FIC: But Neither Fire nor Iron Told Upon Them 3/3 (Nathan/Toki, PG-13)
TO: puella-improba
FROM: Your Secret Valentine
Continued from Part 2...
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
*****
It turned out Toki was right. When they emerged out into the light and set back up the mountain, they weren’t far from the peak at all.
The slope of the mountain wasn’t too harsh here, the two of them able to follow the snow around the ridges and up to where the peak spiraled. Nathan worried a little, knowing the snow they were walking on was quite deep, and that it was that, and not the mountain itself, that made the slope manageable. Should their weight dislodge the snow, it could go tumbling down the mountain, taking them with it.
“Still too cold,” Toki assured, his hand against stone as they made their way around an outcrop. “Snow will only gets slippy when the spring starts to melt it, an’ the water runs down undersneath.” He glanced upwards. “We okays for now.”
Nathan took that under advisement and said nothing, but he kept his footing careful until they came up to the final ledge, the flat ground that sloped up gradually to the very top of the peak. Once there, the snow was the least of his concerns.
The peak of the mountain rose up behind what could only be called a throne at the summit, a chair of stone and ice not so much carved into the mountain as built upon it, a shambles, a travesty. Rocks and pebbles tumbled down the sides of it, lodged in the snow, and not a sprig of vegetation grew here. Everything was slate and snow, a lifeless tableau, completed only by the corpse upon the throne, head bowed in a hand, a king in repose, a king in throes of agony, deciding his people’s fate.
Only it wasn’t a corpse. Nathan took a half step forward and saw that, coming to a frozen stop when he saw those revealed lungs inhale, swell in a chest half carved open, and deflate once more. Frigid air moved from the king’s mouth and nose, billowed out colder than the mountain itself, and Nathan could see his fucking jawbone. Flesh hung from it like pulp, dangled and frozen at the tips. His nose was peeled back, skeletal and revealed, the wisps of hair on what remained of his scalp only agonizing the production.
Fingers with skin so tight they seemed naught but bone cradled that haggard skull, those shoulders slumped, and he wore a robe, or what remained of one. Like many things about him, it had decayed with time.
The dead that Nathan and Toki had fought before had indeed been dead, as animate as they were. They had no heartbeat, drew no breath, but this creature, dead while still alive, raised its head, one bald eye milky, but the other still reactive to light, still possessed, almost cruelly, of life.
A decaying corpse of a body, but this man was still a man. He had not yet died.
Nathan had always glorified death, held it as great and honorable, the noble way to pass from this life. He had never feared it, but he’d never thought of how it could be merciful, as well.
“Father,” Toki breathed, and Nathan felt sick.
He looked to the boy at his side, saw Toki’s twisted expression, and it couldn’t be anything else.
“Fuck,” Nathan mumbled, and looked back at the half-dead man on his broken throne.
“There,” it - he? - said, lips stiff and stumbling, and his voice a coffin croak, dusty air moving upon a throat ill used. “You have finally come.”
Nathan pulled his mace forward, holding it out both as a wall and a threat, feet braced in the snow, but the man of the heretic god wasn’t looking at him.
“Father… Why?” Toki asked. He’d brought what remained of his sword, the blade tucked into his belt, hilt jutting out but undrawn.
“Why indeed,” the old man hissed. “Why do you torment me so, devilspawn?”
“Stop it,” Nathan demanded, then changed his track. “Stop whatever it is you’re doing. Raising the dead, or whatever. Or I’ll smash your skull to bits.”
“Do you think I care, heathen?” Now his attention was drawn to Nathan. “Do you think your puny gods can hear you here? You are alone. We are all alone. The dead know this well. As the flesh rotted from my bones I knew the agony of being not alive and not dead. The dead slept in peace. Why should they have peace when I cannot? So I raised them. I called them from their slumber, and they knew my agony. But still, it wasn’t enough. I looked over this mountain, looked down upon you all, and why should the living have joy if I cannot? So I sent my tortured souls to take your joy from you.”
He moved one arm outwards, the wind whistling between ulna and radius, skin and cloth both hanging, and it was hard to tell which was which - the cloth black as pitch, and the flesh blackened by the necrotic rot of ice. But Nathan’s gaze instead followed the gesture of his hand, and the headman started when he saw the dead pulling up from the snow. Some of them were old, like the ones that they’d fought before, but more significantly were five fresh bodies - the bodies of Nathan’s huntsmen, who he’d sent out into the cold night never to return.
Now their eyes were filmy and blank. They saw nothing, felt nothing. They were dead, and yet raised.
“You fucking asshole…” Nathan hissed, then reeled on the heretic fully. “You fucking dick!”
But Aslaug just laughed, a dry, long chuckle, the sound itself tortured.
