He watched them for a long time. As light came down the mountains and worked its way over, chasing shadows from the valley. Their progress impossibly slow. Taking only what they could carry in fear and flight and leaving the dead behind to inhabit forevermore this place on the edge of the world. Where the bodies and walls alike would slowly freeze and then be covered over in snow and ice. He watched them until they were too small to see and swallowed by the snow and he could look out at the crags as if he were alone in the world and no one to hear him scream.
He walked in that snow-draped land, a man forsaken and desolate. The horses taken with carts and riders for the mountain pass the day before. He in his heavy boots walking endlessly, a thing he'd grown accustomed to in a former life of marches and miles and blood. Keeping always those mountains to his right and knowing the path well, though the road had blown under the crystals and ice and he slipped at times on the hidden sheets where water had briefly run and then frozen.
Only once did he stop to look back in that stinging air, his neck taut with a scream that ripped his flesh but soundless in his fury. The keep nothing but a black spot on the horizon, smoke rising and hanging still in the air like a dark rope between this world and some other. Perhaps a heaven but more likely one of greater death and decay than this. He'd returned to the tower and taken down the bodies and buried them, along with the others abandoned where they fell, but he could not see the line of grave markers. As if they'd been drawn out of existence.
As the town would be, in time. A town of decades erased in a night of fire and sulfur and the beating of wings.
And so on he walked and as the night fell again he found a cave in which to shelter. He thought of walking all night and knew that if he did so he would not wake in the morning and his body would be found years later as a corpse encased in ice and perhaps perfectly preserved and so he went into the cave and started a small fire in its center. A hole in the ceiling allowing the smoke to channel. Not much for warmth, but enough to char the dried meat on a stick and he ate in those shadows with his hands and then lay back.
It was in that night that she returned to him. He saw her as he last had and her eyes were closed and upon her face the sun as he had never seen it since. The sound of a rippling water he could not see and all about the green of the garden and life and beauty. Thrust upon him in greater intensity by the dead and frozen world in which he now toiled. He looked upon her and then she was gone and the world slowly receded until he woke in the cave and it was very dark.
Above him, he could hear the wings.
The fire had gone out and he was glad of it and lay in the dark very still. Wanting within himself to take up his sword and cast aside helm and armor and scabbard and stalk out into the night and scream to it. Draw it to himself and then slay it there in a swath of red blood, pouring like pitch and fire over that white snow. He could see himself hacking out its throat and cutting those wings off to the bone and mutilating that which haunted him in a vengeful wrath.
But he did not, for he knew what it was and what it would do to him. Here in the open and the night that it owned. How short that stand would truly be.
One moment of heat in the heart of winter. And then nothing. Or perhaps the rushing of those wings increasing in a flurry as it fell and swept low over the ice fields and then took him up in its claws, the talons of some monstrous bird, rending his armor and flesh. Carrying him higher than the mountains with below him his blood falling and scattered by the wind.
To drop him from heights a man should not know to fall spinning toward the earth for time eternal until the ice again consumed him.
How short and how wasted.
So he lay as still as he could and breathed slowly. It was said they could hear a heartbeat but he did not believe it. But it could hear all else and he made no sounds and finally the wings were gone, moving into that black void above. He knew if he looked there would be no stars and so he did not look.
At last he slept and he did not know when or for how long but he saw her again in that garden and this time he felt he could smell some fragrance on the air, of the garden flowers or her perfume or the two together and then when he woke again there was light at the front of the cave. A light cold and thin, but outside harsh and blinding on the snow.
He gathered what little he had and again he set out and the snow beneath his boots was brittle like bone powdered and cast upon the world by the gods in that heaven of the dead above.
It was two nights after he came to a ridge and when he topped it the town lay in the valley before him. Still a league off but a town all the same. The light already nearly lost and the lanterns and fires of that town glowing warmly in the dark. He felt he could hear the crackle of those fires but he knew he could not, and he flexed frozen hands. No more than two dozen buildings, set together about a square. The far edge of the town against a small mountain of solid ice. He could hear a long way off a dog barking.
He went down the ridge slowly, picking his way through the drifting snow. Below pitfalls and crevasses covered in blown snow where a wrong step would cause all to give way and he would be falling in the dark with the ice high around him and snow falling about as he plunged toward the cold and dark heart of the world. But in his care he felt for them and made his way around and down to the flat plain before the town. That which in a place with summer may have been field or water, but in this place was always ice.
They saw him before he reached the town. He heard a man call out and could not see the man and then there was another dog barking and the light of a lantern bouncing as it was carried down a frozen street. He walked on. The lantern was gone and then returned and another with it and the two men came out to meet him at the town's edge. A third behind without a lantern.
They were hard men and thickly bearded against the winter and wrapped as he was in furs and leather. The tallest standing in front with a spear in hand and the point afire in the lantern light and his pulse quickened at that image and he looked away. The other with heavy arms crossed and a handax in his belt and the third behind with skin as dark as that falling night itself. No weapon on him visible, though Brack knew it to be there all the same.
The spearman held up a hand to stop him. “You have a name?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“I could run you through to the ice and leave you for the wolves.” There was little malice in the way he said it. Just two men here exchanging facts in the bitter wind of that which they could do if they so chose. In this world those things less of an affront than perhaps they were in Cabele or the Island Kingdoms. The details of lives as hard as the iron the men who lived those lives carried.
Brack nodded, though, and put his hand forward. “Therros. From the Ringed City.”
The man stared at his hand and didn't reach for it and then looked up to meet his eyes. “Ironhelm?”
“If you have to.”
Reaching, the spearman took his hand and grasped it firmly for a moment and then released it and stepped back. His posture changed and loose. One of the dogs still barking somewhere behind him in the dark and faces pressed to the lit glass of the windows. “You walked from the keep?”
“The keep's gone. Burned.”
“Is anyone still alive?”
“Everyone who lived is gone. I walked here myself. Told the rest to run for the gap.”
“Burned. You said it burned.”
At this the man without a lantern stepped forward and reached and took Brack's hand. A gentle touch, almost, but something in those eyes. A merriment, perhaps, as he smiled, but something else as well. As if that merriment were driven by a dark and terrible knowledge.