The Tower

From the time he could lift a bow, there was no creature that could escape Ymir's aim. Hunting was his greatest, and perhaps only talent, often leaving his Hunt-Fellows feeling obsolete. Some wondered why they even formed hunting parties.

Despite that, Ymir was beloved by his countryside home. Although it was small for the kingdom of Gevalt — only a few generations old — the praise still swelled his chest with pride. He was their crown jewel.

Ymir's most profound compliment came one particularly harsh autumn, when food was scarce.

“Praise be Yulfrid!” A woman cried out as Ymir returned from the forest, the hunting party behind him carting back deer, quail, and rabbits. She rushed forward and pulled him into a tight hug, three small children following behind her. “You are truly a blessing to us all. Thank you… Thank you!”

“Please, Ingrid, I'm just happy to help," Ymir objected earnestly. Yet, his humility was drowned by the children's own mewls of gratitude.

“Haha! Don't be so modest, boy!” With a booming laugh, a rather large man clapped Ymir on the shoulder as Ingrid shuffled away with her children. His strong grip made Ymir stumble, yet it had all the warmth of a proud uncle.

“Ya d’serve the credit,” he continued. “At this rate, not even the mystical creatures in the Twisted Woods could outfox ya. Gods as my witness, I'd bet ya could even take down Svartrvargr!”

There it was.

The seed of hubris which quickly took root in Ymir's very being.

Svartrvargr was a name known by everyone in Gevalt. Ymir remembered hearing its legend as a child — a giant, ferocious beast that had terrorized the country for centuries. It was the reason all major cities existed behind sturdy walls, safe from the threat of violent attacks. No one unlucky enough to meet Svartrvargr ever lived to describe it, but every so often news would sweep across the land of another unprotected village or town being massacred overnight.

All of Gevalt lived in fear of Svartrvargr's terrible carnage.

It was for this very reason that Ymir couldn't chase the thought from his mind. No one had ever proven themselves capable of stopping Svartrvargr, not even the royal army! Yet Ymir stood upon a pedestal his countrymen crafted for him, offering him up to the task like a bastion of hope.

It was intoxicating.

Before long, Ymir began to truly believe that his talents placed him among the ranks of heroes. Surely it was his destiny to slay Svartrvargr. He was born to save Gevalt!

It was an obsession that existed within a vacuum, bouncing around Ymir's mind and growing louder. The villagers' encouragement only echoed his grandeur, enough that Ymir began to wish the beast really would attack them, eager to fulfill his destiny.

The Gods are always listening.

One night, Ymir was awoken by the sounds of screaming. Vigilance sprung him from his bed and into the darkness with only his bow and a fistful of arrows.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.

Ymir's beloved home had become a hellscape. Fires illuminated families as they fled from their ruined houses in horror. Carefully gathered sundries littered the village like waste as blood flowed through the streets.

At the helm of it all was a massive beast, blacker than the night that surrounded it, with eyes as red as the hottest coals. It resembled a great wolf, albeit one that was mutated into something ungodly. A convoluted monster.

Svartrvargr.

Ymir's heart thundered in his chest, ringing into his ears. The air in his lungs halted beside time as his mind struggled to process the reality before him. Revelation washed over the hunter in waves, clearer with every heartbeat pushing him forward like a marching drum.

This was his moment. As Svartrvargr’s burning gaze locked with his own, Ymir gripped his bow and readied an arrow. The beast responded with little more than disinterest, uttering the vicious snarl of a predator telling its prey to wait their turn.

“What are you doing, child?! Run!” Ingrid hesitated as she fled with her children. However, the talented boy she'd watched grow had become deaf to her pleas.

Ymir unleashed a small volley of arrows at Svartrvargr, but they were merely twigs against its fur. A nuisance at best.

Svartrvargr lashed his long, whip-like tail in response, sending heavy debris soaring towards Ymir. The impact knocked him off his feet, a smog of dirt clogging his lungs.

As it settled, Ymir desperately tried to get his bearings back. He was surrounded by complete chaos. The bodies of everyone he knew and loved littered the landscape, mutilated — Svartrvargr's half-finished meals.

Ingrid and her children were spared being eaten, instead a gruesome mess beneath the flung debris. The rough hands that once clapped Ymir's shoulders laid roasting in the spreading fires, chewed from their owner's body.

His heart wanted to break, but Ymir refused.

“You bastard!” Ymir screamed. “You should be facing me!"

Svartrvargr's ear twitched, shifting its attention from a newly shredded victim to the gnattish hunter. It was a small victory to finally be acknowledged, a victory that helped Ymir nock another arrow in his bow.

As Ymir aimed for Svartrvargr's eye, it uttered a demonic bark. In an instant its thick tail collided with the hunter’s chest. Several of his ribs cracked at once.

The impact turned Ymir’s vision into a blur. He was flying through the air, helpless against the immense velocity. Just as he started to lose himself, the flight was abruptly stopped by a sickening crack.

Ymir slid down a stone wall into a limp heap. His body numb from the blinding pain, he was unable to hear anything besides the blood rushing in his eardrums. He wanted to vomit, and his mouth tasted like blood.

Being so disoriented was remarkably sobering. The world around Ymir was both blurry and vivid, like a scene from a terrible nightmare that he couldn't wake from. This was all his fault, and all he did was make it worse. Crushed beneath his own powerlessness, nothing had ever made Ymir feel so insignificant…

He was a fool.

Like the harbinger of his folly, Svartrvargr approached Ymir with hunger. Despite himself, the hunter futilely tried to lift his bow in defense, but seeing the monstrous wolf up close robbed him of all the strength he had to react. All that remained was a petrifying fear.

