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  Before I could leap forward into my strike, the shadow of my hammer suddenly stood out starkly before me in a silhouette grip, so clear it might have been painted on the ice. There were no shadows on the surface of Ravanur, for there was very little direct light, only the hazy gloaming of eternal twilight. But something was casting that shadow. I whirled, hammer held two-handed before me in a defensive stance and froze as I saw the source of the light. A star burned yellow-white in the silver sky, growing ever larger as it streaked down from the heavens toward me. It trailed a tail of thick smoke and before it came a bloom of heat that I could feel even from where I stood. I wondered then if I was going to die. As I gaped, open-mouthed at onrushing doom, the ground lurched beneath my feet, sending me down to one knee, only then I was tipped over onto my back as the plates of thick glacial ice cracked and lifted into the air. The burug was breaching. I was definitely going to die. The next several moments were lost in a confusion of impact, an avalanche of skull-splitting crashes and roars, and a wave of all-encompassing heat that sucked the breath from my lungs even as I was driven into crushing darkness. I barely had time to wonder what great sin of mine had brought down such punishment before my mind slipped away sideways into silence, and I knew no more.

  …

  I woke in complete darkness. For a moment I panicked, sure that I had died and was awaiting judgment beneath Ravanur's heart. But then I realized that I could move my arms and legs, and I was breathing, so chances were, I was still alive. I fumbled in my furs for the bundle of glowstones I kept for just such an occasion, found one of the smooth little rocks, and then cracked it against the hard, stippled surface of the ice that supported me. The stone broke smoothly, and bright, greenish-white light spilled from the two halves of the palm-sized stone. I sat up. The first thing I noticed was that the ice below me was not actually ice. It was hard and slightly sloped, pocked with scars and abrasions, and continued in great overlapping plates out of the range of my little light. It took all of my self-discipline not to shout with alarm. I had been lying on the great, broad back of the burug. As near as I could tell, the monster was dead, though whether my spear had played any role in its demise I could not have said. All around me were broad slabs and boulders of cracked ice, piled one atop the other, many of them partially penetrating the chitin and flesh of the dead burug beneath me. The great heat I’d felt was gone, replaced again by the dull, gnawing hunger of deep cold. The sensation was unpleasant, but the blessing strapped to my arm kept it from being truly painful. The edges of the frozen chunks all around me were slick and smooth, as if they’d all started to melt, but had been immediately refrozen before they could take the idea too far.

  Whatever had happened, I wasn’t dead, and the burug definitely was. It was my duty to return to my people, to tell them what had happened, and give the forage teams a location so that they could begin the process of collecting the valuable meat and chitin from the dead beast. I found my great hammer lying beside me, picked it up, stood, and slung the weapon over my back. It wouldn't do me much good now. The pair of climbing axes in my pack, however, was a different story. They were actually more like spikes attached to a recurved handle, and they could punch through even the hardest ice with brutal efficiency. I removed them from my pack and unwrapped them, then returned the pack to my back. Before moving, I spent a few minutes rolling my shoulders, warming up the muscles for what I knew would be a strenuous task.

  The light of the broken glowstone cast a feverish reflection of my face onto the smooth ice before me. The wan light changed my normally ice-pale skin to a strange greenish hue, even as it cast a rainbow aurora through my crystalline, reflective hair. My eyes were hooded, glittering orbs of darkness, the left one ringed with a ferocious purpling bruise. I grinned at my reflection, showing my rows of jagged, carnivore’s teeth. I looked like I’d just been kicked in the head by a god. But I wasn’t down just yet. Wasting no further time, I crouched, resettled the axes in my grip, and jumped with all of my strength. My first axe bit the ice, stopping me before I could fall. I dug into the icy wall with the array of claws attached to the toes of my boots, then pushed off and slammed the second axe home.

  My chest and back burned, and each blow showered my bruised face with shards of ice, but repeated the action over and over, dragging myself up the sheer walls of shattered ice toward the distant light at the top of the pit. It was as the Warmaster always said. "Pain is our teacher, our lookout, our friend. But it is not our chief." If I stopped, I would die frozen in the pit. If I died, my tribe would not harvest this burug, and children would not eat. No warrior of the Erin-Vulur would ever give up with stakes such as these, and I was no exception. I fell into a rhythm. Strike, dig, pull, jump, strike, dig, pull, and jump- I lost track of the movement of my body and simply stared up at the slowly growing window of silver against the smooth aquamarine darkness of the pit where the burug had fallen. It was amazing how deep we had gone. Perhaps when the beast fell, it had dragged us both into a natural crevasse. I was lucky to be alive in that case; those cracks in the skin of Ravanur could descend for hundreds of spearcasts.

