Stinging numbness struck my every nerve, each limb throbbing as if torched by invisible flames. Icy water, dark, thick, and viscous, swirled around me in a relentless dance, seeking to claim me for its own.
I swam upwards, fighting the current.
For a dream, this was the exceptionally unpleasant kind.
I slammed against the ceiling of ice above me with my entire body, silently banging against it with my fists. It didn't give, didn’t crack.
Squinting through the murky depths with stinging eyes, I noted the direction of the current and swam perpendicular to it, aiming for the lightest section of the ice, praying that my instincts were right.
My knee suddenly collided with the submerged rocks. I’ve made a miscalculation, this was the shore and the ice was likely thicker here, even harder to break through! I pressed on with the determination of my last seconds of life, reaching a lighter section of the ice as the space between the ground below and the ice overhead gradually diminished.
The pain became more intense, my body begging for oxygen. No dream could be this realistic, this agonizing.
Summoning every ounce of remaining strength, I pushed my body against the ground, leveraging my entire frame against the slippery rocks and roots beneath me. Colourful spots danced in my eyes from the strain as I gritted my teeth, refusing this to be my end, kicking at the ice with my feet.
The ice suddenly gave way with a resounding crack. I kicked against it again and again, until it shattered and then pulled myself out of the icy river, inhaling precious air and feeling completely drained.
It was the dead of winter or perhaps late autumn. Large snowflakes fluttered from a distant, gray sky wrapped with a blanket of thick clouds. My entire body trembled from shock, pain, and cold.
As I dredged water from my lungs on the ice-covered ground, a new realization took hold–this was not my body.
My new limbs were thin and pallid. I quickly pulled off the wet clothes that clung to my body. The crude attire, tattered and soaked, looked like it came from a long-forgotten age, with a distinctly Scandinavian or perhaps Slavic look. The knowledge that I had somehow lost my muscles and height was a bitter pill to swallow.
What cruel, improbable event had conspired to cast me into the frigid embrace of this icy river, to awaken in the form of a bruised, skinny, waterlogged… teenage boy?
A leather rope featuring a half broken blue agate amulet with a drawing of what looked like a girl with feathers sticking from her hair dangled from my chest. As I pulled my shirt off, the rope holding the gem frayed apart and the agate piece twinkled down right into the hole in the ice, vanishing in the river before my trembling fingers could catch it.
I also saw that a large, red, crude drawing of intersecting triangles glittered in my chest, slowly flaking off me as I moved. The questionable hexagram and the now lost agate amulet were the least of my worries.
Shivering violently, I sought to stave off the relentless advance of hypothermia, my thoughts racing with my chattering teeth. Desperation lent urgency to my actions as I wrung the icy water from my clothes.
In a few moments, I quickly checked myself over for injuries and dressed myself once again in the damp fabric and leather boots, aware of the scant protection they offered against the biting chill that hung in the air. I needed to find warmth and shelter as soon as possible.
Barren trees flanking the water’s edge stood like lonely sentinels, their gnarled branches reaching skyward. In the distance, smoke rose from the remnants of what looked like a ruined village.
Smoke meant fire and fire meant warmth. I forced my aching body to push towards the village even as it begged me to lie down and to embrace the lulling cold.
With faltering steps, my body trembling from the cold and rising panic I made my way to the smoldering ruins. As I came nearer, the acrid stench of burnt something filled my nostrils.
I definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
As I walked around the buildings, peering through the windows, I saw nothing but ashes. Despite the grim view, I headed towards the nearest fire. As I approached, I noticed a peculiar oddity—the flames seemed to dance with an unnatural hue, their vibrant colors twisting and turning from white to emerald to a brilliant blue.
I stopped in front of a flame to get warm.
As I stared at the fire, something in my mind suddenly clicked—memories of a lab, of flasks and Bunsen burners.
Biochemistry.
I rolled the word over in my mind. It tasted strangely foreign and also like it belonged to me. Not the teenage me wrapped in wet furs, but the… Biochemist me that awakened in this frail, underfed body.
The memory of biochemistry burned like a bright star in the fog of confusion that had engulfed me since emerging from the river. I felt a surge of relief at reclaiming this essential fragment of my identity, clung to it and pushed it to the forefront of my mind, trying to awaken more memories of my former self.
Clarity.
The knowledge of Biochemistry became my sword and shield against the cold trying to strangle me, a mental barrier against complete unravelling and the rising terror of the inexplicable situation. I clamped down on the panic attack, focusing on understanding what I was seeing through the sharp lens of scientific analysis.
