Redemption

Chapter One

Niko Aesin rose from the bed of furs before the sun rose. He stoked the hot embers in the fireplace, bringing the fire back to life. Isa dropped a few pieces of firewood at his side with a heavy thud. Niko looked at her with a smirk and shook his head; she was getting so large.

He lifted hand and she put her head up against it affectionately. The smile that lit up his face was reminiscent of childhood; pure and beautiful. He loved Isa with his entire being - she had saved his life as a child and every day since as his surrogate mother. If it hadn't been for her, he would have succumbed to the loneliness after his father's death.

"You keep growing. Do you think one day you might regain what it was before?" Niko asked curiously.

"I've told you before, whether I do or not, it doesn't matter to me." Isa's tone was chiding, but she fluffed her wings out, preening.

"I was just curious...because if you do, I'll have to build a bigger house." He teased her. Isa smacked him with a white wing playfully as he laughed at her expression. Niko stacked another piece of firewood in the fireplace. He stood and pulled on a pair of pants, leaving his shirt off as he walked towards the pull-up bar that his father had built for him years ago. This whole part of the house was actually an upper body workout tower that went thirty feet up into the forest canopy, but it was indoors and insulated, to keep out the harsh wind of the north.

Every exercise that was built into the walls utilized Niko's own body weight in order to train. Haldr had pushed his son to become so strong that no one man would ever be able to take him down. Haldr's extensive training had made Niko into a disciplined individual; he would work himself into exhaustion in order to maintain his strength. Even now, after his father had passed, Niko spent two hours every morning, waking before the sun rose in order to climb this tower. Niko knelt down and started attaching large leg weights to his ankles. He would need to fashion new ones out of heavier material...these ones were becoming too light for him now. He walked unencumbered to the wall and gave a small jump, gripping the built in ledge and started to work his way up the wall.

The grips were nearly worn smooth from all the years of use they had seen, because of that Niko knew how to displace his weight between his fingers in order to maintain his grip on the smoothed surface. There were still some grips and ledges that required Niko to rough them up periodically, but it always gave him a thrill to find out the hard way. Falling as an adult was far less terrifying as it had been as a child.

The fire began to heat up the house and Niko began to sweat, a grin forming on his face. He leveraged himself and using only his arms, leapt to the next ledge, the next handhold. Isa flew up to the top, nearly twenty feet above him.

He made it up to her quickly, picking his handholds from memory, trying different ways to reach the top, until finally, he hung onto the pullup bar at the very top.

"Are you feeling it at all?" Isa asked curiously, cocking her head to the side to look at him with one ice blue eye.

Niko laughed, perfectly fine, not winded in the slightest, "Hardly. I'll have to do nearly a thousand on this bar to feel much of anything."

"Then we should increase the weight. Perhaps hang the weights off of your back as well so you don't hurt the joints in your legs." Isa suggested beside him. Niko continued at his quick pace of pulling his body up and over the bar repeatedly, the floor nearly thirty feet below him. The heat from the fireplace was finally reaching up the wooden tower and the sun was starting to crest above the canopy. Niko could see it through the windows at the top of the tower when he pulled himself up above the bar.

After about an hour, Niko finally began to feel the weakness of fatigue creep into his arms so he picked his way down the wall as the sun rose higher. He hopped down the last few meters, and landed softly on the balls of his feet. Isa swooped down above him, her wingtips brushing lightly against the top of his head as she flew up to her perch near the fire and began to clean her feathers. Niko grabbed the towel hanging on the hook to his right and wiped down the sweat from his body before grabbing more firewood from outside.