The Messenger

By the time Moreen had followed the shaman’s instructions, Dinekki had started a small fire, using nothing but rocks for fuel. Her fire-magic was a gift of the goddess Chislev, Moreen knew, and it was a power that the tribe relied on heavily in their unforested land, where wood was precious and rare.

The old woman sat cross-legged before her blaze, her eyes closed, her toothless gums mumbling some kind of chant that seemed more like half-chewing and half-grunting. Moreen sat down on the other side of the fire, holding the water bowl patiently, knowing enough not to interrupt Dinekki’s concentration.

“What is your question?” Dinekki asked abruptly, without opening her eyes.

“My question?” Moreen was caught off guard. “I have lots of questions!”

“What is your question?” repeated the shaman, holding out her hands, swaying her head back and forth while she continued chewing and grunting.

Moreen handed the bowl across the fire, letting the flames warm her hands for a moment, and thought carefully before she replied.

“How can we make ourselves safe before the advent of the Sturmfrost?”

Instantly Dinekki inverted the bowl, sending the water cascading across the fire to spatter and sizzle on the rocks. A cloud of steam billowed up, moist warmth enveloping the two women, wetting Moreen’s skin and suddenly obscuring her vision.

“Look!” urged the shaman. “Look into the vapor. Tell me what you see!”

Moreen wanted to cry out, to object that all she could see was a cloud of stinging steam, but then her eyes discerned vague shapes, white tufts of vapor bending and curling unnaturally. The steam flowed away, formed a column trailing up the coast. “It’s heading north, I see,” she said. She saw a wrinkled face glaring at her from inside the mist, brutish eyes perched above a broad snout and two long, curling tusks. “I see a thanoi,” she added quickly.

“A direction, and a warning,” Dinekki said grimly. “There is danger on our path, danger from the walrus-men. Look more, and remember what you see!”

“I see a wrinkled line, bending around, twisting this way and that. It’s a pathway, water on one side, hills on the other … this coast!” Moreen recognized the bay where she had lived all of her life, where she had watched her parents die, and, following the line of shore northward toward their shallow cave, she noted the flat beach where she had just slain the seals.

“What is the coast telling you?” Dinekki pressed.

Straining her eyes to see into the murk, the younger woman watched an image take shape. “The picture … leads northward along the coastline,” she said. “To the farthest hunting grounds ever mapped.… I see trees … a whole forest of them.… It must be Tall Cedar Bay! My father took me there, once.”

“Keep looking. Do you see all the way to Ice End?”

Ice End was the legendary end of the world, the place where the rocky terrain of Icereach plunged into deep gray ocean waters, leading only to limitless and uncharted roiling waves.

Even as these thoughts assailed her, she realized that the magical image was not taking her so far north as that terminus. “I see a sparkle of yellow, golden light on the coast … a glimpse of a smoking mountain. Farther down, I see sparks of red, flaring here and there. And more … steam?” She blinked, trying to clear her vision, but it wasn’t steam she was seeing. “No, it’s a picture of steam, of warmth rising up from the ground!”

Dinekki nodded. With her harrumph the vapors, the steam of the shaman’s casting, faded into the air, wafting from the shelter on a tiny breath of breeze, leaving Moreen feeling strangely hot and breathless. She looked at the older woman quizzically.

“What does the vision mean?”

“It means,” the shaman said with no trace of hesitation, “that you must lead us northward along the coast. Our hopes for survival will be found where you saw the golden light.”

“Steam coming out of the ground? What is that supposed to mean?” Moreen had never heard of such a thing.

“Remember the old legends,” Dinekki chided. “The tales you learned as a little girl.”

“I remember the tale of Ice End, the stormy point at the end of the world. Another story says Ice End is not the real end of the world but the beginning of something else. Is that what you mean?” Somewhere to the far north, according to the legends of her girlhood, there was vast land, a place where ogres and humans lived among dwarves, elves, and giants, all squabbling for control. “How can Ice End save us?”

“Yes, how?” echoed the shaman.

Another childhood story came back to her, a vague legend dismissed by some elders. “I remember hearing about a place, a citadel where the Arktos once dwelled, protected from ogres by a gate, by hall walls … a place that was warm even through the long winter, snug and safe against the Sturmfrost. That was the place the people once lived, long before the Scattering.”

“Brackenrock,” Dinekki confirmed with a pleased nod. “The place that was heated by steam, steam that burst forth from frozen ground.”

“Surely that place isn’t real?”

“Better to ask, where is this place?’ ” the shaman retorted sharply.

“Are you saying that it really exists-a place where we could be warm, even in the depths of the Sturmfrost?”

“Aren’t you listening?”

She tried to think. “I remember the old song. It was something about serpents breathing fire. Yes-crimson monsters flying from the sky. They came and claimed Brackenrock for themselves, and the tribe fled, spreading across all of Icereach.”

Finally Dinekki’s lips crinkled into a hint of a smile. “Yes. I sang that song to you and some of the others when you were but babies. I had hopes that you, of them all, might remember my song.”

“How did the song go? Was there really a place called Brackenrock, where monsters drove our ancestors away?”

Dinekki nodded. “They were called dragons, dragons of red scales. They came from the north, and claimed the fortress Brackenrock for their own, as comfort against the Sturmfrost. They breathed fire and killed many of our people. The rest, ancestors to you and me, they drove from the ancient citadel, scattering them across Icereach. This is a true song.”

“No one alive has ever seen these red dragons!”

“Nor white dragons or dragons of any other color, either. Yet it is believed that at the time of the Scattering there were other dragons here, as well … dragons of white. Such serpents relished the cold and were the masters of Icereach until the red dragons, which were even mightier in power, came.”

“If these red dragons mastered the whites and drove our ancestors from Brackenrock, what makes you think it would be safe or wise to go back there?”

“Because,” Dinekki said with a wink, and a sly smile, “I think there are no more dragons. I think they are gone from the world. All this was long, long ago.”

Moreen snorted skeptically, but she was intrigued. “Why do you think this?”

“Well, there are many beasts of legend recounted among our people. There are stories of ogres, that we know to be true. The Ice Worm, called Remorhaz-my own father saw one-it killed his brother and two companions. Also we know of great bears-even have a proof of the black bear, slain by your own great-grandfather. But dragons? Even old Chantarik, who was an ancient shaman when I was a girl, had never heard of anyone who had glimpsed them. Oh, to be sure they existed, once. They must have, from all the stories and songs, but by my reckoning they vanished from Krynn many lifetimes ago.”

“Are you sure enough to lead us to this legendary place?”

“Oh, you will do the leading. Brackenrock is a real place, and closer to here than Ice End. There might be danger there, and we might never reach the place, but it is a worthy goal, worth the chance.”

“And the dragons?”

“In my spell I sought dragons, and found only ancient bone and scattered remains of scales. Chislev revealed to me that there are no dragons in Brackenrock. I do not know about the rest of the world.”

“But …” Even as she spoke, Moreen knew that she had already accepted Dinneki’s challenge. “What about the thanoi?” she asked.