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Doubt is my constant companion on my
journey. Do the spirits permit doubt?
I have a holy cause. I know this to be true. Yet
knowledge seems not to mask uncertainty. This is a
paradox, which might occupy my mind, were I not too
cold to think.
Did I say doubt was my companion? Nay, it is frost.
Frost, and air so cold it feels solid to the touch.
Was I ever warm?
It has been three days since leaving the caves and
the bodies of gnolls, and the white woolen cloak I
bought for my journey, which seemed so heavy and
unneeded when I started out, barely seems to contain
any heat now.
Three days without sleep, because if I were to lie
down, I would never wake. I would be ice by morning.
How many of the boulders I have stumbled against are
the frozen bodies of earlier adventurers?
It may be that I am already lost; the cold makes it
so difficult to trust my senses. The valleys are all
the same: white-sided, steep, just a little bare
rock high up. When it snows, which is most of the
time, I can not see the sides, and travel by seeking
the lowest slope. I follow my compass as I wade
through the heavy covering of snow.
Maura's sword is heavy on my back, and my mission,
which seemed so right in the temperate lands, now
seems unclear. My intent: not to return the sword to
her clan, but to yield myself in her place; to take
up her sword to serve her clan's honor as a daughter
of Marr.
If Maura was right, and she served her people by
taking that fatal journey, it can only mean that the
spirits meant for her burden of service to pass to
another. They delivered her sword to me, whom she
trained in lore and art. I am her successor, and
will present myself to her shaman, and seek the
guidance the spirits intended.
If Maura was wrong...
I won't let her be wrong.
I have turned my back on the goals of humanity for
what seems to me to be a cause both more noble and
more primitive than those: the survival of the clans
of the North.
But there are ghosts in the blizzard. I see them in
the swirling snow, when the wind gusts around me,
slicing through my cloak. They whisper to me, in
voices that strengthen as I grow more weary. They
whisper of failure, and rejection. They tell me I
will soon be one of them. That I should lie down,
and yield to the ice, and to despair, and my fate
will find me.
And as I trudge through the thickening snow, I
wonder whether my own survival is a possibility.
Whether Maura's clansmen will accept me, or see me
as an interloper. Whether this cold will claim me
before I reach my destination.
Maura, I do not do this for you. I do not make you
responsible for my actions. Only I am that. But I
hope your spirits have guided me here. I hope that
you approve of the choices I have made.
I hope that Halas is close.
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