Fimbulvetr

by Alkarasu

22: Niðavellir

There were not that many things in Oleg's life that were capable of causing a strong emotional response from him. In fact, since Returning, he had experienced more excitement than in the previous decade. Finding out that the world has suddenly changed into something potentially interesting topped the list, though, the fall from the cloud was also thrilling. Compared to that, a skinny griffon wasn't looking all that threatening, much less so than a ball of feathers and fury that descended upon that same griffon just a moment later.

The ensuing fight was, probably, worth watching, but Oleg's attention was suddenly grabbed by a presence nearby. Turning his head he discovered that one of the elder griffons was now standing very close. Almost like he had covered all the distance from their group to the newcomers in one lightning-fast step. He looked at the fighting cubs with interest, and when Vsevolod started to choke his opponent while screaming "Mine!", carefully hit him on the head with his fist and removed the knocked out cub from his foe. After gently placing him on a pile of straw nearby, the elder returned to the bloodied and crying young griffon. Oleg thought that he'll try to help the unfortunate victim, but instead, the griffon lifted the cub by his throat and started squawking at him angrily, shaking the smaller catbird with each angry sound.

The process was promptly interrupted when Kurgash, recovering from the shock, lunged at the elder griffon. It took all Helga's might to stop the small pegasus from burying her hoof in the griffon's skull. The elder turned to her and raised his eyebrow-like feather in surprise. He chuckled warmly and chirped something to Helga, getting a chirp and a laugh in return. Kurgash stopped trying to reach the griffon and looked at her friend, puzzled.

"Dreamwalker, what's happening?" she asked after a pause, scratching her missing ear with her hoof. "Why they laugh? Why he hit the Honored Ancestor? Why he scream at that sasy ishek like that?"

"I'm sorry, do I look like I speak Bird?" retorted Oleg, checking on Vsevolod. Thankfully, the small philologist was just knocked out and was slowly regaining his senses. "If their faces mean what I think they mean, our little friend just did something extremely right. Maybe even catastrophically right, who knows."

"I'll... translate..." squeaked Vsevolod weakly, opening one eye and wincing. "If... that inedible-rabbit-explicit-part won't stop screaming like that... I'll... probably do nothing, he's too large and strong. And... hits like a truck. Right now he's trying to tell his son that he's... wow, I never knew you can sing it like that... The guy is freaking poet. Well, he's berating son of his son's son for picking fights with an adult. Might've missed a son or two, but the idea is that they are related."

"Seems to be a reasonable lesson, though, I wouldn't mind knowing how he knows you are an adult," nodded Oleg. "But it appears that we're off menu."

Vsevolod rose from the straw, cradling his head and wincing again, though it didn't stop him from chuckling:

"I think you've got it all wrong. He's telling him that the adult as small as me can't eat something as big as you alone, so there'll be plenty leftovers for the cubs."

"So, you've proven your right to eat me, great," said the batpony, sitting down. "Let's hope that also includes the right to do it when you want it, not when that crowd gets hungry. Which would be pretty soon if my assumption that they are short on food is correct."

"Food little," agreed Helga, leading Kurgash closer to their group and angrily glaring at the cubs still following them with hungry eyes. "Winter-r. Bad hunt. Big strong gr-riffons fly far, dange-r-r. Small-feather stay home, safe. Old-feather watch, hunt, feed. Small-not-small find new-stupid small. Helga small-not-small. Found another small-not-small. Rar-re."

"So, the adults fly far away to hunt in dangerous places, leaving the local prey to the young ones, who remain at home while the old care for them, and the young adults try to... catch more young ones?" Vsevolod's attempt at translation brought him a quick hug from Helga.

"Corr-r-rect! Vsevolod wise!"

"Huh, not that bad an arrangement for someone this primitive," hummed Oleg, deep in thought. "I wonder what makes them so sure they'll find some young griffons just wandering around in the woods, though. Can you ask her?"

After several minutes of a weird mix of words and chirps, Vsevolod turned back to the batpony and said:

"Well, it seems that what Podorozhnik said wasn't completely wrong. Apparently, the forests are still full of, well, uncivilized ferals, contrary to the civilized ones we have here. She thinks there's something wrong with how they think... I'm not sure I understand what she means, but the thing is, you can't reason with their adults. They are not much of parents, though, so they tend to leave the young cubs all around to fend for themselves, and if you can catch them early enough, you can still make them Helga's kind of sane. She thought I was one of those, but it turned out I'm too stupid. They all know at least something about hunting and all can fly. They get similar cases from time to time, and from what I can understand, they are mostly kids from our time. They are valuable since they might know something useful - like, how to build a... let's call it a house," he looked at the closest building and sighed. "Yeah, you can see how well it works, but it beats sleeping in the snow... probably. Anyway, there's one thing that is very similar to how the griffons in the pony towns live. They do have that stupid Great Hunt here as well! Same rules, same rewards - you complete the damn thing, you are an adult, you fail - you're dead. Adults that are too young to breed themselves, hunt their future children in the wilds. So... yeah, technically, by their rules, Helga is my mother. Probably the youngest mother with an adult child they ever had."

