Act I - Chapter 2 - Old Scars
The light moved toward the patch of snow that had gone red and stopped beside the raccoon's body. The figure was small and white, with markings that pulsed as they came into contact with his back. To the touch, its skin was cold — a stark contrast to the warmth still radiating from Zandor.
It moved him to the cave without effort. Inside, the air kindled into a fire, and the spirit began working on the wounds — closing what could be closed, leaving the body to handle the rest.
The divine laws were clear. Mortals lived and died, and that was no business of its. This time the hand had reached out before there was any thought behind it.
The wounds were deep. It traced them with its fingers without quite touching, and beneath the grey fur found old scars — many of them. They appeared one after another, without being looked for.
The raccoon was breathing. Unsteady still, but breathing.
It sat beside the fire. The blizzard surged suddenly — a roar that shook the cave mouth and lifted snow from the floor in spirals that had no natural direction. Something else came with it: a presence that wasn't the wind but travelled inside it. The spirit did not move. It held steady against it, fixing its gaze on the phenomenon and watching without yielding.
The gust retreated. The blizzard eased.
The creature let out a slow breath.
It stood and went to the cave entrance and stayed there a moment, the cold hitting it square in the face, looking at the snow that had already covered the trail of blood the raccoon had left on the way up. Nothing remained. The mountain had erased it with the same indifference it erased everything.
It went back inside. Put more wood on the fire though it wasn't necessary. Went to where the raccoon lay and checked the wounds one by one, though it had already checked them several times. The markings pulsed harder when it passed its fingers near the ribs — there, where the deepest wound had almost taken his life.
It sat again. The raccoon had not moved.
There was a dried plant near the back wall, the same one the spirit had been using for the same purpose for centuries. It took it, crumbled it carefully against the stone, and left the result near the fire so the heat could do its work. If the raccoon woke up with a fever, he would need it.
Then it went to find something to eat. It didn't take long. It knew every crack in this mountain, every animal that had taken shelter in it during the storms. It cooked slowly, with the same attention it had given the wounds, and left the meat on a flat stone near the embers so it wouldn't go cold.
It returned to its rock.
The raccoon still hadn't moved, but the breathing had steadied. The body was doing its work.
Outside, the blizzard was losing strength. In a few hours the pass would be open again. The spirit knew this, and didn't know what to do with that knowledge — with the question underneath it: whether the raccoon, once he could walk, would simply leave.
The raccoon shifted. Only a change in breathing, a tension running through his shoulders before it let go. The spirit waited.
Some time passed. The blizzard stopped, and the silence it left behind was the silence of a mountain that had gone still.
Zandor opened his eyes and didn't know where he was.
The warmth came from his left. He tried to turn his head and his neck protested. He stayed still, letting his eyes do the work first.
Fire. Stone walls. The blizzard no longer audible. And something small and white sitting on a rock across from him.
It wasn't moving. The markings running through its fur gave off a faint light that didn't come from the fire, and there was something in the way it simply was there that didn't match any threat Zandor had ever known. This was not the stillness of something waiting to strike. It was the stillness of something that has been waiting a very long time for anything interesting to happen.
Not a hallucination. Or if it was, it was more consistent than the others.
He tried to sit up. A deep ache from his ribs to his shoulder stopped him halfway. He held there, propped on one elbow, breathing until it came down to something manageable. The wounds were closed — he noticed that right away. Not fully healed, but closed, with that sensation of flesh forced together before it was ready.
Zandor opened his mouth. Closed it. He was not a man who asked questions without knowing what he wanted from the answer.
He looked at the blue markings, then at the fire.
“How long have I been here?” Zandor asked. His own voice sounded strange to him — rough as two stones dragged together, one more wound added to the rest.
“Three days” the creature answered. Its voice was light, almost young, but with no hurry behind it
Zandor was quiet, letting that sound settle into him — crystalline, resonant. His ears turned slightly, searching for a threat, for some trace of the deception or contempt he had just suffered in the village below. He found nothing. The tone was so honest, so mineral, that his soldier's instinct — always primed for lies — simply stood down. He let the strange calm of it take the tension out of his shoulders for the first time in years.
He looked at his hands. The skin was closed where the wounds had been open, pink and tight the way things look when they've healed too fast.
“Was that you?” he asked, still caught off guard by everything around him.
“Yes”.
“Why?”.
“Because you were dying.”
“People die on this mountain all the time”.
“Yes”, said the figure, and for the first time its eyes met the raccoon's — empty of pity but full of something that felt like complete understanding. “They do”.
It wasn't an answer, but it was honest, and that was enough.
He shifted against the cave wall. The figure was smaller than it had seemed from the ground.
“I suppose you're the creature from the legends”.
“Depends which legends you've been listening to”.
“The clan says you're dangerous“.
The figure said nothing. Zandor went on.
“The ones my mother told were different“.
The creature tilted its head slightly.
“What did your mother say?”.
“That you were lonely. That you made the lights to draw company up to you”.
Silence. Zandor let it run.
“I used to wonder which version was true”.
“And now?”.
Zandor looked at his hands.
“I’m alive”.
The figure stood, picked up the flat stone with the meat it had left by the embers, and set it down in front of him without a word.
Still warm.
Zandor ate slowly. The pain in his ribs had settled into something he could ignore. What remained was exhaustion — the kind that isn't only in the body — and food couldn't touch that.
When he was done he set the stone on the floor.
“Why me?“.
“I've seen many climb up here”, said the figure, its gaze drifting toward the embers as if the fire held a procession of centuries. “Most arrived with fear or greed. You were different. You'd come up, look, and go back down without having taken anything”.
“You were watching me”.
“Observing you. There's a difference”.
“What's the difference?”.
“Whoever watches is waiting for something specific. I wasn't waiting for anything”.
Zandor nodded. He settled back against the wall.
“The first time I came up alone, I was there to learn the mountain. One night I thought I saw something move at the summit. A light”.
The figure nodded.
“I knew. Or I suspected. But I took the torch and looked anyway“.
The fire crackled between them. Three days unconscious, and his body was still not forgiving him for any of it — eyelids heavier than they should be, one more question still unasked.
“What's your name?”.
“I don't have one”, the figure said, with a simplicity that made the whole elaborate system of ranks and titles Zandor had grown up inside feel like something children invented. “But mortals have given me many over the years”.
“Which do you pref…”.
He didn't finish the sentence.
His head dropped slowly to one side. The figure rose, took a thick pelt it had left near the fire, and spread it over him. Then it went back to its rock.
