A swelling rage - any

[Hoarfrost]

A WHITE BLANK PAGE AND A SWELLING RAGE, RAGE
YOU DID NOT THINK WHEN YOU SENT ME TO THE BRINK, TO THE BRINK

For millions of years he sat undisturbed. 
He uplifted and he eroded.

He lived in a spine, with his brothers, as long as the Great Blank Continent itself, splitting it into two, jagged halves. On one side he cast a mighty rain shadow and the lands to his lee were drier than to his windward, where the prevailing winds brought bounties of moisture.

He made lands grow lush; he made lands grow sparse.
He did so quietly and undisturbed, for millions of years.

Industrious rodents, mottle-feathered birds and quick-footed goats made homes on his shoulders. Men, too, lived there. They settled down and built their villages—brightly coloured homes of timber and the things they could trade with his brothers’ people. They made their families and they tamed the animals—they dug picks into his flesh and carved weapons from the harvest.

He did not love them or hate them.
He simply was and they simply were.

‘Move, Hoarfrost.’
He had no legs then, of course, so when he was summoned he could only quake.
Awaken!’
He shook and threw great sheets of snow down his slopes, ripping ancient trees from their roots; he shook loose the animals from their homes—eggs from their nests and woolen cats from their caves. (Innocent casualties—he feels sorry for them, now that he can.) The villages were buried in his avalanches—men, women and children, all. He moaned and cracked as his bones, those made of stone and ice, fractured and pulled apart from each other.

The agony stretched on for days. Weeks, perhaps.
His brothers watched silently and uncaring;
his brothers’ people celebrated or wept (depending) when they heard the news.

From the rubble and the snow, he emerged, scarred and heavy-hearted. Fleshed and blooded—his skin was wet (and he could feel it, too, down to his bones… those made of collagen) and his hair (black and rough) was long and dirty. “Why?” he asked, with his new voice. It sounded many-tongued—like a thousand voices whispered into a northern wind, captured and caught in his throat. Low, vaporous and sad.

‘Your people were trouble makers, Hoarfrost. They had been warned… But, you were so a part of them that you had to go, too. This is the body I have given you to live in, now.’ It did not sound sorry, the Great God. But it was, in a way.

He nodded, slow and solemn. For the first and last time, he looked upon his brothers.

How mighty they were.
****

Hoarfrost moves slowly, with the contemplative nature of a mountain. With long, drawn-out strides; it is as if each hoof is made of stone and each join is tight with ice. He is large—much larger than any horse. His ears pass over some young trees; those older guards, however, still tower over his square and crude head. He wears a long coat, shaggy and unkempt—it hangs long from his belly; great feathers swish and sway as he lifts and sinks each foot into the snow; on the underside of his head, from chin to jaw, a beard tangles and grabs onto evergreen arms, taking some with him as he goes. His coat is like winter, except it is overgrown and it never sheds and on each strand of hair, frost glistens and bunches in crystals.

The Great God had made him fit for his brothers’ peaks, but Hoarfrost had found he could not bear to stay there.

His righteye is dark, peeking from the thick flow of his forelock. His left is bright and strange—frosted over and frozen through. It had been irreparably damaged by his agonies. It had felt cold, at first, burning his eyelid every time he closed it over. But he has gotten used to its weight and blankness.

The ground thumps dully with each step, and his girth rustles the trees, dropping their gift of snow onto the ground as he moves from them and into the open. Like so many around him, he wanders. He has wandered for a long time, across continents and bodies of water, stringing together long, comforting periods of isolation with terrible and beautiful encounters. He moves as far away as he can from his brothers—and from the wreckage of his body. He had lingered for a few days, cried (a strange sensation) and yelled, but in the end, he found he could not will himself back into stone. He could not will his peak to rise or his animals to stir.

He felt, for the first time, the anguish of nothing. Not like the eternal nothing before it, but nothing where once there was something. Something important and beloved. His heart beats, slow and loud in his chest. (It can be heard in the quietest moments, even by the naked ear.) It is broken, mortals might say, as a turn of speech.

THE FROST GIANT

PHOTOGRAPHY © STEINAR ENGELAND