//------------------------------//
// 1: Niflheimr 
// Story: Fimbulvetr 
// by Alkarasu 
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Cold. Always so cold.

His life, as of late, was made of cold. It crept after him during the day, it came full force during the night. It stepped away for a moment - when he needed to run - but hammered back the moment he stopped. Nothing in the frozen world around him could drive it away. It was no small wonder he was even alive - he knew, that winter, alone in the forest, kills even those who are ready. He wasn't ready. Yet, he was still alive. The cold have tortured him, but never enough to kill.

Then, of course, came the hunger. A forest is a place that is filled with food - in summer. It's overflowing with it in autumn. But winter, winter is bad for anyone who haven't stored enough food at home, or even inside one's body. Winter is the time of hunger. He had no storage, except for the small grocery bag, stolen by a wandering bear. He had no stored fat inside of him. He wasn't expecting the winter to come. He wasn't expecting to come to winter.

Yet, this day was different. This day the hunger wasn't around. The other, happier time, he'd probably befriend that hare. Or ignored it, since the hares are not too social towards his former kin. Today, he named that hare Lunch and made him his first meal in a week. That had probably saved his life, and even the cold wasn't as irritating for some time. Even the fact that he had to eat the hare raw wasn't going to rain on his day. It was going to snow on it. Rain would've meant spring, but his world had no spring anymore. Yet, laying there in his simple shelter made from a spruce tree and a lot of snow, he felt a little better. Maybe, there was hope. Maybe, there was spring. Because today, he also found out where he was.

The first clue was, actually, the spruce tree he had chosen as his shelter for the night. He didn't remember where, but he found out that a medium spruce tree can be repurposed into a makeshift shelter by just putting a lot of snow on its lower branches. It wasn't ideal, but it kept at least part of the night cold out. He did it for every night of the week, slowly walking south every day, and today wasn't any different, but the tree itself grabbed his attention. All the trees before it were green. This one was blue. He knew only one place the spruces were blue.

The frantic search in the fading light of the day revealed his suspicion to be true. The steep cliff he used to ambush the hare, the one he thought to be just another of the weird hills he came over during his travels, wasn't a cliff, it was a wall made of brick. The color was faded, but it was red. He made his temporary home at the Red Square, right beside of what remained of the Kremlin red walls.

Now, he laid in his humble abode, shivering a bit, and thought about last week, trying to put all the pieces of the puzzle he had together.

=A week earlier. May, 23, 2015=

The moment of spring turning winter was nothing special. No flashes of mystic light,  no wind, no booming voice from the skies, just one moment he was closing the car door after a short trip to the store, and the next he's tumbling down rather massive snow pile. To say that he was in a panic is to put it mildly, his scream had shaken the skies above and his thrashing nearly obliterated the small pine tree his tumble have left him in. It also brought a fresh pile of snow down from much bigger pine tree nearby, so it took a bit of a time for him to finally find the top from bottom and dig himself out of the snow. 

What was around him wasn't anything he could expect. Instead of the sunny and warm day in a peaceful suburb of a small town, he met early winter morning of a sparse forest, with no sign of civilization in sight. The only traces of human presence were his own short pants, hanging from a branch about half-way up the snow pile he fell off and the bag with the groceries a bit further down. His crushed glasses finalized the scene, lying near the smaller pine. The last part terrified him a bit more - since he was well aware of his near-blindness without the glasses, and it took his panicked brain some time to realize that, despite the glasses being utterly destroyed and nowhere near his eyes, his sight was better than at any point in his life. So good, that he could, probably, count the needles on a pine branch nearly a kilometer away. And a bright yellow beak on his own face. 