As I stared at the flames, I began to mentally catalogue the various chemicals capable of altering the color of fire: copper compounds produced blues and greens, while strontium and lithium compounds yielded reds and pinks. These were basic principles from undergraduate chemistry.
I exhaled, allowing more heat to seep into my trembling body, pondering the enigma of the oddly tinted flames. The warmth, though a temporary relief from the chill, served as a stark reminder of my precarious situation. I needed to find answers, and perhaps more importantly—permanent shelter.
As I took a step closer to the flames, I noted another odd phenomenon: the fire seemed to warp and bend, unnaturally rippling ever so slightly in my direction with radial waves, as though I were a magnet and the flames were metallic filings tracing the invisible lines of magnetic force.
What the hell?
My mind kicked into higher gear as I moved left and right. The waves of fire followed me, trying to reach out to my body. The behavior of the flames violated fundamental principles of thermodynamics. Heat convection should create upward motion in flames, not lateral attraction toward a nearby observer. The pattern reminded me of electromagnetic fields, but fire consisted of ionized plasma, not ferromagnetic material.
Retreating a step, I re-evaluated the burning village with newfound wariness. Some flames around were of a mundane color and acted normally belching out black smoke.
Meanwhile, blue-green flames danced and twisted in radial patterns around the trees scattered near the village, as if in some perverse near-embrace. They produced almost no smoke. This wasn't random thermal behavior—this was definitely a clear pattern.
Bewildered, I snipped a fresh, bendy branch from a nearby bush and threw it into the heart of the blue-green fire.
The flames eagerly engulfed the branch, their tendrils weaving spirals around it like rippling waves before reducing it to ash in mere moments with a blinding flash. The combustion occurred far too rapidly—green, fresh wood should have resisted burning, taking minutes rather than seconds to ignite properly.
I raked my memories for a rational explanation.
Boosting a fire's oxygen supply to a fire could intensify the flames and turn them blue. This is due to complete combustion energizing the gas molecules. However, excess oxygen didn’t account for any green hues or strange movements.
In lower gravity, the flames become more spherical and spread more evenly in all directions. This is because the hot air does not rise as it does on Earth; instead, the heat disperses more evenly in all directions.
Neither memory explained why the fire was purposefully attacking organic life in radial waves.
I ripped a small cloth patch from a ragged, colorful banner hanging on a half-broken wall and threw it into the blue fire. It didn't even bother to ignite.
I blinked at it, waiting for the cloth to burn, yet nothing happened. I felt my mind sliding sideways. Dry cloth with fibers exposed to flames exceeding 800°C should have combusted instantly. Maybe this was some kind of non-flammable fabric.
I quickly gathered a handful of random items from the floor near me—a desiccated scrap of leather, splinters of wood from obliterated furniture, fragments of rope, a bunch of straw spilled from the house roof and even tattered fragments of parchment paper. One by one, I hurled them into the flames.
The blue-green fire seemed to consider each object with indifference, leaving them completely untouched. Combustible materials—carbon-rich compounds that should have eagerly fed any natural flame—simply sat unmolested within the heart of the eldritch flames.
There were only two answers here—either I was hallucinating or the world I found myself in operated beyond the rules of my former reality. The second option was preferable.
I felt a dangerous thrill surging through my veins, the first genuine emotion beyond panic-laced terror since waking in this nightmare. Purpose crystallized within me like a perfect lattice structure. Whatever impossible forces were at work here—whatever had shattered the laws of physics I once held sacred—I would unravel them with the scientific method, dissect them, understand them, and bend them to my will. My survival depended on it.
Using a rusted knife, I snipped a flock of hair from my head and threw it into the odd flames. The hair flashed and ignited. Keratin, the protein filament making up human hair, wasn't alive.
Why the hell did keratin burn while the straw and wooden beams did not?! All three were products of organic materials!
A dark realization dawned upon me as I stared at the ashes that were my flock of hair.
This wasn't a random disaster; it was targeted destruction. Whatever force controlled these flames specifically sought to eliminate very specific things while preserving everything else. This purpose spoke of intelligence, devious design beyond simple combustion… like a Neutron bomb.
"Khrm, khrm," the guttural sound of a throat being cleared resonated from behind me, interrupting my panicked thoughts.
I spun around, dropping the rusty knife in a fumble of frostbitten, barely responsive hands.
