Skógafoss

[Tristan]

   

Home was empty but not barren; the air crisp but not cold. A tentative contentment washed Tristan like a cool river. Only in this place was he rooted to the earth itself; a connection blunted by the concrete and asphalt of Reykjavík. He drew a long and deep breath so that the air flooded clean through his panting lungs when a howl pierced the skies.

The sound saddened him. It pulled his shoulders low like ropes tugged at his wrists. Yet pale eyes searched the horizon for an answer. When none came, his heart was not too crushed. For he knew the emptiness of the Runner’s dream. He ran it often and hard. For many years. Never encountering another soul. Not even the gray woman of the Huldufólk appeared. 

Running so hard that the air stung like icicles stabbing on your cheeks; to run until the air was pushed from your chest and every breathe was glacial heavy; when the meat of your legs burn heavy as tree-trunks; as grass, branches and beast whip by in blurred images too fast to identify. He who runs like the wild wind howls. Wyldrunner.

Tristan pushed to stand, gaze fixed upon the distance. The Hidden One’s message resounded like a bell ringing on a clear winter’s morning.

“Stop running in the dream and you will be found. Look to far shores and you will find your true family. Return to the beginning and the end will finally arrive.”

“I stopped running and was found.” He said to himself as much as to Thorn Paw.

Brows furrowed low, eyes sharp upon the waters lapping at the base of the mountainside, but finally, he turned to the east instead.
“True family waits on far shores.” Her omens were true. Could he leave his home? Was it even possible? What would he do in the east? 

The last was an enigma, though. Return to the beginning for the end to arrive. What was the beginning? Was the end an inevitable fate?

“I think I know what I have to do,” he told Thorn Paw, but sadness fogged his voice. The basalt column seemed to protest, but the twisted one within was forever trapped. Grandfather could no longer proclaim Tristan's fate. He had to cut the bindings shackling his wrists to Iceland. Even if it meant gnawing through the ropes with bare teeth.

He couldn’t stay here forever.