“Yes. And now you, too, will join them.” Aslaug’s one still working eye ticked back to Toki. “For you have done your work. You have brought him to me.”
Nathan’s heartrate picked up at that, and he thought back to the first attack. The draugar had only made their first appearance when Nathan had left Toki behind. When he was no longer useful to Aslaug. And they’d retreated again once Toki had joined him. Letting them live, so that they could make it here.
“The hell do you want with him?” Nathan asked. Toki didn’t say anything. He still hesitated to draw his weapon.
“I need him.” The broken king rose from where he sat, half decayed legs shaking under his weight. “I can no longer live this way. I came up the mountain to pray, but the wind and the plague rotted me from the inside out. I knew I was to die, and yet death refuses to come for me. I waited and waited, and yet every morning I woke again to see that life had not fled me. Even as my body betrays me unto ruin, he will not release me from this mortal coil. He will not release me.” He raised that awful hand and pointed at Toki, a terrible accusation upon it, and Toki shrank away.
“I don’ts knows what you means!” he cried out, his voice sad and lost. “I didn’ts do nothings!”
The dead lumbered towards them, Nathan’s tribesmen lumbered towards them, and Nathan took a step back, trying to maintain some distance.
“If it’s death you want, I’ll give it to you,” Nathan growled.
“Try your luck, I dare you.” The spectre dropped his hand, looking at Nathan derisively. “But you cannot kill me. Nothing can kill me. Save his love.” He looked to Toki again, and Nathan shivered in realization.
Everything I loves, they always die.
Toki didn’t love his abusive, crazy, dickhole father. Who would? No. Toki hated him, as any sane person would, and so long as he hated him, he would never die. The cruelty of that hit Nathan square in the chest.
Anything that Toki couldn’t stand, anything he hated, would never leave him.
Anything he dared to love, would be ripped from him. Ripped from him because he loved it, the fault, the blame, the guilt, laying squarely at his feet.
Toki fell to his knees in the snow, and he let out a broken sound, a sob that cracked and shattered, and the dead moved to swarm him. Nathan wouldn’t let that happen. He jogged across the snow, swinging his mace in a smooth arc, impacting the one reaching out for Toki and sending it flying upwards, outwards, away from the boy. Nathan whirled around and struck the next closest, slamming it into the ground. He stamped his boot down on the back of its neck, holding it down as he stood against the others.
They stood all around them, to the left and the right, the back and the fore. They were all around, and Nathan knew he wouldn’t be able to hold them off forever.
He’d damn well try, though.
The fight was a long, exhausting affair, a constant shifting of weight that took a greater toll of him than he’d think, not able to just brace himself and chew through whatever came at him. But these weren’t warriors. They weren’t men who could battle or think or love, and they had no need for honor, or understanding of it. They came from all directions, would swarm him without second thought, and in several instances almost did. He battered them away with every strength he’d built, his big body finding here its purpose - to fight, to defend, to make in destruction a haven for someone smaller.
And if he fell, which he surely would, their assault unending and his own breaths numbered, he would do so with the knowledge that he’d fought with honor. Died the most glorious death that any man could wish for. Even if he was raised again, denied Valhalla and dragged back to suffer in this world as these corpses did, he would do so without regret.
He would rather die before his own conscience, be stolen from the afterlife promised him, than fall away now and live with his failure of heart. He would know, at least, in his last moment of consciousness, that he was a man, and not a coward.
A coward like him.
“Give up,” the coward spake, slumping back into his throne. Even his words sounded defeated. “You cannot win. They will drag you down, as death drags every man.”
“Only if you run from it,” Nathan panted, standing surrounded by still crawling corpses, their fingers clawing in the snow. Sweat painted his brow despite the cold, and his shoulders heaved.
“It matters not.” Aslaug brushed his fingers through the air. “Embrace death or run from it, it will take you. Can you not see? Already the boy cares for you. Your doom was already handed down.” Aslaug’s smile was a cold, uncaring affair. Behind Nathan, Toki keened.
“This is why he doesn’t love you, you fucking dickweed,” Nathan growled.”
“Death will take every man but me,” Aslaugh continued, uncaring, “so long as he holds me immortal. No, give in. Give in to the grave, and leave me my burden. From my loins sprang this cursed creature, and it shall be my duty to take him from the world. We will burn together, and God will forgive me.”
“You’re insane.”
“Ah ha ha!” Aslaug cackled, as if to prove the statement. “The dead are the only sane ones! You, you heathens, crawling around, singing your drunken melodies, drinking your mead and fornicating through the night… You cling to such sin, and in the end, what will it win you? You sing of death, but you don’t know the first thing about it, or the worlds that wait beyond. The Lord himself will judge you, will judge us all, and I will not be found wanting. I will do what I should have done on the day he was born, taking his own mother’s life as he slipped from her decrepit womb. I will end this.” He looked Nathan up and down, then glanced to his corpses. “End this,” he echoed, this time an order, and they moved again, ready to drag Nathan down with them.
