The first two days were a battle against the elements. The five that followed were a war against his own biology.
Aran's makeshift ice-raft, though buoyant, offered zero protection from the screaming, razor-sharp gales that swept across the insurmountable frozen water. The sea was less a body of water and more a grinding, churning graveyard of ice floes and black, freezing swells. He navigated blindly, using his splintered driftwood oar not to steer, but to violently fend off jagged bergs that threatened to shatter his precarious vessel.
His scavenged food—a handful of dried, unrecognizable lichen and a few root-bubs, and the stored food in the stasis box he had pocketed before leaving the island—was gone by nightfall of the second day. After that, there was only the void.
A normal man of this broken era would have died by the fourth dawn, succumbing to hypothermia or the madness of starvation. But Aran was a product of the High Age. His physiology, genetically optimised and perfected in an era before the Breaking, refused to let him die. Instead, it cannibalised him. His body meticulously burned its own fat, then began siphoning energy from his muscle mass, keeping his core temperature just a fraction of a degree above fatal. It kept his mind unnervingly sharp, ensuring he felt every agonising pang of hunger, every micro-fracture of cold in his bones.
There were moments in the deep, starless nights when the temptation became a physical weight. Just a spark, the cold seemed to whisper. Just a thread of Fire to warm your hands. Just a weave of Healing to silence your empty stomach.
But Aran's hand droped to the heron-marked hilt of the Atherion at his hip, and the memory of that oily, putrid slick of the Dark One's taint would flood his senses. He gritted his teeth, his lips cracked and bleeding. He would rather freeze as a man than burn as a monster.
On the morning of the tenth day, the black sea finally surrendered to land.
Beyond the brutal, jagged wall of frost-shattered stone loomed a geographic nightmare entirely swallowed by a dense, suffocating gray fog. The Mountains of Mist.
With the last of his strength, Aran drove the oar against a submerged rock. The ice-raft ground violently against a shoal of black gravel and snapped. He fell, boots splashing into the waist-deep, freezing surf. Gasping, moving like rusted iron, he dragged himself onto the stones.
The immediate threat was not starvation, but the freezing ocean water soaking his clothes. Hypothermia was a simple, brutal thermodynamic equation.
Using his scabbard as a crutch, Aran stumbled inland, pushing toward the creeping edges of the mist. He found a narrow, wind-scoured fissure in the basalt face of the foothills. Stripping off his wet lower garments, he wrung the freezing seawater from the heavy wool. Using his salvaged flint striker and dry, crumbling lichen, he coaxed a meagre fire into existence, trapping the heat beneath his High Age coat to bake the moisture from his bones.
Water was his next critical priority. Consuming raw snow was a death sentence that would drop his core temperature to fatal levels. Instead, he used the Atherion to meticulously chip away blocks of dense ice, placing them in a concave depression in a flat stone near his fire. He drank only when the water was lukewarm.
Once the immediate threat of freezing passed, a gruelling survival odyssey began.
The lower reaches of the Mountains of Mist were a desolate, suffocating landscape. Aran applied the analytical rigor to the dirt and snow. Unraveling high-tensile threads from the inner lining of his coat, he fashioned delicate snares, catching a handful of gaunt alpine hares. He hunted the things hiding from the winter—prying up slabs of slate to find clusters of dormant white grubs, and tapping the frozen earth with his sword pommel to locate the hollow burrows of hibernating rock-marmots. He chewed the bitter inner cambium layer of stunted mountain pines and boiled needles for nutrients.
For two full months, Aran dragged himself blindly through the gray vapor, surviving solely on frost-melt and whatever meager life he could pry from the frozen stone.
Then, as the third month drew to a close, the mist finally began to thin. The oppressive, sickening weight of the lesser doom lands—a corrupted sickness he could feel pressing against his sanity—fell away.
He stumbled down a steep incline of shattered shale and collapsed. He woke hours later to a chaotic, beautiful roar.
Cutting through a rocky ravine was a violent, white-capped river of glacial melt. Aran plunged his frostbitten hands into the freezing current, drinking until his shrunken stomach cramped, washing away the ash and rot of the north.
