The journey only got less interesting as Emma continued her being subjected to it; the sights more familiar, the novelty more scarce, the chafing in her ass more uncomfortable as yet more hours of consecutively riding the same shitty wagon added up. She didn’t complain of course. Not out of some stoic tolerance for adversity, merely because the one time she had complained one of the guards had hit her. The prick.
Chuckles the Jolly Sculd was only marginally more talkative than he’d been before, at that, and seemed to be becoming more depressed with every kilometre they crossed. Emma found her curiosity about that mounting of course, and just couldn’t resist trying to satisfy it.
She needled, and prodded, and cajoled, and asked. She pushed and shoved and pricked and sniffed, doing everything she could to coax out even a drop of information. In the end, she got it. It wasn’t what she would’ve expected.
“I’m a Berserker.” Grumpy told her at last, spitting the sentence out. “Or I was.”
That did not reduce the amount of questions Emma had.
“How did you become one?” She asked. He laughed.
“Right, outsider. As a boy I was taken to the Seer, the keeper of the Wilds for our region. All of us were. We drank from potions concocted by…Herbs, and mushrooms, and such, and let ourselves become vessels for the beast spirits. Some of us took well to it, and swore to eat no cooked meat and sleep under no roof. In exchange, we were blessed with a degree of animal fury and physical power in battle.”
It sounded, to Emma, like some old guy had just given him magic mushrooms and told him he had superpowers now, but then she’d seen those berserkers parry hits from Aexilica.
“So how’d you end up here?”
The question just kind of escaped her, they tended to do that. Emma wasn’t sure if she had ADD—aside from claiming to in college to access student support—but she’d never quite had a handle on her mouth and brain at the same time. When one was busy, the other did as it pleased.
This time, the mouth in question seemed pleased to be pissing off a very very scary viking. He glared at Emma.
“That’s a personal question.”
“I got dragged into a deadly siege trying to become an epic hero and get my own harem.” She replied. “Then I got beaten up, knocked out like an idiot and shoved into a wagon with the smelliest pack of men I’ve ever been within ten feet of. There you are. Your turn.”
His glare deepened.
“You’re like Flekin the Glib.” He grumbled.
“I don’t know what that is, but she sounds attractive.” Emma smiled.
“He is the trickster God. A little pig-shit.”
Emma scowled. “Tell me how you got yourself enslaved, asshole.”
Grumpy hesitated a while, then finally did. He told Emma of his youth as a berserker, and how he’d been praised for carving through the enemy better even than most of his own elite class. Then he moved on to how the rage grew so intense in him that eventually he was almost unable to tell ally from foe, until one day…He didn’t.
“Seven of my own men.” He said at last. “Two of them fellow berserkers, I don’t even remember doing it. Just came to. Covered in blood and holding someone’s leg. They weren’t attached to it.”
Well, shit. Emma resisted the urge to edge away from where he was sitting—mainly because doing so might piss off the uncontrollably violent maniac—and found herself suddenly less interested in their conversation.
More days passed, and the landscape changed some more. The weather too. The sun, now, was a distant memory, vanishing behind clouds so thick that noons were suddenly as dark as evenings had been before. The temperature plummeted, and Emma’s concerns with sunburn and heatstroke vanished along with all of her ambient body heat. It was baffling how fast everything had shifted, and quite possibly magical. She was no weather expert, but Emma found herself suspicious. Changes that drastic not only didn’t happen over a distance of double-digit kilometres…But couldn’t.
So what, the sky was magic too?
Yes, Emma, why not? If the world is magic, full of magic creatures, magic people and a magic talking head trying to make you think it’s all real by being meta, why can’t the sky be magic?
It was a little bit disconcerting, she thought, to have her own hallucinations breaking her suspension of disbelief. Wizards was one thing, but if Emma suddenly found gravity acting up she wasn’t sure how well she’d be able to function. Some things were just foundational to a person making sense of the world.
Her making sense of this one was interrupted early into the next day when the convoy was approached, quite surprisingly, by an entire fucking army.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
It was difficult to estimate numbers for so many people at once, but Emma guessed there had to be at least a thousand. Maybe several times that. They certainly dwarfed the piddling few hundred she’d been travelling with, and though all of them seemed to be Sculds themselves she couldn’t help but notice a sudden tension in her own captors.
Perhaps the people of Scurlga weren’t quite as unified as Aethiqi thought, because most of the soldiers around her now appeared to be readying themselves for a fight with their own countrymen.
The man who ended up pulling ahead of the newcomers was, amusingly enough, perhaps the least-intimidating one out of them all. Not very tall, not very broad. Middle aged rather than young, with more grey in his hair than blonde. He carried a bit, rattly staff instead of any kind of weapon and didn’t even wear armour.
Like that old man I killed the other day.
The one who’d been chanting bullshit and thrown lightning at her. Emma suddenly felt herself grow a shade more wary of this new arrival in light of that memory, one of the more harsh lessons she’d learned was that magic went a lot farther than even superhuman strength of arms did in this world. So far at least.
