BECMI Chapter 288 – Ice, Snow, and Frost all Melt
A shadow detached itself from behind a forest elder, gliding over the snow without disturbing it in the slightest. The human who wore it had black hair and beard… one of the weaklings from further south, not one of the native tribes here, who were all fair-haired to one extent or another, with paler eyes.
Hrafner’s eyes narrowed as the blue-black metal of the long blade the human held, its Runes burning with blue-white arcane light, suddenly ignited, and the metal vanished under an inferno of flames that looked unbelievably lethal to his eyes.
Gritting his teeth, the young giant warrior steadied his axe. Giants were taller, stronger, tougher than humans, but there were tales of humans defeating them in straight-up combat, rare though they were.
He was suddenly stricken with a strange thought. What if… the stories of humans killing giants were actually far, far more common than the skalds reiterated? That they deliberately underplayed how dangerous it would be to fight the far more numerous little races, and their champions truly were dangerous?
“A young one, puffed up on himself and the stories of his elders, no doubt,” the human said, his voice thin and reedy compared to the deep and proper rumbling of a giant, but the words in Jotun were understandable enough.
Hrafner snarled, watching that Sword of flame ripple and shimmer with horrifyingly dangerous magic around it. It looked like a Blade designed to kill him!
“If our cousins had joined us, not even your foul magic would have been enough to save you!” the young giant warrior snarled back angrily, wondering where their cowardly cousins of Ice and Snow had been this whole time.
The smile that broke out on the human’s face was not reassuring in the slightest.
“Oh, ye think they be lazy or cowards or fools, that they didnae meet ye at the channel, I wager?” Unafraid but not overeager, the human glided forward, nary a trace of him upon the snow or needles, as if he were but an illusion or ghost… but that Sword of fire was no unreal thing. The human shook his head mockingly. “Laddie boy, they were practice.”
He reached to the pommel of his burning Sword, and popped off what Hrafner had assumed to be a carved skull there.
Instantly one of the bloody Fires on his Blade went out, and what the human pulled off was a skull thrice the size of his own, golden Runes emblazoned upon it, and its eyes Burning with Flames the color of Ice Giant blood staring at him from the sockets the human was holding it by.
Hrafner stared at the Ice Giant skull in horror and disbelief, moreso when the Skull shrank down and was fit again about the pommel of the Sword of flame. That deadly, giant-seeking Flame of bloody hue joined the blazing heat of solid fire about it, rippling and shimmering with magic thirsty for the life of more jotuns!
“They came through the passes we wanted them to, because we collapsed the others waiting for ‘em,” the dark little human went on in Jotun, just watching his face. “Lined themselves up nicely for the effort, and they were scarce coming into the foothills when we fell upon them and cut them apart in series. When they wanted to flee back into the mountains, we collapsed that final pass on them, and they couldnae do aught but stand and die in flames.”
The Sword rose to face him in guard position, and all the Fires seemed to orient on the giant in horrific anticipation of what was about to come. “Ye’re about to join them. Thank yer god fer the honor, and know that your kingdom will soon be joining ye, not the first of His servants to be brought low when they obeyed Him.”
“Thyr?” Hrafnar blurted out. “You do battle against Thyr?” he had to gasp in disbelief. The, the pure arrogance of that statement!...
“Just His servants. Now die.” The human started forward, just as burning pain ripped through Hrafner’s legs, and like hawsers giving way, his hamstrings were severed and he began to collapse, arms windmilling for balance and taking his axe out of line.
The two fair-haired barbarians, white runes painted on their faces, split out of range of his instinctive hacking one-handed with his axe, and then he looked forward as a narrow bar of absolute fire, surrounded by giant-eating Flames, came down for his head.
Then his world was fire and darkness, and he and his dreams of glory were done forever.
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The frost giant nation of Joklhjem was located inside a great glacier the size of a dominion, a river of ice that had stood for a thousand years, moving slowly and inexorably down towards the sea. About every hundred years, the very throne room of its Jarl had to be abandoned and rebuilt further up the glacier, and the oldest sections of the nation were lost as the glacier calved off its leading edges and dropped them into the Früsmuur, the Sea of Floes, there to drift out and away to the east and south. There they became shipping hazards with strange shadows within them, sometimes ending up as lairs used for years by aquatic monsters, especially if such inhabitants had the power to guide them and keep the ice from melting.
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Carving realms from ice made that very ice susceptible to great shocks, however.
The bombs that were dropped on them took great advantage of their own dwellings, superheated shells dropping down deep through the ice before detonating in a coordinated blast of force that rippled in waves through the frozen walls… and brought them and the ceilings down upon the giants being hurled in all directions by the seismic waves blasting through them.
