The Druid's gambit

---Deathloard---

#The druid's gambit.

A lone figure stands in a snow-covered clearing, his weathered face illuminated by the unnatural blue flames dancing before him. The old man's features, deeply etched by both time and hardship, appear otherworldly in the azure glow. All around him, the deep winter has wrapped the forest in that special silence that muffles all but the crackling of his fire.

"O come, brother," he calls out, his voice carrying surprising strength despite his apparent age. "Come join me at the fire. I bet your old dead bones hurt just as fucking much as mine do, vigger or no vigger."

I step from the shadows of the pines, my passage through the snow unnaturally loud. Each footfall echoes with deliberate weight that cuts through the winter stillness. Death rarely announces itself, but tonight, I choose otherwise.

"I want," I speak into the silence, "my steps to sound like—"

"The Leaders from the Hallow games," the old man finishes, a knowing grin spreading across his face. In the firelight, his sharpened teeth flash with an almost predatory gleam, belying his frail appearance.

"Five hundred years and you still remember those?" I ask, moving closer to the warmth. "When you never played them and had little interest in them even when you had the ability to do so?" I pause, studying his weathered face. "And, brother, I do not have vigger, if you remember."

The old man – the Druid, Second Brother, Lord of Life – leans forward, the fire casting deep shadows in the valleys of his wrinkled face. "Some things," he whispers, "you never forget. Even if you never remembered they existed when they did otherwise exist." His grin returns, mischievous now. "Also, I forgot—you've got go-go vampire juice and blood that's supernatural cocaine without the downsides."

I feel my expression sobering. "You are sure of this path, Brother? Our brother was enraged when he found out that you had chosen Grace for this." I trace a finger along the edge of my blade—not quite like Durge's, but close enough to remind us all of what we've done. "One was displeased as well, though I can never tell with him." I shrug: "he didn't stab me, so?" I shrug again.

My memories flicker to Grace—how they found her, what Durge did to reshape her, what the Druid taught her, what six allowed to happen. How we all watched and did nothing when she was broken and remade. The guilt sits between us like another presence at this fire.

"Especially," rumbles a new voice, deep as an avalanche, "one whom I saved already, brother mine."

From the darkness emerges a giant of a man, easily standing eight and a half feet tall. His massive frame is wrapped in thick voide leather, and a monstrous frostblade, Soulrender, is strapped across his broad back. This is Sixth Brother, Lord of Frost, War and Winter. Despite his fearsome appearance – with a face crisscrossed by battle scars and eyes the pale blue of glacier ice – he moves with surprising grace for one so large. His arrival carries the weight of our collective culpability.

"Saved," I say, the word tasting bitter. "Is that what we're calling it now?" The silence that follows acknowledges what none of us wish to speak aloud—that Six's "saving" was a brutal reforging, that the Druid's "teaching" stripped away what humanity remained, that my own inaction was perhaps the greatest sin of all. We who walk between worlds treated her as merely a tool, a weapon to be sharpened, not a girl with a life we had no right to reshape.

"We have done enough to that child as it is." Six rumbles, his voice reverberating through my chest like distant thunder. "Durge has made it clear that he will tolerate no more meddling. He has done enough."

I watch Six's face harden at the mention of Durge—the living embodiment of judgment who carved Grace into what she is now. I remember watching from the shadows as Durge's twin blades reshaped her, not just physically but fundamentally altering who and what she was. His meticulous precision as he cut away what he deemed unnecessary, leaving behind only the perfect weapon he envisioned. The screams still echo in the spaces between my thoughts.

"First Hate as well, has sided with him on that," Six continues. "This was only allowed as far as it has gone, because you are her blood, Druid, though found, not born. Anyone else?"

The giant shrugs before making a throat-slicing motion with a finger thick as a young tree branch. The gesture isn't mere theatrics—I've seen Six follow through on such promises, leaving frozen corpses in his wake.

"If it can be better, then I will deal with the fallout, brothers mine." The Druid's voice turns raspy as he gestures toward the barren landscape spreading out from our hilltop vantage. Beyond it lies a slowly dying world.

I follow his gaze across the wasteland. Once, this was verdant forest. Now it's a monument to our failures.

"I trained them well, but they will not live without me, and I am old. So old and tired." The Druid's voice carries the weight of epochs. "The cold burrows into my bones, brothers. It shall not be long now, and if I can change it? Ensure a future for my kin? I will do much to ensure my clan and kin survive beyond me. None remember the fall. None remember what once was, what, now, can never be again."

The giant approaches the fire, extending his hands to warm them. Despite his fur wrappings, he seems unaffected by the biting cold. "I do not like it, brother," he rumbles, his breath clouding in the frigid air. "Tinkering with the weft and wyrd, brother mine. Doing so shall have consequences for which even our brother Vidky cannot adjust, and by the scent of it, you won't be around to un-fuck it when the ropes snarl and the blood flows."

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I shift, uncomfortable with the truth in Six's words. We've seen too many well-intentioned schemes collapse into tragedy.

"Durge will follow her," Six adds, his voice suddenly quieter, more dangerous. "For what he's done? His creed will tolerate nothing else."

I nod slowly, remembering Durge's oath. After he finished remaking Grace—after he'd taken everything from her and rebuilt her according to his vision of justice—he bound himself to her with a blood-oath deeper than any I've witnessed in my millennia. The Judgment's code is absolute. If Grace is harmed again, if we interfere with her once more, Durge's twin blades will seek our throats without hesitation or mercy. Even we, ancient as we are, would be wise to fear his determination.

The Druid straightens, his eyes reflecting the blue flames. "Then shall you walk the path? Shall you do this? Can you do this thing that I require to be done, brother found?"

