Day 3: In the Groove

Back on track!!

Goal: 5,000 words
Reached: 5,398 words

Welp, I like this story better now. Ready to read it... all???

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Prologue: The Dawn Tastes of Ice


If we had been unsure about the fate of the men before, we were not. The sound of the wind howling came from very far away, as if from far down a tunnel. It was reduced to merely a whistle, the echo of something in pain. Even as I woke, shifting stiff joints between the furs which had kept me alive through the night, I could tell that they had not come home. Nor, I thought, looking for the expression of hope and finding nothing, would they. If I had not seen so much dying in my years—if we all had not—the sorrow might have been too much to bear. But we had buried many, many dead. Though it seemed like the birthing never ceased, our encampment never grew. Geshavvel, goddess of birth and dying, was a harsh mistress.

Across the winter hut, poor mad Annelie nursed her wolf pup. It suckled hungrily, and I turned away in embarrassment for her. Instead I dressed in the warmth of my furs, lacing my shirt carefully before shimmying out of my bed. I rolled it up and placed it against the dirt wall before pulling on a fur coat that went over my hands. It was warm enough this morning from the bone-fed fire that I did not stuff my fingers into mittens, nor flip the hood up to cover my mussed hair.

Ulla handed me a comb as I squatted by the fire, dipping a horn cup into the meltwater bowl for a drink. I smiled and took it, as wordlessly as her, putting some order to my locks before braiding the hair in a single plait, pinning it in a loop with a fishbone pin.

“Will you get some meat?” Ulla asked, softly so as not to awaken those who had fed the fire during the night. I nodded to her, and made to stand up. She put a restraining hand on my shoulder. “Later. Eat first,” she commanded with the force of her many years, passing me a stick piercing a hank of meat. Wrapped inside the meat was grain, possibly the barley I had gathered in the summer, steamed from snow trapped when the mostly-frozen meat had been wrapped around the raw grain and speared, then roasted. I ate dutifully, tasting nothing but the snow. The blizzard turned the air itself to ice, and I watched as flakes of snow drifted down our tiny air hole to melt in the blue smoke of the smoldering bones.

I stared into the fire as I chewed the tough reindeer, watching the play of heat on bone. Those at the center burned the hottest, slowly crumbling into grey ash and splinters of bone which continued to burn. In the summer, we burned grass and dung, but in the winter we burned bone. Wood was too scarce to burn, after all. What little wood we had left after the making of spears was fashioned into jewelry, or saved for when we had to make the bone hot enough to burn. We had burned Kenam’s wooden necklace this autumn when we could not find enough wood. He was out there, now, in the blizzard. Dead? Probably. He would not be buried with his wife’s token. We would likely not even find his body.

Such was winter.


Chapter One: Memories of Summer

My first memory is of summer. Mother always carried me on her back as a little child, letting me down once we reached our destination, usually plains of grass. Then she would set me down, keeping the fur papoose on her back while I “helped” to gather grains, nuts, berries, or any other form of sustenance we could carry back to camp—and by we, I mean her. I know this because she always told me stories, and I watched as other women carried their children into the fields, just as I carried mine. But I do not remember being carried to the fields. I only remember walking, through grass taller than me, keeping near to Mother but straying as little children are wont to do.

I stumbled across a reindeer fawn that summer morning. It was small, my size, with legs like the shafts of spears, the hooves dainty cuts of flint. White spots like snow dappled the tan fur, and its wide eyes regarded me with the stillness of an infant. It did not move, and I did not either, the grain clenched in my child’s fist forgotten. I had never seen a baby animal before, and never a reindeer so close. They fled from humans, for we were their predators. We stared, baby human and baby reindeer, until Mother noticed that I had wandered off again.

“[Plod], [Plod]! Where have you gotten to, little rascal?” As ever, there was a note in her voice, one I didn’t learn to recognize until much later. The fawn froze, even stiller at the sound of Mother’s voice than before. I didn’t want to move, but knew that I had to go. Mother followed my trail, making enough noise that the fawn leapt to its feet, dashing off with wavery swiftness, bleating a pitiful mewling sound as it crashed through the grasses. I mewed back, trying to call it back, just moment before Mother’s arms wrapped around me, swinging me off the ground, her voice scolding.