Even as his muscles burned, Nathan swung his mace and turned to scrambled meat the face of a man he’d known his whole life.
“Go!” he yelled back to Toki. “Run!”
He reeled around, looking back over his shoulder at the boy, still kneeling in the snow, a helpless, hollow look on his face.
“…run,” Nathan said more softly.
Toki’s eyes widened, and he shook his head.
“Yes,” Nathan replied to the gesture. “You have to. You’re the one he wants. I’ll hold them back.”
“I can’ts, Nathans-”
“Get to my people. Take them away from this place. Take them to the places you’ve journeyed, little wolf. Find them somewhere safe, away from these monsters, and let this mountain of the dead fall.”
“Nathans…”
A hand clawed at Nathan’s arm, split his skin open and made him bleed. He roared and reeled at it, back into the fray and hoping only to buy Toki the time to escape. They’d come up the mountain to end this, Nathan had come up the mountain to end this, certain he could fight any monster, but he couldn’t fight this. No man could fight death.
Aslaug was right about that much. All that mattered was how you faced it.
They swarmed, bodies and pieces of bodies, brought him low, the weight of them and their attack too much even for his great strength, and Nathan fell to his knees. He crumbled, but tried to catch himself, tried to keep fighting, feeling their teeth try to tear through the hide of his jerkin, fingertips clanging against the metal of his armor.
Through it all, distant though, he heard Aslaug speak again.
“Come to me,” he said, reaching out, but there was no gentleness to his words. It was the same slim order that Toki must have heard his whole life, full of anger and derision. Words that no parents should ever speak to their child.
But Toki got up, rose to his feet, and Nathan cried out.
“Toki, no!” he cried, knowing that Aslaug didn’t deserve one inch of Toki’s compassion. Nathan tried to surge up from under his attackers, almost did, almost made it to his feet before one knee buckled and he was down again. Toki walked past him, to the throne of rubble, and his father.
“Say it,” Aslaug breathed, looking up at his son.
Toki was shaking.
“Say it. End it.” Now his voice was pleading, a sweet song, wheedling his purchase from a boy he’d already scarred too many times to count.
He’d already had his pound of flesh, and still he wanted more.
Nathan once more tried to get to his feet, throwing himself forward as his body bled and feet slid in slick snow, his teeth grit and bared, trying to get to them. Trying to get to Toki.
Toki looked at his father as the man reached a bare bone hand up to his throat, and a tear slipped down over Toki’s rich, living cheek.
“…I forgive you,” he breathed, giving a gift that didn’t deserve to be received, and tearing it out of himself in the process.
The man before him seemed to smile, though it was hard to tell on his ragged face. Nathan’s weight remained pressed to the creatures draped over him, but his eyes were fixed on the father and son at the summit. Then, the motion so sudden that it made Toki jump, Aslaug’s hand and expression fell at once, his good eye rolling back and life fleeing him. Fleeing him, and taking Toki’s love with it.
Toki cried out, backing up in horror as the body slumped and fell down into the snow at his feet, and the draugar on Nathan ceased their animation. Their bodies fell away like brittle leaves, and at the first sign of reprieve Nathan growled in ferocious anger, shaking them away, surging to his feet.
But once there, he found there was nothing he could do. His foes were defeated, the dead were dead and still as they should be, and the mission that Nathan had set out to complete completed. Done.
There was no one left to fight, and yet, as never before, the victory felt hollow.
There would be no cries of celebration, no hearty yodeling of bloodied men having proven their metal. There would be no feasting tonight, no drinking and merriment. They had won, but Nathan didn’t feel triumphant.
Instead, he watched with pierced brow as Toki broke, his sobs echoing on the mountain top, and then collapsed, bent so low that his forehead touched the snow, his wolf’s pelt having fallen away, and the scars of his back bared to the unforgiving sky.
All Nathan could do was watch.
*****
Toki cried through the zenith of the sun, its rays scattering over the earth, shadows shifting from one side to the other, and still Toki wept, shattered and destroyed. The throne of the damned king lay unoccupied, his finally perished corpse having slumped in the snow before it.
Not knowing what else to do, and certain it couldn’t be a welcome reminder, Nathan dragged it away, around behind the summit of the throne. He kicked at the snow around it, fitting the body into the divot before covering it with the snow. It wasn’t a hallowed grave, wasn’t lit with fire to send him into the afterlife with glory and splendor, but then, he probably wouldn’t have wanted such. Nathan didn’t know the ways of the heretic god, but he planted the old man’s staff in the ground, a meager grave marker, and hoped that perhaps it might please his wizened spirit, wherever it was that the heretic god took it - enough that he might torment Toki no more.
