Everything that remained was noise. It wasn't a sound that entered through the ears; it was a violent spasm somewhere deep inside his head. It pulsed in the same rhythm as his fading breath. He felt each heartbeat like a dull thud against the inside of his skull. He was lying in the snow. He couldn't feel his legs, couldn't feel his face. The blood on the back of his neck had already stopped flowing. He no longer felt its gentle warmth. His breathing grew shallower. Unable to move, he watched as the snow melted under his breath and immediately turned to ice. That thin, transparent layer grew a little larger each time, as if the frost were trying to preserve him in time. The deafening pain in his head began to be replaced by the cold, and the noise slowly started to quiet under the weight of the relentless frost.
The only thing he could feel was the sense of touch in the fingers of his right hand. He was clutching something cold and heavy. A piece of metal. He didn't know what it was, or where it had come from in this white wasteland. But that metal was the only thing that wasn't soft and cold like the snow.
White. There was only white everywhere. No memories, no names. Only the realization that a moment ago there was fear, and now there is only snow. It was fine as dust, but heavy as lead as it began to settle in his eyelashes and throat. He tried one last time to strain his body and force it into some kind of movement. But all his remaining energy was definitively turning into a piece of ice, and he along with it. In the midst of this encroaching freezing silence, he heard a sound. The rhythmic creaking of snow vibrated through his entire head. Footsteps. And those footsteps were approaching.
When they stopped, out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a denser shadow that vaguely resembled a figure in that white storm. He tried to breathe, but his lungs immediately reacted with searing pain, as if he had swallowed a handful of broken glass. He coughed up a bit of blood, which looked like greasy, dark ink that immediately burned holes into the snowy blanket. The shadow grew larger. Someone was standing over him.
"He's still shaking," a voice said. It was harsh, female, but not unfriendly. It sounded like the cracking of ice somewhere in the distance—impersonal and raw. "He's just a child."
A second shadow stepped toward him. He felt someone roughly grab him by the collar and roll him onto his back. His eyes remained blinded by the endless white. He felt fine flakes of fresh snow falling on his eyelids. He never thought they could feel warm. He saw two tall, blurred figures in thick furs with hoods. And long black horns resembling charred tree roots. One figure approached him and pulled down her hood. It was a woman. With long white hair. It waved in the cold wind that stung his eyes. He squinted. He perceived only her silhouette, tall and upright.
"What are you holding?" she asked, reaching for his hand.
He growled. It was a faint, animalistic sound coming from deep within his throat. He didn't let go. His fingers turned white around the metal.
"Fine, keep it," she replied and stepped back from him. "It won't help you in hell anyway." She turned, casting a brief glance at the second figure, and left. Her shrinking form was quickly swallowed by the white mist of the approaching snowstorm. The second figure stepped toward him again. He picked him up as if he weighed nothing. He smelled the scent of tallow, old leather, and the frost radiating from the figure. Another wave of noise flooded his head, and the world went out.
He was woken by a popping sound. A regular, rhythmic sound that cut into the silence in his head like a knife. He felt a stinging pain in his fingertips as his blood tried to force its way through the stiff, frostbitten tissue. Stiff muscles slowly thawed in the intoxication of radiating heat. The familiar hum echoed in his head again.
He opened his eyes and immediately closed them because the light, though dim, was like a whip-crack to his unaccustomed pupils. When he dared to peek again, he saw a flame. A real, irregular orange fire imprisoned in a circle of smoothed river stones. He watched it with dull wonder. It was different, alive. The fire danced, crackled, and threw tiny sparks into the air that vanished into the gloom before they could hit the ground. Again and again. The dance of yellow-red tongues was intoxicating, and he found himself trying to find a rhythm in it.
The room was small. The air here smelled of smoke, fur, and something rich that reminded him of cooked meat, though he couldn't exactly place the scent. It was too primal, too real to evoke any similar memory in him.
He tried to sit up, but his body weighed a ton. Every muscle protested with a cramp, and the veins on his forearms burned as if someone had poured boiling tar under his skin.
"Stay down until your joints thaw," a voice said from by the fire. That voice belonged to the same woman who had found him in the snow.
He watched her through a screen of smoke. She sat on a low chair made of bent wood and bone, holding a battered metal bowl in her hands and drinking slowly from it. She wore heavy furs that bore traces of many repairs, and her white hair fell into her face in messy strands. She looked tired, but it was the kind of tiredness that cannot be solved by sleep. It was the expression of someone who had long ago stopped asking why they woke up in the morning.
"Where... am I?" he managed only in a soft whisper. His voice was hoarse, as if his throat were filled with sand.
"This is a pilgrim's shelter. You were lucky we were heading back this way," she replied without putting down the bowl. Her black horns dimly reflected the light of the flames. Through the fine strands of hair, he noticed pale ears, long and sensitive, that occasionally moved when the wind outside hit the door of the hut.
He instinctively checked his side with his hand. That piece of metal was there. Cold, silent, hidden under a blanket of thick, foul-smelling wool. Its surface was familiar to the touch, though he couldn't remember why it was important to him.
"What are you?" she asked finally, setting the bowl on the ground. She looked directly into his eyes, and for a moment he felt that the woman saw him to the very marrow of his bones. "Where did you come from? You look like a human. Your clothes are from the city and unsuitable for this region, but your eyes... they are different. And your hair is strange."
