand out, throwing it to the ground and smashing it beneath the heel of his boot.
He looked up to find Toki fighting the draugar with all his might, his blade untrained and somewhat unwieldy, but Nathan could see the natural talent beneath it - the strength, the flow, and the way he dodged and whirled, moved like water. He smashed his blade up into the chest cavity of one of the monsters, and as Nathan had always known it would, the sword snapped. It met the spine of the draugr, and that was it. The poorly welded together metal couldn’t bear the strain, coming apart with a ting!, like an icicle breaking.
Two thirds of the blade fell to the ground, leaving Toki holding the hilt and a fraction of his sword.
Nathan rushed to him, swinging his mace wide and shattering the jaw of an approaching draugr, spinning around until his back met with the younger man’s, the two of them facing their foes, weapons drawn. Shattered as it was, Toki’s sword would have to be enough.
They fought hard, panting in the cold, cloud-thin air, breath fogging. Nathan brought his mace down again and again, and this time the bloodlust took more comfortable hold, knowing that an ally was at his back. He fought with the ferocity of the bear, roaring his rage, and if he fell now, if he fell today, he couldn’t bring himself to feel regret.
To his surprise, though, Toki fought with equal passion and verve. The kid was skinny and raised by heretics who eschewed the glory of violence, and yet he fought as if possessed - possessed as much as Nathan, and in the heat of it, in the mess of battle, there was a moment when their eyes caught.
The bear and the wolf, two seekers of prey, two hunters of the world, their eyes ringed red with blood, and Nathan saw in Toki that which he saw in himself.
They who fed on blood. They who fed upon the weak. The bear and the wolf, mangy in winter, alone and standing in the snow, staring across each other, each of them knowing each other more than any other could.
And together they would have the world begging at their feet.
And then the moment passed into many, the two of them dancing as only predators could, fighting back those which sought to steal breath from them.
Nathan didn’t know how much time had passed when he let out a full throated yell, bashing to pieces the draugr at his feet, the pumping hedonism of the blood rage beginning to fade now, but not fully gone. He brought the mace down again and again, the muscles in his arms burning, screaming, but he found only pleasure in the pain. He smashed it over and over again, pulling back only to bellow his scream into the frigid air, whirling around to face his next attacker, only to find them…retreating?
He stopped, breath still coming in fast, heavy pants, broad shoulders rising and falling as he watched them crawl and shamble away, disappearing into the rocks and the earth.
He looked to Toki, who heaved as he did, the young man jumping in shock when Nathan put a hand on his shoulder, reeling around. He relaxed a little, when he saw who it was.
Toki’s face was pale and drawn, his blue eyes almost seeming to glow in the contrast, haunted by the moon and the stars and the night even now, before the sun had fully set.
Nathan lifted his hand, thumbing Toki’s chin.
“…Úlfheðinn,” Nathan murmured in wonder, his mind jogging to catch up with the concept. That an ergi sorcerer could also be one to pull down the spirit of the wolf, could fight like that, with bravery and courage. With the fierce determination of their ancestors, or possibly the gods themselves.
Toki swallowed with a click, and his old eyes shifted away, became young again, looking out at the ridge as the last of the draugar vanished.
“…they ams gone,” he murmured.
Nathan nodded. Wherever they’d gone, Nathan would have to find out. Whatever answers waited for them, waited at the peak now, and if Nathan was to defend his people, he would have to find them.
Toki’s eyes ticked back to his own, hesitance in them, and Nathan felt a similar uncertainty. He swallowed. Belatedly, he realized that his hand was still on Toki’s face, and pulled it back.
“…thank you,” he said in stilted gratitude. “For…coming. You didn’t have to.”
Nathan hadn’t exactly been charitable in their parting. He’d never known an ergi man to have that kind of power in him - although he realized, then, he’d never met an ergi man at all. He’d seen Toki wielding the female magics and that had been enough for him.
He felt an awkward pull to apologize, but such a thing didn’t come naturally for a man like him, so he merely stood there awkwardly, his huge body more lumbering than intimidating.
But Toki relieved him of that. The boy reached up, putting his hand over Nathan’s, which was still held up in the air between them.
“It ams okay,” he said simply. He offered a small smile, a kind of hope there that Nathan didn’t necessarily know how to deal with, how to shelter or protect. It struck him sort of sideways that he wanted to. Wondered what it might look like if it grew, became something less fragile.
He shifted his weight uncomfortably, then lowered his hand.
He cleared his throat.
“Uh. We, uh… should try and find some shelter. Before nightfall,” he said, the snow already beginning to pick up. The sky was clouded now and the light already dim, and before long the snow would block what little visibility they had.
“I can comes with you…?” Toki asked, brightening, as if being offered something wonderful. As if he hadn’t just been following Nathan anyway.
Nathan coughed again.
“Yeah,” he said, then: “…yeah.”
He wasn’t at all prepared for the hug that Toki launched at him, arms going around his middle, and face mooshed into Nathan’s chest.
He wasn’t prepared for Toki, a seiðmaðr and Úlfheðinn both, a child and a man, someone who fought like he was dying, and then turned around just as quickly to indulge in an embrace, like his sweetheart had come home. Nathan didn’t know what to do with any of that, and for a long moment he just stood there, mace dangling in one hand and the other raising and lowering, uncertain what to do with itself.
It was with a sort of final, fatal acceptance that it came to land on Toki’s head, in his hair, and let the dumb kid hold him.
*****
They managed to scurry into a crevice before the worst of the winds hit them, burrowing into the tight space and hiding from the night as it covered the sky. Toki’s sword, only about a foot long now before it met its jagged end, rested just at the entrance, with Nathan’s mace and helmet and armor. There’d be no room for a fire tonight, but the two of them grinned at each other like fools when they outran the wind.
Outside the snow fell, but it didn’t blow in, and there was good distance between them and the shattered remains of the draugar. Nathan was more than content with that.
“Did you bring any of the goat?” he asked, reaching for his pack.
Toki shook his head, looking sheepish.
“Nei. I ates what I could, but I…didn’t wants to lose you, so I lefts the rest.” He looked down at the floor of the little crevice, nudging pebbles with his toe. “I know you saids to stays away, but I gots worried. …and scaredsed.” He shrugged a little, glancing at Nathan from the corner of his eye. “You amns’t mad…?”
Nathan considered his feelings and finally shook his head, deciding that even though he couldn’t really tell what he was feeling, it at least wasn’t anger.
“…I said a lot of shitty things,” he admitted, as close to an apology he’d dare get. “In the people- In my people, only women practice seiðr. It is…not seemly, for a man to do so.”
Toki shrugged slim shoulders.
“Mine fathers hated it too. I didn’ts mean to none. I don’ts even know hows I know. I just does. I starts plays with the light an’ the snow an’ the animals back when I was real little, an’ I hads to go out into the winter to does my chores. When he saw… He sez it ams the way of the old heathen gods, that we amns’t to do things. It ams against the word of God.” Toki pursed his lips. “I try stops, but it never works.”
Nathan considered this. It was, in the end, outside of his understanding. He did not know the way of the völva, the ebb and flow of seiðr and the threads of the Norns as they wove through the World Tree. These things were not the things of men, of warriors. He didn’t know what it might be like to feel it, to feel it tug at you.
But then, he supposed he could understand how it might feel. If someone asked him not to fight, not to hunt, if someone told him to turn his back and run away, he could never live with that. The warrior’s blood flowed in him, and it flowed but the one direction.
He wondered what it must be like for Toki, for he had both warrior’s blood and völva’s, and the two must flow against each other. It must have been like having two hearts, one working always against the other.
He made a little face, then settled.
It was only once they’d settled in, and the night settled just as surely, howling away outside their door, that Nathan struck up conversation again.
“You fought with the fury of a wolf,” he said, the words meant as compliment.
Toki looked up, blinking, but it was too dark to really see his expression.
“My people believe that the greatest warriors abandon their humanity, their civilization, upon the battlefield. That they fight as if possessed by the bear itself. You… I saw it in your eyes. Now I know why you wear that wolf pelt.” He gestured to the black fur over Toki’s shoulders. “You slew him in battle and took his spirit, didn’t you? As I took the bear.”
Toki didn’t respond immediately, and the atmosphere seemed somewhat tense. Nathan wished they had a fire more for light now, than heat, but eventually Toki responded.
“I didn’t slay Tobias.” In the dim moonlight, Nathan saw Toki’s arm move up, the boy running his fingers through the fur of the pelt.
“Tobias?”