Beyond the ravine, following the river, the landscape rose into a colossal, sky-piercing range of brutal granite: the Aldeal Mountains. His artificer's mind tried to map the terrain, but it was useless. The geography of the world had been violently, catastrophically rewritten.
Crossing the first great length of the nameless range was a blur of agony. But as he crested the final major ridge and began the long descent, the air began to change. It lost its biting chill, taking on a rich, complex scent.
Below him, the harsh granite sloped downward into a massive, sprawling valley. Filling that valley was an ocean of deep, vibrant green. A forest.
It was thick, untamed, and wild—a chaotic canopy of ancient pines, sprawling broadleaf trees, and dense underbrush fed by the very river he had followed. Aran could hear the faint, echoing calls of wildlife drifting up from the timberline. It was an ecosystem untouched by the rot of the north.
His hand rested on the hilt of his pale, glass-like blade. The Atherion was a masterpiece of lethal artifice, meant for the hands of a blademaster in a war against the Shadow.
But as his thumb brushed the cold heron-mark on the hilt, his analytical mind—honed by centuries of engineering and logic—sharply corrected his survival instincts. Hunting skittish game in dense brush with a sword was the desperate, inefficient flailing of an amateur. It was a waste of time and a waste of the precious few calories his body still had to burn. To eat, he needed distance, silence, and velocity. He needed a bow.
Drawing a deep, shuddering breath of the pine-scented air, Aran pushed off the boulder and began the final descent into the trees. He had crossed the ruins of the world, but before he could hunt, he had to build.
The forest floor was a sanctuary of damp earth and thick, ancient timber, completely isolated from the rot of the northern shores. Finding a secluded hollow beneath the massive, twisting roots of an old-growth broadleaf, Aran dropped his heavy satchel. He gathered dry moss and deadwood, and using a simple flint striker from his salvaged tools, he coaxed a small, hot fire into life. He didn't even consider reaching for the tainted warmth of saidin.
With his camp secured, he went foraging for materials. His artificer's eyes scanned the canopy and the undergrowth, quickly identifying a cluster of straight, flexible saplings. The wood was dense and green, possessing a natural, snappy resilience that reminded him of the ironwood from his own era.
He drew the Atherion. The glass-like ter'angreal blade, capable of severing armor, sliced through the thick sapling with a single, effortless whisper of motion.
Returning to his fire, Aran sat and went to work. He was no longer just a starving ghost of the High Age; he was a craftsman in his element. Using the razor-perfect edge of his sword and a few small, precise files from his cache, he stripped the bark and began to shape the stave, carefully tapering the limbs to ensure an even bend. For the bowstring, he salvaged a length of high-tensile, alchemically treated binding cord from his stasis gear, twisting it into a taut, humming line that wouldn't fray in the damp air.
Next came the ammunition. He harvested several straight, rigid shoots from a nearby thicket, using his tools to carve precise nocks. He lacked proper feathers, so he carefully split the shafts and fletched them with stiff, dried pine needles and bark fibers bound tightly with thread. For the arrowheads, he used the Atherion to meticulously shave down the points of the wood, then fire-hardened them in the hot coals of his campfire until they were black and hard as iron.
It was a rudimentary survival bow, light-years away from the perfect, composite-alloy weapons of the Age of Legends. But as Aran stood and pulled the string back to his cheek, feeling the heavy, satisfying resistance of the wood, he knew it was deadly.
He secured the Atherion in its scabbard at his hip and stepped out of the hollow, an arrow knocked and resting lightly against his knuckles. Silent as the ancient shadows of the canopy, the artificer faded into the deep woods to hunt.
For the next week, the forest was Aran's sanctuary.
The venison from his first kill, roasted over a smokeless fire of dry hardwood, was the catalyst his body desperately needed. His mutated physiology, advanced for peak cellular regeneration, eagerly absorbed the proteins and fats. The gaunt, skeletal ghost that had dragged itself over the mountains began to fill out. The tremors in his hands vanished, his vision sharpened, and the deep, aching fatigue in his marrow finally began to recede.
He was crouched in the lee of a massive, moss-draped deadfall, the wind in his face. Fifty paces away, a large buck stepped delicately into a sunlit clearing. Aran raised his handmade bow, his breathing slow and rhythmic. He drew the alchemically-treated string back to his cheek. The tension was perfect. He calculated the wind drift, the arc, and the kinetic energy required to pierce the animal's vitals.
