Hugrakkur and Styrkur

The snow drifts from the night sky softly landing among the trees. The snowflakes tickle my eyelids causing my eyes to click open and shut repeatedly. There is a cacophony of muffled sounds from the thump of my paw steps and the streaming of water from melted snow. The trees tower hundreds of feet up, sometimes dropping clumps of snow larger than I am onto the forest floor. It is a peaceful place, calming my instincts. If not for the cold, I could find myself spending the rest of my 500 years here in solitude, but alas I am not built for this frozen environment. I press on, barely passing between trees, often walking an extra mile to make it around tight spaces. The trees are thick from centuries of cultivation by Skogurdreki, the forest dreki. Many of the trees blend in with each other at the base creating walls throughout the forest. Even as a forty-foot drek I am dwarfed by skogur trees. If I were like other dreki I would fly over the forest but we of the Logadreki tribe lose our wings at a young age while swimming in the lava fields of our home.

The winters have been harsh ever since the Kaldreki tribe eradicated the Kraftur, or “humans” in my language, with ice magic. The Kraftur brought peace and unity to the land through their ability to absorb the magic of the dreki around them and make a single identity. The land was warmer when the Kraftur governed us, but it has been a century since that time. Each winter, the land gets colder for longer, even in Logadreki territory where the ground is heated by the slow rising magma. Many dreki tribes have disappeared too: the Vatdreki of the sea, the Vindurdreki of the air, the Berdreki of the mountains, the Skogurdreki of the forest and the Yordreki of the sun. The Kaldreki takeover has devastated the food supply so I hunt for food in the winter. For two weeks, I have wandered in search of life but there have been no signs of any. Although the dreki can go years without food, the hunger pangs are often too painful to bear.

I continue my trek through the forest where Skogurdreki towns were once filled with the music of life. In many places the trees are woven together at the tops with branches creating large abodes and villages far above the forest floor. All of them are now abandoned. I remember in my youth wandering through Skogurdreki lands and thinking how there were so many dreki living here. Now it is a forest of ghosts and ice.

My mind grows still and quiet as I walk. The forest goes for miles and so do I, following the trees, listening for sounds of life. The sound of my thumping paws lulls my mind into a dream of the golden age of the dreki. I remember cities of dreki flying and walking, buildings taller and wider than any tree in this forest, each plated with gold. There is prosperity and harmony in my dream, but it is a dream that ends in horror. I hear the sounds of screaming and panic as a blizzard descends onto the Golden City, cloaking everything in snow and ice. I was a young drek when The Prince of ice came but I remember it vividly. I quiet my mind again as the painful memory subsides and I continue my hunt.

The sound of it seemed like another dream at first. I stop and turn my head in every direction to listen. For a moment I hear nothing but the pumping of my own heart. I could be mad but the noise is unmistakable. I walk slowly in the direction I heard the sound and I faintly hear it again. It is a foreign sound, something I have never heard before but recognize. Then I notice a glow in the distance. It is faint and obscured by the other trees around it but a smaller tree, less than half the size of the rest, clearly glows. As I approach the tree, the trunk begins to move like tendons of muscle flexing. A hollow opens up in the center of the tree where the noise I thought I heard before echoes loudly through the forest. A young human boy is swaddled in blankets and sits inside the tree crying. His eyes are forest green and glowing with magic emanating from his eyes. The other trees seem to thrum with energy and move as if waking up from a long nap. Near the trunk of the tree, I notice three frozen adult humans on the ground clutching each other. They are thickly coated in ice at the base of the tree. There are paw prints and signs of flight a hundred feet away. Ice shards spike up from the ground leading from the prints to the tree where the young human lay. So it happened recently?

The emotions flood in me as I take in the realization. This is a human child and could be the last child of the Kraftur in existence. Hope rises in me as I stare down at a way to bring back the glory of the dreki. When I look back at the tree hollow the child is standing up unsteadily, gripping the bark. As he looks at me he smiles and burps. His eyes close for a couple seconds, longer than a blink, and when he opens them they are a bright orange color, the same as my eyes and scales. I shudder, seeing the stories are true, and pick up the child gently with my paws to set him on my back. The boy giggles in delight as I throw him to my back and start to move the direction I came from. As I do, the trees creak from movement as I move away from them with the child. Out of a bigger tree opens a human-sized hole from which sprints a wooden humanoid sentinel standing ten feet tall and faceless. I turn my head and release a torrent of flames at the sentinel but it is unfazed and grips my tail, stopping my retreat. I let the boy slide off my back and turn to the sentinel but it grabs the boy and sprints back to the trees with him. After laying the boy down in the hollow, the sentinel stands between me and the boy. I watch as the boy staggers out of the tree and yells out in frustration at the sentinel. I am not sure what the boy says but the sentinel obeys and returns to the trunk from which it came. I grab him again and listen for the trees as I walk away but they do not move so I run toward my home.

It takes a day of trotting through the forest but I make it out into the prairie that acts as a buffer between the forest and the volcanic plains. I have made the trek a hundred times before so the journey back to my tribe should take another two hours if I trot the whole time.

I reached Logadreki in less than two hours with the boy sound asleep on my back. My head is held high knowing I am bringing hope to my people, until I look into the town. My heart joins my throat when I enter and see the massive gray and white Kaldreki perched in the center of town. The Prince. It is double my size with striking, light blue eyes scanning the nervous Logadreki walking past it. It doesn’t notice me as I duck my head into the home of the Logadreki healing hut where my mother sits with a young Logadreki male with a broken hindpaw. When my mother sees me her eyes grow wide in shock and then horror before saying,

“Hugrakkur, what is that?! You need to take it back now before…”

Knowing how she panics I interrupt her, “Modur, listen, our hope has come alive and it will be devoured soon if we do not save him. Please help me find a place to keep him.”

