Saturday Morning September 14th, 546 ALW. Fennur's Maw, North-Eastern Glacial Regions. ….
Konan slept deeply. Not long enough for someone who just fought off and killed a team of twenty-six miners and faced multi-thousand degree blasts before running till sun-up, but he slept.
And there were no haunting visions or Full-Moon spirits.
He dreamt of something complex— but largely peaceful and fun.
All around him, lush furs warmed and cushioned him entirely. They carried the faint smell of dandelion, mulberries, honey, rain and wind. He was sleeping in his dream. Lightly and with a comfort he hadn't known. His eyes were half open, allowing him to see the shapes of beings dashing and bouncing across his field of view. They moved to the beat of distant drums, flutes and other instruments that were too far away to decipher. Much closer, a woman hummed sweet melodies along with the tune.
The shapes danced. Sometimes they fought playfully. Other times aggressively. A siblings quarrel. A lovers embrace. Sometimes there was only one. A woman undressing, looking back at him with inviting golden eyes, brown skin and fiery red hair.
He felt wild emotions as he lay in comfort.
Happiness, longing, love, lust, the urge to laugh and move around until he was dizzy.
Konan couldn't bring words to any of it. He didn't know the words. They didn't come to him like the word fear did. He didn't try to understand. He didn't want to ruin it.
Instead he continued listening to the woman humming. He kept dreaming.
Even as her humms became louder and began to distort— deepening into breathy chuffs and grunts.
The word came to him again.
"Fear…"
The dream vanished like water pressed to a painted canvas. Muddied, no longer solid or salvageable.
Konan awakened. The warmth was gone. He was wearing similar furs but they were frozen stiff— stuck to the rocks. The smell of berries, honey and rain was gone. Replaced by bear musk and blood.
The humming of his dreams continued in its now twisted state. But it was no longer music, they were the starved grunts and growls of a polar-bear emerging from the shadowed cave behind him.
Visions hit the back of Konan's mind as he stood up.
Visions of great white furred bears leading their cubs across the white expanse and through rivers splitting glaciers.
A memory. A collection of them. It's in them that Konan noticed how wrong looking the polar-bear he faced was.
It was longer legged and thinner with beady red eyes, black furred highlights and large bat-like ears sunken deep into its head.
The bear growled from a mouth filled with jagged incisors before letting off a screeching roar.
The sound hit Konan with a physical sharpness that made his vision blur and stomach twist. He stumbled from the stunning audial assault.
The icy stones beneath his feet gave as he took a big step backward to protect himself.
Unfortunately, he forgot he was sleeping at the mouth of a cave on a cliff side.
He didn't have enough room.
Konan stepped off the cliff and fell.
The wind was harsh on his back. His stomach sank as he reached for anything and caught nothing. The last thing he saw was the face of the mutated bear-monster, letting off another sonic screech for— insidiously, good measure.
Then he hit a jagged edge of the cliff. Hard enough to make him see white as he bent backwards. Before he could recover, he was sliding off and falling further.
Only to hit another outreach of sharp stones, iced edges and Arctic branches.
Each hit was worse than the last. The spine. A hit to the ribs that echoed in sharp snaps, making it hard to breathe as he fell onto his shoulder forty feet below the last with so much force that it popped out of place.
The hellish descent ended with him tumbling off of a collection of rocks and slamming down onto a flat expanse of stone midway down the cliff.
A plateau of frosted stone where flocks of perched birds flew at his arrival.
He lay there for an unknown amount of time. Coughing up blood weakly. Breathing even weaker with raspy shaking exhales and waves of nauseating pain rippling up from his feet to his throbbing head. He could feel the blood pooling around his eye where it was rapidly swelling.
The burn of the moon was gone, and with it so was his healing.
He wasn't the same terror he was the night before.
Even so, a vision came again.