“My friend. The wolf.” Toki shifted a little in their small shelter. “My fathers sends me out intos the valley all the times. To brings wood or fish, or just to makes the trek, so that I may journey until my sin ams gone.” He shook his head. “Downs there, there was no peoples. No one to crosses theyselves when they sees me, or curse mine name. Down there, there ams just the animals, and they like everyone just the sames. The squirrels were the easiest to makes friends with. They just like nuts. Fatty, one of the badgers, he likes it when you rub hims belly.”
Now, Nathan didn’t need the light. He could hear the wistful smile on Toki’s voice.
“I finds lots of friends,” the boy continued. “But none like Tobias. I thinks…maybe he gets separateds from his family? Or maybe they chase him away with the bitings, because they don’t like him, like no one likes Toki. …either way, I sees him one day, hunting in the woods.” Toki swallowed, an audible thing. “He kills my squirrel friends.”
Nathan had eaten plenty of squirrels in his life, and never before felt an ounce of regret for their deaths, but in that moment, in the sadness of Toki’s voice, he felt a twinge of grief.
“I forgives him eventuallies. It ams hard, but…but he was just hungries. I know what that ams like. At first, Tobias don’ts likes me none. But I got plenty times, all through the winter and the spring and the summer and in the fall, he lets me touch hims nose. He ams my friend. My best friend, for two wholes years.”
There was a happiness in Toki’s voice, but a sort of happiness that seemed as if it were made to break.
“What happened?” Nathan asked after a sufficient pause.
“My father kills him.” Toki shifted a little again, and Nathan thought he might be curling into himself some. “He sees Tobias an’ I playings. He figures out where the missing foods go. He shoots him with an arrow and Tobias…Tobias dies.”
“…that sucks,” Nathan said, knowing well how little that meant.
“So I takes Tobias’s fur to keeps me warm, to keeps him withs me, so we will always be friends. Next spring, I finds his skull. I don’ts know. I just…didn’ts want to lose him. Everything I loves, they always die.”
“…my first hunting dog,” Nathan started awkwardly, trying to reassure. “I kept his collar for many years. He was…a good friend.”
“Ja. A good friend.”
They were quiet for a long few moments. Nathan was sure that it wasn’t long in reality, but it felt it, each heartbeat of silence feeling stretched out and uncertain. He wasn’t good at this. More specifically, he’d just never done this. He wasn’t the guy that people came to talk to. He hadn’t been the child that other children played with.
He stood apart, always had.
He’d only found the comfort of friendship, brotherhood, with his hird quite recently, over the last few years of his life, and even in that, it was they that came to him. They who extended themselves to understand him in his taciturn silence. Of everyone in the world, it was Pickles that understood him the most, his oldest friend, and Pickles had so much patience that Nathan was certain he’d be kissed by the Valkyries themselves when he died.
Pickles just understood him, even when Nathan didn’t understand himself. Nathan didn’t even have to try.
He had to try now.
“Thank you,” he said again, finding it bearing repeating. The gravel of his voice was low, a mere grumble in the low shelter of their cave. “For following me. I’m…glad that you did.” He glanced over at Toki. “You are a good friend too.”
Strange but loyal, Nathan couldn’t claim to understand Toki, yet he found himself grateful that he was not alone on this journey, treacherous as it was.
In the dim light that reflected off of the snow, Nathan could make out a faint smile on Toki’s lips, across the sheen of his eye.
“I’m glads I come too,” he said, and the words meant more than they did on the surface, but Nathan didn’t chase it.
They bedded down one more night, that much closer to the peak, and whatever it was that waited there.
*****
The temperature shifted upon dawn, but the sky was still overcast, blocking out enough light that it seemed as if the sun came late. The light didn’t reach their crevice for a little over an hour after dawn, creeping in reticently, trickling like water over stone, and Nathan blinked, that first wakening sight that still landed somewhere squarely in dreams.
He blinked again, and the breath eased in and out of him, a steady flow, the thump of his heart low and even. He felt at peace, and long minutes stretched past, his brain uninterested in questioning anything.
It was only when Toki moved, shifted a little against his chest, that Nathan became aware that he was holding a smaller body against him.
This time when he blinked, it was in surprise.
He looked down, finding his own rebellious arm draped around Toki, the boy laying on his side and curled towards Nathan, his eyes shut and forehead resting against the leather of Nathan’s jerkin. They’d created warmth between them, nothing so potent as a fire, but enough to sleep easily through the night, heartbeat to heartbeat and circulating heat. Toki was still wrapped in his black wolf’s fur - Tobias’s fur - and he slept on, oblivious.
Nathan had only ever woken in such intimate circumstances with a woman. And most usually a woman that, while he might hold in fair regard, he did not intend to be more than a good lay for them both.
Not…that he intended to lay with Toki. Because that would be strange.
His whole body suddenly became a lot more tense, the morning breaking dreaming sleep and whatever spell lay between the night and the day vanished once and for all, carried away on clarion winds.
“Uh,” Nathan started, uncertain what to follow that with, but it seemed a fair place to start. At the sound, however, Toki just grumbled and burrowed in closer, like some tiny chipmunk eager to sleep the winter away.
Nathan was somewhat disturbed by how the imagery amused him. He cleared his throat and tried to straighten, or at least shift back, but the crevice wall was directly against his back, and there was nowhere to shift. His hand, pressed to Toki’s back, or draped over it, really, had become tangled in the younger man’s hair, soft, if frayed.
He blinked a little when his rough hand found strange strips of flesh, raised lines and equal furrows - scar tissue, and Nathan was used to scars, had many of his own, but not like this. Like the boy had been…whipped, or caned, the skin of his back flayed, and the thought made Nathan’s stomach churn. The wounds were all well healed and calloused over, which meant the blows must have been delivered long ago, when Toki was even smaller.
He was small enough now. Well, not really that small. Still a good sized warrior verging on manhood, bigger than Pickles, who had to be some twenty years the boy’s senior, but Toki seemed small, like this. In the lee of Nathan’s own huge form. The thought triggered a strange feeling of protectiveness, something that Nathan was largely unfamiliar with.
He didn’t really get close to people. Or, people didn’t get close to him. They never had, all through his childhood and into his adolescence. Pickles had been the first, back when he was about Toki’s age, the older man showing him the ropes with a kind of fearlessness that no others seemed to have, when it came to Nathan.
And then there were Skwisgaar and Murderface, who followed Nathan’s lead, but even so, they trespassed upon him, teased him, with the sort of ease that no other men could claim. They made him laugh. They made him…happy.
Nathan would bludgeon any who hurt them, any of his hird, his men who stood beside him and behind him in battle. Who were, all in their own ways, pains in his ass.
But even if Pickles was smaller physically, none of them seemed quite so small as Toki - younger, damaged. A boy with witch’s blood and wolf claws, at turns innocent as a child and vicious as a starving hound.
And with Toki laying against him thus, that protectiveness only surged, and Nathan could only blame Pickles, because if Pickles had never urged him from his shell, none of this would have ever happened.
Stupid fucking Pickles.
“Um,” Nathan murmured, and his hand moved up from Toki’s hair, reaching for his shoulder. He shook it. “Hey. Toki.”
The kid stirred, mumbling in a foreign tongue - perhaps the tongue of his father’s lands - and for a terrifying moment moved closer, and Nathan had no idea what to do.
He wriggled a bit, shifting around, but Toki was waking, even if slowly. He sat up as Nathan shifted around onto his back, the boy pressing his hand to the center of Nathan’s chest, pushing himself up.
“Hi Nathans,” he said with a yawn, more casual than Nathan would have expected - or, at least, more casual than Nathan was being. Toki lifted a hand to rub at his eye, only to brighten when he realized where they were.
“We ams here!” he declared. He grabbed the leather of Nathan’s jerkin. “The peak! We ams not far now - just a little more walksing and we find out what wakes the dead!”
“Uh, yeah. But how’re we going to deal with them? We can’t just smash them all to pieces. And even if we did, what if they re-assembled themselves?”
“The dead didn’ts stir before. Something ams waking them, ups-setting them. We don’ts got to kill the dead - we gots to kill what makes them rise.”
Nathan’s brow furrowed. He sat up some, ignoring(or trying to) Toki kneeling in between his own two legs.
“How do you know? How did you know, to begin with? How did you know it’d be up the mountain? And now that the thing at the peak is what’s controlling them?” Nathan looked the boy over, Toki’s face sufficiently shameful, and the headman figured it out. “…the lights. When you were working your seiðr. You were asking the Norns or the light or…something for guidance. …to help me.”
