1938. Narsaq Beach.
It's past eight already. Darkness is rapidly devouring the horizon, and the moon shows no signs of taking the sun's place in the glacial skies above. Besides, the only sound filling the air is that of the whistling of a cold wind. Piercing as a dagger and loud as a siren.
Yet Igor stays standing still. A dangerous situation to be in. His body has not come into contact with any source of warmth whatsoever in the past twelve hours since he's left his house to go whalehunting. Despite his insulated gloves furnished with thick wool, his fingertips are beginning to freeze. His breath is getting irregular too. Every inspiration is starting to feel like the end of the world. A cold one at that, as if small icycles were forming on the inside of his lungs and arteries, puncturing is innards and damaging him from the inside out.
To him it matters not however. He's lived in this hostile land for his entire forty-three years of existence. He knows his limits like a poet knows a poem. And as he's not of unintelligent disposition, he also knows when he's in the presence of the divine. Something worth battling against the frost for, for an additional hour or two, simply to be allowed the privilege to gaze upon its features a tiny while longer.
And tonight, he's found just that : A deity. He feels it in his gut : That carcass which lays lifeless on the shore, a few feet in front of him, is of higher standing than the greatest of Earth's kings.
The corpse has fallen from the sky just now, before the very eyes of our hunter, piercing the clouds to crash upon the Earth. Igors's consequently stopped all activity related to killing whales in order to study the apparition.
It's a corpse of great measurements, one hundred and fifty feet in length from the head to the ankles. It looks like a human, if one doesn't study it too intently, with human looking limbs and appendages, a human-looking head and a human-looking torso ; human-looking hips too. For each of these human-looking features however, the alien possesses exactly one otherworldy trait, which acts as a warning sign for humans probably not to approach it - and as a proof of its divinity also. For the carcass is indeed, let us be reminded of that fact, very immense in height, dwarfing even the mightiest of conquerors. As for the rest of its physique, it boasts a skin tone so purely white that even the snow is marginally less immaculated than the color of its flesh. Said skin is devoid of hair too: It's lustrious. The creature also possesses a face of peculiar appearance, with two immense crescent shaped growths, akin to thorns, perched atop its skull (left bare in the midst of the decompositon of its flesh) and gifting it the look of a devil. As for its ribs and lower body, it enjoys no sexual organ of any kind, and its thoracis bones are all pointed outwards, as if trying to reach for the stars, but such a formation does not look natural, even on this unnatural body, and Igor theorizes that the creature has perhaps been killed in a battle during which its torso was forcefully opened by some other entity.
To complete the god's image, one has to look at its most striking feature, that of the fact that it wears jewelry all over its skeletal body : Rings and necklaces of all shapes and sizes, earrings also... A panoply of golden goods which decorate the corpse in a way that makes it almost bright or luminous, even in the absence of sunlight.
And so, Igor looks at the skeleton one time again. Its gigantic black eyeholes are as skyward pointed as its ribs. Our man knows it a folly to hope for the creature to look at him, for it is most surely dead and probably has been for days, if not months of decades, but part of the whalehunter's ego tells him in a feeble yet intrusive voice, that he, Igor Akensen, is important enough for a god, even a dead one, to lay its divine irises upon his silhouette.
He approaches the carcass. Now the scent of flesh withering away is getting aggressive. He sneezes and coughs and feels the cold in his lungs being rapidly replaced by a burning corrosive gas. It's as if the essence of the deity's body is warning the man against coming close to a being this glorious. Yet Igor can't be more presumptuous than he's right now. For in truth, he doesn't wish only to come close to the dead lord : He wishes to touch it. To sully it, with his big damaged hands, scarred by three decades of battling with mammals bigger than elephants just to survive.
Frowning in a manly manner, he gets to work. Using harpoons and knives as skillfully as a knight would wield a sword, he cuts the creature right open. It's skin feels familiar to the touch. Similar to that of a human. Akensen is surprised to discover that the wound he designed in the deceased alien's flesh is leaking out warm blood. A blood so thick it's purely black in color. A stark opposite to the creature's immaculate skin tone.
Igor thinks back, when noticing this fact, to his daughter Ania. A beautiful little lady. But a lonely one at that. In this part of Greenland, none dare to step. It's a landscape as unforgiving as a warmonger, and as barren as a cemetery. And so the young Ms. Akensen doesn't go to school nor have any friends. And because her mother died of tuberculosis when she was a baby still, it's easy enough to imagine how solitary of an existence she leads, even though she still has her father, for he's gone most of the day, be it to the city's markets or to the sea, and she could loose him anytime. Whalehunting isn't the most idle of jobs, after all.
Father Akensen, eager to make a gift for his daughter, gathers some of the blood from the dead god's wound in a jar which he shoves inside his enormous backpack with no additional ceremony once it's completely filled. His work on the carcass there completed, he gathers his materials and goes back home, thinking he'll investigate the skeleton more thoroughly on the morrow, when the sun'll be visible once again.
Why had he thought of Ania when collecting the vital fluids of the dead god ? Because she, jaded as she is in her tiny wooden house incessantly surrounded by snowstorms and the like, has developed a passion for writing. And the god's blood, black as it is, surely would make for the most noble of all inks...
