Act I - Chapter 3 - Eitöskr
Zandor jolted upright, heart hammering against his ribs as though it meant to break through. Air came in with a sharp whistle and his hands moved on instinct, reaching for a weapon that wasn't there — fingers closing on nothing, stiff and strange. Daylight hit the cave mouth: white, blinding, bouncing off the snow outside, announcing that the night and the safety of unconsciousness were over.
He was on his feet before he was ready to be. His leg buckled and he had to brace against the wall, breathing until the room stopped shifting. He swept the space with his eyes: the cave, the fire burned down to embers, the entrance. No visible threat. Nothing, really. He had a vague memory of a small figure, a voice — something that felt more like a dream than anything else.
“The red snow again, Zandor?” said the voice from behind him. “You've been fighting shadows all morning”.
Zandor turned slowly. The creature was still on its rock, markings pulsing in the quiet, as though it had never left. Because it hadn't.
It wasn’t a dream.
He stayed still for a moment, back against the wall, the hand that kept reaching for the missing weapon finally giving up. The creature added nothing. It simply waited.
Zandor rubbed his face with one hand, feeling the new skin where the deep cuts had been — pink and smooth in a way that still surprised him. The sweat was cooling against his fur, raising a chill. Then he looked at the white figure.
“How do you know my name?” asked.
“The mountain holds no secrets from those who were here before words existed”, the creature said, and there was a trace of ancient weariness beneath its young voice. “I can see everything and everyone at once, Zandor of the Íslandr-Aett clan”.
He didn't answer. There were questions behind that — a handful of them— but none he knew how to form yet. He moved away from the wall and went to the fire, which had dropped to coals through the night.
The creature didn't move from its rock.
They stayed like that for a while. Zandor ate what was left from the night before without asking where it came from. He checked his wounds, the ones he could see, passing his fingertips along the new skin. Then he sat with his back to the wall and watched the fire.
At some point the creature climbed down and went to the back of the cave. It returned with something in its hands — herbs or roots, Zandor couldn't quite tell — and set to work near the embers. The markings pulsed harder as it passed close to him. Zandor noticed and said nothing. He stored it away with everything else he didn't yet know what to do with.
When the creature finished and returned to its rock, Zandor watched it for a moment.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“Longer than any memory your clan holds”.
Zandor nodded slowly. It was an answer that answered nothing, and answered everything.
“And you've never gone down?”
“No”.
“Why?”
The creature looked at him for a moment before responding.
“Because from up here everything can be seen clearly”.
Zandor didn't ask what, exactly, was so clear from up here. There were other questions — more urgent ones, or at least more manageable — but when he tried to put them in order he found none of them were. Everything he wanted to know pulled on the same thread, and that thread led back to the summit, to the source, to the ritual he had witnessed, to a betrayal that still didn't have a full name.
He went quiet. The fire crackled between them.
“Then, since you see everything and everyone, did you see who was watching me that night?” he asked at last.
The creature's markings pulsed once, soft and sustained.
“Yes. Why do you want to know? No one from your old clan wants you alive anymore.”
“Because I need to know if it was someone close to me”, he said. His voice didn't change. Something underneath it did.
The creature's markings pulsed slowly.
“You mortals are… fascinating”.
Zandor didn't push. There was enough inside that silence without adding anything to it.
The day moved through. The light at the cave entrance changed slowly, from the white clarity of morning to something lower and amber, until there was no light left and only the fire remained. Zandor slept for a while without meaning to, sitting against the wall with his head falling to one side. When he woke, the creature was still on its rock, the same as always, as if time moved differently for it.
When the wind finally stopped howling at the entrance, the creature climbed down from its rock and walked toward the outside. Zandor followed it with his eyes. At the threshold, where the cave's dark opened onto the cold beyond, the creature's feet lifted from the ground. Quietly. Effortlessly. The snow beneath it left no impression.