Right in front of me stood an incredibly old woman, draped in furs and leaning heavily upon a gnarled wooden staff. She looked like the perfect embodiment of a witch, or maybe a Nordic shaman, her face obscured by an elk's antlered skull. Beneath the hollow sockets of the macabre mask, a pair of brilliant blue eyes shined with an unsettling intensity. Her dress appeared to be woven from fragments of animal or perhaps human bones with a tint of green to them as if they were carved from malachite.
"Ioan Starfall," the woman boomed. "It seems your family's sacrifice has worked!"
"Huh?" I blinked at her.
Was my name Ioan? Ah... it must have belonged to the boy whose body I now inhabited.
"What sacrifice?" I asked. My newfound voice was quite high-pitched. To my surprise, the words leaving my lips were not in English, but in a foreign unfamiliar language that sounded like a mix of Finnish, Norwegian and Slavic. The old woman also wasn't talking in English, yet I somehow understood her.
"Four hundred and seventeen lives burned to ashes," the woman said as she pulled up her skull-mask, revealing an incredibly wrinkled face and sad expression. "So one may live and become strong." With a gnarled finger, featuring a grimy, long fingernail, she gestured towards the frozen river.
Beneath the mask, she looked old, incredibly old, eyes sunken deep into her skull.
Four hundred and seventeen. The precision of her words was concerning, as if each life had been meticulously tallied.
"Who are you?" I demanded.
"I am Yaga Grandhilda," she continued, "the witch of the Shalish wood, my domain about nine thousand steps from here. It was I who foresaw the looming death of everyone in this village in the shawl of my precognition and beseeched all the adults to bring me seven drops of their blood. Using it, I created a potion with which the parents painted protective hexagrams upon the children. Alas, you are the sole survivor of the massacre and... have gained great power by straddling the precipice between life and death!"
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"What?" I blinked. "Sorry, my memory is kind of fuzzy from almost drowning," I added.
"Ah, yes. This is because the river spirit took something from you as you dove headfirst into it and gave you something of great value in exchange, young Ioan," the witch explained. "I sense that you have been cleansed by the waters of river Glinka, your soul filled with great potential and knowledge from far beyond the thread of your former life!"
The river did take something. It took Ioan's life, obliterating what he was. It must have given partial memories of a biochemist to this misfortunate teenager in exchange.
"Now," the witch intoned, "Per my agreement forged in magic with the village of Svalbard, I shall bestow upon you the mark and title of a hero!"
"A hero?" I asked.
"Yes. This is how heroes are made!"
"Heroes are… made?" I blinked at her.
"All heroes are made by witches like myself!" she declared. "The monster responsible for the desolation of your village is the Great Dragon Zarnitza. As a marked hero and a DyrkJarl of great renown, you shall wield powers beyond mere mortals, enabling you to exact retribution upon the vile dragon! If you get strong enough and rise in might by defeating smaller beasts, you might someday avenge your kin and bring down the abomination that devastated your village from the sky!"
I squinted at her.
"From this moment on, you step onto the path of being the DyrkJarl of Midgard, a hero…" Her clawed hand extended towards me, lanky finger suddenly glowing with an ethereal luminescence, casting eerie, off-color rainbows in the air.
"Wait, wait, wait. How about we don't dick-jarl me yet," I backed away from her.
"Why?" The witch's eyes grew wide. "You do not wish to avenge your family? You do not wish to decimate villains and monsters, cultivating strength to extract vengeance and stamp out evil wherever you find it? Surely that is the goal of every noble lad!"
"No," I shook my head.
I wasn't Ioan. The original memories of this body were gone. I felt no desire to slay dragons, and didn't want vengeance.
"The sacrifice of your kin will fade away when the magic-infused blood of your parents flakes off your body in about eight hundred heartbeats," the witch said. "When it does, my spell will dissipate and fade into the ether… unless it is bound properly to your soul. You must not squander this opportunity! This is your destiny, take it before it's too late!"
Eight hundred heartbeats—approximately ten minutes? The specificity again caught my attention. The red hexagram on my chest must be breaking down according to some predictable decay function, like a radioactive half-life.
"To hell with destiny," I said. "I… I want to make my own choices!"
The witch raised an eyebrow, examining my set face.
"I want to know more!" I declared. "What are the drawbacks of being a... DyrkJarl?"
"Visibility," she conceded. "Heroes amass power by vanquishing their enemies and monsters. By taking life, a DyrkJarl becomes stronger… and also more attractive to monsters."
"Attractive how?" I asked.
