The man in furs.

Macloren Fri Jun 12, 2009 2:37 pm

The man in furs threw another empty bottle into the snow behind him and with a grunt reached for another. He was annoyed to find that he had just finished the last of his supply.
‘Don’ye hate it when tha’ happens?’ he slurred to his companion, who ignored him completely.
‘Oi, ye old goat, are ye listenin’ te me?’ The man in furs stood unsteadily when he still didn’t get a satisfactory reply.
‘Ye always were a grumpy old bastard… Vaknor’ He exploded into fits of raucous laughter at his own joke until his thoughts of the old Chaplain turned sour when the memory of Her came to the fore. The man in furs crushed the memory ruthlessly lest it consume him and looked down at his companion. The Battleram stirred in it’s sleep disturbed by it’s masters thunderous outburst.
‘Aye, sleep a while beast, I’m fer joinin’ ye presently’ The man in furs gave the ram a friendly kick as he left the campfire to relieve himself into a snowdrift. He sighed as he urinated yellow furrows in the snow, troubled by his sudden thoughts of Her who was lost irrevocably to him. Once again his iron resolve clamped down any thoughts of his lost love and he returned to the campfire to sleep. The man in furs lay down between his loyal Battleram and the campfire and closed his remaining eye. Sleep always came quickly to him when he was in the mountains and he was soon lost to the land of dreams.

*

In his dreams, he had less control. His subconscious mind would make him relive past events or torture him with scenes of a life that could have been his were it not for all the evil in the world.
Tonight he was sat in his inner sanctum working on a particularly beautiful trinket. His thick, almost stubby fingers worked over the Jade sculpting it into a perfect image of a woman dancing, the statuette was worked through with detail etched and lined in Truesilver and it’s face a perfect representation of Merri’s own. It was quite simply the finest piece he had ever made.
He stood, and as is often the case in dreams, he found himself at the entrance to the catacombs below the cathedral. He stepped into the darkness sombrely entering the crypt where Merri’s frozen body lay in her sarcophagus of ice. Macloren prayed to the light that it would be different this time, that he would enter to find the crypt exactly as he had left it with Merri laying peacefully in her icy tomb the trinkets and knickknacks which he had previously made her arranged around her on the edges of her sarcophagus.
It was not to be. The chamber looked exactly as it had that night, the torches had all gone out, the gifts he had brought her were scattered across the floor along with fist sized chunks of ice, the sarcophagus was cracked down the middle and full of more ice and blood. So much blood. But of his beloved Merrideath there was no evidence apart from the few scraps of torn flesh floating in the pool of blood.
RAGE!

*

The man in furs, woke with a start. He reached instinctively for one of the bottles of mead remembering unhappily that he had drunk the last of them the night before. He got groggily to his feet and picked up his axe.
‘Time te go back te that shite-hole trader settlement’ he said to the Battleram.