No attempt was made to go for the legendary treasure of the frost giants, at least not yet. Instead, the entire accessible flank of the Joklflue was smashed and collapsed down atop of the giants calling it home with uncanny precision and speed, faults in the ice spurred by multiple icequakes in series going off. Their proud and unassailable home high in the mountains of their isolated island had great freezing tunnels cut to channel the howling winds, places of Elemental Cold giving the place an unnatural chill, and endless caves carved and being carved out of the eternal ice. It was riven along miles of the glacier’s facing as it collapsed under the bombardment.
Only after many square miles of glacial ice was collapsed under the bombardment did the attackers descend. Elementals of Ice were Summoned, their limbs were coated with vivic fire, and they went out through the ice, finding the corpses of the crushed and slain jotuns and putting them to vivus, making sure they didn’t rise as some undead army in the future.
If they found living jotuns trapped in the ice, they killed them and set them en vivus, too.
More pragmatically, the precious items of metal and ivory and crystal upon them were transported back to their masters up top, until they located the fabled treasury of Joklhjem. Then the Cryptomancers among the attackers opened up a vertical shaft down into the shattered treasury to more easily lift the contents out.
When all was done, and skywings and gravsleds were heaped up with the battle spoils, fallen magic, and hoarded loot of the frost giants, the Summoned Elementals were paid for with vials of liquid Cold Helium, which they drank with ecstatic glee, quite happy to have served for such trivial tasks if they could enjoy such a heady bouquet from their Summoners.
They were then sent back home contentedly. The few knots of unharmed but trapped frost giants located here and there in the glacier were left to hack their own way out, completely unaware of what had happened or how such a disaster had taken place.
But Joklhjem as a power in the north was completely finished. It would be several seasons before they found out that similar disasters had struck their kin of Ice and Snow as well, and as for the fire giants of the Archlands…
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I had to admit, the place was as intoxicating in fire as Joklhjem’s Ice Nexi had made it for cold. It was also quite the captivating sight.
The Arch of Fire was probably the single most fabled sight in all the lands of Eislas. It could be seen from hundreds of miles away, owing to the heights it reached as it blazed.
Within the Firemouth volcano of the southern end, a massive outgoing Gate to the Elemental Plane of Fire gaped open, one too large to have been made by mortals, either natural planar conjunctions or Immortal whimsy having torn it open to belch an unending catastrophe of fire out onto the mortal plane.
There could be little doubt some other Immortal had decided to take a whimsical action to neutralize this threat, and some seventy miles away, the volcano called Firejaws, split open and wide like a great dragon gaping wide to receive a meal, swallowed the flames that arched up in a great flaming arch and came down seventy miles away, an endless inferno that had persisted for at least a thousand years.
Around those volcanoes, and beneath the Arch of Fire they formed, were the Archlands of Fire, where the powers of flame and cinders, ash and smoke, lava and inferno all ruled. Creatures of Fire could be found there, natives of the Elemental Planes come here to the Prime plane of mortals for vacations, a change in scenery, or just enjoying themselves. Probably no other place on the planet had such a concentration of creatures of Elemental Fire running about it enjoying themselves, and there were very, very few beings who would intrude on such a land to learn its secrets and steal away its treasures.
Fire Giants were one of those rare forces. Born on the Prime, they nevertheless had no problem existing in Elemental Fire, and were by nature extremely tough, durable, and able to deal with random fire Elementals without much difficulty, while the magical beasts and creatures of flame weren’t really capable of dealing with their intelligence, arms of burning steel, and armored selves.
Dozens of tribes of the various Fire Giant subraces were spread about the landscape, giants of whitening black Ash and deepest crimson Lava the most common, but here and there rarer smoldering-skin Coal and chain-clad Forge giants labored away at their own projects, being the best smiths among the giants of Flame. The black-skinned, fiery-maned Fire giants were still more numerous than all of the rest combined, however, much like their Frost giant cousins dominated the Jotuns of Ice and Snow.
They had been waiting for the Frost giants to arrive and signal the time to move out and forward, into the hellish storm that now surrounded the Arch of Fire.
Mortal weather driven by supernatural powers of cold slammed into the landscape of fire and was unable to budge it. However, the tremendous collisions of hot and cold air had created churning storms of wind, ice, and cinders blazing and blasting through the sky. Cascades of superheated rain, tornadoes lashing in every direction, burning hail and freezing ice dropped from the sky in scouring storms that were strongest on the peripheries of the Archlands and rendered it nigh-impossible to pass into or around them. Steam warred with fog, flash floods from dumped storm clouds incinerated by waves of heat raged boiling over the landscape, and even the Elementals and supernatural creatures of the Archlands sought cover in the border areas against the tumult of the Wolf Winter smashing into the Archlands.