Multiple rows of teeth like daggers bared at him with a tumultuous snarl, accompanied by the hot, putrid breath of a gluttonous predator. Its giant paws held claws as thick as tree branches, which curled into the soil like a fist clenched in anger. To Svartrvargr, Ymir was nothing more than a trembling rabbit caught in a snare.

As the beast opened its great maw, a haunting sense of irony washed over him. This was his destiny.

The lunging wolf.

A flash of red.

All at once, the world became an empty abyss.

• • •

Just as Ymir was about to let himself melt into the absence of everything, something turned on all of his senses.

Every nerve he possessed was screaming, and his ears rang with a din of high frequency static. Sulfur, iron, and tang filled his nose and drowned his tongue. Visions passed by faster than he could truly process them.

A flame that became a star, which fell from the sky with all the other stars in a shower — until the world flipped and the sky became the earth.

The streaks of the gravity-defying stars tangled together like thread… the fibers of flesh… gnarled, dead tree branches that grew like vines… or was it antler… or bone… It pulled him closer, shifting and knotting into a bizarre matrix.

A twisted smile.

Ymir suddenly gasped, like a breath of life, halting the sensations that threatened to break his mind. He was lying on the cold earth, staring up at the twinkling night sky, his body tingling like it was charged with energy. Deeply unnerved, his once empty mind flooded with questions.

Where was he? How did he get there? What happened to Svartrvargr and his burning home?

Sifting through the din of thoughts, Ymir tried to sit up. His body felt out of sync, like the flesh was slowly calibrating to his neural commands. It was a feeling so engrossing, he didn't even notice the figure sitting cross-legged beside him.

“Splendid! You've come ‘round already!”

Ymir jumped like a startled cat. Smiling over at him was a fair person in a black tunic, donning a crown of cobalt Nixie Blossoms upon their head. While oddly beautiful, Ymir was quite certain that despite their appearance, those thorny riverbank flowers were terribly poisonous to humans. But, considering the person's small stature, pointed ears, and fluorite colored eyes, they weren't human at all.

“A… an elf?” Ymir asked, bemused. While they weren't exactly rare to Gevalt, he couldn't remember ever seeing one near his countryside village before.

“Good, seems your eyes are working,” the elf responded, fiddling with one of the small green braids framing their face against otherwise obsidian hair — twisting it around their finger like a proud schoolchild.

“Now, can you move your arms and legs? Wiggle all your little toes? Does blinking hurt?”

Blinking was exactly what Ymir did several times before trying to speak.

“I— Sorry— What?” He felt like his brain was knotting. “I don't— Who are you? What happened to my village?”

The elf’s smile faltered to something a bit more solemn.

“It's gone,” they said. “Every single villager was mutilated and devoured by Svartrvargr…”

“No!” Ymir protested desperately, despite the vivid memories of carnage surfacing in his mind. “No, no, that can't… How… H-how can you know?!”

“I saw it for myself. It was like a scene from the End Times Oracle…” a hopeful light suddenly returned to the elf's alluring eyes, and their somber expression brightened. “How lucky I was to find you in the rubble! Please, call me Vél. Might I have the honor of knowing your name?”

“Honor…” Ymir tried to wipe away the sandy hair plastered against his forehead by blood and sweat, hands shaking with grief. Everything he held dear… Erased.

This was his fault.

“It's no honor to know Ymir the Fool. I merely survived by dumb luck while others suffered for my arrogance…”

Contrary to Ymir's self-disgust, Vél looked at him like he was some rare treasure.

“You know not your worth,” they mused. “You are special. Chosen. Prophesized!”

“Tch. Liar,” Ymir accused bitterly. In response, Vél smirked with mirth, producing an ornate wand from somewhere in their tunic. The elf then waved it in the air and from its tip came streams of light, dancing and twirling until they formed looping letters.

The Black Wolf’s demise follows a swallowed sun.

Only fangs of the fallen could taste its ruin as it tastes the world's.

Although Vél presented the prophecy as something grand, such things were for the scholars and arcanists of the city, not a peasant hunter like Ymir.

“Swallowed suns? Fallen?” Ymir shook his head. “You lot from the Twisted Woods don't make sense. How is any of that pointing to me?”

Vél rolled their eyes dismissively, unperturbed.

“Because, Ymir, you are fallen!” The elf flipped their wand around, dispelling the prophecy words with its fluorite-orbed butt. “A person who has nothing and is nothing, and a man who became that way thanks to the infernal hound plaguing us all. Is that easier for your simple, country boy brain to understand?”

The nerve of this elf… Ymir must have been making quite the grimace because after a moment, all Vél could do was chuckle at him.

“Look, you don't have to believe me. But you really are without a home now. What more could you lose from playing along?”

Something about the foxish look on Vél's face made Ymir want to punch it. Yet, it was a hard statement to argue against. More damning was the pride in hope's clothing spurring him forward.

With a heavy sigh, Ymir sealed his fate.

“Fine. I'll accept this… burden. But I haven't the slightest idea how to fight Svartrvargr, or even find it.”

Vél winked, chuckling. “Luckily, I'm here for that part.”

“You?”

“Precisely!” The elf eagerly sprung to their feet, offering a hand and helping Ymir off the ground. “I'm an arcanist, after all. I've been using dark sorcery to track Svartrvargr for quite some time. Scheming is my specialty, and no one in this realm knows more about the monster than I. Together, we'll finally end this!”

Ymir raised an eyebrow at the bold claim. It was naively ambitious at best, and a thinly veiled ticket to Hel at worst. Nevertheless, it was his only option forward, so he obliged Vél's lunacy.

• • •