Fire and Ice

I had a hard time deciding if this is science fiction or fantasy. The backdrop is a world where the human inhabitants crash landed their ship and had to merge with the animal life to survive.

The wind was rising, and unlike his brothers Madageio was shivering. Quietly, he pulled his cloak closer, and huddled a little closer to the fire as it flared and sparked against the sky. Quietly, so as not to worry his brothers.

Abai noticed and said so. Then Roan chided him for hiding it, and Gora knocked into him from behind �" pushing his clumsy body as to block out the wind. They all wanted him to keep his strength up and said so. 

The unspoken hung in the air. They curled up in pile away from the fire and around their eldest and smallest brother. Night passed and morning came.

*******************

Abai handed him the pack that would keep him fed for the rest of the journey. Roan kept giving him advice over and over again. Common sense things like keep to the peaks and make camp early. Gora kept hugging him, sweeping him off his feet, and smothering him in his fur. It was two fingers after dawn before they finally let him go. He gazed back only once when he knew he was too far for them to tell he had, but the snow was too bright. He kept walking.

By two fingers to nightfall he was tired and alone on the pitch for the first time in his life. He knew what he should do. Camp on a crest. Fire before sunset well off from the camp. Unlike his brothers he needed heat though, and huddled by the fire, laying his cloak so close it steamed and sizzled until sunset. Abai would have scolded him. He didn’t care.

Night was cold. His cloak wasn’t enough. He ate and it warmed him. In the middle of the night he heard scuffling near his fire. In the morning the wind had erased any tracks.

Days passed. He killed an Abu and dragged it behind him all day �" burning the fat the first night �" in five or ten places �" and then its bones after that. He asked forgiveness for not eating the meat but heard nothing. He traveled on.

The pitch grew steeper and there stopped being ridges. He began carrying his pack in front of him and always scanning the slope. Occasionally he’d see a Szaii perched on the side and he’d stop and throw a snowball at it. Startled it would skate down hill and he’d laugh and laugh and put his pack upslope in case there was another. 

Slowly he climbed.

He found a cave halfway through the day with Maibu in it. Later he circled back and tossed fire into the entrance. Maibu rumbled its warning, and from well away another snowball brought him rolling �" He twisted confused in the flames until he tumbled downhill. Madageio built a thick wall of snow so he’d know if it returned.

higher and he had to camp on the open pitch as the storm that had been building as he climbed only got worse. Higher and the snow was blinding. The pitch was so steep he had to unclasp his sleeves to get his arm skates  out �" brittle as they were �" they could hold his weight and stick into the ice. Hand over hand he climbed hoping he was close.

And then he felt it. Heat. He dragged his way over the edge and there among the swirling snow was steam. He breathed it in and then could not. Instead he turned and breathed in the swirling snow, and held his breath as he peered out over Yawgoth.

Opalescent Jellies floated up and down in the storm. Some with vast fans to catch the winds �" others almost unmoved by it. Each one had horns not unlike Madageio’s �" but thinner, lighter, as large as his brothers’ but not meant for fighting. 

He couldn’t see all the way down with swirling snow and steam but he could see where the ice below him vanished inward.

He  turned and took another breath. 

Then he set to work.

***********************

The tools he needed had all survived the journey �" carefully packed as they had been. Abai had worried for them. If a Szaii had attacked him from upslope and pierced his skins . . . but they had not and Madagoa had burned the bone placed there to protect them on the last leg of his journey. 

Now he unfolded them �" skins thinner than a snowflake �" no holes �" cord tied in just the right way.  Then another cord he unwrapped and tied the two together.  Then arranging them perfectly he cached what was left in his pack where he hoped he would find it and waited. 

A jelly of just about the right size floated past him. He threw the cord as he had practiced a thousand times and watched it loop around its horns. Then setting his mouth to the bag he had full of air and tied to his back �" he took a deep breath and leapt.

He was falling �" plummeting �" screaming �" the jelly flared trying to stay up and the cord jerked - he slowed a little �" enough to remember and fumble for his skin. He cast the smaller one up and the descent slowed. He had to fight to keep from tossing the larger. 

Then through the steam he saw the red. Their descent grew slower as the steam grew ever hotter and Madageio felt heat like he had never felt heat before. He had always been cold he realized now �" and this was heat �" but then they went lower and he began to scream again. His skin felt like glue and he  grabbed for the second string. His airbag began smoldering on his back and in a sudden moment he hoped his skins would not burst into flame. His skin opened and the steam cast him up again. He looked down and through tear blistered eyes he thought he saw the steam part and the glowing orange blood of Yawgoth spit and sizzled beneath him.

Several times he awoke as he rose and tried to breath �" each time he could not �" and slept, body awoken again by great wracking coughs trying to expel the rotten air. The air that smelled like the yellow burning snows.

The winds cast him down the pitch  to where wind would not slow his fall and his skins did little to slow him. He awoke in pain �" with a leg skate broken irreparably and a shoulder out of place. His pack was up the slope five or six days journey and he was probably closer to home. 

He got up and began half walking, half limping towards where he thought home should be. Hat night he came on the Abu he had killed and tore into its meat still frozen in the snow. This time his prayers were genuine. He made a knife from its bones and a cloak from its hide. There were still bones for a fire to draw hunters away �" and he slept. 

Dawn and he ate more and packed as much as he could. He made calculations on the peaks and set out, and that night he mapped by the stars and made marks he could follow in the morning. Days later he cornered a Szaii and flung his skins over it �" piling snow and more snow on top of it until it ceased moving and stabbing it again and again with his knife until unburying it. Its blades had slashed his skins into shreds but it has bought him the time he needed. 

He fashioned a spear out of one of its runners and pulled its body with him. He ate its stringy fat and meat for the next five days and he survived. 

Finally he stumbled  into the camp where he had begun. Abai was the first to see him and he could say nothing. Roan simply gazed at him in awe and Goa did not barrel him over as he had expected but knelt in the snow before his brother.

The unspoken lay between them as Roan tended to his shoulder and Abai got things ready for the journey back to the tribe. Yet it was not the same unspoken as it had been before. Madageio was black �" his skin cracked like ash cakes, and his hair was gone. In some ways he looked weaker than he had ever been. 

Yet Madageio was also stronger. He knew now that even though he was the seventh born in a generation without beasts. Even though he was almost entirely human �" he could survive on his own. 

He knew he could leap.

Madageio had become a shaman �" and the fire of Yawgoth still shone in his bloodshot eyes.