“What has Mother told you? What have I told you?” she said, a look on her face. I don’t remember it, her face. I remember the way she shook her hand at me, clenching a handful of grain stalks, the ripe heads trembling from her grip. I remember that she wore a look, one I can identify in my memories. I can see the set of eyes, the eyebrows, the movement of the mouth, but I cannot see her face. It is a faceless Mother I remember, as faceless as the sorcerers and gods we draw and carve. Fitting, perhaps, as she now dwells with Geshavvel, her face lost unless it is to be reborn.

Mother’s friends always tell me that I look just as she did, but I am not her reborn. How can I be, when I was born while she just walked? A daughter of mine might have been, but there was only the son, one of Geshavvel’s gifts. I would curse the goddess, but that she might hear. It is my only memory of Mother.


Summer always was the season of plenty. Berries, roots, and small game were always abundant, and the summer sun turned the ice of winter into verdant fields that fed massive herds of bison, reindeer, wooly mammoth and wooly rhino, horses… every creature of the herd imaginable. When I had seen enough winters to gather without being tied by the wrist (for once Gehenna had learned how quickly I strayed, she had taken to tying me to her belt with a thong of leather), I loved to do the little hunt. Unlike the men, who hunted with spears and spear-throwers, we had little lances made of bone, and snares made of the tiny willows and bushes that spread across the summer plains.

I always used to pretend that I was off with the men, stalking bison or reindeer. Working my way towards the snares, I would stalk through the chest-high bushes, brambles, and grasses, beating them with my arms and humming a hunting song my foster mother had forbidden me to sing. I didn’t understand the interdiction until I had seen what went on between the sheets during the winters. But by then, the song was hardly remembered and the interdiction useless. If I saw a mouse or a rabbit, I would dart forward with the lance, aiming for just in front of the small morsel. They would always dash forward, and sometimes by bone would hit them as they leapt. Other times, they would vanish into the brush, only to find that the snares were crueler than the point of my lance.

We rarely returned with nothing to show for our work, but nobody made songs about our stalking of mice. I would always present my few to Gehenna, who would hmm and cluck over how very thin they were, before smiling and helping me to skin and gut them. The little bodies would be rinsed of blood in water—sometimes a stream, or a pond, or a rivulet of glacial melt. Gehenna showed me how to stuff the meat with tubers, so they would cook, and wrap them in leaves of grass or some other lowly plant. And we would tan the skins together, using the tiny skulls and brains. A cloak of mice, or hare, or even of the little songbirds we would flush was a declaration of skill for a young girl, and an item of vanity. I, having seen scarcely eight winters, did not have the patience to collect hundreds of mice and stitch them in a pattern.

I made gloves. Which is to say, that I helped to make gloves. Most of the work was done by Gehenna, who guided my inexperienced hands, but the memory and the making were mine. As were the gloves, which I loved to wear, even that next winter, when it would have been much warmer to wear reindeer gloves. But I had mittens to go over the gloves, and they were my pride as much as the mouseskin cloaks of the older girls were their prides and lures to the young men.


The great hunts happened two or three times each summer. In the spring, when the meat from the winter was nearly gone, we lived off of the new growth of the earth while the men made spears from saplings and fastened new heads from the winter using rabbit gut and reindeer sinew. The herds swelled with new young, and the young bucks among us learned to hunt on foot, bringing home the reindeer which could not stay with the great herds. For these we thanked Isterre, the hunt-sorcerer to whom the men sang and sacrificed the offal. The women danced for his consort Pelmony, the she-reindeer who ran with the herds.

Their story was a beautifully sad one—a story for the winter.

