Solo Balancing Risk and Reward

[Raif]

82nd of Fall, 512 AV

Snow fell from a gray sky to a dead wind, thick wet flakes clinging to the sagging boughs of evergreens and blanketing the pine needle floor. The air was filled with the empty silence of winter already, not a bird call to be heard or the crackling of foliage to indicate life on the ground. It made the cold all the more soulfully penetrating, and left its travelers alone with nothing to contend with but their thoughts. It could be a maddening experience for anyone, unless you had a driven purpose for being there.

Raif’s breath was slow and steady despite having found a set of prints in a foot-deep tract of snow, small wisps of heat trickling from his nose and dissipating into the deep hood of his wool-lined katinu. It had been bells since he’d found a trail worth his hike, most of the prints much smaller in stature and suggesting perhaps that a squirrel or rabbit had been through these parts in search of a buried meal. But these were by far the largest he’d seen in days, mounds of powder pushed to the side to allow its wider gait passage.

It would be a risk to follow them considering the Endal’s lack of training in tracking, but in his bold little mind, experience was always a good substitute when one was deprived of proper instruction. With a fearless look cast in the direction of where the prints seemed to head, Raif affirmed the decision in his own mind and set out towards the eastern hills. Perhaps if he was quick of pace, he could bag the animal before the day waned into night.

His bow had been drawn and strung before he’d set out in the morning, having shared a warm cup of tea over a crackling fire at one of the forward camps with two other scarlet-haired hunters from Wind Reach. They had offered him a spot to tag along within their party, but somehow Raif knew they would only slow his efforts down. Judging by their equipment they were more trappers than hunters, looking for a last catch of the season before the snows barricaded them within the natural stone walls of the colony. It seemed the Endal was not the only one who felt that Wind Reach’s stores were unnaturally low this season, a product no doubt of the chaos from the eruption in spring.

Mabiri‘s voice was but a ghostly whisper in the silence.

[Raif]

Nearly two seasons had passed since her death, and yet still the nightmares taunted him from the shadowy hells of his subconscious. Evenings had passed beyond count where he’d woken up panting with a cold sweat blanketing his entire body, hopeless to control what had been burned into his eyes by the fiery brand of Ivak’s iron himself. Raif could swear revenge and drown his sorrows in acts of lust and vice all he wished, but still the dream found him. Never had one man felt so powerless to stop anything his entire life.

Initially he’d wanted respite, a break from the torture of having to relive his sister’s death of being crushed under the weight of fallen stone. He’d begged in the solitude of his aerie late into the night even, praying to whatever deity would listen. But after awhile, when the gradual realization had crawled in that his prayers would go unanswered, the Endal began to accept it as a symbol of penitence, repayment for all the wrongs he’d crafted earlier in his life.

For most it would have been a clear path. Acceptance of misdeeds would have led to atonement through benevolent works that bettered the cradle of humanity. Forgiveness could cleanse the soul, and love could open the door to a life filled with meaning. The conscience steadily learned to separate the ties that held the condemned mind to its past, and somewhere down the road, peace and serenity were at long last found. Many would have faltered, but glory awaited the determined.

Raif pissed on all of it.

His knee was a hard one to bend. If anyone deserved its loyalty, it was Raif himself. And so rather than start down this path of self-righteous hogwash, the Endal chose to fill himself with all the pain and suffering he’d endured and turn it into white hot malice instead. He was the master of his own fate, and gods be damned if someone got in his way.

The snowfall was beginning to mask the trail he’d been following.

[Raif]

Raif had been following the trail for nearly an hour now, the leathered soles of his boots sinking into the same holes created by the beast he was stalking. It made traveling through the snow drifts much easier, and gave him some perspective on the creature’s movements. Occasionally he would stop to assess the prints he was following, hunkering down as the walls of white were steadily rising on each side from the snow that continued to fall. Having been so caught up in the hunt, Raif paid no mind to the darker clouds looming just over the horizon, a churning storm waiting to be unleashed to the valley the Endal found himself in. Hunting, however, came first.

A few sets in particular drew his attention the longest, discerning small clues that led him to believe he was hunting something large and potentially dangerous. Paws, not hooves, were stamped into the snow here and there, claw marks distinct above the rounded imprints of toes with an oblong heel. The distance between most of the tracks was short if not stunted all together, suggesting that the beast stopped often and had an ambling gait. At one of these conjectured stops, Raif noticed that the bark from a nearby pine had been peeled away from the trunk, starting from above his eye level and winding down to about his knee. There were no traceable lacerations or hints of sap to indicate the creature had stood up to scratch away the bark, which was perhaps his biggest clue of all.