Nathan returned to the front of the throne, and Toki was sitting up. The wind whistled through him, stirred his hair and it blew in fingered strands, unevenly shorn and unerringly straight. His eyes were shut, wet lashes dark against pale Nordic skin, and his head was tilted back to the slowly lightening sky.
His bare shoulders seemed as stone, and his body a statue, a pleading sacrament to the gods, holding open its palms in supplication. A warrior praying for the safety of his kingdom, or a mother the return of her children, Nathan wasn’t sure which.
The halfway-here-halfway-there didn’t quite scare him as it had only a few days ago, and he wondered if Toki would call down the now invisible stars to comfort him.
But he did not, and that left such tasks to Nathan.
He coughed awkwardly.
Toki breathed in and opened his eyes, tired and doughy skin beneath them, but when he saw Nathan looking at him, some veil shattered and he remembered himself. He sniffed some, lifting hands to scrub at tear stained cheeks.
“…you okay?” Nathan asked, knowing full well that he was not.
But Toki nodded, apparently game to play along with the illusion.
“That was… It was fucked up,” Nathan continued. “What he did to you.”
Toki’s mouth opened and shut, words playing at his lips then falling apart. Finally he shrugged and shook his head, giving up on the endeavor entirely. In lieu of a reply, Nathan went over and offered his hand, man to man, and Toki looked up, softening before he reached out to grip it, and Nathan helped haul himself to his feet.
“We should get you a new sword,” Nathan mumbled, more for something to say than anything else. “Skwisgaar has like…twenty. He can give you one.”
“That would bes nice…” Toki rubbed at his opposite arm, but he didn’t glance back at what remained of the broken blade in the snow. They were both silent for a long moment. “What ams you going to do now?” he asked Nathan.
“I guess…I go home.”
“What about Toki…?”
“I dunno. What, uh. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know… I don’t know what I should does now.” Toki looked out over the valley, the near infinite stretch of it, looked towards the distant mountains and the range of fire. The steam floated up in the cold air, so far from them, and Nathan wondered if Toki would go that way. If he would walk north until there was no more land and then… Then what? Would he go east? Would he go west? Would he journey far away, to the land of the Anglos, to the islands where they said the elves lived?
Or would Toki just sit down on the edge of the sea and stare out at its rough waves until time wore on him like water wore on the rocks, until he ceased to be at all, the boy cursed with death leaving this world as ignobly as he entered it?
“…come with me,” Nathan said finally, and it felt like the words were unexpected and planned at the same time, things he had battled within himself surely as he had battled the dead upon this peak. “Come back to my people. Be part of my hird.”
For a second, Toki looked hopeful, looked up with brow pinched and expression tender, but it shattered just as easily.
“I can’t,” he replied, letting out a breath of defeat. He shook his head, a violent affair. “You heards what he said - and it ams true. Anything I loves, anythings I get close to. It dies. That’s why I liveds down in the thicket, away from the others. Where I go…death follows. An’ I can’ts do that to you.” He flustered a little. “I can’ts does that to yous people.”
Nathan made a face, considering this, but finally he just reached out, laying his meaty hand on Toki’s strong shoulder, feeling it supported despite the slump.
“Then you shall have to come and see what it means to be of our people - for my people do not fear death. Only fools and cowards run from death, for it will find us all one day. It’s not a matter of ‘when’, but a matter of ‘how’, and all of my people, from the greatest warrior to the smallest child, from those who hunt game to those who weave our baskets, will not shirk from such a noble battle. Men, women, children, we are warriors true. We fear not our mortality, and I will be proud to list death itself amongst our number, for it will show that it is our people who are so strong to survive it.” Nathan managed a low, gruff smile, and he squeezed Toki’s shoulder, certain of that. Certain that the strength of his own people would not be found wanting where the people of the heretic god had. “Come. Come with me. There is more to life than cowering in a thicket.”
He paused, uncertain of himself, then lifted his hand, tipping under Toki’s chin, tilting it upwards.
“…I don’t fear your curse,” he muttered, a little embarrassed, but true.
Toki blinked up at him, eyes bluer than the sky at dawn, the pale sky now above them. He stared up at Nathan, the land of the people scattered out at their feet, the valley and the hill of the village, the woods and the copse and the mountains of fire in the distant north. The winter snow had quelled, leaving all the land clear as crystal, the air dry and charged, and their foe lay vanquished in their wake.