Toki paused, then nodded, and now Nathan felt like an asshole. Mostly because he was an asshole.
Nathan grunted.
“…thanks,” he said, in lieu of apology. It seemed to work just fine, because Toki went from awkward pouting to a happy grin, like a dog who’d pleased his master.
Unable to help himself, Nathan reached out with a low chuckle, ruffling Toki’s hair.
...On to Part 3!
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FROM: Your Secret Valentine
Continued from Part 1...
Title: But Neither Fire nor Iron Told Upon Them
Pairing: Nathan/Toki
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When Nathan’s people are attacked by strange foes, he must journey up the mountain to find their source. On the way he picks up an unexpected companion.
Warnings: Historical sexism? Not much else
Timeline: Viking AU
*****
In the morning the storm had passed and as they emerged from the slice they were greeted by a mackerel sky, the dome of it seeming high and distant. The air was clean and crisp, as it often was after a heavy snow, and Nathan could see for miles, straight across the valley like it were a close neighbor. The further mountains were no longer a hazy chain of grey mist but several distinct peaks and fallows, the rock there looking darker than the mountain of Nathan’s people. Beyond the front set of hills and mountains there was a thin trailing of white smoke drifting in the air, disappearing into the blue ether.
“The fire mountain,” Toki said as he came out to stand beside Nathan.
Nathan could hardly imagine a mountain made of fire, or what that would even look like. Further asking brought awkward and accented attempts at description of flame that was more like water, that dripped and shifted, rolling over rocks like pitch. Nathan finally gave up, waving a hand to silence the boy, getting only impressions of things found in the bedtime stories of children, and he couldn’t help but think that at least some of this was Toki’s overactive imagination.
Nathan would have to go and see this mountain for himself, one day. If it was even one tenth of how Toki described it, it sounded…brutal.
The two of them continued their journey up the mountain the brisk morning air, the path all the more treacherous for the snow and ice that had built up on the stone the night before. Crossings had to be more carefully taken, and Nathan shifted awkwardly along gaps, his lumbering form even more inelegant.
More than once, Nathan saw Toki hesitate, the smaller man turning back to watch Nathan make his way over a gap, or along a wall.
On a flat face of rock, with only a slender ledge of rock to guide them, Nathan put the ball of his foot down on what appeared to be stone, but the instant he put his weight on it, he came to find that it had been ice. He felt his weight slip out from under him, the world spinning dizzily. He only had half a heartbeat to lament this ignoble end, wondering if there was any room in Valhalla for a warrior so bold and bumbling as to kill himself on clear ice, for at least he’d still died in service of his people.
But then a hand snatched his wrist, gripping it with an iron determination, holding onto him like a metal band around a barrel, enough that the bones grated together painfully. There was a sharp tug as Nathan reeled backwards, his other foot still on the edge, and when he dared to look up he saw Toki looking down at him with huge eyes and harried hair.
The boy was leaned out over a crest of rock, above the ledge that Nathan was traveling along, one hand white fisted around the jagged edge of that rock, and the other now holding Nathan from falling, arm stretched out to the limit.
Surprised would have been a generous term. Nathan was no flimsy weight, and Toki was skinny from a life of inconsistent food. But as the headman hung back from the mountain at a terrifying angle, his weight and life depending on the determination of one malnourished young man, Nathan could see the cords of muscle bunched in Toki’s arm, the black fur of his wolf pelt curving around the ball of his shoulder.
With all of his might, Toki was holding Nathan to the cliff face.
Nathan swallowed with a click.
Toki’s hand tightened even more, fingers digging into Nathan’s skin, and with painful effort he slowly began to drag the huge warrior back towards the rock. Nathan lifted his other arm, trying to be careful to not unbalance himself, reaching out until he could grab hold. He pulled himself in, getting both foot back on solid ground, and he felt Toki release him.
For a long moment, the two of them just breathed hard, gulping the freezing air that whistled by them and their hearts racing. Nathan’s forehead was pressed to cold stone, and his heart seemed set to lumber out of his chest, thumping away like a devastating drumbeat.
Finally, when he felt he had breath to speak, he said: “…thank you.”
It was a bare, base thing to offer to a man who’d just saved his life, but it was all his dry tongue had to offer.
They continued on, and Nathan was grateful when the ledge opened up again, making a walkable path that began to lead inward, away from the cliff of the northern face.
The mountain itself was made up of two peaks, one lower in the south, and a final one that rose even higher to the north. The path that Nathan’s people frequented didn’t even go up to the southern peak, ending at a plateau beneath a sheer wall leading up to said peak. The path that he and Toki now took began to twist its way into the mountain, emerging finally into an unexpected plain of snow, the peaks of the mountain stretching up on either side of them.
Nathan was shocked to realize they were basically at the southern peak, the top of it only a hundred feet or so above them. The northern wall went even higher, ascending towards the clouds, but in between the two peaks, where the bridge of the mountain met, there was a relatively flat, open space, which curved away from them, the snow leading to the ledges that, in the spring, would bring melt to their rivers.
Nathan had never been so high up in his life.
“…huh,” he said.
Toki, meanwhile, crunched out into the snow, then came to a stop, his body freezing in that way that screamed alert, and Nathan, too, went tense. He relaxed some when he realized what Toki saw: a mountain goat. It seemed like there were several around here, grazing on lichen on the rocks, or the errant weed, grown tough and ragged in the harsh climate. One of them was closer to the ground than the others, its tail wiggling to scatter some fallen snow from its back.
Toki reached back behind himself, grabbing the hilt of his sword. Nathan raised an eyebrow, wondering what he intended to do with that, and was soon informed. For all the grace and precise ability Toki seemed to possess when it came to hunting birds, he seemed to lack it in equal measure when hunting larger game. He ran through the snow, lifting his sword up above his head.
The goat perked up at the obvious sound, and before Toki had even gotten within ten feet of it, the hairy little beast had calmly hopped up the rock, away from potential attack. Toki came to a slow stop, lowering his sword so that the tip dragged in the snow, and Nathan couldn’t help but chuckle.
“You won’t catch it like that,” he said, crossing burly arms over the barrel of his chest. Toki looked back over his shoulder at him.
“Whyyyy?” the boy asked, voice stretching in a whine. Nathan shook his head, beginning to walk over.
“A sword is to hunt men,” he explained, gesturing to the weakened blade that Toki had made for himself. “It’s a poor tool for hunting game - poorer still to try and outrun them. They have four legs - you have but two. No, to catch a creature like that, you gotta known its strengths, and its weakness.”
Toki was still pouting up at him.
“Whats strengths? Whats weaknesses?”
Nathan looked up at the goats consideringly. To be fair, his method of hunting wasn’t that far off from Toki’s. It was Pickles who schemed and came up with traps and snares, who threw his daggers to debilitate, or Skwisgaar who could move through the tree tops like a Ljósálfar, tracking prey without sound.
Nathan wasn’t like that. He wasn’t silent, nor was he meant for traps. He hunted his prey to exhaustion, across the boundless reaches of their thinly wooded valley, following it as a steady jog, an unrelenting force. The deer was faster, could outrun him, but in the snow he could follow its tracks easily, and soon enough he would come upon it once more. And once more, the deer would spring to action, dashing out of his reach.
But each time he came upon it, that dash would be less spry, less eager. Finally, their long race would deteriorate to the deer keeping ahead of him by but a few bounds. Still, Nathan would come. He was relentless and undaunted, and though he was not swift he could hunt a deer to exhaustion across the relatively flat ground of their valley. By the time the chase ended, the deer would collapse, laying docile in the snow, and Nathan would smash its skull quickly and mercifully, and his people would eat.
That method would not work here. The goats were mostly all above them, and the ones on the ground could easily climb up long before he or Toki got to them. It was not an even playing field - open ground that could be hunted across.
Nathan lightly turned the handle of his mace in his hand, thumb rubbing over the wood.
“If we wanna eat one of them,” he replied to Toki. “We gotta be quicker than it. We gotta…” Nathan grumbled, trying to think of what Pickles would say. “We gotta outthink it.”
Toki pouted.
“I am nots good at thinkings,” he said, that slightly petulant whine in his voice that Nathan thought should annoy him. Instead, he found himself huffing a small, fond laugh. He reached out, clapping his hand on top of the smaller man’s head.
“You and me both,” he admitted. Nathan knew his own strengths, and they were considerable, but he wasn’t someone who liked to talk and theorize. Words always got messed up and crumbly in his mouth, where they were strong and powerful in his head.
