A Quiet Crossroads (Lake Baikal, Siberia)

[Sören]

As the story grew to its culmination, so too did the audience hanging on his words. His voice was low and musical as poetry, pulling at the tribal heart. Stories were the fabric of reality, and like most things that captured Sören’s interest, he mastered them well. For a while his simple ladder-backed chair was a throne, and his gaze travelled amongst those gathered like perhaps he spoke to them each alone. The dining area, slanted with warm bars of summer’s glow, receded to icy tundra and the chill of peril. He told of the sharp crack of ice as slabs of it hurled from the frozen lake; of the creature’s elegant neck and curving jaw glimpsed through the vicious storm, and how the snow erupted into sharp jets when the ice hit the ground. He recalled bitterly the burn of the acid in the socket of his eye, as a writhing tentacle had caught his face, and the way he’d packed snow into the wound. How the wind howled away his screams and sharpened his resolve.

Finally he spoke with solemnity of how the beast fell. Not the mindless victory of heroism for its own sake, but the honour of inevitable death: his, or the beast’s.

Then quiet descended.

A small smirk curled his lips, but did not stay. He knew they would be looking at his scars, and wondering what had really happened to cause them. The amulet was absent from the story as it was from his neck, and nor did he speak of the steps Declan had glimpsed down into the drained lake, nor what lay beyond. He did reach for something hidden beneath the collar of his shirt, though, pulling the thong entirely off his head to lay on the table for them to see. Bound into the criss-cross of leather was a scale, iridescent blue and green and amber, its curvature hard as adamantine and plucked free from beneath the creature’s own eye.