Toki’s lips broke out a shy, hopeful smile, an ember finally stoked, and for Nathan, it was a good day.
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FROM: Your Secret Valentine
Continued from Part 2...
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
*****
It turned out Toki was right. When they emerged out into the light and set back up the mountain, they weren’t far from the peak at all.
The slope of the mountain wasn’t too harsh here, the two of them able to follow the snow around the ridges and up to where the peak spiraled. Nathan worried a little, knowing the snow they were walking on was quite deep, and that it was that, and not the mountain itself, that made the slope manageable. Should their weight dislodge the snow, it could go tumbling down the mountain, taking them with it.
“Still too cold,” Toki assured, his hand against stone as they made their way around an outcrop. “Snow will only gets slippy when the spring starts to melt it, an’ the water runs down undersneath.” He glanced upwards. “We okays for now.”
Nathan took that under advisement and said nothing, but he kept his footing careful until they came up to the final ledge, the flat ground that sloped up gradually to the very top of the peak. Once there, the snow was the least of his concerns.
The peak of the mountain rose up behind what could only be called a throne at the summit, a chair of stone and ice not so much carved into the mountain as built upon it, a shambles, a travesty. Rocks and pebbles tumbled down the sides of it, lodged in the snow, and not a sprig of vegetation grew here. Everything was slate and snow, a lifeless tableau, completed only by the corpse upon the throne, head bowed in a hand, a king in repose, a king in throes of agony, deciding his people’s fate.
Only it wasn’t a corpse. Nathan took a half step forward and saw that, coming to a frozen stop when he saw those revealed lungs inhale, swell in a chest half carved open, and deflate once more. Frigid air moved from the king’s mouth and nose, billowed out colder than the mountain itself, and Nathan could see his fucking jawbone. Flesh hung from it like pulp, dangled and frozen at the tips. His nose was peeled back, skeletal and revealed, the wisps of hair on what remained of his scalp only agonizing the production.
Fingers with skin so tight they seemed naught but bone cradled that haggard skull, those shoulders slumped, and he wore a robe, or what remained of one. Like many things about him, it had decayed with time.
The dead that Nathan and Toki had fought before had indeed been dead, as animate as they were. They had no heartbeat, drew no breath, but this creature, dead while still alive, raised its head, one bald eye milky, but the other still reactive to light, still possessed, almost cruelly, of life.
A decaying corpse of a body, but this man was still a man. He had not yet died.
Nathan had always glorified death, held it as great and honorable, the noble way to pass from this life. He had never feared it, but he’d never thought of how it could be merciful, as well.
“Father,” Toki breathed, and Nathan felt sick.
He looked to the boy at his side, saw Toki’s twisted expression, and it couldn’t be anything else.
“Fuck,” Nathan mumbled, and looked back at the half-dead man on his broken throne.
“There,” it - he? - said, lips stiff and stumbling, and his voice a coffin croak, dusty air moving upon a throat ill used. “You have finally come.”
Nathan pulled his mace forward, holding it out both as a wall and a threat, feet braced in the snow, but the man of the heretic god wasn’t looking at him.
“Father… Why?” Toki asked. He’d brought what remained of his sword, the blade tucked into his belt, hilt jutting out but undrawn.
“Why indeed,” the old man hissed. “Why do you torment me so, devilspawn?”
“Stop it,” Nathan demanded, then changed his track. “Stop whatever it is you’re doing. Raising the dead, or whatever. Or I’ll smash your skull to bits.”
“Do you think I care, heathen?” Now his attention was drawn to Nathan. “Do you think your puny gods can hear you here? You are alone. We are all alone. The dead know this well. As the flesh rotted from my bones I knew the agony of being not alive and not dead. The dead slept in peace. Why should they have peace when I cannot? So I raised them. I called them from their slumber, and they knew my agony. But still, it wasn’t enough. I looked over this mountain, looked down upon you all, and why should the living have joy if I cannot? So I sent my tortured souls to take your joy from you.”
He moved one arm outwards, the wind whistling between ulna and radius, skin and cloth both hanging, and it was hard to tell which was which - the cloth black as pitch, and the flesh blackened by the necrotic rot of ice. But Nathan’s gaze instead followed the gesture of his hand, and the headman started when he saw the dead pulling up from the snow. Some of them were old, like the ones that they’d fought before, but more significantly were five fresh bodies - the bodies of Nathan’s huntsmen, who he’d sent out into the cold night never to return.
Now their eyes were filmy and blank. They saw nothing, felt nothing. They were dead, and yet raised.
“You fucking asshole…” Nathan hissed, then reeled on the heretic fully. “You fucking dick!”
But Aslaug just laughed, a dry, long chuckle, the sound itself tortured.