As for Toki, it was clear that the boy had his own problems.
Speed wasn’t one of them, though, Nathan thought. What he lacked in planning, he made up for in his spry movement - something quite similar to Skwisgaar, Nathan admitted. Errantly, he wondered if the blademaster would deign to teach Toki, if Nathan brought him back with him.
He shook his head of the thought, returning to the matter at hand.
He gestured to the mountain side.
“You can climb the mountain just as good as they can,” he pointed out.
Toki shook his head.
“Sos? Doesn’t mean I can catches one. An’ evens if I did, we just goes tumbling down!”
Nathan snorted.
“Yeah - to me,” he pointed out. He lifted his mace. “Don’t try to catch them. Just knock ‘em down, I’ll take ‘em out.” Teamwork. Pickles would be proud of him.
Of course, saying it was easier than doing it. The mountainside was treacherous and still icy from the storm, and for the goats this was familiar territory. Nathan had Toki begin to climb the ridges far away from the herd, so that he could come across horizontally - hopefully chasing them to the side, as opposed to further up the rock. The goal wasn’t necessarily to get close to the goat so much as it was to force the animal to move in a direction it didn’t want to, or at a less than optimal speed, so that it would lose its footing.
All they had to do was get it to fall.
While the goats had the advantage of knowing the territory, they also had the disadvantage of not having had large predators up this high. They browsed the scrub that grew in the lee of the peaks, which was higher than wolves would ever come, and far higher than a bear would attempt. For the most part, they lived a life uninterrupted by the concerns of other prey animals, and thus, they weren’t accustomed to fear.
They didn’t have the good sense to scatter as Toki stalked them, viewing him and Nathan as little more than an inconvenience, rather than the genuine threat they were.
There were several false starts, and a rather steep learning curve as the two of them figured out how best to herd a mountain goat, but they were too hungry to even consider losing. The goats let Toki get far closer than was safe, and when it came down to it, all they needed was one false step.
In the end, it was a yearling goat, not as adept on its feet as its elders, that made the mistake of trotted out onto gravel. The fall it took was not considerable, a spill their kind was used to making as they journeyed over their rocky home. It bleated, wriggling its legs in the air and shifting the roll back over, but before it could find its feet once more, the heavy thud of Nathan’s quick steps were the short prelude to the thud of his mace, and the goat ceased to live before it even had any idea it was in danger.
Up the rock, Toki crowed in victory, hands thrusting up into the air and thus losing his purchase. He tumbled down with a squawk only to be caught by Nathan, blinking up at the huge man with wide pale eyes, a little snow fox confused by its own foolishness.
Nathan couldn’t help but laugh.
They found a ledge of rock that jutted out from the taller peak, providing a reasonable stretch of dry slate rock beneath it, and dragged their kill over. Toki had nothing but his sword, but Nathan had his skinning knife on his belt, and he set to disemboweling and bleeding their meal while Toki had the unenviable task of finding enough dry scrub to start a fire.
It wasn’t easy work, and by the time they were situated in their camp, it was long past sundown. The storm had cleared the overhanging clouds out the night before, leaving for an open, bright sky, the northern river swimming along in greens and flashes of purple against the white run of the stars. The colors echoed off the mirror of the snow, giving them plenty of light as they enjoyed their feast.
They cooked and ate the limbs first, both of them tucking in ravenously, and it was only once he’d gone through most of his haunch that Nathan began to talk, ruminating without purpose on his hird and their hunts. He started by just telling stories, amusing anecdotes of times they’d failed or won by chance, and moved on to talking about their strengths, how they hunted down prey together.
“Whats about the other one?” Toki asked, his squirrelly little face dotted with blood.
“Other one?” Nathan replied with a grunt.
“Ja. You talks about Pickle an’ his traps, and Skwisgaar wids his sword-” There was a little petulant jealousy there, at that, before he continued. “But yous sez there ams four of you. What about the other one? Umm… Moidaface.”
“Oh, Murderface.” Nathan nodded, finally realizing what Toki was getting at. “He’s…not really good at anything.”
Toki’s brow just creased, looking confused.
“I dunno.” Nathan shrugged his broad shoulders, and he would never cop to the fond smile that tugged at his lips then. “He’s just…there, you know?”
No, it became apparent. Toki didn’t know.
“He came with us when the men from the south started to move into our territories. It’s not like he can’t fight, he just…doesn’t, most of the time. But he helped us - all of our warriors - fight them back. He was good with his axe. Just…annoying as fuck. He wouldn’t fucking leave me alone, and he started coming on our hunting parties, like we fucking invited him. Acting like we were buddies or something. This was before Skwisgaar joined the people, so it was just Pickles and I, back then. He was annoying and loud and smelly… He scared off all the prey. But somehow, I dunno. We just started bringing home more meat.”
Toki didn’t say anything, just looked quizzical. Nathan shrugged defensively.
“I dunno. It just works. When he’s with us, we’re just…better. We just are. So he’s part of my hird now.” Even if he was an irritating, smelly, self-important dickhole. He was their irritating, smelly, self-important dickhole, it seemed, and Nathan, so taciturn and singular as a child, would never have predicted being so surrounded by others now, as an adult.
He never would have predicted that he’d like it. Or that now, separated from them all, he was…lonely.
He glanced across the small fire at Toki, who was trying to set up another cut of meat to roast, the tip of his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth as he did so.
Nathan was glad he’d brought the boy. Despite himself, he was glad.
That night, when they were bedded down, Nathan took the spot closer to the outside, his broad form the shield it was always meant to be, his back well aware of the smaller body just behind him. Under his protection.
*****
Nathan woke in the middle of the night, and he never figured out why.
There was no sound. The whole of the mountain seemed hushed, like the forest after the snow, only the faintest of crystalline sounds, the sounds of the snow, and even the birds reverent of this moment.
The mountain was silent, and at first, Nathan lay there without an ounce of tension, a beast of a man but at total rest, at peace, his belly still full of goat and a strange warmth in the center of his chest that told him that everything was alright. Everything was good, and he had no need to worry.
That, however, was before the veil of dreams left him, and he woke enough to be suspicious. He pushed himself up quickly, glancing around. He turned immediately to check on Toki, something uncomfortably like worry sticking in his throat, and he felt himself growl when he saw the boy was missing. Nathan’s muscles bunched, promising a hard and painful death to anything that had dared to trespass against him, taking what was his to protect.
He grabbed his mace, pushing himself to his feet and skulking out from under the ledge, having to bend over to avoid hitting his head on the rock above him. He straightened once clear of it, green eyes searching the expanse of the lee.
He didn’t have to look long.
The air was clear and the snow undisturbed save for their footsteps, and a fresh set led directly away from their camp. There was nothing at all to obscure Toki, and Nathan found him immediately.
At first, there was relief. The boy was just sitting in the snow like a fool - nothing attacking him, safe as could be, but likely to freeze to death when he should be sleeping behind Nathan, where he was safer as could be. The relief was quickly subsumed by irritation and the determination to march out into the snow and demand to know what Toki thought he was doing, but that feeling, too, passed, and just as quickly, taken over completely by confusion.
For Toki was sitting in the snow, his calves folded under him, and as he lifted a hand a tendril of light from the sky diverted from its flow, a stream diverging from a great river, and trickled down towards him. It snaked down through the air, dripping over unseen rocks and forming limitless waterfalls. It twisted and writhed like a ribbon, curling down and twisting around Toki’s outstretched fingers, danced around his fingertips without touching, and bounced away just as quick as the boy reached for it.
Toki laughed, a bell of a sound, clear and bright as it echoed off of the rocks, and the light seemed to giggle with him. He lifted both arms outward, palms up, a man at worship before the gods, or maybe something even more primal - the first ice and fire of Ginnungagap, the primordial elements that formed all that was, before even Odin and Vili and Vé defeated Ymir and made the world.
The light came to him, to his command, and the sky played with Toki as if it were a kitten and not the heavens themselves, fire sparkling along the ridges of his skin, embers bursting in tiny shots of starlight. Briefly, Nathan realized that Toki had lit all of their fires, even when the kindling he found was poor or wet, and the fire burned regardless. Belatedly, Nathan realized he’d never seen a flint or stick to bring the first spark. He’d just assumed that Toki had had one, too busy thinking of other things, doing other things, to concern himself with what he considered the rote task of starting the fire - something he always left to Pickles.