Oleg looked at the bigger griffon, then at Vsevolod, and then fell to the ground laughing. Kurgash took a bit longer, but when it did, she exploded with laughter, falling on her back and trying to stifle the guffaws with her hooves.

"Yeah, yeah, very funny," scowled the young griffon, trying not to giggle himself.

"Family relations aside," said the batpony after managing to stop laughing, "we still need to decide what we will do next. I don't know about you, but I'm not very excited about spending the rest of my life in one of those things they call houses."

"That's the least of your worries," sighed Vsevolod. "We're running out of food you can eat. Unless you want to roleplay a Yakut horse and dig the grass from under the snow, we'll have to search for something else. Probably grow something, but that's when the spring catches up to us."

Oleg frowned, deep in thought, and then shook his head, "No. Let's be real, we're not farmers, and our gracious hosts are about to ascend to the early stone age if I'm not mistaken. In the tropics, we probably could grow something, but here? Man, we're spitting distance from the polar circle. The only thing we can reliably harvest here are the pine cones, and that's only because they grow themselves. We also lack the knowledge of which plants are edible for a pony - Kurgash probably knows everything about the ones that grow in the steppe, but we're deep in the forest. Don't want to sound pessimistic, but I don't think we can stay here for long. This was always a hunter territory back in the day."

"I don't know forest plants," admitted Kurgash, "but I know how the herds get more food when we can't grow or find enough!"

"Really?" the batpony turned to the pegasus and raised a brow. "How?"

"We go war and take it from those who have more! Or we trade!"

"I like your priorities. Too bad both solutions require neighbors," sighed Oleg, frowning even deeper.

"Neigh-bors! There!" Helga pointed in a direction away from the mountains. "Come soon. Bad hunt. Danger-r. Keep away!"

Helga hissed and the hair on her back bristled. Several nearby cubs chirped in fright and hid beyond the building. Vsevolod turned to her and tilted his head.

"Hey, I know that hiss! Don't tell me... we've got elks as neighbors? Great, I was worried we might have a chance of staying in one place for longer than a week..."

"So it's settled then, we stay," nodded Oleg, standing up and shaking the snow off his coat.

"All right, so we need to ga... WHAT?" Vsevolod turned to the batpony, mouth agape. "We just found every reason why it's impossible!"

"Indeed, so now we know what we must overcome. Now we just need to overcome it and we're golden!"

"But... impossible?"

"Look, pal, I've heard your story. Impossible is how the world works, it seems, and I'm not a big fan of chasing some other kind of it all over the continent. I'm lazy. If we do what you did up to this point, we would wander around until something finally kills us, dodging one impossible thing after another. We need to stop somewhere and dig in. At least here we can hope that no one else would come to eat us, with so many apex predators around. As for impossible... turning into a horse is impossible. Neigh."

Vsevolod looked at the pony, raising a talon to protest, but then sighed and lowered it back on the ground. Oleg's words struck the part of him that was really, really tired of aimless wandering. Deep down he knew that it has to stop somewhere, that he'll need to build a home for himself. And, while he was reluctant to admit it, hoping that there was a place where it would be easy was pretty stupid of him. Yes, the griffons' rock wasn't looking like the best place to settle, but it was a start, and he already managed to impress the locals somewhat.

"Fine, you win this one," he said. "But if they'll eat you while I'm not looking, it's your fault and your fault alone."

With that decided, the group looked around to try to understand what they'll have to do next. During their conversation, the majority of cubs lost interest and wandered somewhere. The elder had also finished "educating" his offspring and left, as did the most of the older griffons. The only one left was perched on the roof of one of the huts and paid the newcomers no attention.

"Well, first things first, we need a place to drop off our stuff, and I don't think we can just take one of the houses," said Oleg, eyeing the nearest hut with disgust. "If only there was a cave or something nearby, it would've made a perfect base of operations."

"What cave?" asked Helga. "Fun place?"

"Not by your definition," Vsevolod shook his head, finally trusting himself enough to stand up. "Remember when we met Kurgash? We've spent a night in a cave. Is there anything like that nearby?"

"Ah, fun-scare-hole! Yes! Near! Fun!"

"You know, we need to work on your definitions of fun, Hel," sighed the small griffon, gesturing to her to lead the way. "I'm afraid to imagine what can be a scary kind of fun to you."

They walked beyond the settled area, through a thin line of trees on the mountainside, and found themselves on a small clearing. Before them, the grey stone of the mountain was broken by a sight none of the Returns expected. Kurgash was first to break the stunned silence:

"Honored Ancestors, is this a door?"

"Aghk!" replied Oleg, gathering all the wits he could muster. "Bghlk!"