Long had the Endal dreamed of hunting such large prey in these wilds, a true juggernaut of fat and muscle with teeth and claws that could rend flesh like a hot knife through butter. But only the bold and reckless ever challenged such creatures alone, and those that did were never heard from again. Raif, like all his predecessors, sought to change that.

His pace picked up once an a vague enough identification had been made, leaping through the snow while keeping a weathered eye out in front of him for any trace of movement. By this time he’d drawn an arrow from his quiver and notched it against the string, fingers itching to draw and fire should opportunity present itself. The stirring winds blew in his favor, but after awhile Raif was beginning to notice a steady decline in temperature mixed with a darkening sky.

It seemed Morwen had other plans for the Endal’s little hunt.

[Raif]

Winds initially faithful to the hunter’s plight soon churned with menace, the low howl of a faraway wolf stalking midst the branches whose needles trembled to its hollowed, icy notes. The tenebrous sky bore a macabre scowl, and extinguished the pale light of the overcast hour, day turning to nightmarish dusk and swallowing the land in shadow.

Raif had never felt so alone, snow beginning to fall in curtains around him as he reached with his rebellious eyes up to the peaks that dared to touch the sky. A sneer wrought by disgust peeled the corners of his chapped lips back, boldly cursing the force of nature amassing to thwart the work he‘d set out to accomplish. It felt so meager in his throat, a speck of dust raging against a furious storm. But it was not frustration which birthed this beast.

Fear, an emotion the Endal loathed more than anything in the world, was building in his chest despite the strength of his own will, an overwhelming sense of preservation urging him to turn back against the wall of misfortune. There would be other hunts, other game, other days if he listened to that voice. Respect nature, it told him, it does not wish to claim you. And it didn’t. Nature ran a course without volition.

Turning back would mean abandoning the hunt however, hours of tracking wasted with nothing to show for it but a fiery glare for anyone who dared to make eye contact with him. Pressing forward promised some end to his turmoil at least, and if the hunter's shrewdness served him any purpose, the beast was likely retreating to some stashed away home within the rock. If Raif could find the den, he could find shelter and food. It simply boiled down to which of them would be touched by Dira's kiss before the day was over.

[Raif]

Flakes of feather soft snow had turned to daggers of ice by now in the advancing winds, pelting the thick hide of the hunter’s katinu with extreme prejudice. The sound reminded him of pebbles striking thick sheets of ice just outside his aerie back home, a peaceful patter he would have welcomed in any other circumstance had it not been today.

No longer could chestnut eyes gaze ahead with the same vigilance that had possessed him before either, nose tipped towards the blotted earth as all one could see was a curtain of sheer white that stretched across his field of vision to the wool lining of a hood. Every step was becoming a small battle on two fronts: one with increasing soreness, the other the beginnings of frostbite.

For Raif, sore muscles were a common thing--something his mind had been trained to manage since the day he‘d learned to climb. Frostbite on the other hand, left a thin trace of worry etched across a face that so often bared little emotion to the world around him. If shelter was not provided soon, death was as certain as an Endal bedding a Dek against their desires tonight. The hunter found himself willing to trade places with either party if it meant a warm hearth to lay by, swaddled in thick furs pressed against his naked flesh. At least those two would be given a greater guarantee of living to see another day.

This fatalistic thought alone seemed to catch Raif off his guard when reality returned, halting in the snow drifts as the wind in all its misery took the opportunity to slip beneath his cowl and rip it violently from his scalp. Almost instantly the small daggers found their way onto his exposed bits of flesh, stinging a perfectly smooth olive canvas with a rosy blemish that had the Endal fighting back tears. With bow and arrow still braced in his left hand, Raif’s right fought to retrieve the hood, chancing a squinted glance up only to find that he was not alone there in the dense thicket of pine.

A mere twenty paces ahead, and treading slowly away from him through a wall of powder, was the quarry he’d hoped to rein in. Its lumbering gray frame was making a sincere effort to continue on a path towards what appeared to be a hazy gray shadow just out of definable sight against the curtain of snow. Whether it had noticed Raif or not was another matter entirely. It was possible, but unlikely, that the beast was more concerned with the storm at this point than a lone man trailing after it.

Then again, with his hood pulled away, it was easy enough to discern that the storm pouring down over them was tremendously powerful. Not only was the wind gusting directly in the Endal’s face, but its large blasting howl was consistent with the cyclonic roar of never-ending thunder. Low visibility could also have accounted for the beast’s ignorance, Raif no more than a white shadow across an already white background, each garment he possessed caked in icy runoff. All these things indicated to him instinctually that opportunity was his to command.

It was just that, no one had ever been known to take down a Neyka Bear all by themselves…