And Nathan knew what this was. He knew it to be the craft of the völvas in his village, the seiðkonas who communed with the elements themselves, who could walk in the dreams of men and steal their breath, who could divine the future or tell the past from touch alone. Who brewed the tonics that saved the lives of warriors when infection set in, or came in the middle of the night to deliver a child before a woman even knew she was about to labor.
Seiðr. The art of the witch women, mysterious and unknown to men - a part of their world and undeniably powerful, but something to be shunned by men who did not need to sneak around. Who did not need to shrivel and shirk the open glory of battle, and instead work their arcane powers of trickery and falsehoods.
“Ergi,” Nathan said, and the light stopped, Toki turning to look at him with those big eyes, a mockery of innocence. Nathan snarled.
“Niðingr!” he cried, adding insult to insult, and part of him hoped that Toki would rise to the challenge - would show himself to be a man and not some weakling effeminate witch. Part of Nathan hoped that Toki would take the offense intended and come to fight him, reclaim his honor and prove himself to be the man that Nathan had taken him as.
Not the coward that Nathan could never hope to bring back to his people.
But Toki’s expression just crumpled, something sad and pathetic, and the light receded back into the sky, back to where it should be, and Toki did nothing but rise to his feet, looking as if he meant to make peace instead of battle. Something Nathan couldn’t forgive.
Nathan turned around quickly, stalking back to their camp with angry strides, his hands already curled in fists. The bitter burn of betrayal scoured the back of his throat, set him seething. He wanted something to hit, something to punch until it bled, until bone and breath shattered under his blows.
For he had been betrayed. All this time, Toki had been a seiðmaðr - a witch man. A man who’d abandoned his honor and his pride, descending to the ways of a woman, unskilled in battle and too weak to face her foes head on. Fine enough, Nathan considered, for a woman. Indeed, what else was she to do? Nathan valued the words of his völvas, even if he found them somewhat strange and frightening, the way their eyes always seemed to know things that he didn’t.
Fine enough for women, but it was not meant for men. To learn such an art a man must strip himself of his bravery, strip himself of his very manhood, and engage in trickery. The art of those who could not stand tall and bare before their enemy, who could not fight face to face, with no falsehoods between them. The art of those who had to sneak in behind closed doors, slip in through the crack in a window or through the flap of a tent. Those who poisoned in the night, who laced a dagger neatly between ribs.
Those who had no honor at all, and would never reach the hallowed halls.
Someone like that… Someone like that could never be brought back to Nathan’s village. Someone like that could never be his friend, his brother in battle. Someone like that could never be of his hird, and the feeling of hurt was not one that Nathan dealt well with.
Anger was so much easier.
He snatched up his fur and the few supplies he’d brought with him. He didn’t even bother to clean off his skinning knife, just shoved it into the wedge of his belt. He snatched his pack up, the anger mounting in each motion, flowing freely through him, burning in his muscles.
“Nathans-” Toki’s voice came from behind him, but Nathan had no patience for it.
He picked up several pieces of meat that had been cut from the carcass and cooked the night before, wrapping them in the pelt from the skinned goat before he shoved them into his pack. He turned around, slinging the pack over his shoulder.
“Nathans wait-”
“Get out of my way,” Nathan growled down at him, his voice dangerous, but Toki either didn’t recognize it or was a fool because he came to stand directly in front of him.
“Please, Nathans, I wasn’t doings nothing wrong, I promise-”
“Ergi witch,” Nathan bit out, another harsh insult, the pain snapping out as fire, and still some small part of him hoped to see anger on Toki’s face. Hoped to see the boy lash out, snarl and spit. Hoped to see him want to fight, to earn back his honor.
But Toki just looked wounded, like some pathetic forest animal, and the way that made Nathan feel awful wasn’t something he wanted to inspect.
“Get away from me-” He shoved Toki aside, stalking past him.
“Wait!” Toki grabbed for him, a monumental mistake, and Nathan rounded on him instantly, arm slapping him away and sending Toki falling back into the snow and utterly at Nathan’s mercy. The boy lay there before him, at his feet, and Nathan still had his mace in his other hand. In that moment, Toki had no recourse.
But Nathan had no true desire to bash the smaller man’s head in, and that, that weakness, that cursed affection that mired every human interaction, that had driven him to stay away from others before Pickles had wandered so blithely in, felt like a bur in his heart. It felt like the curse that it was, and Nathan hated it.
And the one who inspired it.
“…stay away from me,” he warned, disliking how tired the words sounded. He turned away, walking off into the snow and not looking back as he headed for the higher peak, hoping to find a path up. To kill whatever monsters threatened his people and return to them, and forget about all of this.
His warning echoed in his ribs, and it felt less like a threat and more like plea.
Nathan smashed his mace into a rock as he passed it.
*****
For awhile, Nathan just fumed. He stomped around the mountainside, looking for a path that didn’t seem to exist.
Nathan grumbled, searching around the rise of the higher peak, coming nearly to the edge of the plain formed in the lee before he located what looked to be a way up. He began his trek in the pre-dawn hours, still tired and only having had a few hours of sleep, but he was eager to get this over with. He wanted to be back down in his hut, warmed by his fire and the bodies of women eager to bed him. He wanted to be back where he could be silent and listen to the tales of laughter by his men, the clink of their cups as mead flowed, thick and sweet as honey, and everything made sense.
He was so tired of this mountain and its secrets, and the discomfort that came every time he thought of Toki’s face.
It only occurred to him, as the sun was lighting the sky and the mountainside, that he really had no idea if he was even chasing the right thing. It was Toki who’d told him it was the draugar, the dishonored dead, who’d attacked his men, and Toki who’d told him where he could find them. And Nathan, like a fool, had believed him. Without a beat of hesitance, he’d assumed the truth of Toki’s words, even knowing he was from the heretic tribe. He hadn’t even questioned it.
And now his foolhardiness was clear to see, revealed to all the world: a fool up a mountain with no idea what he was doing.
He felt like the sun dawned on him, lit him up, and let every creature in the valley and down at the base see him, shining its light on his humiliation, and surely even the squirrels were chittering their laughter, the birds singing their mocking songs, all about him.
He pressed his forehead to cold stone and took a moment to breathe.
The climb from here was in some ways worse and in some ways better. There was less of an obvious ‘path’ to walk, but the wall was less sheer overall, making for less nerve-wracking moments of dizzying vertigo. By the time the sun was setting, Nathan wasn’t sure how much progress he’d really made. He came to a ledge that looked down over the lee, some one hundred feet below.
He ate a few strips of goat meat and settled in to sleep. His rest was fitful and uneasy, and he woke up feeling just as tired as he had when he went to sleep. He wondered where Toki was, if the stupid kid was alright, and hated himself for wondering. He continued his climb, uncertain now if he’d find anything upon reaching the peak, but having come this far, he decided he might as well finish what he’d started.
At the very least, when he returned empty handed to his people, he could tell them that he’d thoroughly searched the mountain.
He huffed at his own idiocy, though, when he realized that he hadn’t finished searching the hunting path, where the hunting party would have been attacked. Where their bodies were, and Nathan wouldn’t even be able to return and tell the people that their bodies had been burned, given good rites.
He’d been a true fool, a true rube, and now the consequences of his gullibility would be plain for all to see.
It was not a thought that sat well with Nathan, a proud man on the best of days. He rested uneasily, and his journey up the taller peak was full of fits and stops, uncertainty dogging his usually confident steps, and yet his stubbornness wouldn’t allow him to give up and go home.
He would see this to its completion. If he was going to be a fool, he was going to be the fool in full, for better that than to admit to his mistake.
Two days up from the lee, however, he received clemency.
He reached a crag in the rocks, moving through them to another gamboling plain, reasonably level at one end and then sweeping off downward at the other. The slope was deceptive, Nathan knew. It appeared to scoop away at an even incline, but Nathan knew that if he stepped over towards the drop off, he would find it more sudden than it looked. If the snow shifted under him, it would be all too easy to stumble or fall, and once down he would be rolling with no chance of stopping. He stayed on the level area and looked around, searching for nothing in particular besides any sign of foulness.
He found it quite rapidly, and unexpectedly.
He was peering into what appeared to be a varmint hole, burrowed into what loose rock there was, when the scent of fetid, rotting flesh assaulted him. It was not the sour scent that came with old meat, ready to be thrown to the dogs, but rather, something even older than that. A body laid out in the summer sun for days on end, until the peak of the scent had faded, the flesh sloughed off and the intestines puddled and melted. It was the scent of meat gone dry with age, the scent of dirt, almost, and the cottony wool of desiccation.
Nathan gagged, and two eyes opened in the furrow, sending him stumbling back.