From their own side, or rather the side which Emma was being forcibly detained by, another someone emerged. This one looked a bit more stereotypically impressive, by viking standards at least. As tall as Aexilica, if not taller, and broad enough at the shoulder that Emma reckoned two of herself could hide behind him. He wore so much mail that it rattled as he walked, and there was a big, humming maul strapped to his waist which she swore was melting the snowflakes around itself.
The young man stared down the old, and somehow neither seemed beneath the other. Age and magic wrestled with youth and physicality to produce a stalemate.
Behind them, the disparity in subordinate numbers was somewhat more pronounced.
“Guldin.” The younger man said, calling the name out deliberately loud. Emma suspected he was addressing everyone at once, aiming to make some sort of statement. What followed next left her…Less sure. “What business have you with my Warband?”
That was…It? Make a show of calling out to everyone…With a question? Either he was going somewhere with this that she was too stupid to see, or…
“Greetings to you, too, Jarl Vari.” The older man, apparently named Guldin, replied, “I see you have been busy raiding since last we saw one another.”
Ah. This was the Jarl himself, Vari the idiot. Perhaps Emma wasn’t missing anything after all. It was, she knew, entirely possible that he was just making stupid decisions.
“I see you have not.” Vari shot back, speaking with the unshaking confidence that mother nature reserved for big men.
“I have been busy,” The older man replied pleasantly. “Serving the Gods, not my coin purse.”
Some mumbles went out among Vari’s men at that. His unpopularity reared its ugly head, and clearly the Jarl knew it. He got angrier.
“What do you want with us?” Vari snapped. “I’m guessing the Gods didn’t send you here for no reason.”
In Aethiq, from Emma’s experience at least, saying something like that—with that derisive emphasis on the word “gods”— was a really good strategy if you were going for a “publicly lynched speedrun any%”. That it didn’t ruffle many feathers here told Emma the Sculds were a shade less…Enthusiastic about their religion.
“They sent me for a very good reason.” The older man, Guldin, smiled. “They sent word to me through no less than three omens that you are carrying with you prisoners of great value, I would have them as sacrifices.”
Emma went cold. Sacrifice. Human killed, for no reason. She was familiar with the concept of course. With the concept, with the distant, far-gone idea of it, as something left long in the past. Not this. Not something to be threatened with, let alone sentenced to. Not at all.
She found herself panting, fear demanding her lungs cycle and burn themselves on the frosty air. It was a struggle to even hear what was said next, and a struggle that Emma failed in managing. All she knew was a few more angry words flitted between the two leaders, and then her wagon was moving again. The convoy wasn’t.
“W…What the fuck is going on?” She croaked, coming to only as the wagon began veering off to follow the great horde of men Grundi had approached with.
“We’ve changed hands.” Grumpy told her, sounding about as bitter at that as he was about everything else.
“Changed hands.” Emma echoed. “They’re going to fucking sacrifice us.” It was real now, solid, tangible. A thing with mass, and that mass was weighing down on her lungs and keeping her from breathing.
“You thought we’d be sacrificed already, didn’t you?” Grumpy was frowning now, not with grumpiness. Maybe she should’ve renamed him to Confused.
Yes, Emma had thought it. Somehow that hadn’t affected her, because she was slow. Or stupid, or a little crazy—a little, about to get her throat cut by her own imagination and she said a little— but now she’d heard the old man say it himself. Now it was real.
The rest of their journey was quick. It was unfair, cruel. Why had time crawled so tediously slow before, then suddenly accelerated just as Emma’s life ended up on the chopping block? She found that almost as bad as the looming threat itself. The sheer injustice of it all. Surely there was some limit to how much bad fortune a single girl could get.
No, Emma, there isn’t. If there were being a bisexual woman would’ve gotten you out of this whole coma in the first place.
A city was within sight almost before Emma knew it. Or at least something the other prisoners claimed was a city. To her eyes it was a small, desiccated thing. Large in size for a town, perhaps, but compared to the mountainous buildings she’d grown used to it seemed smaller than an anthill.
“Vichin.” Grumpy whispered. There was a new, unfamiliar touch to his voice which Emma had heard in others but, somehow, felt was unfitting in his. Out of place. It was awe. She hadn’t known the angry bastard had it in him.
“You grew up here.” Emma dredged the memory from…Somewhere. The last few days had been a blur. She was going to die here. Could she die here? She couldn’t die here.
She was going to die here.
“Do you follow any Gods?” Grumpy asked her.
“No.” Emma muttered, barely registering the question. He shrugged.
“No need to bother making peace with them then.”
To Emma’s surprise, they never came to the city. Merely stopped outside its walls. A stone slab was set up, almost stereotypically sacrificy, and she was hauled over to it to be strapped down and, presumably, killed. She struggled, desperation and fear giving her a feral strength which achieved absolutely nothing against the sheer size of those holding her. The table grew closer, death nearer. Her life shorter.