Yichimet puffed clouds of mist from his nostrils. The Fjord mornings were cold. Everything in the north was cold. He shifted under the weight of the extra furs keeping him war on his march.
Behind him he could occasionally hear the slight sounds of his companions. Ahead, the party's scout was out of sight. Yichimet had not expected thse tuskarr to be such deft hunters, so spry, so quiet on the prey's trail. He knew they could track a whale on the sea in a fog like soup just by the long pauses between its surfacing for air, could find a bull seal miles down the coast from one washed-up and desiccated spoor in a long-dry tide pool, but he would not have imagined them so silent in the pines on their thick feet, in their stout bodies. They were like his shu'halo brothers and sisters.
Each of the seven tuskarr with Yichimet had the same family crests carved into their tusks. Two days ago, a small fishing boat drifted back to their village with the bodies of three of their family aboard, chests sprouting with Vrykul harpoons, each a little pine tree growing from a bloated island. Their wives wept and sewed their marriage vests into pillows for their long rest in the ground. The burials had just concluded, the keening and the calls to their death-god Karkut, when Yichimet walked into the seaside village with a basket of fish as an offering of friendship. When he saw the sad faces and the Vrykul harpoons sticking from the ground above the graves, he told the family's new elder about the small longship he had seen hugging the coast just a day before. That night, as they sang mourning songs around their fire and drank vicious spirits, Yichimet swore a blood oath with them. They would need a shaman in their small war party. This family's spirit-talker was several spans below the ground, holes pierced through his purple elder's vest.
The war party had stalked through the pines and hilly lands, following the cliff-line, for days, past a terrible Vrykul burial ground and now up a deep channel. Yichimet remembered a long bridge across this chasm, one close to a Forsaken camp. That would put them close to Vrykul territory, closer to their prey.
At mid-day they came to a clearing. The scout Upianiqtut stood on the cliff, still, staring down into the channel. Yichimet was near the end of the line and as the other tuskarr came to stand next to Upianiqtut, they straightened somberly, frozen, staring down. Yichimet stepped to the cliff's edge and looked down at a charred, burnt boat, held up by giant chains, floating in mid-air in the chasm's deep drop. Fire ripped through it mysteriously, furiously, as it should have fallen apart at this point--so much ash and char, nothing left to burn.
They all stood in silence for a minute.
"What is it?" Yichimet asked.
The bubbling words of the tuskarr language whispered around him quickly, then the scout turned to him and said in basic Orcish, "It is Qagsagmuq. A sign of the Great Fire."
Yichimet stared down again. It burned on mercilessly, with no end, and still it was strange--it did not smell of of magic to him, though those energies were unnatural and he knew little of them.
"Tonight we will tell you the story, Yichimet," Upianiqtut said, then turned quickly away.
When they stopped to camp, none would light a fire, so they ate salted fish and dried penguin meat and the few frostberries they could forage. After the sentries were set up, Upianiqtut looked at Yichimet.
"Your people share stories like ours. Around fire. So you know tonight is strange.
"Qagsagmuq is an old and mean thing. Once long ago there was a village whose spirit-talker was very powerful and very proud. His wife had died and he was so sad he could not cure anyone, or make the spirits dance, or anything. The tuskarr of his village were unhappy with him, so they gathered in his hut and told him to bring his wife back from Karkut so he would be happy again.
"He thought this was a good idea because he missed his wife so much. He lit a fire and started chanting and soon because he was so powerful all the villagers were spelled and chanted with him. 'Chimo, Karkut, chimo!' They chanted for hours and all the children came to the center of the village to play, because their parents had forgotten them.
"The children ran around and wrestled and played until they were hungry, but their parents were still in the talker's home. When they went to find their parents, they looked inside the hut and saw everyone standing around the fire, only it was a giant fire, with arms and legs and a giant qaqivak spear in one hand and a razor whip in the other. He was getting so big the children screamed and the great fire woke up and burned up all their parents, one by one, even the spirit-talker, like it was eating them.
"The children went to hide in their homes, but only one boy was smart enough to climb into the drying rack in the ceiling and hide among the sealskins there. When the Great Fire came out of the spirit talker's home it stepped out the doorway and went from house to house, looking for the children to eat, and every house that he found a child to eat he set on fire, until there was only one house that wasn't burning because the boy was up in the ceiling.
"Qagsagmuq left the village then and when the boy came out all the houses were still burning except his. All through the night and the next day they burned, and they did not stop burning. The boy found a kayak and went down the coast to find another village, but everywhere he went, the smell of smoke followed him and no village would take him in.
"Some of our men claim they have seen the burning village. Qagsagmuq is still walking our lands, some say."
The tuskarr fell silent, and until night fell, no one spoke. Yichimet went to sleep thinking of the coming day, hoping to find their Vrykul quarry and finish the oath with their blood on his hands, their dead bodies burning in the middle of their village.
Qagsagmuq, the Great Fire.
Re: Qagsagmuq, the Great Fire.
(( I think I waaaaay stretched geography on this one, but eh, all for the sake of a good story. ))