His hand went to his handle of his mace immediately, the weapon latched into his belt, and he watched with wide eyes as a skeletal hand emerged from the earth, bone clawing against rock and, unevenly, with great disgrace, a body scratched its way out. The head was largely naught but skull, strips of old flesh and the silvery white shine of tendons clinging to lichen colored bone. Its shoulders and chest, too, revealed little other than bone, moss growing in the joints, and Nathan flinched in instinctive horror when the corpse broke its own shoulder coming out of the burrow.
He pulled his mace out then fully, after fumbling for half a heartbeat, and whatever shock and horror was put to seconds, warriors instincts to the fore.
Horrific and maligned as it was, Nathan didn’t fear the monster. He feared nothing, and as it came out, pushed itself to stand on meatless heels, Nathan braced himself in the snow, ready to fight.
It might have been a monster, but Nathan was a berzerker, and he had nothing to fear from the dead.
It came at him shambling, all of its movements unnatural. Nathan swung his mace with all the power in his massive arms, the bulbous head of the weapon hitting the weakened bone like a sledgehammer, shattering it immediately and leaving half of its ribcage as nothing more than splinters on the snow. There was no flesh to pad the blow, none of the elasticity of life, and the bones were dry and brittle.
Nathan smirked - this would be easier than he thought. Indeed, how had such a thing even managed to take down one of his warriors, let alone five?
The draugr glanced down at itself, as if it had eyes to inspect, then it looked back up at Nathan, and continued its plodding progress, disaffected by the wound, and Nathan’s smirk fell. It was already dead - a killing blow meant nothing to it.
Nathan snarled, baring his teeth as he took a few steps back, keeping a steady distance between himself and the draugr. His next blow hit its humerus, shattering the upper arm even as the creature tried to lift it out towards him. The rest of its arm fell to the snow, leaving only a stub rotating out of the shoulder.
Nathan didn’t stop, that time. He just continued to swing his mace, hitting its opposite shoulder, slamming into its pelvis. Soon enough, it collapsed to its knees, and Nathan took his next swing to its head, removing the skull completely and cracking it into pieces.
He felt, surely, that without a head, the beast would be destroyed.
But it had moved without a heart, without a brain. The skull meant as little to it as a finger or toe, and Nathan watched in disbelief as it tried to shamble to its feet once more, despite every broken bone and shattered appendage that Nathan had doled out.
He resumed his attack, this time with breathless enthusiasm, hitting it again and again, reducing it to pieces, and it was in the midst of this that he saw the arm that he’d first disembodied. It was crawling through the snow towards him, pulling itself with its fingertips.
“The fuck!” Nathan roared. He brought his mace down on the hand, obliterating it, only to feel the fingers of the other hand beginning to tug on the leather thongs of his other boot. His whole skin shivered and he leapt back, sending his mace swinging like a bat, knocking it away.
Nathan spent the next several minutes just smashing the skeleton to little pieces, hitting every bit that was more then a few inches complete. He brought his mace down again and again, hefting it back up into the air and dashing the next portion apart.
But the time he was done, his muscles were burning, and he was a bit out of breath. The skeleton was completely scattered, every pieces of itself smashed up, but Nathan noticed that a single finger joint, a single knuckle, was trying to inch its way through the snow, still horrifically animate.
“Ugh,” he spat, making a face. The skeleton was no real threat to him now, in such small pieces that it couldn’t no longer amble or crawl in any fashion, but Nathan knew he wouldn’t be making camp here that night. Maybe the shards would slowly wiggle their way over, an inch at a time, and crawl inside his furs while he slept.
He shuddered at the thought, and he was lifting his mace, straightening himself, when he saw the second one. Then the third.
He swallowed, raising himself up to his full height, and he looked around the sloped plain, eyes ticking from one to the next, finding some six or seven draugar all crouched and waiting, watching, their clawed hands gripping the stone. They were above him, around him, and their eyeless sockets looked straight into him, one with a mountain posy blooming out of one hole, a blanch of color against stained and dirty bone.
Nathan adjusted his grip on his mace, frame braced.
The single draugr hadn’t been too dangerous, in the end, but it had taken considerable work to neutralize it, to make it no longer a threat, and even now Nathan didn’t know that the very shards might not try to chase him. Determined to bring death, no matter how slow. Inexorable.
Six or seven… He could turn his back on one, only to have its disembodied arm or leg sneak up on him. Indeed, hitting one without obliterating it might only mean that he turned one attacker into three or four smaller but just as deadly ones.
The living had the good sense to die when their head was removed or bashed in. The dead, not so. They would come for him regardless.
They began to crawl down from their perches, or stagger out of the crevices, all in varying states of decay. Two looked like the one he’d already defeated, all mossy bones and cracked skeleton, but the others all looked fresher, to varying degrees. The more flesh on the bones, the most difficult they’d be to shatter, Nathan knew, and cartilage may well hold up under his blows, even as he battered them.
He could fight like a demon, and still be dragged under by the slow but unstoppable weight of the storm. And still he had no intention of fleeing.
The first one to reach him was probably the one closest to life, wrinkled and decaying skin still stretched over rotted flesh. The odor was awful, considerably worse than the first corpse, but its remaining meat allowed it greater speed and dexterity than its dryer brethren.
It reached for him, not going for a blow, but rather just trying to grasp him, drag him into the grave with it, Nathan supposed, so that they could be alone together.
Nathan hit it across the face, the spikes on his mace smearing its cheek into mush, baring horrible teeth, and the release of death stench was sudden and overpowering, enough to make Nathan wretch. But he reigned his stomach in, lifting one foot to deliver a hard kick to the center of its chest, sending it falling back.
From there, he reeled to face the bony hand reaching for him, and he felt the warm rage of battle settle over him, pumping in his veins like liquid fire. That feeling, that comfort, the familiar feeling of battle and chasing the thrill of victory, lit him up, and at first, that feeling bolstered him.
He descended happily into the haze, letting it cloud him and make him clear both at once, a constantly moving, constantly fighting beast, and the berzerker flowed over his skin like a well worn jacket, something old and familiar and trusted. He fought them off, smashing them with his mace or kicking them back. With one of the skeletal ones, he brought his foot down on the skull after it had fallen with a satisfying crunch, bone splintering and flying everywhere, and he whirled to face his next attacker.
In battle, Nathan could not be dragged down. He could not be conquered. He was the mountain, unmoved by the storm no matter how hard it blew. He was a primal force all to his own, and as the minutes ticked by, the air filled with his roar, it seemed that, once more, nothing could touch him.
But even mountains can be conquered by waves, no matter how weak, so long as they are unending, and Nathan had never fought with foes that did not die. He went for their heads and their chests automatically, used to hitting those areas when fighting men, but to the draugar it was all the same. Head, chest, neck, arms, clavicle, foot. Every inch of them was dead, and every inch of them longed to bring him to the grave with them. Whether he smashed their little toe or their brain didn’t make any difference to them, and they kept coming.
As fiercely as Nathan fought, he would be overwhelmed. Somewhere beyond the battle haze, he knew this. Somewhere, growing in the back of his mind like a choking weed, he knew this to be true.
This must have been how his men died, down on the mountainside.
He spun around, smashing his mace into a corpse and sending it flying, tumbling down the slope and unable to stop, and Nathan grinned at that - he couldn’t kill it, but it would be a long, long climb to get back to him. But the fleeting victory cost him. He paused, and behind him a gnarled hand snatched out, tangled in his hair and dragged him back, the pull throwing him off balance. He flailed, feeling the world tip, knowing he was going down.
And knowing, when he did, he’d never get the chance to get back up again.
“Yaaah!” a voice cried out, a voice most definitely not of the dead, for they had no voices, and something clashed behind him, the tension on his hair releasing. Nathan reeled back up onto the flats of his feet, jerking around.
“Toki!” he exclaimed in surprise, seeing the young man swinging his sword at the now half-armed draugr, the limb severed at the elbow. Nathan felt his skin crawl and he clamored back around himself, reaching over his shoulder to tug at his hair. He yanked the still dangling, still clawing hand out, throwing it to the ground and smashing it beneath the heel of his boot.
He looked up to find Toki fighting the draugar with all his might, his blade untrained and somewhat unwieldy, but Nathan could see the natural talent beneath it - the strength, the flow, and the way he dodged and whirled, moved like water. He smashed his blade up into the chest cavity of one of the monsters, and as Nathan had always known it would, the sword snapped. It met the spine of the draugr, and that was it. The poorly welded together metal couldn’t bear the strain, coming apart with a ting!, like an icicle breaking.