  When I reached the surface, the banks of silvery clouds that normally covered the frozen sky had parted somewhat, offering me a view of Palamun, the Great Father, in the skies above Ravanur. His face was hidden, appearing as a great orb of darkness that took up fully half of the night sky. He was, as always, limned in a mane of burning, sullen crimson all around. His thoroughly shadowed face, and all about him, was arrayed his celestial host. They were uncountable pinpricks of light in the sky, stretching out to the limits of my vision, each one a god, a warrior in the service of the Great Father, the King of the Sky. One of those warriors had just fallen to the surface of Ravanur’s skin, and I wondered why the Palamun would send one of his own down here in such a dramatic display. Such an omen could be either very good for the Erin-Vulur, or very bad- there was no way the fall of a god could be any kind of middle ground. “When the gods walk twixt men,” I found myself muttering, quoting the High Epic, “Storms follow in their wake. Ware, mortal. Beware the storm.”

  With an effort, I turned my face from the fire-ringed dark visage of the Great Father and surveyed my surroundings. I stood at the mouth of the burug’s pit, itself within a deep scar that had been melted into the glacier and promptly refrozen. The trench in the ice began not far from me, in the direction of the Great Father, and, as I turned, continued, ever widening for at least five-dozen spearcasts behind me. I hurriedly stowed my axes and unslung my greathammer. Whatever lay at the end of that trench may well have been a god, but just as messengers from the Firmament did sometimes descend aboard burning sledges, so also did dark, corrupted gods. And they didn’t come down to help anyone. They came to Ravanur to twist the hearts of men. I found myself torn between a burning tide of excited curiosity in my heart and an acute spike of religious fear in my mind. The desire to know more won out, and I set off toward the wider end of the scar in the ice, my greathammer sitting ready on my shoulder.

  …

  As I approached the crater left by the god’s landing, I dropped to my belly, slinging my hammer and drawing my horn shortbow out of its oilcloth shroud. I rolled onto my back, crooked a leg over the bow and bent it with a minor effort, slipping the wound gut string up into its notch and letting the weapon settle into full tension. I rolled back to my hands and knees and then opened another quiver, which hung opposite the spears on my pack. I drew out an arrow, nocking the shaft and keeping it ready as I crept up to the edge of the crater. When I came close to the rocky lip, I dropped to my belly and crawled forward. Careful to avoid detection, I peered over the edge with one eye and stared down at what stood in the center of the blast zone.

  A short, blunt, metal pillar smoldered in the center of the crater, surrounded by a tangle of metallic lines and shredded silken cloth. It stood in a turbulent pool of ice; it turned to water in its own heat. I could feel the radiant energy pouring off it, but even as I watched it, the
heat was draining away, sucked away by the greedy thirst of the glacier. The pool billowed white steam even as it began to ice over once again, and the strange pillar was obscured in a hazy veil. I waited, tensed, not sure if I should approach the thing or not- but I didn't have long to wait. There was a flash of bright blue light from within the smoke, leaving afterimages of a doorway burned into my vision. A moment later, a figure stepped out from amidst the smoke, and I knew for a fact that I looked upon a god.

  The god was tall, maybe three spears high, and its great metal body must have weighed more than five of the tribe’s largest warriors together. Still, it moved with a kind of unfathomable fluidity, its size belied by its evident grace. The god stretched its arms out to the sides and rippled five enormous fingers, then turned back to the pillar that had been its vehicle down from the firmament. After a moment, the great metal deity drew back from the mist, bearing in its broad hands a box of some kind, made of a similar metal to the god’s glittering skin. It attached three seemingly flimsy stick legs to the box so that it could stand on its own, and did something to the front of the strange device, eliciting a series of piercing beeps and whistles. All at once, a deep, all-encompassing thrumming sound filled the air, vibrating the ice beneath my feet and making my teeth chatter in my skull. The mist dispersed from around the pillar, all at once, like a curtain being ripped down from the doorway of a tribesman’s hut. As I watched, the metallic vehicle shuddered and began to undulate, ripples passing down what had appeared to be a completely solid surface. Each ripple seemed to take a little more of the vehicle’s structure with it, taking its shape and rearranging it to the metal god’s whim.

  Even as the pillar shrank, I became aware of other changes within the crater. The ice beneath the god's feet shrank away and flattened, changing from glossy smoothness and cratered curvature to a flat, textured floor. The sides of the crater rose up and became walls, and I scrambled back and away from the mouth of the god's landing sight lest I was caught up in whatever working it was inflicting upon the surface of the glacier. I retreated, carefully, stealthily, to a hump of ice a couple dozen spearcasts away, and stowed my bow, withdrawing instead the seeing crystal that the Deepseeker had given me. I extended its containment tube to its full length- just a little greater than that of my forearm, then put one eye to the aperture of the seeing crystal and watched the god work. I would probably have sat and watched the great, metal figure in motion until the blessing on my forearm failed and I froze to death. But the little metal talisman chimed a soft warning, letting me know that I had less than a day and a half before it died.

  I quickly collapsed seeing the crystal and its tube and stowed the valuable device within my furs. I had to return to the elders. A god had descended to Ravanur, and we were alive to see it. This was a momentous time, an important time, and I was at the center of it. I didn’t dare try to speak to the god without speaking to the elders first. Though I was curious to a fault, even reckless sometimes, I knew I was not worthy to speak directly to the divine. I would speak to a priest back at my tribe’s home, and perhaps they would know how to approach a god. With the consummate stealth of an Erin-Vulur ranger, I crept away from the god’s camp and set off toward my village at a run.

