It was some time before the fallen warrior woke again. His name was Ashyem and he bore no patronym.

He was an ally of the Warrior Queen Nsymdra from the far south, though of one thing his allies had been wrong: Ashyem was no tar-brained criminal from vulcan soil.

He lay in the dark for hours, floating in and out of conscious thought. What universe he existed in in between was the half-mad beliefs of a dying man.

It was pleasantly horrific cycle: abstract moments of bliss making up children's games with his brother, Crown Prince Jassan, or hiking to the mountain peaks with his father before he lost his leg ... and the next, the burn of fever, the night's cold bite, the head-swimming, stomach churning excruciation of being trapped inside this bruised and broken husk.

Now and again he would rouse only to wish it would be the last time, but his body had not given up yet. He couldn't understand it; he had no will to survive now that he'd finally tasted defeat. Stronger men than he had fallen in battle from fewer wounds, and towards the end, when Ashyem had fallen too, he had welcomed the silence of eternity. He passed out from blood loss without so much as entertaining any fool's hopes of lasting the night, and yet, something cruel bound him to his bones.

With little time to spare before daybreak, Somd Irdrinjall emerged from the treeline. Over the horizon the sky bled orange and the colours stung his eyes, yet the heartbeat was louder now and he couldn't resist its pull. He reached behind his head and pulled up the heavy fur hood of his cloak, obscuring most of his face and vision.

In a field of dismembered bodies, ash and smoking embers, finding the source of the heartbeat using sight would be no help. The sound would have to guide him, but he didn't have much time.

He avoided stepping over the remains of the fallen. It was disrespectful to enter their space, and so instead he weaved between their corpses, careful not to trail his cloak through blood. He moved quick as a spectre in parallel to the rising sun; its rays glinted off the warriors' shiny armour, bathing the whole field in embers that shifted with each step. There came the crunch of frost from under his boots now that the forest was no longer here to ward off the mountains' chill.

Through his fever and the numbness of his extremities, Ashyem barely felt the cold anymore. He hardly even felt the Somd's fingers press against his neck as he searched for a pulse, only dull pressure against the burning wound at his throat. The first indication of another presence besides his own was the dark shadow as the Somd knelt, blotting out the intensifying sunlight.

The stranger brushed the frost off Ashyem's face and he opened his eyes a fraction. Was it another delusion?

"You're not from around here, friend," the Somd muttered as he caught a glimpse of the warrior's unusual yellow eyes. "No man of vulcan soil and certainly no man of the forest."

Ashyem didn't understand the man's northern tongue, but the mildness in his tenor offered him comfort unlike the angry squabble between the Mosfellsk who'd dragged him into the pyre.

"I'm still alive," Ashyem said in his own language. "Alive, I think, but I'm hurt. I can't feel –"

"Save your strength," the Somd responded. The meaning in the warrior's words were lost on him too, though he hoped it hadn't been a threat. He knew not the name of his language either. To his ears it was disjunct and the man hit hard on the consonants.

"They call me Somd Irdrinjall," the Somd continued. "I'll help you, but only because an omen led me your way. Now, can you stand?" He gestured to Ashyem's legs. "Walk? Do you understand walk?"

Ashyem didn't know the word the Somd wanted him to, but he knew another. "Uuin es she, es Somd ke-ahl? Somd?"

"Yes, Somd Irdrinjall. Do you think you can get up?"

"Or neh sve ruun. Ne var, lea see ohn, es Somd ke-ahl uuin es she."

"Walk," the Somd sighed. For what reason had he heard the distant thrum of this man's heartbeat if he could do nothing to communicate with him? His wounds were already too severe, too inflamed and infected, and most likely the man was crippled.

Perhaps he was wrong and nature had drawn him here not to rescue him, but to free the man of his suffering. He deliberated it for a while, though normally would not have hesitated so long on taking his life if it hadn't already been for that mother goat.

When he killed her he should have left and saved himself from what followed – he knew that now.

He saw what remained of Ashyem's burnt right hand, thought better of touching it and grabbed his left instead. He placed the warrior's hand on his own shoulder and said, "I'm sorry." And again, firmer: "I'm sorry."

It took great strength to look away from the desperation in the warrior's eyes. It was the second time that night that nature had sent him to those in need and been faced with the task of execution instead. The first time had been a lesson to him, not an omen, and if the horror he'd faced after taking the goat's life had taught him anything, it was that not everything should be saved.

He peeked from beneath the hood of his cloak over at the glowing horizon and the skin on his chin began to crack.
He couldn't help the man with daylight so near, not without expending himself in the process.

"Don't go," Ashyem pleaded. He gripped the stranger's shoulder with his good hand in a final attempt to reach through to him. It was a cruel twist in his fate to now beg aid from a native after slaughtering as many as he could.

"Help. Please." He shook the cloaked man's shoulder. "I heard them speak of Somd. I heard a man say it!"

The urgency in Ashyem's grasp was enough to unhinge the Somd. The man beneath him was still strong, even half-dead and half-burned, and it was even more unnerving that he kept repeating his own name in whatever bastard tongue spilled from his bloodied lips.

The sun finally broke the horizon and painted the land with gold. The remaining frost on Ashyem's face hastily retreated as the light hit. Somd Irdrinjall's chest tightened in panic and in a hurry he tried to rip Ashyem's grip from his shoulder.

"Let go," he growled. "Let go!"

Ashyem held on, pleading still. He had to make the man understand him; make him understand that he'd survived for a reason and that he knew of Somd. He'd tell him anything he wanted to know about whatever the word meant, even if he had to be creative in ways to communicate it. He'd lie if he had to, even make something up, and then leave the stranger when he was well enough to walk – if he could ever walk. He'd find a way.

"Somd ke-ahl uuin es she," he murmured repeatedly into the fur of the stranger's cloak. "Uuin, lea see ohn... Somd ke-ahl..."

The Somd's palms began to sweat and he grew more frightened than he would've been had the two-headed foetus not spooked him already. He struggled against the warrior's relentless, desperate hold. He tried to block out his raspy words, the sound of his name emitting from the severed throat of a corpse; tried to forget the phantom pain when the warrior's hand had burnt, and the sight of the eerie black slits in the man's eyes, watching him.

It was all a nightmare.

It was all unnatural.

In a flash of black and silver the Somd drove his knife into the man's chest. Ashyem's eyes widened not from the bolt of agony that might've seared through his flesh, but from the suddenness of what had occured. His breastplate had been no match for the Somd's steel and it cut through his armour as if made of butter.