Based on the illustration by Larry Elmore
Part One
Feldrinnal’s horse snuffed at the winter air, puffing clouds of vapor from its nostrils as their troop marched across the snowy wastes. No one spoke. The fresh powder from the previous night muted the sound of snow crunched under foot, hoof and sled as Feldrinnal and his party made their way through the valley between the Icehorn mountains. The air bit at the exposed skin on the hand gripping the reins to his mount, while the other nearly froze and stuck to the haft of his spear. Feldrinnal did not care. His prize was nearly in his grasp.
The events of the previous days had been strange, even for one who’s lived as strangely as Feldrinnal. When the frost giant had appeared at the gates to his great hall and proposed a trade to Feldrinnal, he couldn’t refuse, no matter how his court had advised him against trusting the monster.
“Great Thane Feldrinnal,” the giant had said, its deep voice rumbling like an ice storm against the walls of his great hall, “You have sent many foes screaming to their gods. You have faced beasts and horrors un-faced by any for centuries. You have scoured the southern lands in search of glory for many years. Yet you have not journeyed into the Bloodstone Lands. I ask you: why?”
Feldrinnal knew why, and he knew the giant knew why. Every servant, farmer, drunkard, knight, scholar, and priest in the keep knew why. Feldrinnal didn’t appreciate the coyness of the question, but still made an effort to respect his twenty-foot tall guest.
“The Bloodstone Lands are forbidden to my people by our gods,” he answered, coldly.
“How did that come about?” More coyness.
“Surely one as long-lived as you has heard the tale, giant?”
Beneath his massive hood, the giant’s expression did not change. Nothing but a frown was visible in the dim torchlight.
Feldrinnal sighed, his chin coming to rest on his massive fist, and decided to humor his guest.
“Centuries ago, the forefathers of the Icehold people ruled the plains north of the mountains. They commanded unquestioned authority from the peaks to the northern seas and beyond. They ruled with an iron fist, before the giants came and showed them the true meaning of tyranny.
“From their mountain stronghold, the lords of my people made futile war on the giants, but what was an army of mortal men against the children of the gods? Even the lowliest giant was more than a match for ten fighting men. It was less of a war and more of a genocide.
“All but one warlord remained in the Bloodstone Lands. While the rest fought to the death, consumed with honor and motivated by divine zeal, Feldrin the Red, my great-grandfather, retreated with his men back through the mountain before settling safely on the far side of the range. There, he entered into a divine covenant with Yord, the warrior god. Beseeching Yord for the strength to defend his people from the giants, Feldrin’s lineage was blessed with the blood of the giants, guaranteeing a line of royal Thanes that could defend their new homeland.”
Feldrinnal paused to sip from his goblet. The giant looked on expectantly.
“Go on, please. Why did the warrior-men never return to the Bloodstone Lands?”
After a moment, Feldrinnal said, “Feldrin the Red found his newfound strength intoxicating. Defeating the giants would complete our pact with Yord, and Feldrin feared the loss of the gift granted us by Yord.”
“And you, great Thane? Do you fear the loss of your gifts, should you choose to reclaim your people’s homeland?”
Feldrinnal did not know what he felt. He feared no living thing. He had crushed his fear beneath his divinely granted strength and combat prowess his entire life, just as his father had, and his father before him, and his father before him.
“I fear nothing, giant, save the erasure of my people from the land.”
Seemingly satisfied, the giant approached Feldrinnal’s throne, crossing the room in three great steps. He dropped to one knee, though Feldrinnal was unsure whether it was a sign of obeisance or simply to stare him in the eye. It was then that he got his first good look at his visitor; deep green eyes slashed across the room, set in pale blue skin criss-crossed with tribal scarification. A beard of matted white hairs as thick as strong rope hung loosely from under the giant’s nose, alternatively braided in complex knots or clumping together in a disheveled manner. He felt icy cold breath escape the giant’s nostrils and run across the ground, disturbing dust particulates with every exhale.
