Pathfinder

12 - Inevitability

If anyone would have told Lucas he'd be chased down by an angry frost giant, just a few days prior he would have laughed in their face and deemed it a bad joke. 

Frankly, city boy that he was, he hadn't even been sure those things still existed.  Alas here he found himself, stumbling ahead one half-blind step at a time, cloak tightly wrapped around himself as he struggled against freezing winds and swaying branches. Because of course within his exhaustion and the white flurry of snow that had ensued he'd  all too quickly managed to stumble off the given path and loose his poor odd-colored Opie. 

The fact that the weather had followed him and he by now could barely even see his own outstretched arm really didn't bode well though. Neither for him nor Gregor, who'd...stayed behind. Gods above, he really hoped the man was somehow still alright and alive. After all, how would he stand to face the others if he wasn't? Even if he himself did by some miracle survive, how could he show his face after he'd ran like a coward and left that old hound to fight a fight  that could only end the most grizzly of death? Even if he had been encouraged to do so by the man himself. 

He cursed that wreathed beast. Damned that witch. But most of all anguished in his own stupidity. "Should have just stayed at home...." He whimpered. With Natalia, Mira and Laura...and mom. Mom had been the one who'd begged him to stay behind the most. Wailed through hicks and sobs not to follow in his fathers footstep, like Anton had. Even found him that stupid spot as a shoemakers apprentice with that stupid old man Gilbert. And by the gods Tanya. That beautiful milkmaid and her ungodly full bosom. The kind which made passerby's trip over themselves like idiots. The kind which would inspire bards to immortalize it in song. The kind which made him feel like he was simply too young to die. 

So why had he even left? No, really, why? To fulfill some sort of duty to his dead father who he hardly even remembered? Impress Anton? That self-important son of a bitch who'd left them behind as soon as he was old enough to pretend he was old enough to conscript? That dickhead who'd just smirked and told him not to trip over his own boots when he'd volunteered to accompany Gregor? Not even offered a small pat on the back for a job well done when he'd spotted an caught the little witch spawn? Damn it all, if ever he saw that ass again, without a moment of hesitation, he'd punch him square in his smug mug.

And yet with every passing minute his hope that he'd get to do that was dwindling. He could feel it in the air: the way the cold somehow bit into him harder. Or that the merciless winds had only become stronger and more erratic. He felt it in the way the barely starlit sky had turned into a pitch-black blanket, threatening to suffocate everything that had once peacefully existed beneath... While he, in the end, was only postponing the inevitable. 

His drumming chest was suddenly overcome by a sinking feeling. Suppose a part of him had always kind of wished the last words he'd hear from his brother would have been something more profound. 

But of course fate, frigid bitch that she was, would have it no sooner than he'd finished the wishful thought, the terrain suddenly shifted and he did  stumble over himself, momentarily tumbling down a bumpy slope, only to cease with an abrupt, ice-cold splash.