"Via smell. Monsters and other DyrkJarls will smell the burning air and hear the thunder of Perun emanating from a DyrkJarl's Aura and will seek to usurp the power that thrums within you," the witch revealed. "Jotuns and trolls can smell the blood of a hero from a thousand steps away. The life of a DyrkJarl is one of fierce valour and constant battle! Beast-people from the South are known to enslave young DyrkJarls with their dark magics!"
A thousand steps—maybe around 700-800 meters of detection range. Even in the natural world, certain moth species could detect pheromones at almost unbelievable distances. Was this "hero aura" some kind of potent biochemical signature?
"So essentially, I would be painting a huge target on my back?" I asked. "No, thank you."
I definitely wasn't willing to become a meat shield for a dubious witch, especially if being a hero made me visible to slavers and monsters from 800 meters away. The old woman's frown deepened.
"Is there no alternative?" I asked. "What happens if I don't become a DyrkJarl?"
"I already told you! The magic chains wrapped around your body will snap and you will lose whatever it is you gained from the river spirit be it knowledge or special skills," she said. "It is snowing. If I do not turn you into a dragonslayer, you will forget who you are and then inevitably freeze to death!"
"Hmmm, yeah, that does sound bad," I said. Losing my rationality, memories and understanding of my current self would suck.
"Yes. Which is why you must…" Yaga insisted.
“You won’t offer me shelter?” I asked.
“I’m not actually here!” She barked, getting frustrated with me.
I stepped closer and stared at her, noticing that her body shimmered slightly at the edges like a mirage
Was she some kind of hologram? A magical projection?
“Can I not walk to your… witch house?” I asked. “Which way is it?”
“No,” she shook her head with a sad expression. “Many dangerous beasts seek to devour me. Even if they cannot see me, they stalk the edge of my domain, attracted to its magics. If you walk directly to my grove, your death in the jaws of a Jotun during the day or the talons of a Sirin after sunset is assured. You must slay many weaker beasts to grow stronger–only then you’ll be able to visit me!”
"Hold on," I tried to organize my scattering thoughts.
Something wasn't adding up: Everyone in Svalbard was dead. I was the only survivor. There was an incredibly suspicious witch character at the scene of the mass murder, offering me incredible power. More specifically, a witch who had the clear motives of killing everyone here to create a dragon-slaying DyrkJarl.
My paranoia intensified.
"How does one become a witch?" I asked, trying to find a loophole in her words.
"A sacrifice of life, a pact with a local nature spirit or another witch and the desire to bind yourself to a place," she explained. "A wish to be safe, to tend to the land. Desire to seek connection to the All-Mother Zemlya above all things."
"And are witches… perhaps routinely hunted and killed?" I inquired, suddenly thinking of the Spanish Inquisition.
"As much as anyone else is," the witch shrugged. "It is however exceptionally hard to slay a Yaga on her land, for we are domain-bound, and are able to dream of the future. We draw our power from the fecund earth beneath our feet and lose our magical prowess if we venture beyond our domain. While cursed beasts can smell our domain, they cannot see the witch as long as she stands on her land.”
I evaluated my options:
- The witch was lying about everything and was trying to turn me into her hero patsy to send on dragon-slaying quests. I didn't see the dragon personally. I woke up under a river, not recalling a single thing about myself as Ioan. Maybe she cast an amnesia spell and pushed me into the river and killed everyone in the village with a spell. Maybe there was no dragon involved at all. Without checking thoroughly for dragon paw prints, I had no reason to believe any of Grandhilda's words.
- The witch was honest about her intentions and if I didn't become a hero then I would lose all of my new, shiny memories, lose my scientific understanding of the world, lose my ability to rationally observe patterns and to break them down.
"Three hundred heartbeats," she warned. "Before the blood sacrifice is rendered futile!"
There was only one way to determine if Grandhilda was even slightly honest about things. I had to derail the entire 'hero' narrative she wove for me, demanding something... entirely unexpected.
"Bind me to this village," I declared. "Make me into… a warlock!"
"W-what?" The ancient crone blinked. “I don’t understand that word. What’s a ‘warlock’?”
"Witch me up!" I said. “Give me witch powers!”
"You are a boy!" Yaga Grandhilda declared.
"And?"
"Don't you know anything?!" she asked. "Earthly wisdom and feminine wit belongs to Zemlya, the Goddess of fertility. Bravery and strength belongs to her husband Perun, the God of men and war! The land belongs to Zemlya while the sky belongs to Perun."
"Meaning what?" I asked, prying for more information as to why warlocks weren’t a thing here.
