The charred pall of clouds overhead cast even the white snow into a sallow grey, snowflakes falling and swirling in the slight wind, although it didn’t feel like a storm. Vast valleys of white, broken now and then by protruding bits of rock or the occasional lone fir tree, separated the peaks, which seemed to carry on and on and on into oblivion. Barren. It was the only word that seemed fit to describe the widespread bleakness that stretched before us.
“I’m glad,” Enja said, hugging herself as we stopped to take in the view, “that I’m not here alone. I don’t think I could stand it.”
I nodded, although I wasn’t sure I felt the same. I imagined standing in the middle of the widest valley in the middle of the swirling snow, screaming my thoughts to the wind.
Siiva had continued without us, shuffling through the snow with his nose to the ground, so I moved onwards to follow him.
Distances had always been simple growing up: I knew how long it took to get through the village, or to get to my favourite caves through the forest. I knew exactly how many steps it took to get from my house to Sølvi’s – sixteen – and how many to get to our favourite tree outside the village – fifty-two. But out here in the mountains, where spaces were so immense that it left me feeling utterly minuscule, my mind began to wander with all manner of possibilities. Like here, where snow married with stone and sky, what sort of things would make such a deserted wasteland their home? Childhood stories came to life: beasts with glimmering eyes that roamed only in the coldest parts of the world, and ones with great wings that could take to the sky at will. Stories like that, of things we had never seen but that could exist somewhere out of sight, had kept me awake at night as a child, dreaming up all the possibilities of what things our small corner of the world might harbour.
Now and then, a sudden gust of wind would beat against us from one side, trying to tear us off our feet. We struggled onwards. I missed the sun, the blue sky, the feeling of openness when the sky was clear. Here, it was impossible to imagine that it ever saw the sun, the dismal surroundings steeped in a grey so solid that I wondered if even fresh sunlight could alter it.
“What do you suppose those are?” Enja asked. She stood still and pointed to the ground, where deep impressions broke up the snow.
They were a set of tracks, to all appearances, but not ones like we had seen before. They were certainly not wolf tracks, nor human, nor fox, nor anything else that we would expect to see. The wind had blown snow into them, making their shape difficult to read. Siiva sniffed them for a long moment, as if unsure himself what might have passed by here and left them behind. When he stood up straight again and put his nose to the wind, he seemed unconcerned, as though there was nothing near enough to cause him any alarm.
“It’s probably nothing,” I told her, moving past the footprints to continue on our way. It’s definitely something, my mind whispered. “But let’s keep an eye out anyway, yes?” My words brushed it off, but my vision flickered with images, possibilities of what might have left those prints behind, and it made me shudder.
We pressed on, the coldness growing so intense that, at times, the surface of the snow was frozen over and our feet had to break through a layer of ice. I didn’t like the crunching, splitting sound it gave off that could be carried away by the wind and to the ears of whatever creature had left those tracks, but there was no other way through. As always, I kept a close eye on Siiva, gauging his movements and actions and searching for any sign of alarm, but all seemed normal with him.
This place, these hills and valleys, they did not feel like a part of Skane. Not the Skane I knew, anyway. I thought of trees with rich green needles, rivers that rushed to get somewhere far away, smoke curling up to a clear blue sky. But when I looked around me, surrounded by a bone-white wilderness where life seemed entirely impossible, it felt like another world.
By evening, the clouds overhead miraculously began to dissipate, revealing bits of a dark blue sky. Our legs ached more than they had ever done so before, and when we found a small nook carved out of rock, we decided that it would have to do for a place of rest. We couldn’t walk through the night, as much as our lack of time made it desirable for us to do so, so we dropped our things in the rocky crevice and I hiked a short distance away to another lone fir tree to tear off any twigs, loose bark, or dried needles that could serve for a small fire. We’d been in the cold for so long that I wasn’t sure I would ever feel my hands again. The thought of a warm fire, even a brief one, gave me enough energy to carry on.
Exhaustion had swamped my mind. Tomorrow, I could think about how I’d seen no sign of the wolves, about how we had wandered out here with little to no plan, in search of a god that almost certainly only existed in songs and stories, and I could wonder whether the kind woman was still alive.
