"Glassdust Hulk" image by Franz Vohwinkel
During their travels in the north they saw a great many things. Good things, bad things, just things. They saw the lights in the sky, both the white ones that were points and the colorful ones like great waves in the sky. They saw people eating their pets because the ice was too thick to get any more fish, and the pets were eating food, and the pets could be food. The people might not have known how they were going to hunt or travel in the summer, or make it through the next winter without the spoils of the hunt or take things to market without the horses, but without the meat from those dogs or horses or other pet creatures more foreign to your ear, they wouldn't get to see how to make it through, and that wouldn't do. So they ate the pets.
They did worse things, but they did better things too. The wealthy among them, those who had the most food and also the most fighting power, gave more freely. They kept enough for themselves, but they gave fairly freely all the same. There were hordes of people traveling South, either hoping to get far enough South to hunt before they starved, or hoping to find help South, or hoping to steal from someone down South so they wouldn't starve. Some of them didn't know why they had gone yet, they were just going because it was colder here than it was there, and that meant things couldn't be as bad.
There were other things more foreign to you, things like beings of ice and spirits of winter and monsters large and small. They saw dogs whose fur was frozen, but the dogs did not care, and when they bit a man, he lost the arm to frostbite. There were bears, and the bears were constantly sweating, and the snow and ice the bears touched melted, even when it was freezing outside. The locals told tales about them, myths and ideas people from your home would not believe. When a man ate an organ of the bear, for a time he did not need to worry about the cold, and so it was very good for winter warfare or hunting, but the bears were very hard to kill, and they were not plentiful.
Some of the locals worshiped the winter spirits as angels, thought of them as the reason that enemies could not conquer the people, and were glad for them, sent them offerings, usually frozen rather than burnt. Most of them preferred to think of the winter spirits as devils. Really the winter spirits had nothing to do with bringing the winter, they simply appeared at the same time, and occasionally caused flurries when they were emotional or protective. They were solitary beings, and territorial, but they seldom hurt men, preferring to make men uncomfortable, which they were better at.
In addition to the spirits, great beings of ice persisted in the areas most cold, where year round there was no melting, and the bears dared not venture into these areas. Not even the tribe who had trained some bears could force the bears into that territory, the bears would buck and roar and the riders who fought them over it would find their bears angry, though not with them. The tribe and the bears being very close, the bears did not maul their riders, but they also would not be budged, and if persuasion for beasts of burden turned into attacks to drive the bears into this Northland, they would retaliate, halfheartedly, to try to keep their riders from attacking them, and prove their stubbornness on the issue. It was speculated that if a bear traveled into the region of the ice hulks, the bears would be killed, but the bears were typically brave in battle, or so the natives said, so an explanation of fear seemed unlikely to our explorers.
The explorers, curious as explorers are, traveled into the region, looking for what the locals called "huge death cold", which the explorers, I'm sure like you, rolled their eyes at, and moved forward with their survival magic and their guns and their picks and their explosives, and the cannon in an extra-dimensional bag. What kind of ice-being could withstand a cannon? It was silly. The natives were simply ill equipped to deal with their trouble.
They regretted their arrogance. The first two days in the new territory were uneventful. A bit worse weather, but nothing to raise suspicions. They saw very little, mostly snow drifts bigger or smaller than the last, and occasionally trees or very tall mountains or glaciers. Once they were three days in, the weather became very difficult to move in, and the men hunkered down, planning to wait the storm out -- they had started in the fall, moved through a passable region during the winter, and now it was spring - it would only get warmer. After four days of hunkering down in these conditions, both the explorers and the giant were getting terse, but the explorers did not really believe in corporeal beings powerful enough to control the weather, so they continued to hold out until the ice monster attacked.
When it came down to it, they were all inside the shelter when he ripped the top off. He had come up in the midst of a terrifying and loud wind, and when he ripped it off and turned his head their way, they assumed the sound was a roar. The men scrambled to remember and act on their battle plan. One man melted the ice beneath the hulk's foot, trapping it, which was a good move. Another three rushed for and loaded the cannon, clamping the end of the barrel to the mouth of the bag so the cannon would not shoot off into the space of the bag with recoil. They sent a spark of magic into the fuse, and the cannon shot, blasting the great thing's arm. Morale was running high, but the other arm came swinging, and though the men tried to move, and one jumped over it successfully, it sent four men flying, and it was not likely they would be back for the fight, if they came back at all.
The men near the leg were equally unlucky, and the beast raised its foot and stepped, just as a ball hit its chest. Two men were buried deep, and the men were disheartened, but they kept shooting, and another ball hit its large chest, while rifle shots peppered the face, and again, the wind grew louder, so that no one could claim that the wind and the beast's cries were not related. A piece of the chest fell off, and the beast's arm went to it, clearly in pain, though showing few other signs of intelligence. Its strange eyes stopped showing, and in front of it, a presence materialized that resembled the descriptions of the winter spirits. It rushed at them, and when it hit, the bag, the cannon within, and the three men loading it froze solid. A lone rifleman remained, and alone, he would not make it back, so instead of running, or hiding, or pretending to be dead, he raised his rifle, and fired not at the face, but at the gap in the chest, and pulled his trigger.
There is no more record of the rifleman's memory, but the natives say winter lasted three weeks longer that year, that the following winter was the coldest ever, and that a week after the explorers left on their fool's errand, a cold front came in that killed nearly a third of their people. No one has braved the wastes to retrieve the corpses, but it seems clear that there are some things technology does not solve, and that weather is one of them.
"Forces Beyond Our Control" Flash Fiction © Ben Clardy V
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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