“Yes. And now you, too, will join them.” Aslaug’s one still working eye ticked back to Toki. “For you have done your work. You have brought him to me.”
Nathan’s heartrate picked up at that, and he thought back to the first attack. The draugar had only made their first appearance when Nathan had left Toki behind. When he was no longer useful to Aslaug. And they’d retreated again once Toki had joined him. Letting them live, so that they could make it here.
“The hell do you want with him?” Nathan asked. Toki didn’t say anything. He still hesitated to draw his weapon.
“I need him.” The broken king rose from where he sat, half decayed legs shaking under his weight. “I can no longer live this way. I came up the mountain to pray, but the wind and the plague rotted me from the inside out. I knew I was to die, and yet death refuses to come for me. I waited and waited, and yet every morning I woke again to see that life had not fled me. Even as my body betrays me unto ruin, he will not release me from this mortal coil. He will not release me.” He raised that awful hand and pointed at Toki, a terrible accusation upon it, and Toki shrank away.
“I don’ts knows what you means!” he cried out, his voice sad and lost. “I didn’ts do nothings!”
The dead lumbered towards them, Nathan’s tribesmen lumbered towards them, and Nathan took a step back, trying to maintain some distance.
“If it’s death you want, I’ll give it to you,” Nathan growled.
“Try your luck, I dare you.” The spectre dropped his hand, looking at Nathan derisively. “But you cannot kill me. Nothing can kill me. Save his love.” He looked to Toki again, and Nathan shivered in realization.
Everything I loves, they always die.
Toki didn’t love his abusive, crazy, dickhole father. Who would? No. Toki hated him, as any sane person would, and so long as he hated him, he would never die. The cruelty of that hit Nathan square in the chest.
Anything that Toki couldn’t stand, anything he hated, would never leave him.
Anything he dared to love, would be ripped from him. Ripped from him because he loved it, the fault, the blame, the guilt, laying squarely at his feet.
Toki fell to his knees in the snow, and he let out a broken sound, a sob that cracked and shattered, and the dead moved to swarm him. Nathan wouldn’t let that happen. He jogged across the snow, swinging his mace in a smooth arc, impacting the one reaching out for Toki and sending it flying upwards, outwards, away from the boy. Nathan whirled around and struck the next closest, slamming it into the ground. He stamped his boot down on the back of its neck, holding it down as he stood against the others.
They stood all around them, to the left and the right, the back and the fore. They were all around, and Nathan knew he wouldn’t be able to hold them off forever.
He’d damn well try, though.
The fight was a long, exhausting affair, a constant shifting of weight that took a greater toll of him than he’d think, not able to just brace himself and chew through whatever came at him. But these weren’t warriors. They weren’t men who could battle or think or love, and they had no need for honor, or understanding of it. They came from all directions, would swarm him without second thought, and in several instances almost did. He battered them away with every strength he’d built, his big body finding here its purpose - to fight, to defend, to make in destruction a haven for someone smaller.
And if he fell, which he surely would, their assault unending and his own breaths numbered, he would do so with the knowledge that he’d fought with honor. Died the most glorious death that any man could wish for. Even if he was raised again, denied Valhalla and dragged back to suffer in this world as these corpses did, he would do so without regret.
He would rather die before his own conscience, be stolen from the afterlife promised him, than fall away now and live with his failure of heart. He would know, at least, in his last moment of consciousness, that he was a man, and not a coward.
A coward like him.
“Give up,” the coward spake, slumping back into his throne. Even his words sounded defeated. “You cannot win. They will drag you down, as death drags every man.”
“Only if you run from it,” Nathan panted, standing surrounded by still crawling corpses, their fingers clawing in the snow. Sweat painted his brow despite the cold, and his shoulders heaved.
“It matters not.” Aslaug brushed his fingers through the air. “Embrace death or run from it, it will take you. Can you not see? Already the boy cares for you. Your doom was already handed down.” Aslaug’s smile was a cold, uncaring affair. Behind Nathan, Toki keened.
“This is why he doesn’t love you, you fucking dickweed,” Nathan growled.”
“Death will take every man but me,” Aslaugh continued, uncaring, “so long as he holds me immortal. No, give in. Give in to the grave, and leave me my burden. From my loins sprang this cursed creature, and it shall be my duty to take him from the world. We will burn together, and God will forgive me.”
“You’re insane.”
“Ah ha ha!” Aslaug cackled, as if to prove the statement. “The dead are the only sane ones! You, you heathens, crawling around, singing your drunken melodies, drinking your mead and fornicating through the night… You cling to such sin, and in the end, what will it win you? You sing of death, but you don’t know the first thing about it, or the worlds that wait beyond. The Lord himself will judge you, will judge us all, and I will not be found wanting. I will do what I should have done on the day he was born, taking his own mother’s life as he slipped from her decrepit womb. I will end this.” He looked Nathan up and down, then glanced to his corpses. “End this,” he echoed, this time an order, and they moved again, ready to drag Nathan down with them.