When the grass grew thick and the snows had melted, turning the ground to mud and the fields of white and twigs and frozen reindeer moss to fields of flowers, brambles, and every good thing. Then, when the bison were fat and the mammoths left great hanks of fur on the ground for the women to gather and spin, then did the first great hunt occur.

It was always a matter of great speculation, when the time would be right to hunt the bison again. We followed the herds, trailing after the browsing bison and reindeer. Their dung fed our fires as we prepared, heading for the cliffs—and the caves. Oh, the caves. I do not know what joys and terrors those who drove the prey met while I was young. Even Seht, when I asked, would only sigh and hint about the wind, and the roars of things dying. But the caves are my memory of the first part of the great hunts. While the hunters left, the rest of us would stay behind—the young, the old, the infirm, those with children. It usually ended up that only a few women hunted, those who were without children, yet old enough to run and wield a spear.

The rest of us would wait in the caves, letting the sunlight fall in the small entrance and lighting the rest with torches. And the caves were beauty themselves. Over the years, over the hunts, artists had depicted the hunt and the stories of the gods and ancestors. There are not words to describe the beauty of the art that was there. There were only two people in our clan capable of truly painting as the walls of that cave deserved. To be an artist, one who painted for the gods and for the hunt, was a privilege reserved for the crippled and infirm. As such, it was an honor and a thing of shame for those who otherwise might have been hunters, gatherers.

But such was the beauty that they created, that I could not bring myself to think of the broken artists as broken or burdened at all. They were touched by the gods; how could such a thing be a curse and not a gift? I was young then. We all are young once, are we not?

The painters and the carvers would tell us stories, keeping us enthralled as they carved tales into the walls, the creatures and characters overlapping. Sometimes I would try to make sense of old stories, but the dreams had been lost in the times. Sometimes I could recognize the tale—Isterre chasing his sometimes lover and sometimes enemy Pelmory, or hunt from seasons past. Most of the time, though, I could tell nothing from the layered carvings. And some of the carvings were merely sketches, practice for the great works spread across the walls. There was magic in the art, magic which brought bison thundering past and sent us rushing after, with sledges and knives to butcher the beasts after they died from being driven over the cliffs.

Sometimes there were hundreds. Always we were with three or more clans, sharing stories, food, knives, and children.


It was summer when I first met Seht, and Tiramnet. He was a young cave lion, and she was an apparition of winter, the god Helamm in human form.


And it was summer when Kyren died.


Chapter 2: The Seer of Helamm

In the time before time, there was an almighty being who lived in the darkness alone. There was neither day nor night, and for time uncounted the being lived in the darkness. Until, one day, he saw a glimmer of light. Approaching the light, he saw a ball of unformed matter, floating in the darkness with him. The being stirred the matter, and out sprung gods of every kind. But they fled into the darkness, not staying with the being. So he formed the matter into the earth, and when he breathed upon it, living things sprang up out of the ground—trees and rocks and grass and streams and the willows which grow by the streams.

And do you know what happened next? The gods saw that the ground was good, and returned from the darkness. Geshavvel came first, and from her womb sprang sorcerers and witches. Behind her came the other multitudes. They formed all the things that crawl and teem across the plains. Can you name them? Mammoth, and rhino; wolf, fox, the saber-toothed cat; reindeer. It was Pelmony who made the reindeer in her image, birthing them with the son of Geshavvel, Isterre, the hunt-sorcerer. And like his mother, he hunted his children, calling them to death when the time came for them to die.

But the world was incomplete yet. A daughter of Geshavvel conceived and gave birth to two strange creatures. They were brown and furred, but they stood on two legs like one of the gods. Geshavvel was curious, and came to see them, but the daughter of Geshavvel fled with her ugly twins, past the mountains and onto the plains. There they multiplied, unchecked by death but without true birth, splitting into more copies of themselves.

Then Geshavvel came across the mountains, disguising herself as one of the great herds of reindeer, harried by Isterre on their great migration. She found the many furred creatures, and found them abominable to her. She stood on the mountaintop and bellowed, and spat a plague into the sky. It formed into a dark creature; its name was Alhera, the Darkness, the Destroyer. It spread across the plains, and everywhere it went, the furred god-men lost their skins and their lives. It spread until it reached the daughter of Geshavvel, who gripped the hands of her twin children as Alhera reached them. It killed the daughter of Geshavvel and skinned her children.