That was the breaking point. All things piled up, he couldn't take it anymore. He wanted to faint right on the spot, to curl up and die, to wake up, or to suddenly remember that all his previous life was just a dream of some kind of alien bird. He didn't.  He froze in place for a couple of minutes, eyes on the beak, tail swishing around and wings quivering.  The tail was what woke him up from the stupor. Long, flexible, covered with dark gray fur, it was just too annoying to ignore, as it's end flew right into his painfully wide field of vision only to disappear the next moment. So he caught it with what was his hand just a few minutes before - and found out that he now had something resembling a claw instead. With long and very sharp talons on it, and a vice-like grip. The sharp pain in the new extremity finally woke him up completely.

With his very mobile neck, he examined his new form. To say it was weird was to remain silent. Mostly, it reminded him of what would griffin look like if such an abomination of all things science could actually exist. His lower half resembled one of a big cat - not a lion, the colors were wrong, the hair was too long and thick, the tail didn't have the trademark tuft on the end of it. It was more like a tail of really large house cat. Unlike the griffins he'd seen on the pictures, his front half was covered by the same fur, giving way to feathers only in front of the forelegs. The forelegs were more like those of a feline as well, excluding the lower part, large birdlike claws with sharp talons. The feathers on his  head and body were an even darker shade of gray while those on the wings matched the color of the fur. 

The last thing he examined were the wings. Large feathery appendages rested on his sides, quivering softly when he turned, sending dizzying signals to the brain that had no idea what or how to manage two extra limbs. All attempts to move them were ignored, so for the time being, he decided to leave the wings alone. Besides, even being this large, almost as long as his entire body even closed, he hadn't expected them to be functional. Unless there was a way to flap them with a speed of a hummingbird, the wings were obviously just for show. What kind of evolutionary hiccup can produce a creature like that was a mystery, but even larger one was how he managed to end up like a parody on a mythical creature lost in a winter forest. A rather small creature, too, if the trees around him were anywhere close in size to what he was used to. A big dog, at most.

He had enough experience with the kind of literature where the protagonist is thrown into an unfamiliar world. It was hard not, too, with the stories being so popular, but most of them focused on how the former nerdy geek, suddenly trapped in a body of a muscular barbarian, or bestowed upon with hidden unfathomable magical power, or given an artifact of immense importance, went and saved the world, rewritten history or something else along the lines. None explained how you supposed to survive the winter. Most had many helpful locals about, ready to at least imprison the hero in a warm prison. None had any hints on how to walk with four legs.

Thankfully, the snow is a soft substance, and his first attempts on moving weren't too painful, but he still spent a long time figuring out some kind of gait that matched his unmatchable set of limbs.  It was slow, but at least, it didn't involve hitting the ground with a face every third step. It allowed him to gather all the worldly possessions he had - which included his pants, that didn't fit being way too large, a grocery bag (several packs of nuts, a pack of buns, several apples and a frozen chicken), and mangled remnants of t-shirt and a west with pockets. Unfortunately, while the contents of those pockets were very useful in the day-to-day life of a modern human, all of them were nearly useless in a forest. The phone had 5% of the battery left and no signal, the driver license and car keys required the car, and the house keys set... had a small multitool attached to it. That was useful, despite the tool being more of a joke than a real tool. It was also almost impossible to use with the talons - the "fingers" being less dexterous than he was used to. He used the small knife to convert what's left of t-shirt and the vest into one small bag with a string to hang it on the neck under the feathers. It was just large enough to contain the keys and the tool itself without the risk of losing it walking around. And he felt that his future had a lot of that in it. If he wanted to find out what happened, if he wanted to survive, he had to move. His food supplies were meager enough, he had no doubt in his ability to find food in the forest (skill not found), he was already feeling cold creeping up on him, so he did the only sensible thing left - picked up the bag in his beak and marched south. Even if there wasn't any kind of civilization there, there were at least some hope of it being warmer - if he could survive long enough. He did not give himself too much of a chance, but then again, he was going to at least try.

When the world had spring in it and the names had a meaning, he was named Vsevolod, "the owner of all". Who would he become now? Only time will tell. But his journey had begun.