Two thirds of the blade fell to the ground, leaving Toki holding the hilt and a fraction of his sword.
Nathan rushed to him, swinging his mace wide and shattering the jaw of an approaching draugr, spinning around until his back met with the younger man’s, the two of them facing their foes, weapons drawn. Shattered as it was, Toki’s sword would have to be enough.
They fought hard, panting in the cold, cloud-thin air, breath fogging. Nathan brought his mace down again and again, and this time the bloodlust took more comfortable hold, knowing that an ally was at his back. He fought with the ferocity of the bear, roaring his rage, and if he fell now, if he fell today, he couldn’t bring himself to feel regret.
To his surprise, though, Toki fought with equal passion and verve. The kid was skinny and raised by heretics who eschewed the glory of violence, and yet he fought as if possessed - possessed as much as Nathan, and in the heat of it, in the mess of battle, there was a moment when their eyes caught.
The bear and the wolf, two seekers of prey, two hunters of the world, their eyes ringed red with blood, and Nathan saw in Toki that which he saw in himself.
They who fed on blood. They who fed upon the weak. The bear and the wolf, mangy in winter, alone and standing in the snow, staring across each other, each of them knowing each other more than any other could.
And together they would have the world begging at their feet.
And then the moment passed into many, the two of them dancing as only predators could, fighting back those which sought to steal breath from them.
Nathan didn’t know how much time had passed when he let out a full throated yell, bashing to pieces the draugr at his feet, the pumping hedonism of the blood rage beginning to fade now, but not fully gone. He brought the mace down again and again, the muscles in his arms burning, screaming, but he found only pleasure in the pain. He smashed it over and over again, pulling back only to bellow his scream into the frigid air, whirling around to face his next attacker, only to find them…retreating?
He stopped, breath still coming in fast, heavy pants, broad shoulders rising and falling as he watched them crawl and shamble away, disappearing into the rocks and the earth.
He looked to Toki, who heaved as he did, the young man jumping in shock when Nathan put a hand on his shoulder, reeling around. He relaxed a little, when he saw who it was.
Toki’s face was pale and drawn, his blue eyes almost seeming to glow in the contrast, haunted by the moon and the stars and the night even now, before the sun had fully set.
Nathan lifted his hand, thumbing Toki’s chin.
“…Úlfheðinn,” Nathan murmured in wonder, his mind jogging to catch up with the concept. That an ergi sorcerer could also be one to pull down the spirit of the wolf, could fight like that, with bravery and courage. With the fierce determination of their ancestors, or possibly the gods themselves.
Toki swallowed with a click, and his old eyes shifted away, became young again, looking out at the ridge as the last of the draugar vanished.
“…they ams gone,” he murmured.
Nathan nodded. Wherever they’d gone, Nathan would have to find out. Whatever answers waited for them, waited at the peak now, and if Nathan was to defend his people, he would have to find them.
Toki’s eyes ticked back to his own, hesitance in them, and Nathan felt a similar uncertainty. He swallowed. Belatedly, he realized that his hand was still on Toki’s face, and pulled it back.
“…thank you,” he said in stilted gratitude. “For…coming. You didn’t have to.”
Nathan hadn’t exactly been charitable in their parting. He’d never known an ergi man to have that kind of power in him - although he realized, then, he’d never met an ergi man at all. He’d seen Toki wielding the female magics and that had been enough for him.
He felt an awkward pull to apologize, but such a thing didn’t come naturally for a man like him, so he merely stood there awkwardly, his huge body more lumbering than intimidating.
But Toki relieved him of that. The boy reached up, putting his hand over Nathan’s, which was still held up in the air between them.
“It ams okay,” he said simply. He offered a small smile, a kind of hope there that Nathan didn’t necessarily know how to deal with, how to shelter or protect. It struck him sort of sideways that he wanted to. Wondered what it might look like if it grew, became something less fragile.
He shifted his weight uncomfortably, then lowered his hand.
He cleared his throat.
“Uh. We, uh… should try and find some shelter. Before nightfall,” he said, the snow already beginning to pick up. The sky was clouded now and the light already dim, and before long the snow would block what little visibility they had.
“I can comes with you…?” Toki asked, brightening, as if being offered something wonderful. As if he hadn’t just been following Nathan anyway.
Nathan coughed again.
“Yeah,” he said, then: “…yeah.”
He wasn’t at all prepared for the hug that Toki launched at him, arms going around his middle, and face mooshed into Nathan’s chest.
He wasn’t prepared for Toki, a seiðmaðr and Úlfheðinn both, a child and a man, someone who fought like he was dying, and then turned around just as quickly to indulge in an embrace, like his sweetheart had come home. Nathan didn’t know what to do with any of that, and for a long moment he just stood there, mace dangling in one hand and the other raising and lowering, uncertain what to do with itself.
It was with a sort of final, fatal acceptance that it came to land on Toki’s head, in his hair, and let the dumb kid hold him.
*****
They managed to scurry into a crevice before the worst of the winds hit them, burrowing into the tight space and hiding from the night as it covered the sky. Toki’s sword, only about a foot long now before it met its jagged end, rested just at the entrance, with Nathan’s mace and helmet and armor. There’d be no room for a fire tonight, but the two of them grinned at each other like fools when they outran the wind.
Outside the snow fell, but it didn’t blow in, and there was good distance between them and the shattered remains of the draugar. Nathan was more than content with that.
“Did you bring any of the goat?” he asked, reaching for his pack.
Toki shook his head, looking sheepish.
“Nei. I ates what I could, but I…didn’t wants to lose you, so I lefts the rest.” He looked down at the floor of the little crevice, nudging pebbles with his toe. “I know you saids to stays away, but I gots worried. …and scaredsed.” He shrugged a little, glancing at Nathan from the corner of his eye. “You amns’t mad…?”
Nathan considered his feelings and finally shook his head, deciding that even though he couldn’t really tell what he was feeling, it at least wasn’t anger.
“…I said a lot of shitty things,” he admitted, as close to an apology he’d dare get. “In the people- In my people, only women practice seiðr. It is…not seemly, for a man to do so.”
Toki shrugged slim shoulders.
“Mine fathers hated it too. I didn’ts mean to none. I don’ts even know hows I know. I just does. I starts plays with the light an’ the snow an’ the animals back when I was real little, an’ I hads to go out into the winter to does my chores. When he saw… He sez it ams the way of the old heathen gods, that we amns’t to do things. It ams against the word of God.” Toki pursed his lips. “I try stops, but it never works.”
Nathan considered this. It was, in the end, outside of his understanding. He did not know the way of the völva, the ebb and flow of seiðr and the threads of the Norns as they wove through the World Tree. These things were not the things of men, of warriors. He didn’t know what it might be like to feel it, to feel it tug at you.
But then, he supposed he could understand how it might feel. If someone asked him not to fight, not to hunt, if someone told him to turn his back and run away, he could never live with that. The warrior’s blood flowed in him, and it flowed but the one direction.
He wondered what it must be like for Toki, for he had both warrior’s blood and völva’s, and the two must flow against each other. It must have been like having two hearts, one working always against the other.
He made a little face, then settled.
It was only once they’d settled in, and the night settled just as surely, howling away outside their door, that Nathan struck up conversation again.
“You fought with the fury of a wolf,” he said, the words meant as compliment.
Toki looked up, blinking, but it was too dark to really see his expression.
“My people believe that the greatest warriors abandon their humanity, their civilization, upon the battlefield. That they fight as if possessed by the bear itself. You… I saw it in your eyes. Now I know why you wear that wolf pelt.” He gestured to the black fur over Toki’s shoulders. “You slew him in battle and took his spirit, didn’t you? As I took the bear.”
Toki didn’t respond immediately, and the atmosphere seemed somewhat tense. Nathan wished they had a fire more for light now, than heat, but eventually Toki responded.
“I didn’t slay Tobias.” In the dim moonlight, Nathan saw Toki’s arm move up, the boy running his fingers through the fur of the pelt.
“Tobias?”
“My friend. The wolf.” Toki shifted a little in their small shelter. “My fathers sends me out intos the valley all the times. To brings wood or fish, or just to makes the trek, so that I may journey until my sin ams gone.” He shook his head. “Downs there, there was no peoples. No one to crosses theyselves when they sees me, or curse mine name. Down there, there ams just the animals, and they like everyone just the sames. The squirrels were the easiest to makes friends with. They just like nuts. Fatty, one of the badgers, he likes it when you rub hims belly.”
