Snippet #2679312

"There, all done my boy." Lady Minna Störmalt, one of the wise women of clan Rotgevir said, wiping the blood and a bit of grey-blue grime from the end of a bone needle. "Your runes are complete. My magic, combined with the dust of the crystal from our ancestral homeland, shall weave a protective shroud around you and your spear, young Sören."

Sören was not all that young. He had seen twenty one winters so far, had been traveling out of the Dead Forest for over a year now. But, he supposed that compared to Minna, who looked as if she had seen nearly a hundred winters, he really was just a boy. Maybe that was why he believed that her magic would work, that it was actually magic to begin with.

There was still blood and wet ink on his arms, dripping from the angled runes that ran up both of his arms to his collar bones. He looked her work over and he liked what he saw. Sören could not read the runes, of course. They were of the Lost Language, which the Rotgevir believed to be the language of the old gods, those that were either dead or in a very deep sleep. "How do they work?" He asks. "How do I activate the magic?"

"Simple, my boy." Minna says, wiping away the blood from Sören's arms as she speaks. "All you have to do is focus, think cold thoughts, and remember the name of your clan."

Sören did as the wise woman said, and although it was warm in Minna's small log cabin, he began to see his breath misting the air before him, and could feel the bite of frost at the edges of his new tattoos.

"Careful. You need to let them heal, and even then, careful. If you use the ice runes too long, or too often, you will freeze yourself whole!"

-=-=-

Four years had passed since that day, but as Sören made his way through the sands, Duneyrr close behind him pulling a wagon loaded down with timber and furs, the memory returned to him as clear as if it had happened this morning. He had spoken with Lady Minna the night before he had left for the dessert proper, and she had told him he would never see his home again. Sören knew that if this was true, he would never see the wise woman again, but the feeling he got now in the bit of his stomach said that wouldn't happen anyway.

The Rotgevir have a belief that you will know when those close to you have passed on. And right now, his gut is telling him that Lady Minna has done just that.

"See, I told ya we'd see the horned man again this year!" A voice calls from ahead, from the shadows of Dol Duna. Two men stand together to one side of the main drag, watching as the travelers and merchants enter the city. "How can he stand to wear that cloak? And that thing with him-"

"The stag?" The other man asks, laughing a little. "What, have you never seen one before?"

"No, as a matter of fact I haven't!" The first man says, sounding irritated. "Anyway, how can either of them stand this heat? Aren't they from the Dead Forest? I've heard it's always cold there, like a Qafar night in the winter, only much worse."

The men continue to talk, one of them calls out to Sören, but he ignores them as he walks past. It was true, the Dead Forest was always cold, and if not for his runes, the tattoos which he had since learned carried no magic in them, he would not be able to stand the heat. How Duneyrr could stand it, he had no idea. Maybe the old stag had some real magic inside of him.