His question hangs in the air between us, heavy with implication. We are discussing violating Durge's prohibition, risking his retribution, all for the Druid's desperate gambit. I weigh the consequences—Durge hunting us across realities, his blades singing for our blood, his absolute conviction that we have violated the one sacred thing left to him: his duty to protect what he created.

Yet the desperation in my ancient brother's eyes is palpable. The weight of years—so many more than mine—bears down on him like all the stones of the world.

I watch the Druid as he challenges us, his ancient eyes reflecting the dancing blue flames. Though his body appears frail, there's a steel in his gaze that hasn't diminished in these five centuries of his current incarnation. He knows what he's asking of us—something that crosses boundaries we rarely transgress. Despite being younger in this form, the Druid carries memories from before my existence began, from cycles of life and death that predated even my appointment as Deathlord. It's humbling, even for one such as I.

"Brother Death," the giant says, turning those glacier-blue eyes on me, "can tell you what befalls the loved ones of he who spits in the face of fate, and I shall not throw my men to an uncaring blizzard when I need not, kin of mine. Those whom follow me have been through enough, and I will not have them suffer more for a single child."

Six's massive face transforms with cold fury as he continues: "No matter how much we have wronged that girl." His enormous fists clench and unclench, the frostblade across his back seeming to share in its master's rage. Not surprising—living weapons, especially those who become women and then marry their wielders, tend to do that.

"Agreed," I rasp, my voice like stone grinding against stone after millennia of disuse. "The price demanded is not one I shall ever pay. If it were myself, perhaps, but others? Children." The last word escapes as a snarl, and the flames flicker violently as my rage pulses outward like the death that I am. As flames are spoken of as living, well, you can imagine what happens when death itself grows angry.

"Grace," the giant rumbles, his massive hand stroking his frost-rimed beard. "Must it be her, brother mine? Why not the dwarf? He of the stout heart and the strong arm? Why not your Vidkey? Why a child who's only just passed her twenty-first winter? Why a child who, in our ignorance, we have wronged so already." The last word emerges as the low growl of a winter wolf, frost-rimed muzzle slavering for meat and viscera.

Pain flickers in the Druid's ancient eyes—eyes that have witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations I know only from the souls that have passed through my realm. He may appear merely old, but the weight of countless eons presses down on him, memories from before the concept of death as I embody it even existed.

"She is the only choice, brother mine," he says. "It must be her, as she is the only one who might survive. The others? They are strong, but they cannot adapt. You say she has been through enough? You are correct, although that is precisely the reason why she is the only choice."

The giant sighs, a sound like wind through a mountain pass. "As you wish, brother. I shall not stand against you, as I know well enough that if I were given the chance to change the wyrd of the Frosthold, I would do it, and damn anyone who attempted to stand in my way to hellheim."

I turn to the Druid, curious despite my misgivings. "I thought that the daughter of the hearth was a kind ruler of her kin? It says such in the old myths, and I have spoken to the shield-women of Valhalla who have confirmed this."

"On your world, yes," the giant answers before the Druid can speak. "But I have walked among the grimdark and the gilded for long, and all who dwell there are infused by their worlds. Your brothers are neither, and give thanks for that mercy, Deathloard."

I focus on the Druid once more, aware that despite my age, I am but a child compared to the primordial memories he carries within him. "Why did you ask me here? I have little skill with runecraft, Ogham or otherwise. Perhaps Eighteenth Brother, with his bonding to a Skjald, but I? I walk among the shadows of the dead and speak the words of the angel courts. I have no skill with ancient nature, and less with the weft. Though my mate can walk the strings, she cannot assist in this endeavor, at least not on this side." I consider, before: "and if she found out what was done? What you have done? She would spirit the girl as far from us as she could, consent or no." I pause, thinking. "Of all those whom bind to us, my mate might be able to restore the girl to what was. She is an expert in the mind, after all."

The Druid's gaze pierces through me, carrying the weight of epochs that existed before death had a lord. "You are death. That is enough."

I bow my head, understanding finally dawning. "Only death can pay for life," I intone, the words ancient and heavy. "I shall do this thing, then, to power the transfer. You are brother mine, and I shall, though under protest, give you your final wish, Lord of Life, Lord of Growth."

"As shall I," the giant grunts, placing a hand as large as a dinner plate on the Druid's shoulder. "And if it must be Grace, then I shall do what I can to assist her transfer."

"Good." The Druid rises to his feet, and for a moment, we glimpse how truly ancient he is—not merely old, but something beyond mortal comprehension, a being who remembers the birth of stars I've never seen. Yet his smile holds a flash of joy in those tired eyes. "Now, if you would, kin of mine? The festival of midwinter is nigh, and I must prepare for it. The fires won't light themselves, and the meat must be brought, as the mead must flow."

"Thirsty throats care not from whence the mead flows," the giant chortles, his deep voice a rumbling bass. "Only that it does, aye?"

"Aye," I grunt as I stand, my joints making no sound despite my frequent grumblings to my kin. "I would join you at midwinter, brothers, if I may?"

"Aye," my two brothers answer in unison. We turn and descend the hill toward a rough camp of logs and hides nestled deep within a forest of swaying pines. The snowbound silence is broken now by jubilant voices and the glow of a massive bonfire lighting up the otherwise dark night.

As we approach, I and my brothers shift our forms—a necessity to avoid being shot by the well-armed locals. I find myself wondering, as we walk among these mortals who know nothing of what we truly are: Where is the girl now? This Grace, for whom such momentous plans have been made? What new suffering will our meddling bring her, and will Durge's blades find our throats when he discovers what we've done?