#i was thinking of adding something similar to antlers to hold her ponytail

[parokka]

ive decided to start posting stuff more often here since i realized no one knows what's going on in the au outside the discord

have a wip of a redraw of one of my first posts with a bunch of concept art im gonna be updating the designs and just trying to draw the stuff way better because the old art was very rushed and yucky

[azvolrien]

A Long Walk in Winter - Part One

We established in Fifteen Years at Dun Ardech that Asta, despite very much not being a huntress herself, accompanies Roan on her hunting trips up into the hills, and saw a brief snippet of one of their expeditions.

This is the story of the first.

---

           “Hmph,” said Asta, frowning at her book – a historical adventure set during the Raiding Period, following a band of seafaring warriors sworn to the King of Bjarnafjord. “I do not care for that simile.”

           Roan gave a querying grunt without looking up from the map she was studying.

           “Well – one character has just told another one off for being naïve. Except that he’s said his – the other character’s – actions are ‘like going up to a berserker and asking for a hug’.”

           Roan looked up at that. “I give great hugs,” she said with feigned hurt.

           “You give wonderful hugs,” Asta assured her. “Are we all set for the hunting trip?”

           “More or less,” said Roan. “Everything we need is packed and ready to load onto Pardus – we can go soon.” She shuffled further along the couch and laid the map on the cushions between them. “This is us, out here on the headland,” she said, tapping the point she meant with a fingertip. Dun Ardech had not been marked when the map was printed, but Roan had added a little triangle to indicate the broch. “Where I’d usually go in winter is up here, just below the bealach-”

           “‘B’yallack’?” Asta approximated.

           “The, the… Not exactly a pass, because it flattens out at the top instead of going back down, but this… saddle, I suppose, in the mountains between Loch Gorm and Loch Dubh. It’s about two days’ walk from here, and it’s often a good spot to bag some ptarmigan, just above the treeline in Glen Coll. However, since we’ll have Pardus with us…” She paused and glanced at Asta, raising her eyebrows.

           Asta nodded, answering the unspoken question. “Yes, I still want to come with you.”

           Roan grinned and went on. “Since we’ll have Pardus, we’ll be able to move faster and carry more than I could by myself, so I thought we can still travel up through Glen Coll – it’s a beautiful glen, even in winter, and I want you to see it even if we don’t hunt there – but instead of stopping there for more than one night, we can carry on up over the bealach to the high plateau. It’ll be cold, cold and very windy – I’ll be wearing sleeves, which should give you some idea – but if you’re up for it, there’s a good spot for a camp above this lochan here. A sort of… cave? We – Granda and I – used to set up there when we went hunting in the highlands.”

           Asta nodded thoughtfully. “What would we be looking for up there?”

           “There’s a few possibilities. More ptarmigan, though they’ll be harder to spot in the open snowfields than they would be down in the glen – Glen Coll is quite sheltered, so even in the dead of winter it doesn’t get as much snow as you might think. Hares, foxes – red foxes and white foxes, they both live up there. Not elk or aurochs – they prefer to stick to the forests, and I wouldn’t risk tangling with them anyway. Sometimes pheasants. Reindeer; they graze on the plateau at this time of year. Thousands of them, so even if we don’t kill one we’ll almost definitely see them.”

           “I’ve never seen a reindeer,” mused Asta. “Not in person. Kiraan gets too hot in summer for them, so the menagerie there didn’t keep any.”

           “Well, this’ll be your chance, then.” Roan paused. “There is one thing I’d like to do before we head off.”

           “Oh?”

           Roan bit her lip, flexing her fingers. Such a clear nervous tic looked so odd on her that Asta stared. “Will you let me braid your hair?”

           Asta stared a little harder. “You want to braid my hair?”

           “Nothing too fancy! Just something to keep it under better control in the wind.”

           Asta smiled quietly. Roan had never exactly admitted it, but nor had she made any particular attempt to hide that Asta’s long, sleek black hair had a similar effect on her that Roan’s arms did on Asta. “You know, if you just want to touch my hair, I think we’re at a point in our relationship where you don’t have to come up with an excuse for it.”

           “I don’t just want to touch your hair,” said Roan. “But if you leave it loose or in a ponytail, it’ll get all tangled in the wind and take ages to brush out.” She caught the end of her own braid and waved it in Asta’s face. “Speaking from experience.”

           “Mm, I see your point. Well, all right, then. Right now?”

           Roan gestured towards the stairs. “No time like the present.”