This time he was in a forest clearing. Under the same sun despite the possible difference in time and stark contrast in biome. It was hot. The trees were green masses eating up the sky and placing the flowers and grass in shadow below. The Lycans that battled in the clearing were steaming beast-men of martial mastery and deeply entwined brotherhood. Even as they shed blood and traded blows hard enough to knock the dust off of eachother.
The larger of the two was brown furred with black brindle striping along his arms and back. His golden eyes were hard on his opponent. A smaller black furred Lycan missing an ear.
The two clashed by the smaller Lycan's design after the larger of the two slashed into his chest and kicked him in the ribs hard enough to crack them.
Once in the clinch, the dark furred lycan switched holds twice in a smooth twist and loop around his opponents dense arms until he was positioned behind him and twisting his arm out of its socket.
The Lycan snarled in pain before being kicked away from behind.
The Lycan went with the blow and twisted, jumping back first into the nearest bordering tree hard enough to crack its dense bark.
To anyone else it would've looked like a simple— devestating, exchange that the dark furred Lycan came out on top of.
But Konan heard the crack. He knew the pain— the purpose.
The dark-furred Lycan couldn't get past his opponents hand speed. So, he tried to immobilize one arm by dislocating it.
Only for the Lycan to relocate it immediately after, rendering the entire exchange pointlessly exhausting. The pain of the shoulder relocation was excruciating— but only for a while. Konan felt it— remembered it, like it was him fighting with the stripes on his back and lightning fast strikes.
The vision ended.
Konan was still on the ground. Healing ever so slowly.
His breaths were less raspy. His ribs were less sore. The ache running up his spine and down his legs was muted, making him able to wiggle his toes and roll his ankles.
His left arm sat at a hideous angle due to the protrusion of his shoulder.
Just like the vision.
He looked around.
No trees. Only endless stone and ice.
With nothing left to do, he sat up and threw himself back into the ground. He slammed into the cold earth back first. His shoulder popped back into place with a grisly slide.
He rolled off of his left shoulder and roared from the pain.
Something replied from above.
Luckily he felt good enough to get up.
Just in time to see the bear mutate sluggishly descending down the cliff face after him, jumping from rock to rock with mad efficiency. Sliding down iced slopes and splits with a fearless edge he didn't remember the average bear having.
Konan turned, knowing now to look where he wanted to run.
All he faced was another dropoff.
The only way out was up.
And he had no up left as the bear came crashing down onto the plataue with him.
It landed so hard the ground cracked.
Konan felt his knees tremble.
The only word he knew echoed throughout his whole body like it was the very blood coursing through his veins.
"Fear….. fear…. Fear." He whispered as the bear took a step forward.
He took a step back, trying to ignore how even that hurt to do. Trying to ignore how his stomach sank and he shivered from the cold. Of the wind and the world he was thrust into.
Something rose up in him then. Something reactive to his circumstances and how unfair they felt. The confusion and violence he didn't ask for. The questions he didn't get answered and the bliss in fleeting moments he couldn't entertain.
His lips moved to say the word but all he did was snarl instead.
The bear moved to roar and stun him again.
Before it could though, Konan lunged forward and threw the stone he didn't know he had in his hand.
The shard of earth flew like a bullet, smashing into the bears left eye with so much force that it burst with a splatter of red ocular fluid and flesh pieces.
Konan felt triumph in those moments.
But it barely moved.
It shook off the damage and growled more with irritation than pain.
Something grunted behind him— below him?
As soon as he noticed the movement, the bear at his front charged.
Konan was healed just enough to evade with a jump to the left.
He landed in a roll and was back in his feet to witness the lanky bear mutate sliding across the frosted stone as it turned around.
Konan braced himself— flexing his claws….
He could feel their absence the same way he could feel his stunted strength and speed.
With nothing else to do, he balled his fists.
The grunts from below came again.
Closer now and followed by the sight of paws rising up onto the plataue ledge to the left and right of the bear.
More bears.
Their heads came up in unison. Smaller but having the same unnatural red eyes and deep set cavernous ears.
A mother and her cubs.
And he was the solitary young seal they were hunting for breakfast.