Even as his muscles burned, Nathan swung his mace and turned to scrambled meat the face of a man he’d known his whole life.
“Go!” he yelled back to Toki. “Run!”
He reeled around, looking back over his shoulder at the boy, still kneeling in the snow, a helpless, hollow look on his face.
“…run,” Nathan said more softly.
Toki’s eyes widened, and he shook his head.
“Yes,” Nathan replied to the gesture. “You have to. You’re the one he wants. I’ll hold them back.”
“I can’ts, Nathans-”
“Get to my people. Take them away from this place. Take them to the places you’ve journeyed, little wolf. Find them somewhere safe, away from these monsters, and let this mountain of the dead fall.”
“Nathans…”
A hand clawed at Nathan’s arm, split his skin open and made him bleed. He roared and reeled at it, back into the fray and hoping only to buy Toki the time to escape. They’d come up the mountain to end this, Nathan had come up the mountain to end this, certain he could fight any monster, but he couldn’t fight this. No man could fight death.
Aslaug was right about that much. All that mattered was how you faced it.
They swarmed, bodies and pieces of bodies, brought him low, the weight of them and their attack too much even for his great strength, and Nathan fell to his knees. He crumbled, but tried to catch himself, tried to keep fighting, feeling their teeth try to tear through the hide of his jerkin, fingertips clanging against the metal of his armor.
Through it all, distant though, he heard Aslaug speak again.
“Come to me,” he said, reaching out, but there was no gentleness to his words. It was the same slim order that Toki must have heard his whole life, full of anger and derision. Words that no parents should ever speak to their child.
But Toki got up, rose to his feet, and Nathan cried out.
“Toki, no!” he cried, knowing that Aslaug didn’t deserve one inch of Toki’s compassion. Nathan tried to surge up from under his attackers, almost did, almost made it to his feet before one knee buckled and he was down again. Toki walked past him, to the throne of rubble, and his father.
“Say it,” Aslaug breathed, looking up at his son.
Toki was shaking.
“Say it. End it.” Now his voice was pleading, a sweet song, wheedling his purchase from a boy he’d already scarred too many times to count.
He’d already had his pound of flesh, and still he wanted more.
Nathan once more tried to get to his feet, throwing himself forward as his body bled and feet slid in slick snow, his teeth grit and bared, trying to get to them. Trying to get to Toki.
Toki looked at his father as the man reached a bare bone hand up to his throat, and a tear slipped down over Toki’s rich, living cheek.
“…I forgive you,” he breathed, giving a gift that didn’t deserve to be received, and tearing it out of himself in the process.
The man before him seemed to smile, though it was hard to tell on his ragged face. Nathan’s weight remained pressed to the creatures draped over him, but his eyes were fixed on the father and son at the summit. Then, the motion so sudden that it made Toki jump, Aslaug’s hand and expression fell at once, his good eye rolling back and life fleeing him. Fleeing him, and taking Toki’s love with it.
Toki cried out, backing up in horror as the body slumped and fell down into the snow at his feet, and the draugar on Nathan ceased their animation. Their bodies fell away like brittle leaves, and at the first sign of reprieve Nathan growled in ferocious anger, shaking them away, surging to his feet.
But once there, he found there was nothing he could do. His foes were defeated, the dead were dead and still as they should be, and the mission that Nathan had set out to complete completed. Done.
There was no one left to fight, and yet, as never before, the victory felt hollow.
There would be no cries of celebration, no hearty yodeling of bloodied men having proven their metal. There would be no feasting tonight, no drinking and merriment. They had won, but Nathan didn’t feel triumphant.
Instead, he watched with pierced brow as Toki broke, his sobs echoing on the mountain top, and then collapsed, bent so low that his forehead touched the snow, his wolf’s pelt having fallen away, and the scars of his back bared to the unforgiving sky.
All Nathan could do was watch.
*****
Toki cried through the zenith of the sun, its rays scattering over the earth, shadows shifting from one side to the other, and still Toki wept, shattered and destroyed. The throne of the damned king lay unoccupied, his finally perished corpse having slumped in the snow before it.
Not knowing what else to do, and certain it couldn’t be a welcome reminder, Nathan dragged it away, around behind the summit of the throne. He kicked at the snow around it, fitting the body into the divot before covering it with the snow. It wasn’t a hallowed grave, wasn’t lit with fire to send him into the afterlife with glory and splendor, but then, he probably wouldn’t have wanted such. Nathan didn’t know the ways of the heretic god, but he planted the old man’s staff in the ground, a meager grave marker, and hoped that perhaps it might please his wizened spirit, wherever it was that the heretic god took it - enough that he might torment Toki no more.
