Moonsong Glacier [BOO] In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

It is a late hour, some might call the witching hour, when the wind picks up. The low-lying mist clinging to the glacier eddies with some effort, and when the air goes still again there is a lingering chill that hangs heavy across the landscape—the feeling of an early winter, making the breath plume from the body and the skin tremble.

The night is quiet; although there is a disturbance to the air, there is no sound from the frosted blades of grass underfoot, or the trees clustered across the wilderness of this place. The moon looks full, and yet there is a haze as thin clouds shift to obscure its shape.

Below, perhaps due to a trick of the moonlight through these heavy mists, a pair of green eyes flash.

Fjall ventured restlessly into the glacier’s darker folds, his soft-gold coat aglow in the tendrils of moonlight that came downward unobscured by teasing midnight clouds. Though he had hoped to expel some excess energy that late late hour, his steps slowed when he began to perceive a stillness and a silence that felt unnatural in this world that always seemed filled with some song or another: cricketsong, windsong, leafsong, rainsong. There was nothing here. As if the presence of some great predator had turned nature mute in its wake.

Then the wind picked up in sweeping cold, combing forcefully through his fur. Fjall paused mid-step, catching a glint of what looked like eyes occupying the dark space between two tree trunks. Hello? Uncertainty rippled in his voice.

A rippling to the air.

A churn to the frost. The glacier seemed to warp with color and a haze of gray, opalescent.

Those eyes unwavering where they sank in the gloom; but the air trembled like an ocean current, roiling, a smoke.

Mine, rasped a voice abyssal deep. Mine! The green flash of northern lights between the trees; greensun setting.

A beastly howl of wind! Air sucking around the boy a rush of brine and blood and green, livid! Wind that felt like teeth cutting at cheeks and chest, dark-capped, serrated, while the howl curdled the air!

A rising veil of fog answered his call, swallowing the eyes in a swirl of frostmist and shadow. Fjall felt his skin prickle, attuned to something his wisteria gaze could not firmly seize.

Mine, a voice rolled like thunder beneath the earth; he felt it more than he heard it. Mine!

All of Fjall’s hair was suddenly standing on end. Fear crinkled the corners of his mouth into a grimace and the whites of his eyes flashed towards the greenlit spark. His heart raced as the wind shrieked, raking across his body, pinning his ears flat. That searing greenfire spun ‘round him like webbing, and the yearling could only crouch down and cry out in a reverent plea.

I am nothing! I beg you! He had never experienced this force before, but he thought it must be the wilds, a great clashing of the spheres, come to claim those without faith. Yes, I am yours! I swear it!

The howl rose and drowned the boy as he pled against it, but when permission was granted (of a sort) the air became preternaturally still again. Leaves caught in the draft were suspended in motes of fog with pinpricks of ice glinting off of them. The trees which had been bowed outwards with the force of the gale now came to rest and sagged in to their natural hang again.

The green settled now within the eye of Fjall; though hard to catch a glimpse, it was a sheen of color that was imperceptible. The feeling of a presence would now weigh upon the boy; he who had acquiesced the spirit's demand.

Home, sang the fog now, sorrowful. The spirit clinging in its way to the boy as a drowning sailor might grip to a float. We go... home. Now. Should this desire not be met, there would come a tightening to the boy's limbs as the spirit constricted, and the shadows bent to heed it.

The very earth bowed to the squall of this estranged presence, and Fjall was not near naïve enough to think that he could stand against it. He held his head low against the bladed, screeching wind, weathering its fury until suddenly–

There was nothing.

He dared peer upwards, a glimpse of that greenfire hovering hollowly at his eyeline. The boy felt a weight settle upon his slender shoulders then – cold as chainmail, heavy as a great shield he was only strong enough to carry but not wield.

It felt to be all about him: grasping, gripping, pulling.

Fjall stiffened but did not refuse it, borne ceaselessly in a direction he knew was not his own. Lurching and unsure, though willing.

I am yours. I am yours. I am yours.

The mantra filled his thoughts, echoing through the halls of his veins, reaching out to the feral entity that had curled its ghostly tentacles round each of his limbs and led him home.