He reached for it. "I don't remember," he said honestly. It was a terrifying realization, but at that moment, it felt natural. Everything before that snow was just a black hole in which an occasional blurred face of a woman with red hair, fire, shouting, and white darkness flashed.
The woman wiped her mouth. "I am Alina. And you, boy... well, until you remember, you're just another wanderer that Skeldar didn't manage to finish chewing. We'll have to come up with a name for you."
The boy clutched the piece of metal under the blanket. "Why didn't you leave me there?" he asked, watching the shadows of the flames dance across her face.
Alina gave a short, dry laugh. There was no mockery in it, only a bitter acknowledgment of reality. "Because in the North, nothing goes to waste. Not even your life. If you survived whatever spat you out into that snow, maybe there's something in you worth saving."
"Eat," she said, handing him a fresh bowl of soup and standing up. "Tomorrow I'll take you to a man who has a weakness for lost causes. His name is Filopsis."
She gazed at him and felt that his hair looked a shade darker in the firelight. Then she stepped out through the door. The cold that rushed in during that brief moment struck the back of his neck. He felt the wound there, but it was no longer bloody. It was cleaned now, and under his fingers, he felt a strange, greasy substance smelling of nature.
It was soft and quiet. He sat there, watching the smoke rise toward the opening in the roof. He had no past. He had no name. The warm bowl in his hand thawed his sense of touch enough that the stinging pain finally receded. He felt exhaustion still pulling him down into the darkness, but this time it wasn't that painful spasm. In his head, he tried to fish out at least a flash of the past, but the only thing he remembered were his monotonous footsteps in the snow and the searing pain in his lungs from the freezing breath. He didn't know where he had walked from or for how long. He only knew that something had lured him to go further into the frost, even though a part of his head told him it wasn't a good idea.
When he woke up in the morning, the fire in the hearth was no longer burning. A thin wisp of smoke rose from it, curling slightly as it ascended. The morning sun penetrated through a small window, creating sharp shadows. Alina sat on the same chair, observing him without a word. She was dressed in furs, ready for the journey. When he opened his eyes, she said: "You have very strange hair. Pollux."
He sat up abruptly and, surprisingly, felt no pain. The temperature had long since dropped, and he saw a faint mist rising from her mouth with every breath. The sun illuminated her face, which seemed younger to him today.
"What did you say?" he croaked with a dry throat. Alina handed him a bowl of water and a piece of bread.
"We have to call you something, wanderer. You will be Pollux, like our brightest star. At least until you remember your true name or choose another. Eat and get dressed." She pointed to a bundle of furs placed next to the bed. "Echion spent the whole night sewing it. If it's too big, pretend it fits. I won't have to save you a second time." Her lips formed a smile and her eyes changed their glint. The boy remained silent, just watching her with wide, moist eyes as she left the dwelling.
"Pollux," he said to himself once the door closed. Loud enough to hear how it sounded in that cold echo.
The bread was harder but nourishing. You could tell it was a few days old, but it tasted good. The water was crisp and smelled of fresh snow. When he finished eating, his eyes fell on the furs by the bed. He took them in his hand. They were heavy and soft. They smelled of tallow, smoke, and something he didn't recognize. He clumsily slid into them and stepped out of the hut.
Outside, he was blinded by the sun reflecting off the ubiquitous snow. The glare was so intense for his unaccustomed eyes that he instinctively closed them. Fleeting fragments of a brief image were completed by his other senses. He smelled the faint scent of herbs from Alina's hair, carried to him by a gentle breeze. The smoke from the dying hearth and the remnants of mead from the mustache of a tall man. He heard the snow crunching completely differently under his heavy boots while he tightened a strap on a backpack that whistled unpleasantly in his ears. When he finally opened his eyes and lowered his left hand, which had instinctively formed a shield, both were staring at him intently. It seemed as if time had stopped for a moment.
"Ambara," Alina whispered into the morning breeze.
Echion walked up to Pollux. He looked intently into his eyes, but the amber light in them was already fading, turning into a deep azure.
"This must be tightened," he said while pulling the fasteners on Pollux's hastily sewn coat, "otherwise the first wind will blow it off you." He was a tall, sturdy man. His face was covered with a thick but short beard. His long, thick black hair was tucked behind black horns. They were different from Alina's. Twisted and pointed. They appeared more serious.
He gave him one last look, turned, and walked toward Alina, who was still looking at Pollux. On the way, he picked up a large axe that had been leaning against the porch of the pilgrim's shelter the whole time. It was made of dull Northern steel and dark wood. Everywhere except for the grip, it was covered with geometric ornaments and runes. The handle was wrapped in a thick, braided red ribbon. It looked simple, but to Pollux, it was a work of art. He knew it wasn't meant for mechanical labor but for something personal, and Pollux felt that Echion, that large man, was no novice at it. He wasn't afraid. He watched his efficient movements as he walked toward Alina.
"Don't stand there like an icicle. The days are getting shorter; we have a long journey ahead to the North, through those mountains on the horizon. If we want to cover any ground, we must move," he said without looking back.
As he passed Alina, he leaned toward her and whispered something quietly. Pollux paid no attention to it. His attention was now on that battered hut where he had been born for the second time yesterday, and which he intended to remember. Then he stepped into the snow, and his hair turned white once again.