Nathan returned to the front of the throne, and Toki was sitting up. The wind whistled through him, stirred his hair and it blew in fingered strands, unevenly shorn and unerringly straight. His eyes were shut, wet lashes dark against pale Nordic skin, and his head was tilted back to the slowly lightening sky.
His bare shoulders seemed as stone, and his body a statue, a pleading sacrament to the gods, holding open its palms in supplication. A warrior praying for the safety of his kingdom, or a mother the return of her children, Nathan wasn’t sure which.
The halfway-here-halfway-there didn’t quite scare him as it had only a few days ago, and he wondered if Toki would call down the now invisible stars to comfort him.
But he did not, and that left such tasks to Nathan.
He coughed awkwardly.
Toki breathed in and opened his eyes, tired and doughy skin beneath them, but when he saw Nathan looking at him, some veil shattered and he remembered himself. He sniffed some, lifting hands to scrub at tear stained cheeks.
“…you okay?” Nathan asked, knowing full well that he was not.
But Toki nodded, apparently game to play along with the illusion.
“That was… It was fucked up,” Nathan continued. “What he did to you.”
Toki’s mouth opened and shut, words playing at his lips then falling apart. Finally he shrugged and shook his head, giving up on the endeavor entirely. In lieu of a reply, Nathan went over and offered his hand, man to man, and Toki looked up, softening before he reached out to grip it, and Nathan helped haul himself to his feet.
“We should get you a new sword,” Nathan mumbled, more for something to say than anything else. “Skwisgaar has like…twenty. He can give you one.”
“That would bes nice…” Toki rubbed at his opposite arm, but he didn’t glance back at what remained of the broken blade in the snow. They were both silent for a long moment. “What ams you going to do now?” he asked Nathan.
“I guess…I go home.”
“What about Toki…?”
“I dunno. What, uh. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know… I don’t know what I should does now.” Toki looked out over the valley, the near infinite stretch of it, looked towards the distant mountains and the range of fire. The steam floated up in the cold air, so far from them, and Nathan wondered if Toki would go that way. If he would walk north until there was no more land and then… Then what? Would he go east? Would he go west? Would he journey far away, to the land of the Anglos, to the islands where they said the elves lived?
Or would Toki just sit down on the edge of the sea and stare out at its rough waves until time wore on him like water wore on the rocks, until he ceased to be at all, the boy cursed with death leaving this world as ignobly as he entered it?
“…come with me,” Nathan said finally, and it felt like the words were unexpected and planned at the same time, things he had battled within himself surely as he had battled the dead upon this peak. “Come back to my people. Be part of my hird.”
For a second, Toki looked hopeful, looked up with brow pinched and expression tender, but it shattered just as easily.
“I can’t,” he replied, letting out a breath of defeat. He shook his head, a violent affair. “You heards what he said - and it ams true. Anything I loves, anythings I get close to. It dies. That’s why I liveds down in the thicket, away from the others. Where I go…death follows. An’ I can’ts do that to you.” He flustered a little. “I can’ts does that to yous people.”
Nathan made a face, considering this, but finally he just reached out, laying his meaty hand on Toki’s strong shoulder, feeling it supported despite the slump.
“Then you shall have to come and see what it means to be of our people - for my people do not fear death. Only fools and cowards run from death, for it will find us all one day. It’s not a matter of ‘when’, but a matter of ‘how’, and all of my people, from the greatest warrior to the smallest child, from those who hunt game to those who weave our baskets, will not shirk from such a noble battle. Men, women, children, we are warriors true. We fear not our mortality, and I will be proud to list death itself amongst our number, for it will show that it is our people who are so strong to survive it.” Nathan managed a low, gruff smile, and he squeezed Toki’s shoulder, certain of that. Certain that the strength of his own people would not be found wanting where the people of the heretic god had. “Come. Come with me. There is more to life than cowering in a thicket.”
He paused, uncertain of himself, then lifted his hand, tipping under Toki’s chin, tilting it upwards.
“…I don’t fear your curse,” he muttered, a little embarrassed, but true.
Toki blinked up at him, eyes bluer than the sky at dawn, the pale sky now above them. He stared up at Nathan, the land of the people scattered out at their feet, the valley and the hill of the village, the woods and the copse and the mountains of fire in the distant north. The winter snow had quelled, leaving all the land clear as crystal, the air dry and charged, and their foe lay vanquished in their wake.
Toki’s lips broke out a shy, hopeful smile, an ember finally stoked, and for Nathan, it was a good day.
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