Far away, deep in the frozen lowlands of the valley...
Silas, the newly appointed Head Scout, led his small Reconnaissance team through the snow-laden pine forest.
He still remembered the shock of the day Frodo had elevated him from a mere unblooded youth to a leader of the tribe’s most vital unit.
While the oldeق hunters had been reluctant to trust a teenager with the perimeter, Silas had seen the brilliance of Frodo’s vision. He had accepted the task immediately.
After spending a week setting up the tension-line telegraph along the mountain paths, Silas, Orin, and Jax had embarked on their first deep-range mission.
They were tracking the retreating path of Kael and the Blood-Walkers.
After two days of travel, avoiding the open ice and sticking to the shadows of the canopy, they finally found it.
Silas established his hidden observation post on a high, rocky overlook. Down below, nestled in a natural depression protected from the wind, lay the primary camp of the Red Clay tribe.
But as Silas and his scouts peered through the brush, they felt as though they had walked into a different world.
Kael had forced his people to construct a massive palisade. Hundreds of sharpened pine trunks had been driven into the permafrost, tied together with vines and bone.
It was a fortified settlement, heavily guarded, vastly outclassing the simple alcoves of Silas’s home.
"Look at their furs," Orin whispered, his eyes wide.
Silas nodded grimly.
Mixed among the typical Blood-Walkers were figures dressed in strange, incredibly thick pelts.
The architecture of the camp was peculiar, featuring a mix of typical hide-tents and strange, semi-subterranean earth lodges that Silas had only heard of in the oldest myths of the elders.
He had never seen a camp with so many different clans gathered in one place. It made him suspect that Kael was not just a tribal chief, but a warlord conquering and assimilating weaker nomadic groups.
His subordinates, Orin and Jax, moved through the brush with expressions of awe on their faces.
Seeing their fear, Silas quickly hardened his own expression. He grabbed Jax by the shoulder, squeezing a stern warning into the younger boy to maintain silence before their fear got them killed.
Silas observed the center of the camp, where Kael’s elite warriors lounged by bonfires.
They were being served and catered to by dozens of starving captives who flattered them at every step, bowing low and offering the best cuts of roasted meat.
"By the spirits..." Jax gasped.
"What?" Silas hissed in a low voice.
He looked at Jax, only to see the swift runner gobsmacked, unable to form a coherent word.
"What are you doing? Do you want to get us all skinn—"
Just as Silas was about to reprimand his subordinate, he followed the direction Jax’s trembling finger was pointing.
Silas’s voice trailed off. He was witnessing a scene that defied everything he knew about the world...
But this was the first time Silas had ever seen a creature like the one dragging a massive timber log through the mud below.
It was a man, but not a man...
The figure had an incredibly thick, sloping brow ridge, a massive, barrel-shaped chest, and short, impossibly thick limbs.
It was a Neanderthal... a breed of the old world, a separate species of hominid that had been slowly dying out in the wastelands for millennia.
Although the Neanderthal looked starved and beaten, the sheer density of its lean muscle couldn’t be hidden from Silas’s sharp gaze, even with the ribs protruding through its filthy, matted hair.
It was broader and thicker than any Homo sapiens Silas had ever encountered...
The malnourished giant, who appeared as though he hadn’t eaten a full meal in weeks, was being treated like a beast of burden.
A Blood-Walker warrior with a bone whip was striking the Neanderthal’s broad back, forcing the hulking captive to pull a heavy sled loaded with boulders toward a new defensive wall.
Silas quickly regained his composure, suppressing the dread in his stomach.
He signaled his scouts to maintain their focus. After thoroughly inspecting the layout of the palisade and memorizing the patrol routes, Silas signaled the retreat.
They needed to get back to the mountain and warn Frodo immediately.
***
Inside the Palisades of the Red Clay Camp...
Korg worked as a bone-breaker in the deepest, filthiest pits of Kael’s camp. He used to be a proud, free hunter of the River Clan, living miles to the south where the fish were plentiful.
Unfortunately, Kael’s war band had swept through their valley two winters ago, slaughtering the men who resisted and enslaving the rest.
Korg’s young daughter, Elin, had recently fallen ill with the ’shivering sickness.’
The brutal labor quotas imposed by Kael’s overseers left Korg with no extra scraps of fat or meat to trade to the camp’s healers.
With no other option, Korg had offered to take on the most dangerous, back-breaking shifts in the camp just to earn an extra handful of dried berries.
He managed to trade the berries for a medicinal moss to treat his daughter, but perhaps the spirits were cursing him.
His world had collapsed when he learned the moss only alleviated the fever temporarily; the rattling cough in Elin’s chest remained.
Devastated by the news, he realized she wasn’t fully cured.
She was the only family he had left. His wife had died during the Blood-Walkers’ initial raid, struck down by a stray spear.
He had done everything he could for his daughter, but the frozen world seemed to test him.
Accepting his fate, Korg endured the brutal labor of the bone-pits without giving up hope.
He knew the mortality rate was incredibly high but he pushed through the agony, driven solely by the image of his daughter’s pale face. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Fortunately, the mountain spirits had spared him thus far. He hadn’t broken a bone or caught an infection...
Drenched in sweat despite the freezing temperature, Korg wiped his filthy brow with the back of his bruised arm after dropping an elk carcass onto the refuse pile.
Work had been especially tough in recent days, as Kael was stockpiling resources for an upcoming campaign.
While Korg was stacking the frozen firewood near Kael’s personal guarded earth-lodge, he accidentally tripped over a loose fur tarp.
As the mammoth hide slipped aside, Korg’s breath hitched in his throat.
Hidden beneath the tarp was a cache of strange, shiny stones.
But they weren’t stones... They had been cold-hammered into the shapes of deadly axes. They reflected the firelight with a greenish-brown hue.
Copper.
Korg had only ever heard rumors of the southern tribes pulling the strange ’bleeding rocks’ from the earth, rocks that didn’t chip or shatter like flint, but bent and held an edge that could cleave a man in half. Kael had somehow acquired an arsenal of them.
Shocked and terrified, Korg quickly kicked the fur tarp back over the weapons and continued stacking wood as if nothing had happened.
He knew that possessing knowledge of Kael’s secret armory would mean a brutal execution.
Today was the day the rations were distributed.
Korg’s usual weekly allowance was three strips of dried venison and a handful of fat.
Usually, one strip was barely enough to keep a man standing. But Korg had been severely starving himself.
By secretly eating the discarded, marrow-less bones from the refuse pile, he had managed to save nearly twenty strips of dried meat over the past few months.
He had hidden them meticulously beneath a loose rock in his sleeping pit. He only needed a few more strips. With thirty strips of high-quality meat, he could bribe one of the perimeter guards to look the other way, allowing him and his daughter to escape into the night.
"It will all be worth it," Korg muttered to himself, looking at his bleeding hands and frostbitten toes, thinking of Elin shivering in the dark.
The horn sounded, echoing across the palisade. Korg limped toward the center of the camp, standing in the long line of captives to collect his weekly ration.
As the slaves waited, their eyes fixed on the baskets of meat, the fat overseer stepped up onto a large boulder.
"Listen closely, you filth," the overseer stated. "Because of the losses our vanguard suffered at the mountain pass a few days ago, Kael has ordered all resources redirected to the elite warriors. They need their strength for the coming slaughter."
The overseer crossed his arms.
"Hence, starting today, the slave rations are cut in half. You will receive one strip of meat, and no fat."
Korg stood frozen in the snow.
Without that fat, his daughter wouldn’t survive the week...