The darkness felt calm. The coldness ebbed and flowed, each wave washing away the pain. Not just pain; it also washed away all rage, all anger, all heartache. All hunger.
He focused his eyes, and a moment frozen in time was exposed to him. Small, stopped, and yet still so vivid, like a slice of time where a crystal ball showed only one image, and one image only.
It was the image of the flame from fifteen years ago, in the village of Elm. The moment when the house of the Chief's brother erupted into flame without any apparent cause. The same dreaded flame that had caused Sol's exile, that led to him being treated so poorly, that made him shunned and hated by everyone in the village.
He looked around in the coldness of nothing. Above him, there was nothing. Below him, there was nothing. What was there was only the image in front of him, like a set from a play, but all the actors were away for a moment of respite.
The flame was frozen, unmoving. The house's broken roof and rafters floated, with no movement to be seen. Inside, Sol could see the foyer through the open door of the house; the flames that were eating that place alive were no longer active, yet they were still there, inanimate, without movement or heat.
Sol took a step forward and entered the house. It was supposed to be a simple foyer, a floor of stone with a foundation of packed earth. The walls were made from cut stone, with small antlers used to hang cloaks. A rack filled with shoes and other outdoor gear, wooden pegs for weapons. He walked a couple of steps more towards the open space inside, where the flames seemed to blaze wilder. It was the hearth.
A large open space, with the hearth at his left and a low table on his right at the center of the room. Furs and woven rugs were scattered around and already half gone from the flame. There were some benches near the low table, with others placed along the walls far to his right, some of them with storage hinged underneath to store blankets, winter clothes, some spare glowbricks.
"This is where they eat their meals, where they talked, where they shared their stories."
Sol was startled by a voice from upstairs. He instinctively looked up and saw no one there, yet the voice seemed to originate from that direction. The voice sounded very familiar; it felt like Sol had heard that voice often throughout his life, yet it felt so alien to him.
"Who's there? Where am I? How did you get me here?"
"Home. You're home." The voice answered him briefly, and seemingly ignored his other questions.
"I still have two more questions you haven't answered yet." Sol walked forward, towards the wooden stairs right next to the fireplace. The flame had almost consumed them whole, yet the structure seemed intact, at least for now. Sol knew that he would still be able to climb it easily; he just did not know whether he should.
"I have zero obligations to tell you anything, you should be thankful I said something to you."
The voice changed its location; once it felt like it was upstairs, but now Sol felt like it came from the hearth.
"Besides, this is a cause for celebration."
Sol looked towards the hearth. There was no one there, yet he could swear that the voice sounded close, very, very close.
"...Celebration? What kind of celebration?"
"Because it's a start."
Sol walked towards the low table and sat at the bench, facing the hearth. "A start. To what?"
The voice seemed to originate from behind him, right behind him.
"To a very beautiful friendship." Then, it moved to the second floor, almost instantly. "What else?"
"I don't understand." Sol stood up and looked towards the second floor. The flames were eating everything above him, the rafters, the roof, and it seemed that the second floor's flame was far worse than the floor he was standing on now.
So the flame originated from the second floor. Huh... what could it be?
He took a step upwards. The stairs were broken in some parts, but the majority of them were still intact and seemed safe for him to traverse.
"Of course you don't understand it yet, we haven't even met each other." The voice seemed to originate from a room somewhere on the second floor.
"Okay... do you want to help me understand?" He took a couple of steps forward. Something moved in his peripheral vision. He thought it was just his own mind playing tricks on him, but what he saw was actually true. The flames had started moving, albeit very, very, very slowly.
The place is no longer frozen in time? Does this have something to do with me getting closer to the source of the voice?
"I don't know. Do you want to?"
"Assume that I do."
"Oh no, it's a yes or no question." The voice seemed to pause a moment. "You have to make a choice."
...He treats this like a game.
Sol stopped at the top of the stairs and looked around. On his left was a short corridor with two wooden doors, one on his left and one on his right. A window to see the outside sat right at the end of that corridor. One of the doors was slightly open, the right one.
"Do you need me to answer now? Or can we talk first before I make my decision?"
"You can answer now, it's not a one and done type deal, there's still lots of other choices to make."
Huh. I mean, what's the worst that can happen?
Sol walked towards the slightly open door and peeked inside. The voice seemed to stop responding. Is he waiting for my answer?
"Okay, then. Yes."
"That's what I like to hear. Then, you can take a peek, and tell me what you see inside that room in front of you." The voice sounded a bit far, from the other end of the second floor. It did not seem to move.
Okay...? What's inside?
He noticed that the door would not move even if he pushed on it, so he just put his face there and tried to see what he could peek inside. It was a bedroom, with a pretty large hay bed atop a strong wooden frame. On top of it was a woman, Geherrim, in a magenta dress, lying sideways. A small hand seemed to hug her from the front, a boy who could not be older than four, perhaps five or six.
"It's a room."
"Yes, yes it is. Astute observation." The voice sounded sarcastic. "What else? That's not everything."
He's mocking me, what am I dealing with here?
Sol looked inside once again to see that the flames had already reached the rafters above the room, and some flames had started to drip into the room proper like a small, localized rain of embers, but they were stopped in the middle, and now they descended very, very, very slowly. Like a dance of one thousand tiny flamebugs.
Sol's eyes noticed something different. The color on the woman's dress seemed to change very slowly on the right lower back side; it seemed to get redder every passing second. "That woman... is she wounded? Was it a stab wound?"
