Famfrit's Jewel - Chapter 10
Honouring the Dead
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The snows had begun to melt. Streams and rivers flowed fast and clear with icy clean water. Dagnar smiled at the budding crocuses breaking through the last of the frozen earth. Soon the forest would bud, leaves would sprout from the trees, and life would return.
But not to Kol.
Kol, nothing but a smouldering ruin, would remain dead, the people with it, all of them except Dagnar the Last. He climbed Bracon Point, the three mighty fir trees a little brighter in tone, the worn away slab stones braided with recent grass growth. Winter had been short and harsh which meant a long mellow spring followed, the type Dagnar preferred. Jareel’s Outpost was close but each step chilled his mood, the grim truth of the task ahead alight in his mind. It had to be done, for he was the Last.
The forgotten Outpost stood upon its hill overlooking naught but trees. It remained how he had left it when all that remained was his lust for revenge. He sated that revenge in blood, fulfilling his duties with a finality that awed him. Once Marazoth lay dead at his feet a great weight lifted from his shoulders but he wasn’t done, not yet. He had gathered the shards of Famfrit’s Jewel and headed home to Kol, passing by Ankoron to visit Alaea. She had moved on, the physician told him. Dagnar didn’t believe it but acted as if he had, nothing good would have come from seeing her again anyway. He climbed the steep slope of the valley and stood before the door into Jareel’s Outpost. He reached out and pulled the door towards him, the old hinges creaked in the cold.
The snow had fallen thick through the holes in the roof, the ice mostly preserving the six bodies that lay inside, though rot had begun to set in now that spring had arrived. Maggots feasted on the eyes of one of the dead. It would take the better part of the day for Dagnar to move all the bodies back to Kol to be buried beside their kinsmen, his kinsmen.
The sky darkened and the night sounds of the greatwood bubbled up. The whistling, cawing, shrieking, and general hum that suffused the trees, life had returned. Dagnar set down his wife’s body. He had, like the others, wrapped Krina’s corpse in a shroud and set it near to where the shrine to Famfrit had stood. The village was a blanket of ash, black in parts and a slushy grey in others. The fire that destroyed Kol had spread through the trees nearby bringing hundreds down and then burnt itself out, or the snow had grown too thick. By then Dagnar had been on the hunt for Marazoth, back in the thick of winter.
The melting snow softened the earth and made digging graves a touch easier. He dug the first beside three unmarked cairns at the edge of what had been the village. Other graves lay further out, some up the hills, some nearer the river, each family picking a grove of the greatwood for their ancestors. That was all gone now. A few stones stood in odd places, odd only because the trees had burned down and the ancestor shrines along with them. Dagnar set the first body in the ground and covered it with the soggy dirt. He set a trio of stones on the grave and began on the next.
When it came to his wife and child’s grave he set the bodies one on the other, his son atop of Krina, and stood at the foot staring at the two shrouds, one large, one small. He leaned on the shovel handle unable to move or think. Words would have been hollow, meaningless without anyone else to hear them, but he spoke anyway. ‘You have been avenged, may you both know peace,’ Dagnar began shovelling dirt into the occupied grave. Each crunch of earth tore at his heart. Revenge had been sweet but he had not savoured it and it had been fleeting, with it gone he was left with an emptiness. Not of regret or sorrow but of fulfilment. He had mourned in his revenge, was mourning still and Dagnar suspected he would for the rest of his days.
He tossed the last shovel full of soil on the grave and knelt down to set six stones in sets of three on the dark earth. Scratched into one set of stones was Krina’s name and lineage going back four generations and a note from Dagnar, on the other stones were the words, ‘The son of Dagnar and Krina.’ He set his hand on the moist ground and said a prayer.
Dagnar rose and headed for what had been Famfrit’s shrine at the heart of Kol. The fire had destroyed the building but the stone altar and pews remained, black with ash and soot. He walked between the pews, sack of shards in hand, and knelt before the altar. He ran his hand along the blackened surface revealing the white stone beneath, his fingers coming away black. The string on the sack opened with a gentle pull and Dagnar set the shards of clear crystal on the altar one by one. Some of the shards were discoloured, a few with a purple haze, and another, the one he threw at the torrent of fire, with a harsh orange-red. Light no longer gleamed from the Jewel, though Dagnar did not know if that meant it was any less powerful.
Dagnar set the last piece of Famfrit’s Jewel on the altar and said a silent prayer to his god, a god who had came to him in those final moments against Marazoth in a simple yet profound way. Dagnar did not have the mind to unravel the why or how only that it had happened and aided him in fulfilling his duty.
With the burials complete, the Jewel returned, and his prayers said Dagnar rose to leave for there was nothing remaining for him at Kol. Marazoth had been right, in a way, he was free. Freer than he liked, freer than he had ever been, and that brought him greater mourning for he could not stay, not yet, perhaps he would return some years hence but not now. He set his sights to the east, on the trail of rumours he’d heard in Ankoron of people needing hunters. What needed hunting the rumours did not say.
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