Act I - Chapter 1 - What The Mountain Erases
The storms of Stormfjell show no mercy.
The winds cut like blades dragged slow across the skin until they find bone. The snow smothers even the most stubborn fire. The legends did justice to that mountain: they spoke of vengeful spirits living in the wind, the rain, the snow, but some said it was something older still that moved the elements, a creature that had existed long before the first settlement rose at the mountain's base.
Zandor was climbing toward the summit in one of the worst blizzards he could remember. His wounds were deep and bleeding freely, and they had been bleeding since he left the village behind. He knew that if he stopped, he would fall, and the cold would not let him rise again — so he had no choice but to keep moving.
Without warm clothes, without supplies, his body was beginning to give out. One knee dropped into the snow; the other leg, shaking, held all his weight. He tried to find strength where there was none left, and managed to get upright again, to put one foot in front of the other, pressing the heel of his hand against the deep cuts that had stained his fingers with blood that froze almost the moment it left him.
His fingers had stopped answering him a while ago. For anyone else it would have been nothing more than cold — one more misery among many. For Zandor it was a real loss: without his hands he couldn't properly assess his wounds, couldn't grip anything with reliability. He had depended on those hands his entire life. Now they were dead weight at the ends of his arms. He tried to close them. The right obeyed, more or less. The left did not.
What unsettled him most was not the pain but his mind. Thoughts were forming a little more slowly than usual, as if the cold had gotten in there too and was slowing something that had always run without effort. He tried to gauge with his eyes how far he had to go, but it took too long to answer him, and when it did, he wasn't sure he could trust what he was seeing.
He kept climbing, until finally his legs gave out from under him and he went down into the snow. His eyes opened and closed. The cold had stopped hurting. That was the worst sign.
The snow kept falling over him, beginning to cover him, to bury him. It couldn't end like this, he thought. Zandor had spent half his life defending this land, knew every step of this mountain better than anyone — he knew there was a cave not far from here where he could take shelter. His legs shook when he tried to stand.When he managed it, when he got his eyes up and level, he saw a blue light through the blur. Quiet and steady. The creature from the legends, he thought, and he almost would have laughed if he'd had any air for it. A hallucination from blood loss, he told himself, and pushed on as best he could.
The cave was there — he could see it, a dark shadow against white rock that didn't seem to get any closer no matter how many steps he took. Each one was a negotiation: right foot first, then drag the left as far as it would go, repeat. The wind had eased a little, or maybe he simply didn't have the energy to notice it anymore. The snow kept falling, silent, covering the trail of blood he left behind as though the mountain were erasing the proof that he had ever been there.
A few metres from the cave, he went down again. This time his hands didn't come up to break the fall. The snow against his face was the last thing he felt clearly. He closed his eyes for a moment, and the snow disappeared.
It was not the first time Zandor had walked into the officers' hall uninvited, but it was the first time he had done it without being summoned. He told them what he had seen — the torches, the three infants, the blue light at the centre of the forbidden summit. He gave it to them with his usual precision. No emotion. No ornament.
The officers listened in silence. When he finished, the eldest simply said: —Rest, Zandor. You've been on the mountain too long.
He didn't move. He asked about the infants. About the light. About why the summit was forbidden only for everyone else. Each question received the same calm condescension. No answers. And it was that absolute calm — that complete absence of surprise — that confirmed it: they weren't doubting him. They already knew exactly what happened up there.
His companions were harder to take. The ones he had thought of as nearly brothers looked at him with something like fear and glanced away. Some put a hand on his shoulder and told him to be careful about what he said. None of them asked if he was sure. None of them wanted to know more.
That same night they came for him.
When the door to his quarters opened, Zandor was already on his feet waiting. The officer he had recognised on the summit walked in without urgency, as if this were just another routine matter. He extended one hand, murmured something low, and Zandor's magic was gone.
There was no pain, no flash, no drama. Just a sudden and terrible absence. What had lived inside him since he was a newborn wrapped in clan cloth went out like a light. A silence in his chest where there had always been warmth.
They didn't give him time to react.
Several of them tried to bring him down. The clan's code was clear on one point: magic was not to be used against a brother in arms. What they could do was overwhelm him with numbers, and that was enough. Zandor fought with everything he had left. He struck faces he had known for years, took a deep cut along his ribs that burned like a brand, another across the thigh, and then a blow that drove his wrist into the wall with a dry crack. He kept fighting anyway, forcing his way through with elbows and fists.
He crossed the courtyard leaving a wide trail of blood, one eyebrow split open, his vision swimming. He heard commands, shouting, boots behind him. He made it to the edge of the village more or less on his hands and knees, counting each metre as if it might be his last.
When the blizzard hit him full in the face, the cold on his open wounds was so sharp he almost cried out. He could hear voices behind him for a while.
They followed him a stretch. But not far. They didn't need to. The mountain would do the rest. He kept going anyway.
The snow took him under for a moment. Then gave him back.
He had followed the figures in silence, certain no one had seen him slip out. Halfway up he thought he heard footsteps behind him, a rhythm that wasn't his. He stopped. Only wind. He went on.
But it hadn't started that night. He had been accumulating things for months, small inconsistencies that a less observant warrior would have dismissed or filed away as inevitable friction inside any structure of power. Zandor had not dismissed them. He had archived them.