Vsevolod couldn't agree more. While, in theory, he knew such things exist, he never saw any in person and wasn't expecting to see it nine hundred years in the future. Any mechanisms that once held the enormous construction in place had long rusted into nothing, and the only reason it was still standing was its thickness. The door was at least a meter thick and was likely half-open when whatever powered it stopped. Now it stood there, a reminder of the era when the human technological genius sometimes trampled any sense of reason.

"Y-yeah, it's a door," he agreed weakly, carefully touching the rusty surface. "Or was a door, when it was still working."

"That... can be useful," said the batpony, examining the door and turning his attention to the hole in the mountain it once closed. "I wonder what's inside, though. Let's hope it's not a rusted pile of plutonium warheads. Wait, scratch that, we do know that it's safe - Helga apparently went in and is still alive."

The apparently alive griffon trotted to the dark entrance and gestured with a wing, inviting everyone to follow her. Hesitantly, the travelers went into the wide gap, stepping over the pile of rust indicating where the steel threshold was once. The first part of the cave had nothing of interest - the concrete walls had long lost all the paint and plaster, the floor was covered with dried mud and rotting leaves, and the only sign of the artificial nature of it was a lone lightbulb on a wire hanging from the high ceiling. How did it manage to survive almost a thousand years intact was a mystery. About half a hundred meters in, another massive door was hanging half-open. It wasn't as rusted as the one outside and the hinges were still holding. Oleg pushed it, but it didn't budge even a little. Beyond, the light from the surface became scarce enough that Vsevolod nearly bumped into a wall - the corridor split right after the door, with the left side partially blocked by a pile of rubble from the ceiling.

"Nice place," said Oleg, looking around. His eyes quickly adapted to the gloom of the cave and he looked around, noting the cracks in the walls and the remnants of the various appliances once adorning them. "The entrance alone is enough to make a decent home, and this could be used... hmm, guys, you don't look too good."

Turning to his friends, he noticed that both the griffons and the pegasus were shaking, glancing around and clinging to each other. Kurgash looked at him as if she was barely able to see him and said:

"D-d-dreamwalker, this place is sc-c-cary! And d-dark! I-I-I can't see the walls! They are closing on us, right? I know they... they are!"

"Scary! Scar-ry!" nodded Helga, nudging the group towards the pile of rubble. "Go! Quick! Fun!"

Shrugging, Oleg carefully stepped over the rocks and, after several steps, turned a corner.

"Wow!" was the only thing he managed to say, sitting down, overwhelmed by the sight before him.

The enormous cave lying before him was the most beautiful thing he ever saw. The corridor connected to it pretty high above the floor and every surface of the huge cavern was covered in a soft multicolored glow. Everything was covered by a layer of large crystals, each adding a slightly different hue to the wonderful rainbow filling the air.

"You were not kidding this time," admitted Vsevolod to Hel, carefully stepping on the narrow ledge near the entrance to the corridor. "I've got no idea what it is, but it looks... you know, I know seven languages, and I don't have a word for this. Not a single one."

"Pretty!" whispered Kurgash, forgetting all her fears and crouching to see the nearby crystals better. "Never saw them grow so big!"

"Fun!" chirped Helga, lying down near the entrance and fluffing her feathers. "Scary, then fun!"

"You know what those are?" Oleg turned to the pegasus, raising a brow.

"Yes! Those are magic crystals. They are made... grow? I'm not sure... from magic. You can use them to make strong potions or torches that never go out, or you can even make magical items if you know how! Mom knows... we always had some small at home. They cost much, especially when big... and this... we can buy half of the Field with just a couple of those!"

Vsevolod blinked at the glow and settled down near Helga. The glow of the magic crystals was warm and soothing. He felt his eyelids getting heavier by the moment.

"Sleep," said Helga, covering him with a wing. "Good place. Good sleep. Good dreams. Safe."

With it, the small griffon closed his eyes and for the first time in who knows how long, his dreams were filled with summer and warmth.

Comments

[Kovoranu]

Wow, new chapter!

[SolangeEggbert]

Interesting changes - so much potential!
Thanks!

[Winter Rosario]

Nep Nep

i.warosu.org/data/jp/img/0140/65/1441685647187.jpg

[Alkarasu]

8781456
I'm confused.

[Winter Rosario]

8782763
Nep smugly approves of this update. NEP'GYA!

[Alkarasu]

8783590
I'm no longer confused! Yay!

[rikithemonk]

8782763
Your not alone, I had to look it up too.

Its actually a bad phrase to use by-itself with no other context. It can literally mean anything. Without anything else to go with it, its imposable to figure out what its supposed to mean. It apparently comes from an Anime character named Neptune and her catchphrase "Neppu"

This story sounds interesting, I'm going to give it a listen this weekend.

The Monk

[Starlight Nova]

8783593
Which anime is Neptune from?

[Alkarasu]

9325272
She's from this thing.

[Celefin]

Yay for me reading this, finally. This story is beautiful. Right away immersion again. And... Helga. Best catbird ever. Mom catbird. Lol.