           Asta followed her up to their bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed, untying the strip of cloth that bound her ponytail at the nape of her neck. Roan fished a comb carved from a single piece of polished antler out of the bedside cabinet before she knelt behind her on the mattress and set to work. It was rather soothing; Roan was painstakingly gentle as she combed out Asta’s hair, carefully teasing out any small knots without tugging, and Asta found her eyes fluttering half-closed in relaxation by the time Roan separated her hair into three tails, wove them into a single long braid, and tied off the end with the same cloth Asta had used for her ponytail.

           “There,” she said, wrapping both arms around Asta and hugging her back against her chest. “How does that feel? Not too tight on your scalp?”

           Asta shook her head, testing how the braid moved rather than in answer. “No, that feels good – thank you. How in the world do you manage to do this for yourself, behind your own back?”

           Roan grinned and kissed the back of Asta’s head. “Lots of practice.” She released her and stood up, then crossed the room to kneel beside the wooden kist against the wall. “One more thing before we set off,” she said, rummaging inside the kist. Asta came to stand beside her, leaning against the wall, and Roan straightened up with a bundle of cloth and fur in her arms. She held it up and gave it a shake; it was a long cloak made from dense, tightly-woven wool, patterned in a tartan of dark, muted blues and greens and with a heavy mantle of thick fur brindled white, grey and brown. Nodding to herself, she laid it around Asta’s shoulders and fastened it with a pewter brooch shaped like an otter. “It was Granda’s,” she explained as Asta, a little wide-eyed, freed one hand from inside the cloak to brush her fingers over the fur. “He was even taller than I am, so it’s a bit big on you,” indeed, parts of the hem brushed the floor, “but it’ll keep you warm.”

           “Thank you,” said Asta again, more quietly and less casually. She stood up on her toes to kiss the corner of Roan’s mouth; Roan turned her head to properly meet her lips instead. Asta drew back after a moment and gently took hold of Roan’s forearms. “Come on, then,” she said, smiling. “We’d better get on our way before the light goes.”

           Getting both their supplies and themselves onto Pardus’s back was quite the exercise in organisation, but they managed it eventually with Asta at the front, Roan behind her holding on around her waist, and the saddlebags and the rest of their kit securely tied across Pardus’s rump behind the cantle. So laden, the construct was a little slower than usual, but it could still move far faster than they could have without it and they made it more than halfway up the sheltered valley of Glen Coll before the light faded and they had to pitch their tent.

           Unusually, Asta was the first to wake the next morning when a bizarre sound stirred her. She didn’t sit up – Roan had flung one arm and about half her torso over her in her sleep, pinning her on her back quite effectively – but lay still and silent, listening as the deep clicking, rasping noise moved slowly through the trees outside the tent.

           “Roan?” she whispered to no response. The sun hadn’t quite risen outside, and the light shining through the tent canvas was a pale, watery bluish-grey. “Roan.”

           “Hrmrrm?”

           “What’s that sound?”

           Roan yawned, arched her back, and sat up, freeing Asta to do the same. She cocked her head, listening, and grinned. “It’s a capercaillie. Funny, you don’t usually hear them making that sound at this time of year – it’s a sort of territorial courting song. They usually do it in spring.”

           Asta silently ran through all the animals she knew before admitting defeat. “And a capercaillie is…?”

           “A kind of big grouse. Anyway – breakfast, then we can head up onto the plateau.”

           Breakfast was a bowl each of porridge and dried fish, before they loaded everything onto Pardus’s back once again and carried on up the path through Glen Coll, itself not much more than a narrow deer-track of level ground with the hillside sloping steeply upwards on one side and down on the other. As Roan had said, there was little snow beneath the trees; the land itself kept away the worst of the weather, while the high, dark green canopy of the tall, straight pines held off most of the rest, leaving the glen calm and silent but for the occasional cry of a bird. The cold of the winter hills still seeped in, however, and the moss and bracken beneath Pardus’s paws crunched with a thick layer of frost. Once on a trail, Pardus could follow it without further direction, and Asta took the opportunity to relax a little and enjoy the scenery, settling comfortably against Roan at her back.

           “When was the first time your grandfather took you hunting?” she asked as Pardus stepped carefully over a spot where the track was falling away in a miniature landslip.

           “I think I must have been a baby,” said Roan. “Wee enough for him to carry in a sling on his back. The first time that I remember, I was seven – old enough to keep up with him on foot, mostly, and to understand when he needed me to do something.”

           “You don’t remember any trips from before then?”

           Roan shrugged. “There weren’t any to remember. There was no one he trusted enough to leave me with for more than an hour or two, so he stayed near the cottage in those years, relying on traps and fishing instead.”