  …

  “A god has come to Ravanur,” Elder Perwik repeated, and I could tell, just from the tone of his voice, that he was unconvinced. “A metal god, which rode down in a pillar of fire and smote a burug in its descent, somehow, spared you.”

  “Yes, Elder, that is what I saw.” I knelt before the seated elders, my forehead pressed to the wooly rugs that coated the floor of the tribe longhouse, gritting my teeth and struggling to control my temper. I had been kneeling there for more an interminable amount of time, and the tribe’s elders had been grilling me with questions, repeating the same skeptical interrogations over and over again.

  Another voice, deeper than Perwik’s, but just as laced with scorn, spoke from the opposite side of the room. “A metal god. I know not of any metal god.” Of course, the priest would respond so. If it wasn’t in his precious High Epic, it might as well not exist to those sunken, staring eyes.

  I dared a sideways glance over at the Deepseeker, and to my shock, he was staring back at me, his face a mask. He bore an expression somewhere between fathomless boredom and searing fury, and the effect it had on his face was altogether both alien and terrifying to behold. I returned my gaze to my close up view of the rug. A moment of silence passed, and then the Deepseeker spoke, surprising me again. Judging by the coughs and disgruntled murmurs that passed around the room, he’d surprised everyone else too. They were used to his utter disinterest in their business, and his input wasn’t entirely welcomed by the rest of the Elder Council, which thought he was insane. “The list of things for which you have only ignorance, Vassa, is far longer a tale than the list of things for which you have names.”

  I stifled a laugh. Vassa, the priest, sputtered feebly and then went on, not daring to challenge the Deepseeker directly. "The gods are not ones to descend from the firmament. We all know this." There was a pause, presumably during which he looked each of his fellow elders in their eyes, one at a time. "Only the senile or the foolish could forget the Eater-King, which descended to Ravanur in a similar way, no more than fifty full cycles ago. " If the Deepseeker took any offense to the subtle barb, he did not respond. Vassa continued, his practiced speaker's voice filling the longhouse with his resonant tones. "The Eater-King destroyed the Erin-Caval completely, as well as the Maccanda, the Hove People, and the burug-riders. We are fortunate indeed that the demon has not returned to our lands." Falling into his usual, didactic rhythm, Vassa drove his point home. "If a god were to come down, surely the Great Father would have sent it down to us, the elders of the Erin-Vulur, the chosen children of Mother Ravanur. Why would a god only show itself to a lone ranger, and a middling warrior at that?" I grounded my teeth at the casual insult, seeing in my mind the image of an iron spear smashing the smug expression off Vassa's face. He'd always hated me. It rankled in him that I had been made a ranger when his son hadn't even lived through the trials. He would take any opportunity to humiliate and discredit me. "Either the ranger is lying, in a misguided attempt to gain notoriety or the thing that came down from the Firmament is another demon, one which has easily turned the mind of a mere warrior and made him think it to be divine."

  A fourth voice spoke, this one high-pitched and sibilant, each word like the note in an eerie, swaying melody that filled the thoughts of all who heard it with thoughts of biting cold, rushing wind, driving snow. “Peace Vasssssa.” Elder Lot, the master of all the tribe's Stormcallers, spoke soothingly, unconsciously dragging out random sounds in some of its words in one of his strange tics. Stormcallers were all strange, but he was by far the strangest. "Perrrrhaps young Volistad is not lying for attention. Perhaps the young rrrrrranger did see a god descend to Ravanur.” There was a pause, in which I could practically hear Vassa’s scowl. “I am sommmewhat inclined to believe, however, that he may have been tricked. Surely no agent of the Great Father would be unknown to the High Priest of His chosen people?” There were mutters of assent. “I sssssuggest that we take action. I will send one of my Stormcallers to destroy this innnnnterloper. If it is a messenger from the Great Father, surely it will identify itself to us. If not, we will dessssstroy it before it becomes too strong to deal with.”

  “Agreed,” said Elder Perwik.

  "Imprison the ranger," Vassa added, offhandedly. "At least until the false god is destroyed. We cannot risk him wandering free if his mind has been taken by a demon." There was a long silence as the elders waiting for the Deepseeker to speak, but he maintained his silence. After a time, Vassa grunted uncomfortably and said. "So be it. Lot, deal with the false god. Perwik, please secure young Volistad." The meeting ended, and just like that, death had been passed upon the strange, metal god I'd seen. Despite myself, I wondered if it was a demon like Vassa said. It couldn't have gotten into my head, could it?
It hadn't seen me! ...Had it? Three of Elder Perwik's guards lifted me to my feet, their grips gentle, but firm. They shot me apologetic glances as they led me away to the prison pit. They didn't like this any more than I did, but they had their orders. The elders had spoken. I didn't resist; I merely allowed myself to be taken away.