Pride

It was a cruel night – dark and cold, empty of emotion yet corrupted, and it stabbed Nenusidh’s warm heart like a knife. The land was giving the ranger a message – a rather bitter message at that, that there cannot be mercy. The moon was neither bold nor strong enough to best the cruel skies, and the stars were too few and much covered. The land was covered in darkness, yet despite so, there was a fragment of light within the ranger.

After chasing the wolf through the forests and fields with no luck of catching it, Vaalea stomped back in to the forest and started a vigorous search for a certain kind of wood. She needed a tree of certain age, of certain strength and of certain flexibility and it had to be fallen a certain time ago. She did not eat nor rest, before she finally found one. A tree trunk, fitting for a perfect bow. She had done a few bows back in her youth with Aika, the bow maker of her tribe, and she remembered the instructions well.

Vaalea was picking firewood. She had piled old dry branches upon her forearm and now ripped a few fistfuls of last year’s dry hay from the ground for kindling. A lot had happened since the Spirit had spoken to her in her dream. She had found the ’tumbled hall being remade’ but not this Tyrgrim. Tall man with a beard and furs she had been told by Hrothulf, but such was the description of half the men she had encountered.

Part 1 - A Horseman's Welcome