Vaalea was picking firewood. She had piled old dry branches upon her forearm and now ripped a few fistfuls of last year’s dry hay from the ground for kindling. A lot had happened since the Spirit had spoken to her in her dream. She had found the ’tumbled hall being remade’ but not this Tyrgrim. Tall man with a beard and furs she had been told by Hrothulf, but such was the description of half the men she had encountered. She tried to remain patient. Surely this man the Spirit had spoken of would show up eventually.
She had learnt that the wooden plate she had found from the river’s bottom, said ’Bree’, and suddenly the sign the Spirits had sent her had started to make more sense. ’Bree’ with a nail sticking out of it, cutting what ever came on it’s way. That was surely Bree as she had started to experience it, a town of barbarians with strange customs, without any respect toward good life or good death. Bree was unwelcoming toward strangers like herself, and the friends she had found within the town walls were mostly foreigners as well.
Vaalea had tried to sell meat to the local tavern’s cook and he had been appalled, explaining her the concept of ’poaching’, blaming her of such. The Men of Bree believed that one could own land and then the animals upon this soil for some reason belonged to this ’owner’. Smug bastards, she had thought quietly inside her mind. All animals belong to Siimes, the Lord of Forest, or Béma as the Men of the other North called him, not to some silly and feeble Man of Bree. Eventually the cook had turned out to be as spineless as the rest of the Bree-men. He took back his words and asked her to hunt hare for him. Apparently they didn’t even respect their own laws, she thought.
The hard wind roared and the trees swayed in its mercy. She glanced up at the branches, which were dancing violently against the sky. A bird was desperately hanging in one of the branches, swept from one side to another. Some of the twigs got torn off by the wind’s great force and she imagined it was the Great Äijae’s hand, creating firewood. Vaalea smiled at the wind, the locks of her hair dancing in front of her face as fiercely as the branches of the trees did.
She started to stride toward her camp-site, halting suddenly as she sighted a figure of an enormous beast, standing next to her soon to be bonfire. She dropped the wood she had gathered and sprinted closer. It was the Great Wolf again, the High Servant of Siimes, she thought, standing tall and mighty, it’s size close to that of bear’s. It’s raven coloured fur was so silky that one could’ve thought this wolf was not affected by the physical realm, yet it’s eyes were baring the scars it’s flesh did not, appearing ancient and weary. The same Wolf had taken her furs and pendant away a week ago. She halted, only ten or twelve steps away from it. The beast had her bow clenched tightly between it’s fierce set of white fangs. The lengthy piece of wood cracked a little and she raised her palms in the air, showing that she was willing to negotiate. The beast’s cold and indifferent gaze told it was clearly not interested in any sort of negotiation. Instead it bolted away, taking her bow with him. Her eyes snapped wide and she quickly sprinted after the wolf, screaming ”No, no, no!”
The wolf was fast, but so was she. They run through the forest and through fields, eventually entering the Marshes. She stubbornly kept running after the wolf, even after the swamp ate her feet and her running started to resemble crawling. She screamed in her mother tongue ”What have I done wrong?! What do you want from me!? I found the tumbled hall!? Wait! Tell me what have I done wrong?!” But the wolf didn’t wait nor did it answer, and the distance between them only grew wider, for her legs weren’t as fast as her forefather’s and the wolf didn’t seem to be affected by the swamp as it leaped from one spot of solid land to another as if it would’ve known the ground by heart. After a very long and exhausting chase, she fell to her knees in the soft soil, sinking slowly deeper and deeper inside it. Her heart raced and she was panting, her weary, albeit wide eyes locked on the misty horizon into which the wolf had vanished with her bow. She yelled a furious wordless scream which echoed throughout the Marshes, before suddenly climbing back up on her feet and striding back toward the forest with a pace of a determinate strong woman who was about to challenge the will of gods.
