Laugavegur, A Hinterland Journey

Chapter 12 - The Maelstrom

The morning had broken cool and damp, wrapping the highlands in an icy fog. The sun was but a hopeful halo, barely penetrating the mist and shortly thereafter disappearing altogether. As the clouds thickened and the sky darkened, Anja, Tokki, and Skari paced out away from Ravendome and settled into a slow, but steady rhythm. The seer navigated them in and out of minor drainages and across ice bridges. Tokki, for his part, kept his head down, taking long strides to match the footprints his older sister left in the snow. The snow was the wet, pilly kind that soaked through his reindeer fur boots. It was a constant problem, no matter how well one oiled and smoked the hides. That was the trouble with walking in the highlands during the warmer parts of the year. Tokki mulled this over in his mind and wished for colder weather so that his feet would at least be dry. In the highlands, dry was better than warm.

Every now and then, Tokki would look up to gauge their progress, but with the mist so thick it was hard to tell if they had moved at all. Ravendome had disappeared once they were all of a hundred paces away, swallowed by the devouring mist. One thing Tokki could do was search the ground for more of the obsidian they had used to make the vial. However, since leaving the abundance immediately surrounding Ravendome, he now found a paucity of the glass. Tokki admonished himself for not collecting the pieces when he could. He kicked sullenly at the snow. There weren't even herbs or wildflowers to break up the monotony of the white snow blanket.

From the corner of his eye, Tokki caught a glimpse of something dark flitting through the mist, uncertain and erratic. He stopped, waiting for the fog to thin again. The mist swirled and undulated as though it were alive. Tokki strained his eyes, willing a break in the sheet of white. The mist, however, was uncooperative and whatever had caused him pause refused to show itself a second time. A moment later though, he heard the anguished cry of an injured animal. Within the cloud it was difficult to determine the exact direction from which the call had come. Anja had continued ahead, unaware, or unconcerned by the call.

"Anja," Tokki shouted into the fog. "Wait for a moment. I think something is injured over here." Without waiting for a response, Tokki scrambled off in the direction he best thought the injured animal lay. Immediately, the fog surrounded him. He walked for but a moment before stopping, contemplating returning immediately to the trail, but a cry rang out anew from a nearby knoll. Tokki stomped through the wet snow till he saw the source of the calls. A large raven lay heavily on his side, onyx amid the alabaster snow. The bird's right wing splayed outward, the feathers broken and frayed.

Tokki approached slowly, his eyes cast down, quietly whispering, "There, my friend. All will be fine. There, now." The raven quorked and struggled to get away, but the injury was severe, and the bird collapsed back into the snow. "Oh, easy now." Tokki settled down next to the bird, reaching into his apothecary bag and pulling out a tin of pitch and a pot of salve. The bird was in a bad way. The wing appeared burned and a deep wound oozed where the wing met the raven's body. "Poor boy. Flew too close to the fires, did you?" The raven gazed upward imploringly at Tokki with a glassy eye. Tokki placed a small wad of cotton grass in the wound and then sealed it all with pitch from his tin. He then turned his attention to the burned feathers. There was not much to be done for them and it was likely that they were not causing the bird much pain, but he spread the salve along burns and abrasions where the skin was exposed and on the puncture wounds where entire feathers had been removed.

Tokki knew it would be a long time before the raven would ever fly again... if the raven would ever fly again. His primary concern was keeping the bird warm and dry. Tokki pulled his woolen scarf from around his neck and tenderly bundled the bird up. "Looks like you are with us, now," Tokki said as he shouldered his rucksack and struggled to his feet, ensuring that the bird was not jarred.

He began to retrace his steps to get back to the trail. He had taken but a few steps when he heard a cry and a second raven plummeted into the snowdrift beside him, crashing down with sickening thud. The bird writhed in pain, crying pitifully. Tokki looked from the bird in his arms to the newly fallen bird. As he was considering how to treat the second bird, a third bird slammed into his rucksack, dead.

"What the..." Tokki stumbled backward.

A fourth, and then a fifth raven came crashing to the ground, both burned, both crying out. Another raven fell. And then another. A hailstorm of streaking limp black carcasses plummeted to the ground all around him. Tokki turned, clutching the first bird to his chest, and ran through a maelstrom of dead and dying ravens.

This was actually the first scene I ever imagined for this story. I was walking along a barren plateau in Iceland, surrounded by shards of black obsidian peeking up through the snow. 

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