“There is a way, Feldrin the Youngest, to save your people’s homeland without sealing your covenant forever,” the giant began. “Your gods and warlocks have lied to you about the source of your power. It comes not from the mighty deity Yord that you love so dearly. Nay, it comes from the very Bloodstone of the mountains you’ve fled!”
This was an affront. “Heresy!” spouted the nearest man to Feldrinnal. His advisors had gathered alongside him during the meeting, but had remained frozen in silent terror until this moment. “Heretic! He blasphemes against our patron! He must be sent away, great Thane!”
Feldrinnal held his hand up for quiet. His high priest began to protest again, but a malicious sideways glance silenced him again.
“You make great claims, giant. You’d best have some proof of your heresy, lest I cleave your head from shoulders here and now. I’ve already been more than gracious by allowing you to explain yourself.
Feldrinnal caught a nearly imperceptible smile cross the giant’s face, and a twinkle of amusement in his eye, before he spoke again.
“I can prove it, of course.” Producing a pouch the size of a full barrel from his belt, the giant reached in and produced a single black stone. The onyx-colored rock was of a fair size, but looked miniscule in the giant’s huge fingers. The edges seemed to glow red, faint light-lines peeking out from behind its silhouette no matter how the room’s illumination touched it.
“A great vein of Bloodstone,” the giant had said. “An ore planted in the earth in the times before men. Deep beneath the ancient mountain strongholds of your people, warrior-king.”
The giant extended the blood stone to Feldrinnal. He took the stone and turned it over in his hand. The dark red light seemed to seep from its edges, but as he stared into it he saw only the plain black surface.
The road through the tundra was a dangerous one, even outside of the wintertime. No man had laid claim to this area as his home in generations, and in man’s absence abominations had migrated from the far north to take up residence in the drifts and amongst the ruins of Feldrin’s ancestors. Tales told of malicious tribes of orcs and goblins that picked through the snow-dusted fortresses and keeps that marked the land, detailing the boundaries to kingdoms long forgotten.
It was as early as the first night that Feldrinnal’s excursion encountered foes. They gathered in a loose circle around a campfire, setting the sleigh as a buffer between themselves and the treeline before the last light of day plunged them into darkness. The horses were tethered to the sleigh with a bit of slack, and then left to rest. Men took it in shifts watching the treeline and the fields around them, shivering from the cold in their positions far from the fire.
They sat silently. Feldrinnal and his men sat picking at tough bread and jerky while the giant, who had given his name as Anders, sat apart from them, opposite the sleigh, motionless against the backdrop of tundra. Feldrinnal couldn’t tell whether he was conscious or not. He didn’t even seem to breathe.
Anders had led them up the tundra between the two mountain ranges that struck out into the frozen north. The giant's loping steps had set a fast pace for Feldrinnal and his men, and he knew Anders must’ve had to adjust his stride to not leave them behind.
Feldrinnal had ridden most of the way, only dismounting where the fresh snow was too soft and too deep to risk the combined weight of a man and horse. In these stretches, waist-deep snow could stretch on for miles, leaving a man half-frozen before he could find solid ground again. Feldrinnal was soaked from the belly and down, more or less, and was grateful they hadn’t yet found a reason to extinguish the fires. As Thane, it was Feldrinnal’s right to take the first watch, and soon he found himself staring out into the treeline as the rest of his company lay on their cots.
It was Gerig, on the second watch, who woke Feldrinnal. First the gentle pressure of a hand on his shoulder, and then opening his eyes to stare into Gerig’s wrinkled face, mere inches above him. Gerig’s finger was pressed to his lips to indicate silence. He stood up slowly, careful not to crunch too loudly in the snow, before motioning for Feldrinnal to get up and follow him.
Gerig had been housecarl to Feldrinnal’s father, and though the man was aged, he was no less the warrior for it. Countless campaigns into the southern lands had made Gerig strong, and years at court had kept his mind sharp, even in his late years. One mean scar cut across Gerig’s face from the edge of his hairline down past his eye and into his cheekbone. He wore it like the battle honor it was.