“Hugrakkur The Prince is in the town square and could destroy our entire village alone. If he finds out we have a kraftur child, I… no, you will take him back from wherever you found him. He is a danger to us all, my son. Whatever you think he will do for us you are going to be disappointed.”

“It is true though! His eyes glow orange now when they were green before! The Krafturs are not extinct yet and their powers are true! If I can raise him, we will never have to worry about The Prince of ice, again.”

My mother sits in silence for a long moment taking in what I just said. She senses my passion but more than that, I think hope is growing in her. She looks at me with fearful resignation and opens the wide cellar door with her jaw to allow us access to the magma caverns. She looks at me again and shakes her bulky head and closes the cellar behind us with a sack of food and a cauldron of water.

Not much time passes before the boy wakes up and stumbles around. When he looks at me I feel the fire in my belly grow more vibrant and I hum with ecstasy. Humans never lived near our territory because of how deadly the terrain is for all creatures except the Logadreki. He is young, maybe three years old, but just being near him gives my magic a new vigor I didn’t know existed. The caverns are hot and although the boy has fire magic in his veins making him resistant to the heat, he sweats profusely. The boy doesn’t cry and instead closes his eyes for a long moment and they turn a deep blue color. The water in my cauldron begins to glow a faint blue and crystallizes into a faceless sentinel who approaches the boy and wipes his wet hand over the boy's face cooling him down. The water sentinel returns to the cauldron as the boy changes his eyes back to orange. The boy stares at me intensely, appearing to be frustrated or upset. He is concentrating on something, growling like an angry dreki when a mental spear hits me. The sensation of screeching racks my brain as I feel an immense amount of magic leave my body as if I had breathed fire for six hours straight. The boy glows orange covered in a fiery aura as the pain subsides. Exhaustion comes over me and I black out.

I wake up to a human hand pressed against my face. He is speaking but I cannot understand what he is saying. When he notices my eyes open he steps back and sits against the rocky cavern wall patiently waiting for me to speak. Where is the young boy? I think to myself. My vision clears and I slowly rise as I shake off the soreness of… whatever just happened.

“I am sorry for what I did to you Hugrakkur. I know I took a lot of life force from you but I needed you to understand what I am going to do. I can restore it just as easily now if you’ll let me. May I?”

The boy now grown into a young man, gestures to his hands. I don’t understand whether I am dreaming or not so I just nod my hulking head. The man stands up and puts his right hand between my eyes on my snout. He whispers something unintelligible in another language and his hand glows. I close my eyes and feel my mind thrum with the ecstasy I felt before from the boy. I look at him with a clear mind and say,

“Who are you? Were you not just a baby only moments ago?”

“My name is Styrkur, and yes, I was a baby about an hour ago and many centuries before that. I wish I had time to explain but there is a Kaldreki here is there not? The one called ‘The Prince’?” I look at Styrkur and make the effort to not continue questioning him. Upon introducing himself he began to seem a lot older than just a young man. Having restored my strength I feel as though I can trust him so I just nod. I then say,

“The Prince is here, yes. How do you plan to stop him?” Styrkur, already walking to the cellar door, looks back at me and smiles with kind and humble eyes as if I were a child asking a curious question. He says to me plainly with humble confidence,

“I am going to absorb his power Hugrakkur. Not simply ‘copy’ it like Kraftur usually do, but take it. I just need to get close… Will you follow me?”

I look with disbelief at the statement. If not for the humility he displayed, I would laugh at the proposition, or yell at him for his overconfidence. I sense he is not overconfident. I sense that he is the most capable being in existence to restore the world to harmony. I only think to say yes and follow him out of the cellar. When we come up through the floor my mother is incredulous at the man walking before me out of the cavern. She doesn’t speak, overcome with fear, as Styrkur walks past the dreki with the broken hindpaw and heals it. He continues out the door and looks back at me with yellow eyes this time and becomes invisible. I wander outside the hut and although I can’t see him, I hear him. My role is to provoke The Prince to distract him so Styrkur can make physical contact with him.

Styrkur runs toward the Kaldreki, staying invisible by bending sunlight around his body. I roar boldly at The Prince and bellow fire into the sky in typical Logadreki fashion when challenging someone to a duel. The Prince takes the challenge looking more amused than offended and walks toward me arrogantly. I bellow fire at him which is met by shards of ice coming from his own maw. For a few moments the two torrents of ice and fire are evenly matched but even with my newfound strength from Styrkur, The Prince’s ice overpowers my fire. "Styrkur, I can’t do this much longer," I think to myself.

A moment later, The Prince cries out in panic, cutting his stream of ice. I halt my torrent as well and notice Styrkur, next to the Kaldreki prince with his hand to his side. I take The Prince’s neck in my large jaw and pin him in place. Other Logadreki follow suit when they see what is happening. Styrkur keeps his eyes closed in concentration as bright blue tendrils of light flow from inside the Kaldreki’s body. A blue aura surrounds Styrkur as I continue to pin The Prince to the ground. The Prince stops moving and turns ice cold like a statue.

Styrkur steps back from The Prince with his eyes glowing ice blue and a gold aura swirling around him. "It is done" I hear in my head. A second later, Styrkur shouts to the hundreds of Logadreki around saying the same striking phrase I heard in my head,

“It is done!”

Styrkur glows brightly like the gold plated buildings of the Golden City. He then disintegrates into bright gold dust that swirls its way slowly up into the sky. The last of the Kraftur is gone so that the Dreki may live freely. He gave me strength and it made me brave. Now we can govern ourselves.