I woke in complete darkness. For a moment I panicked, sure that I had died and was awaiting judgment beneath Ravanur's heart. But then I realized that I could move my arms and legs, and I was breathing, so chances were, I was still alive. I fumbled in my furs for the bundle of glowstones I kept for just such an occasion, found one of the smooth little rocks, and then cracked it against the hard, stippled surface of the ice that supported me. The stone broke smoothly, and bright, greenish-white light spilled from the two halves of the palm-sized stone. I sat up. The first thing I noticed was that the ice below me was not actually ice. It was hard and slightly sloped, pocked with scars and abrasions, and continued in great overlapping plates out of the range of my little light. It took all of my self-discipline not to shout with alarm. I had been lying on the great, broad back of the burug. As near as I could tell, the monster was dead, though whether my spear had played any role in its demise I could not have said. All around me were broad slabs and boulders of cracked ice, piled one atop the other, many of them partially penetrating the chitin and flesh of the dead burug beneath me. The great heat I’d felt was gone, replaced again by the dull, gnawing hunger of deep cold. The sensation was unpleasant, but the blessing strapped to my arm kept it from being truly painful. The edges of the frozen chunks all around me were slick and smooth, as if they’d all started to melt, but had been immediately refrozen before they could take the idea too far.

Whatever had happened, I wasn’t dead, and the burug definitely was. It was my duty to return to my people, to tell them what had happened, and give the forage teams a location so that they could begin the process of collecting the valuable meat and chitin from the dead beast. I found my great hammer lying beside me, picked it up, stood, and slung the weapon over my back. It wouldn't do me much good now. The pair of climbing axes in my pack, however, was a different story. They were actually more like spikes attached to a recurved handle, and they could punch through even the hardest ice with brutal efficiency. I removed them from my pack and unwrapped them, then returned the pack to my back. Before moving, I spent a few minutes rolling my shoulders, warming up the muscles for what I knew would be a strenuous task.

The light of the broken glowstone cast a feverish reflection of my face onto the smooth ice before me. The wan light changed my normally ice-pale skin to a strange greenish hue, even as it cast a rainbow aurora through my crystalline, reflective hair. My eyes were hooded, glittering orbs of darkness, the left one ringed with a ferocious purpling bruise. I grinned at my reflection, showing my rows of jagged, carnivore’s teeth. I looked like I’d just been kicked in the head by a god. But I wasn’t down just yet. Wasting no further time, I crouched, resettled the axes in my grip, and jumped with all of my strength. My first axe bit the ice, stopping me before I could fall. I dug into the icy wall with the array of claws attached to the toes of my boots, then pushed off and slammed the second axe home.

My chest and back burned, and each blow showered my bruised face with shards of ice, but repeated the action over and over, dragging myself up the sheer walls of shattered ice toward the distant light at the top of the pit. It was as the Warmaster always said. "Pain is our teacher, our lookout, our friend. But it is not our chief." If I stopped, I would die frozen in the pit. If I died, my tribe would not harvest this burug, and children would not eat. No warrior of the Erin-Vulur would ever give up with stakes such as these, and I was no exception. I fell into a rhythm. Strike, dig, pull, jump, strike, dig, pull, and jump- I lost track of the movement of my body and simply stared up at the slowly growing window of silver against the smooth aquamarine darkness of the pit where the burug had fallen. It was amazing how deep we had gone. Perhaps when the beast fell, it had dragged us both into a natural crevasse. I was lucky to be alive in that case; those cracks in the skin of Ravanur could descend for hundreds of spearcasts.

When I reached the surface, the banks of silvery clouds that normally covered the frozen sky had parted somewhat, offering me a view of Palamun, the Great Father, in the skies above Ravanur. His face was hidden, appearing as a great orb of darkness that took up fully half of the night sky. He was, as always, limned in a mane of burning, sullen crimson all around. His thoroughly shadowed face, and all about him, was arrayed his celestial host. They were uncountable pinpricks of light in the sky, stretching out to the limits of my vision, each one a god, a warrior in the service of the Great Father, the King of the Sky. One of those warriors had just fallen to the surface of Ravanur’s skin, and I wondered why the Palamun would send one of his own down here in such a dramatic display. Such an omen could be either very good for the Erin-Vulur, or very bad- there was no way the fall of a god could be any kind of middle ground. “When the gods walk twixt men,” I found myself muttering, quoting the High Epic, “Storms follow in their wake. Ware, mortal. Beware the storm.”

With an effort, I turned my face from the fire-ringed dark visage of the Great Father and surveyed my surroundings. I stood at the mouth of the burug’s pit, itself within a deep scar that had been melted into the glacier and promptly refrozen. The trench in the ice began not far from me, in the direction of the Great Father, and, as I turned, continued, ever widening for at least five-dozen spearcasts behind me. I hurriedly stowed my axes and unslung my greathammer. Whatever lay at the end of that trench may well have been a god, but just as messengers from the Firmament did sometimes descend aboard burning sledges, so also did dark, corrupted gods. And they didn’t come down to help anyone. They came to Ravanur to twist the hearts of men. I found myself torn between a burning tide of excited curiosity in my heart and an acute spike of religious fear in my mind. The desire to know more won out, and I set off toward the wider end of the scar in the ice, my greathammer sitting ready on my shoulder.