The adventurers, down a man, return for more.
Spoilers for Wolves upon the Coast follow, of course. 800 words.
HEY, NOW HEAR
What the sword and bow and rockpick of the
Saviors of Culemwardern,
The Whalekilers
Did in days gone by,
What deeds made their power.
DUGSON, the butcher of the Tesch-Tesch;
PICTIDOTTIR, silenced novice sorceress;
BILL NINE-TOES, head-struck, druid-slayer,
SCOURED the windswept lands
To put down an
Ancient Druid and
CHALLENGED
The Tesch-Tesch
At its roost.
But before:
Forgall’s mother
Crept from the palisade
Told of Wards.
Heather Beer (courage) and Hawthorne Berries (the Unliving) they knew,
And the Yellow Flower Elecampane of Albann (the nose).
She told of Yew shields’ advantage
Promised a spell
If Cioran were deposed.
A fog
A thick flowing broken cloud
Across the Sea & Land
A fog
Made open waters a treachery.
East
To Cloyne
A silent people, fish-catchers, swine-herders
Painted blue
Stared
“We are protected,” declared their speaker
“You were not meant to know how.”
“Tihe druids!” said Dugson.
East
To desolation
Where the Land’s bones
Burst in furrows from the earth
They beached Sundrgammr.
(Robust Knut, voice lost, could not boast, stayed aboat,
The mule, too.)
Wind-whipped trees, bent,
Spiky shrubs, Hawthorne, collected.
The gusts screamed here.
In the Land’s bones
Wards etched in
Bone, dirt, blood, twigs, feathers
In threes.
Claimed by the Whalekillers,
Filthed feathers in Bill’s hat.
East
To Land’s Edge
A roped climb to the shore
A boulder tumbled
Striking Bill’s pate
The Whalekiller inert in the sea’s lather
Atop the cliff
Nothing.
Nothing
Pushed another,
But Dugson’s quickness
The rock into the water’s froth,
The seabirds startled.
“I will find the rock thrower and kill them!”
Pictidottir shrieked
The words taken by the wind.
Footprints in the sand to
A cave
Marked of blood in threes,
A home,
Feathers and eggshells and wind scouring inside.
A pile of
Dung, decades in the making.
“Shove your sword in the shit.”
“How hard were you hit in the head?”
“There is a reason for this mound.”
“We are stalked by an animal!”
“Beasts don’t shit where they sleep.”
And then
Appeared
From Nothing
A man, but barely:
Eyes mad
Blood-smeared and feathered, naked
But for a necklace, a wooden claw,
Struck at Drystan.
Bill’s arrow through his throat,
His bowels
Leaving one last mark in the cave,
Dugson depositing this offering atop the mound.
“I must dig,” Bill said, taking the claw.
“My boast was lost,” Pictidottir admitted,
“May I have his necklace?”
Three shriveled eyes
Linked by a strip of bloody hide:
“It is all yours.”
Bill dug for hours
With wood and stone,
Pictidottir watched the tides.
The prospecting struck coin of gold, etched,
A sacrificial knife of stone,
A bird’s hood,
From beneath the waste.
Bill smirked.
The druid had tossed the grapnel
Into the sea,
But they made the boat
On Ruislip’s north shore.
Pictidottir dreamed:
Grasping the necklace
Birds watched her move through the Land’s bones,
But the blue-painted people reacted not.
She awoke for her watch,
The fog lifted and
Figures approaching along the beach
Toward Cloyne,
Blue painted, the lead in a cloak of fern.
“To the sea! To the sea!”
Sundrgammr was afloat.
The coast hugged,
Tacking against the North wind,
The spire like stone spears thrust from the sea
Beneath overcast skies.
Ashore,
The horse-bird’s outraged cry
The Tesch-Tesch swooped.
Archers and slingmen loosed
Four shots struck as it arrived:
Eyes mad, talons reaching, mouth screaming.
A claw knocked Bill
Again senseless on the sand,
Barely alive.
A beak crushed Pictidottir’s throat,
Now gurgling on the rocks,
Barely alive.
Dugson brought his blade down
A wing’s bones snapped.
The monster crashed into the surf,
A boast realized,
Two Whalekillers near dead
At the base of the wave-lapped outcrop.
White chunks, the horse-bird’s dung
Striped the rocks:
Hair and fish-bones, half-digested.
Screams now,
Smaller, nearer
A nest atop the crag.
“I shall climb this spiky hellspire
And loot the bird’s nest.”
Without grapnel, the Druid’s revenge from beyond death,
Dugson fell.
Dugson fell again.
Battered.
Riding the wind back to Culemwardern.
Bill awake.
Pictidottir silenced.
Greeted as heroes
(Forgall and his mother excepted),
Feted and fed fish,
Plentiful fish.
Mead was drunk in joy
(Save Forgall in his cups),
Cioran toasted:
“More than Whalekillers
They have slain Sea & Land & Sky!”
Other blubber-mongers arrived,
With the sea’s honeycomb,
Stinking sweetly.
(Forgall and his mother seethed.)
Pictidottir remembered her letters,
She would boast in script.
Worked on hand signals,
Learned the eyed necklace hung around her crushed neck.
Pictidottir the Vanished.
Pictidottir the Silent.
Bill threaded gold through shells,
Attached the feathers of the
Tesch-Tesch:
A heroic claim for all to witness.
Dugson’s gold
Bought an iron claw:
They would return to the hellspire
In a week’s time,
The second Thonarsday of Thrimilch,
His failures to be reconciled.
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