Do you know what was left behind, when Alhera sank into the ground and Geshavvel pawed the ground beside them? It was us, children. Two babes of human kind. Geshavvel had pity on the children of her child, and brought them back to be her own. And thus the world was made, and humans came to walk on the earth as children of Geshavvel, who rules the door of the womb and the mouth of the grave.


A woman sat in the caves, waiting for the great hunts of summer. She lived alone, for the hand of the god of winter was upon her. Her silver hair and white lashes were as pale as the snow which still lingered in the springtime chill; her red eyes gleamed like the blood which would spill in but a few short weeks, flowing from the smashed heads of the bison who would charge over the cliffs, driven blindly by avatars of Isterre. The woman stared into her grassfire, watching the flickering patterns twine and retwine, as the grass curled and crisped, drying and dying.

Her fingers braided and unbraided the same length of hair, a piece which fell down along her neck, tracing the elegant ivory skin which was just now streaked with soot from the fire that sent her into a trance. She hummed tunelessly, to the rhythm of the fire and to the visions which danced in the front of her eyes, blurring together. Suddenly, roughly, she shoved herself upright, staggering over to a blank piece of wall tucked into a nook. In her hand was a stone, gripped so tightly that her knuckles were as pale as her hair.

Swift movements gouged the flint into the softer stone. Circles, squiggles; the dance of fire in grass. She blinked, shaking her head, and the first of the visions from her mind. Her hand and lip trembled as she stared at the wall, and the stone dropped from her hand to slam into the ground next to her left foot, a flake breaking off and clinking delicately onto her foot. The woman, the seer of Halemm, splayed her hands across the wall, fingers tracing along the fresh lines scratched into the stone.

“Ice,” she muttered. “And blood. Halemm.” The woman turned her head to the opening of the cave, where a slow drift of snow fell down from the sky, a light spritz from the sky. Then it turned to rain, and the woman turned away again, back to the end of memory. “Not tonight,” she whispered. “Tonight is nothing but ice.” She leaned her forehead against the coolness of the wall, her tangled and braided hair catching on the new lines. “But tomorrow there will be blood.”

And she walked over to her fire to add more grass.


“A step, a step, a threestep!
Walking for the hunt
Isterre behind, Pelamy ahead
A step, a step, a threestep!”

The other children sang and skipped, holding hands. Gehenna held my hand, not letting me run ahead with the other young ones of the clan. I wasn’t angry—only irritated. My hand was better than my wrist, and certainly better than the leather tied to me like a leash. Gehenna didn’t like to let me wander off and away, always afraid that she wouldn’t find me back. I didn’t understand why, at least not until later. But I was a daughter of the clan, and Gehenna was the only mother I had left.

Mother was gone, and I had fallen to the clan. It was the way of things, and I was certainly not the only one who was a child of the clan. But I was Gehenna’s only clans-daughter. She had never had a daughter of her own. I could hardly appreciate her concern. All I wanted was to run and sing.

Around us, the hunters romped, laughing and joking. They jumped at each other, shaking their spears, whirling and stomping and pretending to be bison and sorcerers. One of the young men jumped at me, and I kicked his spear and growled like a cave bear before Gehenna pulled me away, scolding. He laughed and strode on, ducking under another hunter’s arm, this one a young woman with blue eyes and black hair. She was beautiful and strong, and I wanted to be her. I wanted to shake spears and dance like wild bison. How could this not be a dream?

I tugged on Gehenna’s arm, whining. She just gripped tighter, her lips pressed together. Sighing, I gave up, walking next to her at a slight trot. It was summer, and it was the walking time. We followed the herds until they brought us to the caves, and we followed them now.

