an age of wolves (_fimbulvetr_) wrote in forgotten_past, @ 2011-07-15 22:49:00 |
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Entry tags: | hati, odin |
Who: Hati, Sköll & Odin
When: 990 AD
Where: North America's northeastern wilderness, Vinland and its surrounds
What: Beginnings. Or something like them.
Warnings: Here there be wolves'n'rambling'n'hedgehogs.
Snow and ice matted the bottom of padded feet as the beasts ran, splintering the earth beneath the snow and the ice with their frantic chase. Sköll was a blur of whites and golds and dusty silvers, and one a blur of blacks and inky greys, and in their eyes was a hunger unmatched, tapping into ancient desires and wants, with no mortal morals, or logic, to be had. There was only the sun, the moon, and them. Such creatures were double, if not triple, the size of the wild dogs that roamed the lands, and their size would surely dwarf the domesticated brute that is now called 'dog'.
Did they know who they were? Perhaps. Sköll would look at Hati and he would know they were brothers. He would gaze toward the sky and know that it was he who would tear it down. Hati would look upon the stars, throw his head back and his mouth would snarl over his predatory teeth, and he would howl until dawn; he knew the stars would bleed in his grip. They knew. They just didn't have anyone to share this knowledge with, and so it remained that their awareness of self revolved around the call of the wild, their own wild, that inner yearning for a world torn asunder by themselves.
There was nothing on this earth except man, forests and wolves. There may have been boats, once, but even they had become a foggy memory in the wild animals' minds. They did not come in boats. They simply weren't there, and then they were. Some glimmer or nuance of their primal, mythical origin was kept deep in their spirits, faces and names of fierce, wise gods and giants made of ice.
Man believed the wolves could fly, the way they terrorized and cast the people often into famine for lack of game to hunt. It was as if the wolves had consumed all four legged creatures within a twenty mile radius of villages within a fifty mile span. And indeed, the wolves knew the concept of Man. It was hard not to, here. It was a land of fang and brute force, and even the bonfires lit at twilight did not keep the monsters at bay.
Quiet stories whispered and written on stones, interwoven with the stories of lands ancient and forgotten. It was said the midnight sun stayed so long in the sky because she was afraid of what came before, and the moon refused to shine on these nights in summer for fear of what came after. It was said the play and dance of greens and pinks in the winter night were traces of tears left by the moon when he realized the sun's face was so scarce in the day; some poetic men who had stayed behind when the last Viking ship sailed said the colors in the sky were the strands of Sol's hair, even at night, remnants of her flight from the sun chaser, that monster of Ragnarok.
This night was a summer night, and the midnight sun cast an eerie, dim glow across the grey, snowy meadows, this Vinland and the surrounding water ways, hills and endless forests. Hati and Sköll flew across the landscape, snow and ice in their wake, and it was not that they were running from something; for what would run after them, save the foolish and the suicidal?
It could have been that the hedgehog dared to attempt to outrun them, scurry and hide from unrelenting Hate and Treachery, or that there was something else in the dirt, some traces and footsteps and the scent, of something else, someone who was not man, but all men.