He was half a second from releasing the string when a sound shattered the quiet of the woods.
It was a high, thin shriek—the unmistakable sound of human terror.
The buck bolted instantly, vanishing into the thicket. Aran let out a slow breath, easing the tension on his bowstring. His mind rapidly processed the variable. A shriek meant human, a human meant civilization, or at least a settlement. But it also meant unpredictability, danger, and the risk of exposure.
A second scream, shorter and more desperate, tore through the trees to his left.
Aran didn't hesitate. He slipped through the underbrush, moving with a predatory silence born of a decade of martial training.
He found the source of the noise in a rocky ravine where the forest floor gave way to a steep embankment of exposed roots and loose soil.
Backing up against a wall of tangled roots was a little girl, no older than seven or eight. She was a wretched sight—her bare feet were bleeding, and she wore a ruined, high-collared tunic and wide, pleated trousers—a structured, distinctly foreign fashion that was now blackened with old soot and dried mud. She was clutching a heavy branch, trembling violently as she stared at the massive shape blocking her only exit.
It was an aberration. An impossibility that defied every biological taxonomy Aran had ever studied in the archives of the High Age.
It possessed roughly the bulk of a large bear, but the similarities ended there. It had a thick, leathery hide the color of bruised earth, utterly devoid of hair or scales. Its heavily muscled, frog-like body was built close to the ground, ending in thick limbs tipped with three vicious claws. But it was the head that truly disturbed him—a broad, flattened skull dominated by a cruel, snapping beak. Above that maw, three unblinking eyes were locked onto the terrified child. The Breaking had not just shattered continents; it had apparently birthed, or dragged in, nightmares that had no evolutionary right to exist.
The beast let out a wet, rhythmic, croaking hiss and lunged forward, snapping its terrible beak. The girl screamed, dropping her stick and throwing her arms over her head.
Thwack.
An arrow, fired with lethal precision, struck the creature's broad shoulder. Instead of burying itself to the fletching, the fire-hardened point punched through the extraordinarily tough, leathery hide with a sickening crunch, halting halfway in the dense muscle. It wasn't a killing blow, but it was enough to break its focus.
The three-eyed beast shrieked—a horrific sound like tearing metal—and spun around to face the trees. Aran stood in the open, twenty paces away, already nocking a second arrow.
"Come on, then," Aran muttered.
The creature didn't need a second invitation. Enraged by the sudden pain, it charged the artificer. It didn't run like a natural predator; it bounded with terrifying, explosive speed, a localized avalanche of muscle and claws tearing up the damp earth. Aran's tactical mind calculated its density and velocity in a fraction of a second. His handmade bow lacked the draw weight to punch through that thick, alien skull.
He dropped the bow.
His right hand crossed his body, fingers wrapping around the heron-marked hilt of the Atherion. As the beast closed within five paces, launching its massive weight into the air to crush him, Aran stepped precisely inside its chaotic guard.
The draw was a single, fluid blur of motion. The glass-like ter'angreal blade hummed as it left the scabbard, catching a sliver of sunlight. Normal steel might have glanced off the creature's unnatural hide, but the Atherion met no resistance. Aran pivoted, channeling the beast's own momentum into a flawless, upward diagonal strike that sheared seamlessly through leathery flesh, dense muscle, and alien bone.
The creature collapsed heavily to the ground behind him, its torso completely opened by a cut so clean it took a full second for the thick, dark blood to follow. Aran flicked the blade downward, clearing the gore from the pale steel, and smoothly sheathed the Atherion before the circuit of the sword could tempt him with the agonizing draw of the tainted Source.
The forest fell deathly silent, save for the wet, heavy thud of the creature's dark blood pooling into the damp earth.
Aran turned his attention to the girl. She was backed so hard against the tangled roots she seemed to be trying to merge with the wood. Her wide, terrified eyes darted from the steaming carcass of the beast to the tall, pale-coated man who had just cleaved it in two.
Aran held up his hands, palms open and empty, and approached with slow, deliberate steps. He knelt a few paces away, keeping his posture relaxed.