Gerig carefully led Feldrinnal to the edge of the camp, kneeling beside the sleigh and poking his head around the corner. When he turned back, all he said was, “Look.”
There, 150 feet from the sleigh and about equidistant to the treeline, four lumbering man-like silhouettes came slowly towards the camp. In the darkness, Feldrinnal could not make out any details, save that they must’ve been ten feet tall to a man, with arms that hung the entire lengths of their bodies with knuckles that dragged at the snow as they walked.
“Your sharp eyes have served us well, Gerig. Ice trolls are nearly impossible to detect when moving through open country. Wake the others, we’ll prepare ourselves and be ready.”
Even as he finished and turned to begin waking the others, a shadow fell across him, blocking out the light from the campfire. Feldrinnal found himself face to belly with a disgustingly wrought imitation of a human. The thing’s long, greasy hair fell in thin strands over a distended face dominated by a mouth of razor teeth. It’s snot-colored skin was patched with blood-matted fur that betrayed a torso both emaciated and muscular at the same time. Cold breath struck Feldrinnal’s face and made him gag.
The funerary pyre had been a grand conflagration, grand enough to match the measure of the man that now burned atop it. Feldrinnal had observed the traditional death rites of his people, yet the honor they showed his father in death had left him with a hollow feeling within.
The night air had cooled the fire to sputtering embers before Feldrinnal looked away. The hours had seen every other mourner depart, save one. Standing a respectful distance behind Feldrinnal, Gerig waited at attention. His stoney face betrayed no emotion, but Feldrinnal knew he felt the loss of the Thane deeper than any of the simple warriors under his command.
There, as the orange light waved across his countenance, Gerig had comforted Feldrinnal in the only way two men of their stature could. A moment after the young Thane’s backward glance, Gerig was behind him, his hand resting on Feldrinnal’s shoulder. Another moment, and then Gerig spoke.
“He was a great man, Feldrinnal, he will be remembered.”
“His passing held no honor, Gerig. A consumptive illness is no way for a warrior such as my father to perish,” Feldrinnal said, and then, “What is the use of our bloodline’s great power if it cannot stop the simplest death? We meter out destruction on our foes with reckless abandon, knowing our divine strength will never falter, but a man cannot face disease in battle. What a cruel joke played by our gods.”
Gerig knew the melancholy that now gripped the new Thane well - he had seen three generations of this kingly sorrow come over his lieges in nearly a century as housecarl. Gerig suppressed a sigh as best he could; he’d had a lot of practice in the art of consoling young nobles throughout the years, and was beginning to get pretty good at it.
“The divinity granted to your blood through the gods is not always so literal, young Thane. Tell me, what makes a man divine?”
“To arms!” he shouted. “To arms! Trolls!”
Feldrinnal immediately ducked, anticipating the troll’s wild swipe at him. The beast’s claws flew overhead and struck the side of the sleigh, causing it to rise up on one blade briefly before smashing back down. This sent the horses into a frenzy, and Feldrinnal saw Gerig cut them loose before he, too, rolled away.
The camp was alive with violence in second. Once clear of the troll, Feldrinnal was sprinting towards cot and the sword lying next to it. In that same second, the sleigh was rocked back it’s side as the trolls approaching from the forest charged at the camp, choosing to collide with the sleigh rather than redirect their sprint and lose momentum. The sleigh, caught between the immense force of the troll’s inertia and the unyielding snowpack, splintered and burst, sending shrapnel raining across the camp.
By the time Feldrinnal had drawn his sword and spun about, Anders was already threatening the first troll. Standing head and shoulders above the twisted creature, he threw a wide punch into the thing’s skull and knocked it off its feet. Four more of the trolls closed around the giant as men grabbed at spears and shields and struggled to their feet. Anders swung around in a full circle, backhanding another troll and knocking its drooling jaw out of alignment with the rest of its head.