           “It seems such a strange way to grow up to me,” said Asta. “You were out here in the wild – out on the edge of the world, you once said – with just you and your grandfather, never seeing another person except for when you went to the market. Learning to hunt and to fight. Meanwhile I was a thousand miles away in the Imperial City with millions of people around me, not even seeing a horizon without buildings on it until I was twelve and my parents took me out for a holiday in the country.”

           Roan shuddered at the thought. “Millions… Gods. Duncraig was bad enough, and I don’t think there are even a hundred thousand there.”

           “Oh, less than eighty thousand at the last census,” said Asta. “I had to look it up once, back in Lady MacArra’s office. Can’t remember why,” she added, shaking her head. “Knowing how much you hate crowds, I’m just impressed you stayed long enough to finish university. Which tattoo did you get to commemorate that?”

           “The adder on my left forearm.”

           “Symbolic of your patience?” teased Asta.

           Roan chuckled. “Might as well have been!”

           They both ducked as Pardus passed beneath a fallen tree, its trunk wedged against another to leave it lying at an angle. Off to the right, its roots reached up towards the sky where they had torn from the ground. Something had clawed at the bark recently, leaving deep scratches that still oozed sticky reddish-gold sap.

           Asta reined in Pardus for a moment and held up one hand to gauge the size of the claw-marks. “There aren’t… bears out here, are there?”

           “Not often,” said Roan as Asta nudged Pardus back into a walk. “They usually stay up in the Dragon’s Teeth, or in the really huge, deep forests up north past Selwick.” Asta made a small, worried humming sound. “What’s this?” said Roan, smiling. “And here I thought the Kiraani loved bears.”

           “Just because they’re our national symbol doesn’t mean I want to meet one!”

           Roan gave her a reassuring little squeeze around her waist. “Once we’re out on the plateau, it’s open enough to see any bears coming from a long way off,” she promised. “So long as you don’t surprise them, they’re more likely to run than attack. Same goes for wolves, really – and there are a few of them up here. They usually stay away from humans, but we might hear them now and then.”

           “I’m starting to think I wasn’t making an informed decision when I asked to come up here with you…”

           “Do you want to turn back?” asked Roan, no longer teasing.

           Asta squared her shoulders and sat up straight, looking determinedly ahead. “No,” she said firmly. “Whatever happens… We’ll deal with it.”

           Roan leant forwards in the saddle to hug Asta more closely against her. “Aye, we will.” Asta lifted one hand to brush against her cheek, and she sat up again to gaze along the trail. The light grew steadily brighter as the trees became sparser. “We’re almost out of the glen.”

           Pardus finally emerged from the shadow of the last ancient pine and reached the top of the trail. Asta shaded her eyes, squinting into the sudden light, until they adjusted enough for her to look out over the open, treeless plateau. It was not the flat plain that the word usually suggested to her; level only in comparison to the hill they had just climbed, it was instead a rolling landscape of rounded summits and shallower valleys incised by narrow, rushing streams from tiny springs among the rock and stronger rivers of cloudy meltwater from the high mountains far to the northeast. Here and there the occasional rocky crag jutted up towards the sky, having somehow stood against the vanished glaciers that had scoured the hills smooth. The snow that had spared Glen Coll had fallen freely out on the plateau, coating everything in a blanket of white that only the odd boulder or tough little shrub broke through beneath the biggest, clearest, coldest blue sky Asta had ever seen.

           “Great Siraki,” she whispered.

           “I don’t think she had much to do with it,” said Roan with a hint of a laugh in her voice.

           Asta gave herself a shake and took a steadying breath, unbuttoning the earflaps of her fox-fur hat. “Where to next, pathfinder?” she asked, re-securing them beneath her chin.

           “We’ll get everything set up at the camp before we go out looking for prey,” said Roan. “The path’s not all that clear with this snow, but we won’t go far wrong if we follow the cairns.”

           “Cairns? I don’t see any.”

           Roan leant in again so her chin was touching Asta’s shoulder and her cheekbone brushed against her hat. “How about now?” she asked, pointing.

           Asta followed the line of her finger with her eyes. “Oh! Yes, I see it now.” What she had taken for a natural outcrop of rock was, once Roan had pointed it out, recognisable as a carefully-stacked column of flat stones, about Roan’s height and covered with moss, lichen and snow. Asta nodded to herself and tugged on the reins, guiding Pardus over to the cairn and then along a shallow furrow in the snow to the next. From cairn to cairn they made their way across the plateau tundra, huddling close together against the wind until, a couple of hours later, the ground suddenly dropped away in front of them, first in a cliff twice Roan’s height and then in a gentler slope down towards a large pond fed by a little waterfall tumbling over the cliff away to their right.