"Duad carai," he said softly, speaking the melodic, precise tongue of his age. "Sei asanha cue."
The girl blinked, her breathing ragged. She opened her mouth, and a string of harsh, clipped syllables tumbled out. Aran frowned, listening intently. It was a butchered, heavily degraded derivative of the Old Tongue. Vowels were flattened, consonants slurred, but the root words were still recognizable. He could understand her, just barely.
Slowly, carefully adapting his tongue to the rough, broken dialect she was speaking, Aran tried again. "You safe. Your name?"
"M-Miri," she stammered, her small hands tightly gripping the pleated fabric of her structured trousers.
Aran reached into his satchel, pulled out a strip of the smoked venison he had prepared earlier, and held it out to her. Miri stared at it for a long second before her hunger won out. She snatched the meat, tearing into it with a desperation that spoke of a long, terrifying night in the woods.
"Miri," Aran cautioned. He gestured toward the colossal, three-eyed carcass. "What is that?"
Miri paused, her mouth full, and looked at the dead beast with a shudder. "A grolm," she whispered, as if the word itself might wake it. "Papa says they have three eyes so they can see three things: your lies, your fears, and the marrow in your bones."
Aran raised an eyebrow. His mind craved taxonomy, origin, and anatomical function, but he was conversing with a child. "Is that what your father teaches you?"
Miri nodded vigorously, swallowing the venison. "They belong to the Blood. The high lords ride them in the great hunts. Papa says they were brought by the Empress—may she live forever—to eat the shadow-men. But old Nana says if you don't do your chores, a grolm will smell your laziness and come out of the dark to swallow you whole."
She wiped her soot-stained nose on her sleeve. "I wasn't lazy. I was just following a moth. It was a death-watch moth, all white with a black spot. Papa says seeing one means you have to turn in a circle three times or the earth swallows you. I turned, but then the trees looked different, and Papa was gone."
"You came into this forest with your father?" Aran asked, parsing through the superstitions to find the tactical reality.
"Yesterday," Miri said, her voice dropping into a sad, small register. "He was looking for iron-root for the village forge. I chased the moth. Then it got dark, and the trees started whispering. The grolm found me this morning when I tried to drink from the stream."
Aran looked at the massive, alien corpse, then back to the shivering child. The world had broken, the continents had shattered, and yet, humanity persisted in exactly the same way it always had: with myths, omens, and children wandering too far into the woods.
"Aven, sei...Come," Aran said softly, cutting himself off before the musical, high-born cadence of the Old Tongue could fully leave his lips. He forced his throat to adapt to the rougher, clumsy shapes of her modern speech, though his phrasing remained strangely formal and archaic."You may take your rest at my campsite, Miri. The beast is dead".
He spent the remainder of the afternoon securing their small camp, building a smokeless fire deep within the roots of the ancient broadleaf. As night fell, the temperature plummeted, but Aran gave Miri his heavy, insulated High Age coat, wrapping her in a garment engineered to withstand the vacuum of the upper atmosphere. She fell asleep almost instantly, curled into a small ball by the warmth of the coals.
Aran did not sleep. He sat cross-legged near the fire, the Atherion resting across his knees, and watched the dark perimeter of the trees and meditated.
He was a ghost of a forgotten age, carrying a weapon that connected him to a tainted, maddening power perpetually. His only objective was to survive, to navigate this violently reshaped continent, and to stay entirely hidden from whatever civilization had risen from the ashes. Walking into a human settlement was a calculated risk that bordered on suicidal. If there were channelers in her village—or worse, Women who hunted them—he would be walking directly into a snare.
But as the grey light of dawn finally began to filter through the dense canopy, Aran looked at the sleeping child. She was small, fragile, and utterly helpless in a world that had birthed monsters like that grolm. He could not leave her to the mercy of this new age, nor could he drag a seven-year-old on a march into the unknown.
Aran stood, his joints popping softly in the morning chill, and packed his satchel.
He had to get her out of the forest. He would find this father of hers, or he would walk her to the very edge of her village. It was not the logical choice, but it was the right one. And Aran of the Age of Legends was still, above all things, a man of honour.