Now, Nathan didn’t need the light. He could hear the wistful smile on Toki’s voice.
“I finds lots of friends,” the boy continued. “But none like Tobias. I thinks…maybe he gets separateds from his family? Or maybe they chase him away with the bitings, because they don’t like him, like no one likes Toki. …either way, I sees him one day, hunting in the woods.” Toki swallowed, an audible thing. “He kills my squirrel friends.”
Nathan had eaten plenty of squirrels in his life, and never before felt an ounce of regret for their deaths, but in that moment, in the sadness of Toki’s voice, he felt a twinge of grief.
“I forgives him eventuallies. It ams hard, but…but he was just hungries. I know what that ams like. At first, Tobias don’ts likes me none. But I got plenty times, all through the winter and the spring and the summer and in the fall, he lets me touch hims nose. He ams my friend. My best friend, for two wholes years.”
There was a happiness in Toki’s voice, but a sort of happiness that seemed as if it were made to break.
“What happened?” Nathan asked after a sufficient pause.
“My father kills him.” Toki shifted a little again, and Nathan thought he might be curling into himself some. “He sees Tobias an’ I playings. He figures out where the missing foods go. He shoots him with an arrow and Tobias…Tobias dies.”
“…that sucks,” Nathan said, knowing well how little that meant.
“So I takes Tobias’s fur to keeps me warm, to keeps him withs me, so we will always be friends. Next spring, I finds his skull. I don’ts know. I just…didn’ts want to lose him. Everything I loves, they always die.”
“…my first hunting dog,” Nathan started awkwardly, trying to reassure. “I kept his collar for many years. He was…a good friend.”
“Ja. A good friend.”
They were quiet for a long few moments. Nathan was sure that it wasn’t long in reality, but it felt it, each heartbeat of silence feeling stretched out and uncertain. He wasn’t good at this. More specifically, he’d just never done this. He wasn’t the guy that people came to talk to. He hadn’t been the child that other children played with.
He stood apart, always had.
He’d only found the comfort of friendship, brotherhood, with his hird quite recently, over the last few years of his life, and even in that, it was they that came to him. They who extended themselves to understand him in his taciturn silence. Of everyone in the world, it was Pickles that understood him the most, his oldest friend, and Pickles had so much patience that Nathan was certain he’d be kissed by the Valkyries themselves when he died.
Pickles just understood him, even when Nathan didn’t understand himself. Nathan didn’t even have to try.
He had to try now.
“Thank you,” he said again, finding it bearing repeating. The gravel of his voice was low, a mere grumble in the low shelter of their cave. “For following me. I’m…glad that you did.” He glanced over at Toki. “You are a good friend too.”
Strange but loyal, Nathan couldn’t claim to understand Toki, yet he found himself grateful that he was not alone on this journey, treacherous as it was.
In the dim light that reflected off of the snow, Nathan could make out a faint smile on Toki’s lips, across the sheen of his eye.
“I’m glads I come too,” he said, and the words meant more than they did on the surface, but Nathan didn’t chase it.
They bedded down one more night, that much closer to the peak, and whatever it was that waited there.
*****
The temperature shifted upon dawn, but the sky was still overcast, blocking out enough light that it seemed as if the sun came late. The light didn’t reach their crevice for a little over an hour after dawn, creeping in reticently, trickling like water over stone, and Nathan blinked, that first wakening sight that still landed somewhere squarely in dreams.
He blinked again, and the breath eased in and out of him, a steady flow, the thump of his heart low and even. He felt at peace, and long minutes stretched past, his brain uninterested in questioning anything.
It was only when Toki moved, shifted a little against his chest, that Nathan became aware that he was holding a smaller body against him.
This time when he blinked, it was in surprise.
He looked down, finding his own rebellious arm draped around Toki, the boy laying on his side and curled towards Nathan, his eyes shut and forehead resting against the leather of Nathan’s jerkin. They’d created warmth between them, nothing so potent as a fire, but enough to sleep easily through the night, heartbeat to heartbeat and circulating heat. Toki was still wrapped in his black wolf’s fur - Tobias’s fur - and he slept on, oblivious.
Nathan had only ever woken in such intimate circumstances with a woman. And most usually a woman that, while he might hold in fair regard, he did not intend to be more than a good lay for them both.
Not…that he intended to lay with Toki. Because that would be strange.
His whole body suddenly became a lot more tense, the morning breaking dreaming sleep and whatever spell lay between the night and the day vanished once and for all, carried away on clarion winds.
“Uh,” Nathan started, uncertain what to follow that with, but it seemed a fair place to start. At the sound, however, Toki just grumbled and burrowed in closer, like some tiny chipmunk eager to sleep the winter away.
Nathan was somewhat disturbed by how the imagery amused him. He cleared his throat and tried to straighten, or at least shift back, but the crevice wall was directly against his back, and there was nowhere to shift. His hand, pressed to Toki’s back, or draped over it, really, had become tangled in the younger man’s hair, soft, if frayed.
He blinked a little when his rough hand found strange strips of flesh, raised lines and equal furrows - scar tissue, and Nathan was used to scars, had many of his own, but not like this. Like the boy had been…whipped, or caned, the skin of his back flayed, and the thought made Nathan’s stomach churn. The wounds were all well healed and calloused over, which meant the blows must have been delivered long ago, when Toki was even smaller.
He was small enough now. Well, not really that small. Still a good sized warrior verging on manhood, bigger than Pickles, who had to be some twenty years the boy’s senior, but Toki seemed small, like this. In the lee of Nathan’s own huge form. The thought triggered a strange feeling of protectiveness, something that Nathan was largely unfamiliar with.
He didn’t really get close to people. Or, people didn’t get close to him. They never had, all through his childhood and into his adolescence. Pickles had been the first, back when he was about Toki’s age, the older man showing him the ropes with a kind of fearlessness that no others seemed to have, when it came to Nathan.
And then there were Skwisgaar and Murderface, who followed Nathan’s lead, but even so, they trespassed upon him, teased him, with the sort of ease that no other men could claim. They made him laugh. They made him…happy.
Nathan would bludgeon any who hurt them, any of his hird, his men who stood beside him and behind him in battle. Who were, all in their own ways, pains in his ass.
But even if Pickles was smaller physically, none of them seemed quite so small as Toki - younger, damaged. A boy with witch’s blood and wolf claws, at turns innocent as a child and vicious as a starving hound.
And with Toki laying against him thus, that protectiveness only surged, and Nathan could only blame Pickles, because if Pickles had never urged him from his shell, none of this would have ever happened.
Stupid fucking Pickles.
“Um,” Nathan murmured, and his hand moved up from Toki’s hair, reaching for his shoulder. He shook it. “Hey. Toki.”
The kid stirred, mumbling in a foreign tongue - perhaps the tongue of his father’s lands - and for a terrifying moment moved closer, and Nathan had no idea what to do.
He wriggled a bit, shifting around, but Toki was waking, even if slowly. He sat up as Nathan shifted around onto his back, the boy pressing his hand to the center of Nathan’s chest, pushing himself up.
“Hi Nathans,” he said with a yawn, more casual than Nathan would have expected - or, at least, more casual than Nathan was being. Toki lifted a hand to rub at his eye, only to brighten when he realized where they were.
“We ams here!” he declared. He grabbed the leather of Nathan’s jerkin. “The peak! We ams not far now - just a little more walksing and we find out what wakes the dead!”
“Uh, yeah. But how’re we going to deal with them? We can’t just smash them all to pieces. And even if we did, what if they re-assembled themselves?”
“The dead didn’ts stir before. Something ams waking them, ups-setting them. We don’ts got to kill the dead - we gots to kill what makes them rise.”
Nathan’s brow furrowed. He sat up some, ignoring(or trying to) Toki kneeling in between his own two legs.
“How do you know? How did you know, to begin with? How did you know it’d be up the mountain? And now that the thing at the peak is what’s controlling them?” Nathan looked the boy over, Toki’s face sufficiently shameful, and the headman figured it out. “…the lights. When you were working your seiðr. You were asking the Norns or the light or…something for guidance. …to help me.”
Toki paused, then nodded, and now Nathan felt like an asshole. Mostly because he was an asshole.
Nathan grunted.
“…thanks,” he said, in lieu of apology. It seemed to work just fine, because Toki went from awkward pouting to a happy grin, like a dog who’d pleased his master.
Unable to help himself, Nathan reached out with a low chuckle, ruffling Toki’s hair.
...On to Part 3!
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