“Who will we meet this summer, Gehenna?” I asked, looking up what seemed an interminable distance to the woman who would be my mother. “Is the seer going to be there again? She was pretty.”

“A seer of Halemm is not pretty,” she said after a short pause, biting off her words. I rolled my eyes.

“She is, too,” I informed her. “She has hair like the very tip of a spear, where it gets all thin and the sun shines through. And her eyes are purple like flowers. I’m just all… mousy.”

“You are much prettier than the seer,” she replied, frowning at me. “You have brown eyes like a reindeer—“

“Like a mouse,” I interrupted, cheekily even to my own self. “Look!” I opened up my eyes as wide as I could and pulled my lips into a tiny point. She gave me a very mothery look, and I twitched my nose at her. From the side of me, I could hear a snicker. Gehenna was unmoved.

“You look like Pelmory,” she informed me.

“I don’t want to look like food.”

“The she-reindeer is not food!” Gehenna excplaimed, obviously aghast that I would think such a thing. The cheeky warrior of before came and laid an arm around Gehenna’s shoulders.

“Old mother, don’t you think we’ve eaten she-reindeers before?” he asked, using his spear as a walking stick. The tip of the flint and the edges around it were translucent, and the sun shone through the flaking, as silver as the hair of the seer of Halemm. No matter what Gehenna said, I knew that she was far more beautiful than eye. Certainly she was more mystical and otherworldly, no matter how my clans-mother compared me to the she-reindeer Pelmory. It was certainly not a comparison I found particularly delightful, though I supposed that as a woman who acted my mother, she would have to find me beautiful, even if I did look like a mouse.

The people who told me that I looked just like my mother were lying, I was sure of it. Mother was beautiful. I remembered the way her wavy hair fell around her face, and how she would laugh when the sunlight would catch [ummm I have no idea what I was saying so let us forget I even wrote that…] and how she would laugh when she caught me doing something I wasn’t precisely supposed to be doing, even when it might have worried her. She was beautiful. I was a mouse who could twitch her nose.

“Look!” the cry rose from the front of the band. We were perhaps fifty strong, half children. Our warriors numbered almost ten, eight men and one girl who was not yet a woman. I yanked to the side, surprising Gehenna, who had loosened her grip at hearing the cry. She let go, and I dashed off, darting between two of the warriors and up past the vanguard of the group. Her voice chased me, but I didn’t stop for her. I stopped once I got out in front, the wind blowing off of the plains and knocking back my hood. My brown curls streamed away from my face as the snow on the ground traced past in miniature drifts, the breath of Halemm. It was warm today—almost warm enough for the snow to melt, but not quite. My breath puffed out in front of me as I stared out over the snow-dusted grasses.

I grinned. Turning, I stomped the ground like a challenging she-reindeer, then tossed my long coat skirt out around me in a flamboyant flare before whirling around again and dashing madly towards the smudge of darkness that I remembered was the caves. A trickle of smoke darkened the skies just before the trees which marked the caves, and a darkness next to the tree resoved itself into a coated figure standing next to the entrance of the caves, waiting. The seer.

She stood, as immovable as the twin trees which grew from the depths of the cave. Her furs were dark, and shaggy—certainly not reindeer. Her hands were tucked together, each hand in the sleeve of the opposite arm. Her hood was thrown back, and her silver hair was intricately braided and pinned up with bone combs. A necklace of teeth hung around her neck, wrapped thrice in ivory and her pale skin was kissed red from sun and wind. I stopped again, then stepped forward. Wordlessly, the seer turned and walked into the opening of the cave.

About to follow, my arm was grabbed by Gehenna, who yanked me around, fury writ in her face. I cringed back as she shook me, trembling with rage. I shook myself free again.

“I hate you!” I yelled at her, watching the shock on her face with a cold delight. “You never let me do anything! It’s not like anything could hurt me with all the warriors about. Just leave me alone!” Gehenna stared at me, clearly hurt at my outburst. I crossed my arms in front of my chest as the rest of the band reached us.

“Get inside,” she hissed. “You need to be taught a lesson.”