I managed to return to the hollow with an armful of various dried bits of tree, and after scooping out snow and clearing away a rocky surface, I soon had a small fire going. It danced and bent with the wind, but the heat it gave off, slowly soaking into my hands and returning them to life, was magical. We ate dried rabbit as we sat there, just enough to take the edge off our hunger, as the clouds continued to sweep away and reveal the brilliant stars. Both of our heads were tilted back to take in the view, so vivid and stark so far from a village. Here, atop the mountains and far from home, I could easily believe it was another night sky altogether, nothing like the one I’d grown up gazing at, and about which I’d heard so many stories. But that thought, that here, even the stars were unfamiliar, made me shiver.
The wind blew. The clouds ebbed away. The stars glittered ferociously. Their perfect beauty nearly brought tears to my eyes – or perhaps it was the thoughts of Sølvi I’d spent a good part of the day trying to stave off. I remembered his dream of coming to mountains, of seeing and exploring everything he could find and returning home with story after story. Stories he would tell our children, our friends; stories that would pass down through generation after generation until no one was quite certain where they had come from in the first place. Sølvi had wanted that. He had dreamed of it so often, and now I was here without him, for reasons neither of us could have ever foreseen.
I reached into the pocket of my cloak and wrapped my fingers around the bit of paper I’d rescued from my parents’ house. He was with me, in a way.
“I made it,” I whispered to the stars, recalling how we had wondered if they were the souls of those we loved watching over us. “If you are up there, Sølvi, I made it.” I had things to accomplish down here on earth, but if it was true, and Sølvi was up there watching over me now, then I suddenly wanted more than anything to join him. I miss you, I thought, because my chest heaved with emotion and I couldn’t speak it aloud. I want to swim in darkness with you and drown in the stars. I do not want to be alone down here. I do not want to be alone. Tears slipped from my eyes, but I could feel them starting to freeze, so I wiped them away.
Enja carried on staring at the sky, oblivious to my struggle only a few feet away.
I volunteered for the first watch. I wasn’t done admiring the stars overhead – more in number than I’d ever seen before – and I wanted to eke that last bit of fire I could out of the rapidly reducing pile of tree bits. All around us, dark rises and valleys ended abruptly at the stark night sky, lit only faintly by the array of stars set into the moonless heavens. It was all so grand, boundless flecks of hope and possibility that defied the night with an unapologetic spirit. That was what I wanted, I realized, burdened with thoughts of love and loss and things that would never be. I could defy the night, if I tried, square my shoulders and push away the dark thoughts that wriggled their way unbidden into my mind. It didn’t mean pushing away Sølvi, just the endless spiral of heartache that came with him.
Love is like a river, my mother once said. Steady. Sure.
But it wasn’t. To me, love was like the winter. Unpredictable. Frightening. Wild.
Exhilarating.
Love is waking up to sunshine and falling asleep in a blizzard. Love is the bone-deep crush of the cold when you think you might lose it. Love is never knowing what will come next, and the incessant, determined wind forever shrieking their name somewhere in the back of your mind. And lost love is the memories encased in ice, there for you to look at, but to never touch again.
I picked out one single star in the sky and didn’t look away. I imagined that was Sølvi, that the star had only blinked to life when he had released his final breath, his soul climbing high into the sky to its eternal resting place among the stars. “I love you,” I whispered to the star, “more than the snow loves the cold. More than the stars love the sky. More than anything.”
And somehow, as I stared at the distant light that flickered in the shivering cold, I felt better.
I touched the paper in my pocket again, remembering when he had given it to me the day before he died. I’d seen him jotting something down on paper from time to time, and he would always tuck it away out of sight when I got close. Then he gave it to me and told me to read it when I felt alone, and I wanted to before everything broke. Before Skane stole him away from me on one especially cold winter’s night. And after that, I could not bring myself to look at it. To read it. They would be the last words he ever spoke to me that weren’t already a memory. The last new words he could utter. I hadn’t been ready to rob myself of that gift over the past year, and I wasn’t ready tonight. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready.
I turned where I sat to check on Enja, wrapped tightly in her cloak with Siiva snuggled against her, sleeping soundly. All seemed peaceful and quiet, just us, alone, in the middle of nowhere, only the stars aware of our presence.
When I turned back to face the wilds around us, two glowing eyes peered out from beside a tall rock, fixed unflinchingly on me.