Surrender to the will of the night

26. The Chosen: Transitions

The Windwalker’s thrall had fallen off half a frozen world. Wherever they could, wherever they were bright enough, whole peoples took flight.

The edge of the ice became the realm of fury, of war and chaos. Few princes or peoples were as welcoming as Tsistimed the Golden and the Hu’n-tai At.

But Tsistimed did rule the steppes and mountains for six thousand miles.

In the west geography and history made the situation a little different. The refugee problem was not as troublesome. The lands above the Jago Mountains had not been heavily populated, initially, and many natives of the northern principalities had migrated south already. Only around the cities was there a significant impact. Thousands could live off the land in the wilds. And only thousands had escaped the Windwalker’s reign.

The god had spent the rest.

Few escaped the lands above the Shallow Sea, most of those by crossing the Ormo Strait on a bridge of ice that formed briefly during the winter.

The handful who failed to make that crossing would not see summer’s return.

A dozen figures prowled the shingle where the fallen god lay, all encompassed by the feeble thrum-hum of the life still animating the Windwalker. Seven were men. One was a wild-haired woman. Those eight were all mad, dedicated priests, the last of Kharoulke’s local adherents. They protected him from lesser Instrumentalities. They prayed and performed rites in an effort to waken him. They grew weaker by the day. They had little to eat but dead things found on the ice, or washed ashore during those brief times when the tides were not roaring back and forth.

In the main, they scavenged the gaunt corpses of fallen Chosen.

Of the other four, two were Krepnights, the Elect. Feeble imitations of the original. The big one stood four feet tall. The other barely topped two. Both had the look of work hastily done by an exhausted artisan.

Like the mad priests, they tried to protect their creator.

Two more madmen roamed the shingle. They were not the Windwalker’s friends. They wanted to murder the god. They did not know how to manage it but they had perfect faith that it could be done.

They were more cunning than the Windwalker’s protectors, whom they had been picking off and eating almost from the moment Kharoulke dragged himself out of the water.

Once a woman came who tried to show them how to realize their ambitions. They attacked her. She did not speak their language so, clearly, could not be trusted.

She hurt them both and went away.

They saw her again, occasionally, never up close. She must be some powerful Instrumentality. She appeared when so inclined and vanished the same. Her visits always marked the start of a setback for the Windwalker. Most visits produced explosions and clouds of noxious brimstone smoke.

Yet Kharoulke kept recovering.

Divine healing went slowly with the wells of power going silent. Kharoulke’s progress suffered frequent setbacks. But the trend was definite.

And Kharoulke was timeless. The pesky mortals could try as hard as they liked. They would fade. They would die. One day, one century, Kharoulke the Windwalker would rise from the shingle as he had risen from the prison where his supplanters had bound him. He would reclaim his frozen realm.

His pain was exquisitely terrible, and without respite.

Kharoulke managed it by fantasizing about himself in the future middle world, exacting his revenge. The dream was much like the real thing would be. Sometimes he lost his way in time and thought he was there already. But his condition did join him to the moment more tightly than usual for an Instrumentality of his magnitude.

Vaguely, he sensed the surface of the nearby ice start to slicken and run.

Now a season of warmth would add to his miseries.