“No.” I stared at her, all as big as a reindeer fawn. Her jaw worked at the insult to her authority. “You can’t make me,” I said angrily. “Just leave me alone.”

“Have it your way,” she said, switching from anger to nonchalance in a moment, though the anger at my defiance still simmered behind her placid eyes. “I hope you don’t get cold out here.” Gehenna turned and stalked into the caves, following many of the band, a few of which might interest themselves in my teaching a little later in the days to follow. But for now, I was still under the teaching of Gehenna, who was considered to be my mother, though my parentage fell to the clan itself now that Mother was dead.

She left me outside, and though the air was chill, I was not about to stand down from my confrontation with Gehenna. The female warrior tapped me on the shoulder with her spear and leaned over.

“I don’t like her, either,” she whispered conspiratorially. “But you should be nice to your clans-mother, even when she is being more protective than a she-mammoth.” I smiled weakly at the blue-eyed warrior. She saluted me with her harrying spear, then followed the rest of the group into the caves. From memory I knew that the great entrance cave was covered in depictions of the beasts of the herds, so intricate and beautiful that they moved across the cave walls, as if by magic. And who knew, perhaps the artists of the clans were truly magical, touched with the powers of the ancestors and the gods. Surely the beauty of their art seemed to say so.

I shivered a little, wanting to go inside where the seer and the stories would be, but completely unable to bend my will to Gehenna’s. Instead I laid one gloved hand on the guardian tree. It had low-hanging branches, or spurs of branches, and I smiled, a little more truly than I had smiled to the girl warrior. I had wanted to climb this tree last summer, and Gehenna had stopped me, afraid that I would fall and break my neck. As long as I was in trouble anyways…

With a little bit of glee, I swung up onto the first branch. I had to stand on the tips of my toes to reach the broken off limb above me, but after that point the main trunk split, and I could shimmy along a network of branches living and dead. I finally got up as high as I could, only slipping once, and settled myself happily into a crook of one of the branches, my legs swinging below me.

The first indication that I was not alone was a twig falling into my hair. It was followed by a shower of leaves and bark, with a few more twigs. I (foolishly) looked up, only to have another bunch dropped directly into my face.

“Hey!” I yelled at the mystery attacker. I was greeted by a treble laugh. “What’re you doing?” I asked, shielding my eyes with my hands and peering between two of my fingers.

“I should ask you that,” the voice asked impishly. “After all, you are in my tree.”

“It’s not your tree,” I retorted. “It belongs to the caves.”

“Well, the caves belong to Tira, and so do I, so you might say that the trees belong to me, too,” the voice said. A figure slid down from much higher up, to squat next to me. It was a boy, older than I was by several winters. He looked pale, but his brown hair and hazel eyes meant that he was no more a seer of Halemm than I was.

“Who is Tira?” I asked, less concerned about twigs now that my mysterious attacker was on the same level as me. He tossed a twig into my hair as I lowered my hands, and I scowled at him. It only made him grin wickedly, a roguish look on his boy’s face.

“Tira is the white-haired witch,” he informed me. “The one who stares at fires and draws squiggles on the wall.

“She’s a seer,” I protested. “Everyone knows that. She is the seer of Halemm. And she gave up her name to the god, anyway. She told me so.” She had told me no such thing, but it was common knowledge. At least, it was what I had heard the women say over the winter when one had dared to curse Halemm for the drifts of snow covering the reindeer meat.

“Hmph,” he said. “She told me her name was Tira. Tiramnet. And she’s just a witch. Seers talk to the gods, and she just calls visions in the fires.” He narrowed his eyes at me, daring me to contradict him. I rolled my eyes at him. If he was too stupid to know that the white-haired woman with eyes of blood and violet was touched by the god Halemm himself, than I wasn’t about to get into an argument with him.

“Anyways.” I gave him my most scathing look, one copied from Gehenna. He only laughed.

“I’m Seht,” he said.

“What sort of name is that?”

