“Farseer, on his vulture throne

Seer to The One Beyond,

Beyond every word, every tongue

So the voice of Frigia moans—

Cold,

To take from Man’s throat, his word.”

-The One Beyond

On the long, low-sweeping branches, barren of leaves in early winter, the vultures sunned themselves, turning like so many dark-eyed papas toward the sun as it rose to its lopsided zenith over the forest they had so recently quitted, a forest stunted, bent and beaten by the icy age that was upon them. Ravens pranced and fretted above in the higher branches.

The shield maidens were beautiful even in death, even Mortria with half her face eaten by the hounds, eesepcially Hearthless, who was dead and rigid atop the giant Mudder she had mounted and decapitated even as he ran her through with his spear.

The children had fought at the feet of Reverent Arbor. They formed a torn and bloody shield wall around him, having a accounted for some of the hounds that had gotten through the shield maidens as they came to grips with the Mudder runners.

At the base of the tree, among a tangle of rigid, twisted, still snarling hounds of all types—frozen in their death agonies and bloody strivings—was Reverent Arbor, face frozen in stony serenity, his arm down a great hound’s throat to the shoulder.

At his side had died the old lame wolf, tearing smaller hounds apart at his feet, three of the stout little munchers locked with him in a death roll, frozen by time from within and winter from without.

Est was singing the song of Frigia, beloved of the shield maidens, as he gathered their bodies and sat them in a circle at the base of the tree, piled the dead enemy at their feet, the children on their laps.

Fend had little time for these observances, as Reverent Chandler, whispering in his ear from his back sling, directed him in the extraction of Reverent Arbor—his cult brother—from the tangle of hounds. Reverent Arbor was lade rigidly crooked on his front, his sacred painted elk hides cut away from his back to expose the sacred runes, the record of his reverence, which constituted his call to The One Beyond, the faceless, nameless, creator of the gods, who were to his unfathomable being what men were to Farseer.

Within the womb of the Oak Unbent, a spear length above the massive exposed roots, was the Codex of the Nords. Where the Muds and Mudders had their many codex’, identical and ancient with their many accursed ways therein illuminated, from which their papas chanted, the Nords had but one codex, the record of their reverence, bound in its bison hide fold. The Codex was itself enwrapped in a snow bear case, with shoulder straps of musk oxen fur braided to attach to its eventual bearer.

They all three knew, without wasting breath on the obvious, that these Mudders and their hounds had merely been the lead element of a horde out of the Cumberlands, boding ill for their easterly cousins, and explaining their absence downriver. They worked fast, Est making the pyre, Fend skinning with care the back of Reverent Arbor, inked with the record of his sacred unspoken observances, which must never be uttered by man, but delivered in silence to The One Beyond.

The Reverent skinned, and his back runes transferred to three oak panels over which they were stretched in the Codex, the man who had preserved Fend for this grim task was entered into the record of the Nords, on four panels, for the four seasons of his life.

Reverent Arbor was then raised in a rope sling by Est, to dangle stiff and grim before Fend and Reverent Chandler. Reverent Chandler then croaked to Est, “First and Last Slayer of the Nords, the Wuxx must ascend, a Wuxx no more, but a Reverent Brave!”

With those words Reverent Chandler, strapped to his tender’s back, grabbed Fend’s head between his big wan hands and intoned, soulfully, “Wuxx no more.”

With this words Est’s maul-like fist slammed into Fend’s nose, bursting it like a summer fruit on some damned tamed Mud tree.