The first was a young warrior, curious, with too many questions about the mountain's forbidden zones and not enough discretion about asking them out loud. One day he was in the barracks; the next he wasn't. The official explanation was an external mission — long, open-ended. Nobody asked where. Nobody mentioned his name again, and what unsettled Zandor most was not the absence itself but how quickly everyone seemed to have forgotten him, as if he had been erased from something more than just the records.
Then there was the conversation he should not have heard. Two officers in a corridor, talking low with that particular cadence of people who have spent years having conversations that can't be repeated. Zandor came around the corner without making a sound, and both of them went quiet immediately — with a naturalness too rehearsed to be spontaneous. They smiled at him. He smiled back and kept walking, and didn't know what to do with what he had just seen, because technically he hadn't seen anything. Only the wrong silence at the wrong moment.
Then there were the nightly movements. He had been noticing it for weeks: certain officers disappearing on certain nights with no entry in the records, always the same ones, always toward the upper mountain. He had put it down at first to private meetings, then to something he didn't want to name yet — because naming it meant pulling on a thread he didn't know the end of.
And then there were the children. He had grown up hearing that the blessing of the gods was random, that magic came or it didn't and no one could predict it. But there was one thing that never varied: it only came to male children. The women of the clan were born and died without magic, and the official explanation was that the gods had ordained it so, that it was simply their nature and there was nothing to question. Zandor had accepted it for years the way he accepted the cold or the rock beneath his feet. Until he couldn't anymore.
The night he decided to follow them was not quite a decision. It was the point at which the weight of everything he had stored became more unbearable than the risk of knowing.
Shadows moving across the rock. Torches that had no business being there. The senior officers of Íslandr-Aett gathered at the forbidden summit, arranged around something that radiated a light Zandor had never seen before — ancient and perfectly still. He recognised their voices before their faces, chanting something that was not quite language, a repeated cadence that resonated off the rock as if the mountain were sending it back amplified.
There were three infants. Zandor saw them when his eyes adjusted to the darkness — wrapped in clan cloth, motionless with that particular silence of newborns who don't yet understand that cold is a threat. One by one, the officers brought them close to the source. The light pulsed each time they did, a slow and deep contraction, as if something very old were breathing. The first infant survived; Zandor knew it because the baby cried — a small, furious sound that the officers received without flinching. The second made no sound at all. It simply stopped moving. Neither did the third.
None of the officers broke their rhythm. No one lowered their voice or interrupted the chant. The two infants who didn't survive were set down carefully on the rock with the same composure with which they had been brought — as if their deaths were an expected part of the process, as if it had always been this way and always would be.
Zandor understood in that moment what the clan called the blessing of the gods. He understood what they called sacrifice. He had spent his whole life learning that no one was to go up there. That night he understood why.
That light was still pulsing behind his eyelids.
He was sixteen the first time he made a solo mission on the mountain — seven days moving up and down Stormfjell until he had it memorised in every muscle. The third night a storm drove him into a crevice for hours. The fourth he moved in near-complete darkness, learning the rock with his hands. One night he thought he saw something move at the summit: a light that was not the wind. He took the torch and looked. Nothing. He filed that away too, along with everything else. When he returned, his mother was waiting outside. She said nothing. She only looked at him for a moment and nodded slowly, as if she had found what she was looking for. Zandor never asked her what it was.
Before his body gave out entirely, a last memory arrived without being called.
He was five, and his mother had woken him in the middle of the night without telling him why. She took him outside into the cold, and the two of them stood in silence watching the sky until the northern lights appeared — green and blue, drifting slow above Stormfjell as if the mountain were breathing light. His mother began to tell him the stories that went with them, made by a creature as old as the mountain itself, solitary, who sent those dancing lights out to draw someone up to it so it wouldn't be alone.
Zandor listened without interrupting, eyes on the sky, until she finished. Then he asked if the creature was dangerous. His mother thought for a moment before answering that she didn't know — that no one had ever climbed high enough to find out for certain, that the clan's stories said one thing but the older stories said something else. Zandor sat with that for a few seconds, watching the lights move, and then announced with the quiet certainty of someone who cannot conceive of things going any other way: that he would find her. He had magic; the warriors of the clan could do things others couldn't; and if anyone could climb to where the creature lived and learn to make the lights, it was him. He also explained, with a gravity his mother did not interrupt, that he would first need to grow up and finish his training — but that afterwards he would go, and when he did, he would wake her in the middle of the night to tell her about it, the same way she had woken him tonight.
His mother looked at him and laughed softly — not at him but with him. She told him she didn't doubt it for a second. That if anyone could do it, it was him. She ruffled his hair with one hand and turned back to the sky, and the two of them went quiet again, the boy already planning in his head how he would find the creature, the mother not knowing her son had just made a promise that would take him nearly thirty years to keep. At some point Zandor leaned his head against his mother's arm without noticing he was doing it, his eyes still on the sky, following the slow drift of the lights until his eyelids grew heavy.
He couldn't remember how long they had stayed like that. He remembered the cold on his bare feet, the smell of woodsmoke in his mother's coat, and that neither of those things had mattered to him in the slightest.
He came back to himself. His half-open eyes found the blue light again, closer than before. He tried to lift his head. He wasn't sure he managed it.