           The pond had not yet frozen completely solid, but a skin of ice forming on the surface hinted that it would before long. The ground on the other side of the pond rose back up in another sheer cliff, this one coated thickly with more moss. The hollow around the pond provided some shelter from the biting wind once Pardus had carefully picked its way down a steep path at one end of the cliff. Although water and ice may have first carved the hollow from the plateau, it was clear from below that they had not done so completely without help. What had looked like a smooth slope from above had, long ago, been deliberately shaped into rough terraces, and a row of standing stones – some fallen, some broken, and all very worn – formed a semi-circle near its base, just above the pond.

           “Here we are,” said Roan. She climbed down from the saddle and crunched through the snow to a barely-visible dip in the slope between the central pair of standing stones. They were taller than the rest, dwarfing Roan while the others barely reached her shoulders, and despite years of weathering there was still a hint of carved decoration beneath their coating of lichen.

           “Are you sure?” said Asta, dismounting to join her.

           “Och, aye.” Roan gestured for Asta to stand back before she jabbed the head of her spear deep into the snow and wrenched it backwards. “Remind me to bring a shovel the next time we’re up here in winter, eh?” Even without one, it didn’t take her long to clear away enough snow to reveal an opening in the hillside: a stone-framed doorway with a heavy, solid lintel, tall enough that Roan only had to stoop a little to get in and that Asta could stand up straight.

           “This is where you and your grandfather camped?” asked Asta as she followed Roan down the stone passage beyond the doorway. Roan had conjured a witchlight to see where she was putting her feet, but the gently-rising passage was narrow enough that she blocked most of the light from it and Asta could see little but Roan’s back. “The ‘cave’ you spoke about?”

           “Aye, this is it.”

           Asta ran one hand over the wall. The stone beneath her fingers was mostly smooth, but had been decorated here and there with incised carvings like Roan’s tattoos and simpler patterns of spirals and concentric circles.

           “I don’t think this is a cave, Roan,” she said as they emerged into a larger chamber, tall enough that Roan couldn’t even touch the ceiling and with plenty of floor space for all their supplies and a campfire. Roughly half of the interior walls – behind them and to either side – were made of drystone masonry like the cairns, but the other half and the floor had been carved into the solid bedrock of the hill. Smaller chambers led off the main one to either side, little more than cubbyholes. It wasn’t exactly warm, but it kept the wind off and the stone underfoot was completely dry. “I think it’s a tomb.”

           “Granda thought it might have been, once,” admitted Roan as she checked that nothing had made a nest in the side-chambers. “But whoever was buried here, there’s nothing left of them – not a single bone. Could be their people took their remains with them when they abandoned this place. Or could be there was never anyone here to begin with.” She waved the hovering witchlight over to float by the wall instead of above her shoulder and fed a little more power into it, casting a warm gold light into every corner of the chamber. “Does it bother you?” she asked quietly.

           Asta studied the far wall in silence. With the illumination of the witchlight, it was far easier to see that the living rock was almost completely covered in carvings, from more concentric circles and tightly-wound spirals, through symbols like the crescents, discs and broken arrows that Roan had inked into her skin, to clear outlines of animals decorated with strange flowing markings as if they had tattoos of their own. At one corner, a pack of wolves pursued a red stag; at the other, a bear reared on its hind legs above a river full of salmon. A dragon soared above it all, its wings outstretched and its tail forming an elegant curve behind it.

           “No,” she finally said when Roan started forwards to check if she had heard her. “Maybe it should, when it seems almost everything else in the world scares me, I don’t know, but – no. For whatever reason, it doesn’t.”

           Roan smiled, a softer, gentler expression than her usual grin, and brushed one hand across the fur mantle of Asta’s cloak and down over her back. “Let’s bring our stuff in and get a fire going. Probably best if we warm up a bit before we head back out and get cold again.”

---

The tomb takes inspiration from a couple of different real archaeological sites, primarily the Neolithic chambered cairns of Orkney, though as Asta notices it’s partly rock-cut rather than completely constructed. In the real world these cairns predate the Picts and their symbol stones by thousands of years, so the carvings may not be the handiwork of the same people who actually built it (Maeshowe in Orkney is full of Viking graffiti), but on the other hand it’s a fantasy world and doesn’t need to be historically accurate.