Prologue

The very beginning of the journey.

“It’ll be okay, little one,” She whispered weakly, as if she were breathing out her very life into the words. It was a dark winter night as my mother cradled me in her arms, gaunt and freezing.

‘Little One’.

It was the only name I had. It was all I would know myself as for the majority of my life. I began to cry. She shushed me, the sound coming out broken and jagged. She rocked me very slightly; she didn’t have very much strength left. I settled down, gulping in the cool, dark air. I was barely 7 months old, but my infantile mind could still discern the fact that my mother and I were completely, totally alone in the world. We were trash in the eyes of our village, and trash was promptly thrown out of the village as soon as it was found. Weak, feeble, and carrying her infant son, my mother stumbled through the dark woods that surrounded our village. She came to a cave by a stream, and after crawling into it, collapsed on the ground. This is where we had lived for the past three weeks. We got water from the nearby stream, and my mother had started to teach me how to swim. However, my mother couldn’t hunt, and the harsh northern forests bore little fruit in the winter. The few rotten berries or leftover chunks of frozen animal carcasses didn’t provide enough nutrition for the both of us, so my mother fed them to me.

My mother was on her last leg, dying of starvation, when we heard a cannon fire in the distance. My mother started which seemed to use up every last drop of energy she had in her body. She slumped back against the wall, murmuring to herself. “The village must be under attack… Too far into winter to train… Destroy them… Then the queen can return…” She closed her eyes and her head lulled to the side, asleep.

Against her chest I listened to her heartbeat. She was so skinny by now that I could almost feel the pulsing. Little by little, it slowed to a stop. I sat in her arms for several minutes, feeling her arms stiffen, slowly slipping off from around me. I began to cry, loud and crisp through the chilled air. The cannon fired again in the distance. Then again, and again, with increasingly rapid frequency.  Next thing I knew I was listening to a full artillery barrage while I laid crying in the lap of dead mother. After about an hour my energy had been exhausted, and I fell asleep on the cold leg of my mother’s corpse.

I awoke in the morning, and the barrage had stopped. I immediately resumed my crying. I cried and cried, until a figure appeared at the mouth of the cave. I instinctively stopped crying; something in my heart told me to be wary. As it was, I was still sniffling, so I couldn’t hear what the figure called out. Another figure soon appeared, and they entered into my ‘home’. As they got closer, they grew faces, complete with rugged beards and war-scarred faces. These men were clearly warriors. I kept still, paralyzed with fear, unmoving as I layed in my mother’s lap. One of the men reached right over my head and put a hand on my mother’s neck. “She’s dead,” He stated plainly.

“Shame,” the other said with the same calloused tone, “She was a pretty wom’, she was.” He shook his head. “An’ the kid?”

The other man, surprisingly tenderly, moved his hands onto my neck. His eyebrows raised in surprise. “He’s ‘live an’ breathin.”

“So we did ‘ear ‘im cryin’! She looks  cold as ice, yet he’s ‘live? Mus’ be ‘is mother.”

The two men nodded in agreement. The one took his hand from my neck and gently picked me up in his arms. “So then, what we do with ‘im? I sure as ‘ell don’ wan’nother kid.”

His partner sighed, walking further into the cave towards me. “Giv’im here. I’ll take ‘im in. My wife keeps sayin’ she wants a kid, so I guess this saves ‘er some pain, wonnit?” He took me into his arms, gently cradling me just as my mother did.

The two men walked out of the cave, one of them holding me in his arms, the other carrying my mother over his shoulder. They had said they wanted to give her a warrior’s burial, since she fought so bravely for the life of her son. When we went back to their camp, she was given such a burial. I was present for the funeral, though I was too young to really understand or remember anything that had gone on since the day we left the village. All the knowledge I have of my brief life in the village, and the events shortly thereafter, come from my mentor; The Ice Dragon, Vaald.