Zandor blinked. He had spent years on this mountain, had seen storms that seemed alive and lights in the sky with no explanation, but a creature floating a few centimetres off the ground as if gravity were merely a suggestion was something else. He looked at the feet, then at the undisturbed snow, then at the feet again.
It hung there for a moment, looking outward, its markings pulsing slow in the dark. Then it turned its head toward him.
He grabbed the pelt he'd been using as a blanket, threw it over his shoulders, and followed. Because what else was there to do.
The outside air hit him, dry and sharp. The sky was clearer than it had been in days, not a cloud, the stars so close they seemed within reach. Snow crunched under his feet as he walked to the rock ledge where the creature had stopped.
Its markings pulsed with an intensity he hadn't seen in them before.
Then, without a word, the creature raised one hand toward the sky.
A ribbon of green light tore open from nowhere, spreading slowly, bleeding into blue at its edges and violet at the centre. The aurora unfurled overhead with a rhythm that wasn't random, it had a pulse, like something alive and breathing. It came down so low that Zandor had the impulse to lift his hand. And he did, slowly, without quite deciding to.
The creature lowered its hand, but the lights held. Pulsing above them, stitching rock to sky.
Zandor looked at it.
“I am the keeper of the mountain's cold”, the creature said suddenly, still looking up. “Without me, the cold becomes absolute. It would consume everything”.
Zandor kept watching the lights while the creature explained what it was.
“And you've been up here alone all this time, protecting everyone?”.
The creature didn't answer immediately. Its markings pulsed once, slowly.
“From the first day of my existence”, it said, tilting its head. Its eyes, which until now had taken in everything with the same distant calm, held something heavy. Not exactly pain. More like the exhaustion of someone who has carried something for so long they can't remember what it felt like not to.
The silence that followed was different from the one inside the cave. More open, with the lights still moving above them and the cold settling into Zandor's shoulders.
“Before I fell asleep, Zandor said at last, I asked you something I didn't finish”.
The creature looked at him.
“I know”.
“What's your name?“.
The markings pulsed slowly.
“I don't have one”, it said. “I never did. Mortals have called me many things over the centuries, but none of those names were mine. Before they arrived, no one called me anything. I simply was”.
Zandor looked at it for a moment.
“What did the ones who came closest call you?“.
The creature paused.
“Eitöskr. I like it. It means the one who is always there”.
Zandor said nothing for a while. He stood with that name in his head, and the cold, and the quiet, and the small luminous creature beside him.
“You already know this”, he said at last, “but when I was little my mother woke me up one night to see the lights. She told me they were made by a solitary creature who lived at the summit. That it made them to draw people up. so someone would come and keep it company”. He paused. “Is that true?”.
The creature didn't answer right away. The markings moved slowly across its white fur.
“Yes”, it said.
Zandor nodded slowly, eyes still on the sky.
“It took longer than I expected”. He huffed. “I told her I would find you, and that I would also learn to make those auroras myself.”
The creature tilted its head and looked at him.
“Now that there isn't a drop of magic left in me, that would be impossible”.
He said it without bitterness. The way you say something you've already accepted, even if not entirely.
Eitöskr moved closer. It placed one paw on his hand and the markings lit with an intensity Zandor felt in his skin — something warm that he hadn't expected.
“Try”, it said.
Zandor felt something settle around him: warm and ancient, and strangely familiar, as though it had already been inside him once. He looked at Eitöskr. Then he looked back at the sky and raised his hand.
The lights responded. The green ribbons opened like a fan, exploding outward in waves that crossed the sky from one end to the other, running into blue, into violet, into a white that was not the white of snow but something older. The whole sky moved under his hand as if he had always known how to do this, naturally, without effort.
Zandor stared upward with an expression that hadn't been on his face in years. Then he smiled without meaning to. A tear slipped free that he didn't try to hide — not for the lights, not for the magic. For his mother, who had told him that night she didn't doubt him for a second.
“Look, Mum”, he murmured, almost to himself. “You were right”.