Men cut and stabbed at the beasts, flanking them in pairs or trios and jabbing with longspears to keep out of the creatures’ long reach. Feldrinnal watched as the man next to Gerig struck a troll through the chest with a spear, only to have the thing break the haft off in its body before seizing the man in two monstrous claws. The troll raised him, screaming, into the air before lowering his head into its mouth and clamping its jaw shut, silencing his screams.
Gerig used the beast’s gluttony to his advantage, stepping around its sight. He stabbed up into its ribcage, then brought the blade free in a horizontal slash that left ruined entrails spilling from the wound. If the troll felt the strike, it made no indication. Before Gerig’s eyes, the flesh around its gut had already begun to knit and reform, the thing’s intestines retreating into its torso before the skin sewed itself shut.
Feldrinnal couldn’t let him have all the fun. Summoning the strength of his ancestors, Feldrinnal felt his muscles tighten and his heart rate relax as his years of battle prowess mingled with the ancient magic of his bloodline. With a wordless cry, he raised his sword above his head and charged back into the fray.
The blade, reacting to his fiery zeal, began to burn white-hot. Feldrinnal felt the surge of holy energy flow through his body and vowed to slay these frozen hellspawn just as his ancestors had. Feldrinnal stepped to the troll now facing Gerig, and slashed at its legs with a wild abandon. His blade left two sizzling wounds on the back of the troll’s knees, and it fell to a kneel. Gerig finished it off with several heavy chops to its throat, taking two or three attempts to completely decapitate it. Ichor fountained from the headless body as the thing’s blackened heart continued to pump foul blood through the air, showering Feldrinnal and Gerig with gore.
A fist the size of a boulder smashed Feldrinnal from his feet with the force of a chariot at full-tilt. He careened several feet through the air before crashing into the snow, dragging an impact mark along the ground. He touched his hand to his temple, where the beast had struck him, and saw through spinning vision first the blood soaking his fingers, and then the troll beyond charging to finish him off. He brought his sword up in a horizontal parry just as the troll’s fists arced down towards his skull. The blade, still burning with the fire of Yord, deflected the blow, shattering at the hilt with an explosion of blinding light and sending the troll’s crushing attack into the snow beside him. Before he could jump to his feet, a backhanded swipe to his chest sent Feldrinnal rolling through the drift again.
“What is it that makes a god divine?” Anders had asked.
The thought had never crossed Feldrinnal’s mind. Now, the question posed to him at the head of his great hall, Feldrinnal did not want to appear un-philosophical.
“The gods are granted divinity by virtue of being the first created. They were formed from the primordial elements of chaos, before time began. Their essence is the very stuff reality is made of.” Feldrinnal surprised himself with his own answer. Perhaps he was a philosopher.
“Does being old always grant one the right to rule?” Anders had followed up.
“Not always, but wisdom comes from experience, and many of our kind revere their elders, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Anders seemed to ignore the answer. “If what you say is true, then could not another god come from the primordial chaos and into being? Would this god be any more or less divine than the others?”
Feldrinnal was beginning to become fed-up with this teasing game of question-and-answer. “Out with it, giant. What is your point to this? How does this concern me, or your magic rock?” He asked, with more than a bit of obvious irritation.
Anders let the question hang a moment before answering.
“The great powers of this world are not always what they seem, Great Thane. The stories we tell ourselves about our origins are, more often than, not fantasies we’ve created. We weave tales to make ourselves and our choices more important than we actually are. True divinity is acquired from belief, in stories and in people.
“This is the stark truth of your people, Thane: No covenant with the gods granted you your strength and the power to rule. For generations, your ancestors drew power from the deep magic of the minerals in the mountain. No magical divinity was gifted to you; instead, you are emboldened by the mundane energies contained within the Bloodstone veins of the mountains. And you must return.”