"Yes, yes it is, and yes it was. Astute observation." The voice did not sound as sarcastic as before. "Unfortunately, you won't be able to see the weapon as it's on the other side."
The Voice took a moment before continuing. "And unfortunately, what happened inside that room belongs to someone else's memory, so that will be the extent that I can show you. At least for now."
The door closed by itself, slowly.
"Okay... so what now?" Sol walked closer to the crystalline window that exposed the outside on his left. He could see the Plaza and the Frozen Elm from this position, and also how people from the village gathered right in front of the house, trying to do their best to quench the flames. Unfortunately, Sol knew that the flame was supposed to burn this entire house down, along with everything inside it.
Sol turned his body and walked towards the other side of the corridor, passing a couple of closed doors in between, and focused on one slightly open door.
"So, this door? Is this where you are?" Sol asked before peeking, hoping the answer was yes.
"Why? Do you want to meet me that much?" It sounded like it was coming from above the rafters, even higher than the second floor.
"...You can just say no." Sol observed his surroundings before peeking. The flames felt packed, massive, like they were coming from this room.
So this was the source...
He peeked inside, and from his angle he could only see a few things. A single bed near a window, where on top of the bed lay a woman, blanketed; the blanket itself was red and wet with blood. He could not see the face of the woman, as she was looking to the other side, but he could see her hair.
Her hair was long and wavy and shone auburn within the light of the flame. There were no horns. Her skin was pale; she was thin, almost thin with sickness. The flames had not touched her yet. And cradled within her arms, from Sol's point of view, he could only make out two small feet of a baby, still red, still bloody.
The flame inside the room seemed to originate from the direction of the woman and her baby.
"Is that...?" He pushed the door, unintentionally, but it was able to move forward, opening a way for him to get inside.
"..." He stopped at the frame of the door for a second, wondering whether he really wanted to go in or not.
The voice did not say anything, yet it seemed close, so very close. At this point Sol was no longer focusing on him. His hands were sweaty, and he was shaking, whether from fear, or from excitement, or from sadness, he did not know.
Without even realizing it, both his hands pushed and opened the door wide.
Everything went dark. The space suddenly went wide, too wide, like there were no longer any walls in this place, just an open, infinite nothingness. In front of him now was a chair, white, made from some wooden material that he had never seen before. It faced another chair across it, a bigger chair; the stark difference was that the other chair felt like it was being reserved for royalty, or a high priest, or someone at the pinnacle of reverence, with its velvet lining, golden decorations, and the lines jutting out from behind the back portion of the chair like the rays of the summer sun.
A throne.
—
—
The four Garm pups arrived just in time before the first massive rock hit the house and demolished almost the entirety of the building.
The four pups managed to get them out of the way, through biting and pushing and tackling them a bit closer towards the Longrass Meadow, currently burning even in the middle of the blizzard.
Nia lifted her face up to see the house was gone. "Oh... oh no. The house, Grandpa." What she did not realize was that one big rock was currently hurling towards her direction from above.
The four pups noticed this, and all were ready to put their bodies on the line to protect her.
The Old Chief stood up, ruffled the fur of Skafl, and moved towards Nia's side. "...Stone and timber can always be raised again, little one." And with one decisive movement, he destroyed the hurling boulder with the wind from his kick. "But a moment to teach the young, that is a gift that seldom returns."
He continued, showered by thousands of the boulder's fragments. "For fifteen winters, I turned my eyes from the boy's path."
Nia opened her palms again, trying to concentrate her powers to finalize the healing for the Old Chief, but her hands were closed by him before she could restore his wounds.
"Why?"
"I underestimated the power of my gja'rim. It will never happen again, child."
"Gja'rim?" She tilted her head to the side.
He looked towards her, seemingly a bit embarrassed. He had forgotten the fact that humans might not know Ancient Gehennic. More boulders started to fall from the mountain proper; pieces of land slid down together with them.
"Yes. A Gehennic word we reserve for masters, for teachers, and for grandparents." The four pups dashed towards the slope and started to destroy boulders that they could handle, while seemingly ignoring the larger ones currently falling towards Nia and the Old Chief's location.
"For masters, the word means pupil, the one who walks behind their footsteps." A simple round kick, one boulder smashed to smithereens. Nia flinched and lifted both her hands to protect herself from the fragments, but none hit her. The Old Chief stood right by her side, recovered his position, assessed the amount of boulders while smiling, and continued. "For teachers, the word means student, the person who carries their lessons forward."
"For grandparents?" Nia lowered both her hands and looked towards the Old Chief, who seemed taller and more charismatic than before. The Old Chief looked at her and smiled.
"...Oh." She realized what it meant.
Hrida destroyed one big boulder by her lonesome. The two smaller fragments of that same boulder were tackled by Skafl and Drifa, eliminating them completely. Fonn used his speed to dig a trench at the base of the mountain, as fast as a Snow White Garm possibly could, before the dirt hit them and buried them all.
The Old Chief dashed fast towards the slope of the mountain, sprinted almost vertically upwards, and with one loud shout, kicked the mountain with all of his strength, creating a massive hole shaped like a sharp line that spanned almost the entirety of the landslide-affected ground, then buried both his hands inside the hard earth.
Using both of his hands, he lifted a part of the mountain and, with a massive roar, slammed it inside the sharp hole, creating a platform to contain the landslide.