“You’re supposed to tell me your name,” he said, completely ignoring my (legitimate) question. “Might as well dump snow on the fire.” I glared at him some more, which only made him grin wider.

“I’m [Plod],” I finally said, crossing my arms over my chest. He poked me in the forehead, darting forward with all the speed and accuracy of a hunter’s spear. I jerked backwards, and had to grab for the branches to keep from falling out of the tree. Panting in the surge of fear, I stared at him, eyes round.

“Better,” he said.

“I could have died!”

“You didn’t,” Seht said cheekily. “Don’t tempt the gods.”

“You could have killed me!”

“But I didn’t,” he said, a little more crossly. “And you’re not crossing your arms like you’re warding off Alhera. Am I really that ugly?” I stuck my tongue out at him.

“Even the Darkness is prettier than you,” I said, not willing to stain my tongue with its name. Didn’t this boy know anything?

“Oh, good,” he said, fanning himself with one hand. “I wouldn’t want to be pretty.”

Day 2: What am I doing, again??

Goal: 3,333 words
Reached: 3,429 words

I'm definitely thankful for the little bit of a buffer that I built up yesterday. Unfortunately just as I finally hit my groove--out of Chapter 1:Foreshadowing, and starting into the actual plot section, I had to stop. Because of schoolwork. Yeesh, how I hate having to write essays during Nano. It is the worst.

In other news Plod has an actual personality. Sort of. She has turned into a precocious child. I had already known she was an orphan, but I hadn't exactly determined how. An her foster-mother has an actual reason to be a foster-mother.


Characters in Day 2 material:

Plod: Being a narrator, yup yup. And a cute nine-winter-old orphan child of the clan.

Gehenna: Being worried about Plod. All we know is that she is nervous about losing Plod, and that she never had any daughters. That we know of. Hmmmmmmm

Seer of Halemm: Yeah, it's Tira. Yeah, she's albino. What now???

Friendly hunter: Shaking his spear and teasing Plod. We won't see him again. Probably.


And I'm making up mythology as I go!!!

Godly figures so far:

Geshavvel: Goddess of death and birth. The first god to walk on the earth and the grandmother/mother/foster mother of humans

A daughter of Geshavvel: The mother of the things that Geshavvel made humans.

Isterre: The sorcerer of the hunt, a son of Geshavvel. Consort to Pelmory, the she-reindeer. Hunts his own children, like Geshavvel. Men pray to Isterre during the hunt for success.

Pelmory: The she-reindeer, who rules the herds. Women pray to Pelmory during the hunt for safety for the hunters.

Almighty being: Formed the other gods and the earth. Dwells in the sky; the stars are his.

Alhera: The Darkness and/or the Destroyer. Plague.

Helamm: God of winter and warfare. He rules ice and blood. An albino is his seer. They are obviously very, very rare.

Day 1: Off to a running start

Goal: 1,667 words
Reached: 2,272 words

The story is prehistoric. The main character, lacking a name and personality. Let us call her Bella Swan Plot Device. Plod for short. On the other hand, the other two characters I actually care about have names and personalities. I can't share much about them to you. Here's all I've written about them so far:

"Even Seht, when I asked, would only sigh and hint about the wind, and the roars of things dying. But the caves are my memory of the first part of the great hunts."

"It was summer when I first met Seht, and Tiramnet. He was a young cave lion, and she was an apparition of winter, the god Helamm in human form."

Hint: Tira's not actually a god
Hint hint: if you know me from Pern, you might know Tira *cough*Sym*cough*
Hint hint hint: I barely stopped myself from calling her an ice apparition.

Plod is boring me already. Her memories--the first part of this retelling--are fairly basic. And happy. Though her life sucks really badly once I get out of the "Memories of Summer" chapter and into the actual narrative. I am contemplating switching the narrative completely over to Tira for a while, and maybe Seht as well. But he's much cooler when he's being all mysterious and stuff.

And anyways, there's plenty of foreshadowing on the first page already. Dead people, a woman nursing a wolf cub, a blizzard. What's not to love?