Several ribs cracked as he stood, and Feldrinnal still felt the ringing in his forearm from his clash with the troll. With some distance between and the closest foe, he had a moment to observe the field of battle. Four trolls continued to terrorize his warriors, the two he had disengaged with turning to battle Anders as his four remaining soldiers prodded at another pair to keep them at spear-length. Feldrinnal could not make out Gerig anywhere.
Anders wielded no weapon, but was more than a match for the two trolls. His ancient fists pounded at their bodies, striking them one the chest and sending it reeling just as it had to Feldrinnal. The other came in with a wild strike to Anders’ side, which he caught mid-swing in one giant fist. Bringing his other arm around to brace against the thing’s torso, he gave a mighty rip and tore the appendage from the troll’s body. It let out a bestial howl that forced Feldrinnal to cover his ears. Anders silenced it with a follow up strike to the skull.
Already, the downed troll had begun to recover. Feldrinnal could hear its bones working beneath its leathery hide, reknitting themselves. Scooping a spear from the ground nearby, he charged, crossing the thirty feet to the troll in seconds. He leapt, brought the spear above his head, and lanced down at the troll. The spear bent in a brief moment of resistance before piercing the troll’s skull and driving all the way through to emerge beneath its jaw. His feet firmly planted in the creature’s rotting hide, he rode the troll down to the ground as it bent at the knees, and then collapsed under its own dead weight.
An exciting kill, to be sure, but he had no time to admire his work. He heard the heavy breath behind him before he spun and saw yet another monster, this one wielding a dislodged tree stump, aiming a strike at his head. In that instant, he considered his options. Weaponless, he had no way to deflect the blow before it fell, and diving to the left or right would leave him open to the follow-up swing. Every thought crossing his mind in that half-second saw him crushed beneath this troll’s primitive savagery. Out of some bizarrely ingrained sense of honor, Feldrinnal saw no use in diving away. He simply stood and prepared to die on his feet, like a warrior king should.
Mid-swing, the troll stopped suddenly, dropping the stump, its face contorted into an inhuman mix of confusion and pain. It was Gerig’s scowling face emerging from above the troll’s shoulder that shocked Feldrinnal at that moment, and then he saw his blade rise up and dive back into the troll’s back, anchoring Gerig to the creature as he drew and stabbed his sword time after time into its body. Blood sloshed out and onto the ground with each withdrawal, and the beast reeled backwards and clawed at its back with its long, misshapen arms. One hand closed around Gerig’s body, and with the last bits of its malice-fueled strength, the troll hurled him hard across the campsite, colliding with the destroyed sleigh. Gerig did not cry out as his body came to rest, and he did not struggle to stand.
That was more than enough distraction. Feldrinnal closed with the troll even as it swung wildly to remove Gerig from its back. He reached for Gerig’s sword, still embedded in the flesh of the troll, and used it as a handle to climb atop the beast and finish the job. He drew the sword from its troll-shaped sheath and drove it back down into the thing’s skull.
Across the way, one troll was downed as three men launched at it simultaneously with spears, skewering it in place and unable to draw itself closer to any of the warriors. A fourth man approached from its flank and hacked at the beast’s neck until it died there. In the wild melee, Feldrinnal hadn’t even seen the last troll drop, but a gorey mess on the ground nearby spoke of its fate.
Feldrinnal crossed the camp to the wreckage of the sled. There, he found Gerig’s body, broken and lifeless, his neck mostly snapped when he came into contact with the wooden frame. It was no way for a warrior to die, perishing in a fight against lowly beasts of chaos. Feldrinnal remained there for several minutes, standing quietly above his dead friend and mentor.
In the quiet after the fight, Anders appeared beside him. He looked down on the crushed body of Gerig.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Then, after a moment, “He gave his life to buy you precious seconds, Great Thane. He did not die dishonored.”
“His story will be passed down to my sons, and my sons’ sons, until my blood no longer walks the land," Feldrinnal said.
“He was a great man. He will be remembered.”