"You are not a girl!" The witch barked. "Girls meditate to commune with spirits and breathe magic out of their bodies. You… you'd make the weakest witch in the world, one blind to the wild! Men inhale magic to become stronger, they cannot see nature spirits! Men cannot communicate with spirits, cannot cast magic out of their bodies no matter how much they meditate! That is the way of the world and…"
The Yaga's words sounded like excuses. If men couldn't communicate with nature spirits directly could they simply not hire a woman to be their medium or something?
I decided to press on with my attack, confident that either she would accidentally reveal the truth about murdering everyone here or make me into a witch, which was fine too because it would make me less visible in a dragon-populated world.
"Please make me into a warlock… err, a witch, Yaga!" I urged. "Magic me up. Bind me to the land. I'm ready. That's my greatest and only wish!"
Yaga Grandhilda stared at me like I was mad.
"Don't you want to leap over the trees, to lift weapons with incredible ease?" She attempted to market the strongman abilities of the sky-god-aligned heroes to me. "If you live long enough as a hero, you might even learn to fly atop of your sword! Doesn't that sound exciting?"
Flying on a sword? I suppressed a chortle as I considered the aerodynamics involved.
The surface area would be entirely insufficient to generate lift for a human body. Unless magic completely rewrote the laws of physics, which... seemed increasingly likely in this world.
"No, I want to be a witch!" I insisted. "Flying on swords sounds extremely unsafe, what if I fall off?"
"Heroes don't just…" the Yaga sputtered.
"Flying round these parts just seems dangerous," I added with an exaggerated look of a scared teenager. "A dragon could eat me."
"Very well," she sighed. "So be it. As inordinate as this is… I suppose that a male witch, or worry-lock-whatever, just might be possible. It's better than you simply freezing to death as a mortal. Maybe in a few centuries time… if Zemlya takes pity on you, you'll learn to commune with the spirits of the wild."
I nodded.
"Step forward, quickly, to me!" She barked. "We have only sixty heartbeats left!"
I did.
With swift, deliberate movements, she tapped the center of my chest where the hexagram converged with her glowing finger.
"Lie down and embrace the Earth-Mother, Zemlya, beneath you and yearn to be her eternal… virgin maiden and dedicated caretaker," she instructed, chortling slightly at the 'virgin maiden' bit. "To aid all who venture here with the power of the wilds, to persist through the breath of the land from this point on forevermore!"
I obeyed, my arms encircling the icy ground, head turned to the witch.
My thoughts were consumed not by visions of hippie forest love, but by the desire for safety and protection, for invisibility and anonymity. I yearned for a sanctuary of my own, a haven in which I might conduct experiments and unravel the mysteries of the new, magic-filled universe that now surrounded me.
Within moments, I felt a peculiar sensation as if an invisible chain snapped between me and the ground. I saw that my entire body ignited with a violet shimmer as I were suffused with an ethereal glow akin to Cherenkov radiation—the eerie blue light produced when particles exceed the speed of light in a medium. But this was violet, presumably somewhere around 400 nanometers on the electromagnetic spectrum, just at the edge of human visual perception.
"Is this…?"
"This is normal," the witch reassured me as I felt my limbs growing heavy. She traced a circle in the ground with a gnarled staff. "Farewell and good fortune… Yaga… Ioan Starfall!" She smirked at the word Yaga, seemingly amused by the absurdity of a male witch.
"Umm. Do I not receive an apprenticeship, or some form of guidance from here?" I asked.
"Seek me out in the Astral Ocean," she replied cryptically. "But first, claim your land and draw sustenance from it and make it bloom!"
"How?" I repeated. "Isn't it the middle of winter?!"
"All things that decay and bloom in your domain's soil will gradually empower you."
"Uhm. Right," I tried to process her words. "What if something tries to eat me or my... garden?"
"Night predators will no doubt attempt to devour you tonight," the Yaga said with a nonchalant look, sliding her skill mask back on.
"What?!" I sputtered.
"Simply remain in your glade and do not move, do not breathe and most of all do not speak, if one approaches. Your domain shall hide you from the spirits and monsters wishing your harm," she said.
"Don't breathe? What?" I blinked at her.
The average human could only hold their breath for a minute or two before autonomic responses forced inhalation. What kind of predator would I need to hide from for such a short time? Did witches not need air or something?
“Seek me out in the Astral Ocean, should you have further questions!"
"How?!"
"To reach out to me—replant the mushrooms that will bloom below my feet into your grove. Once they turn deep red in two weeks time, squeeze the juice from them and drink a fistful of it before going to sleep!" She declared. "For now, survive and draw power from Mother Zemlya, be akin to a tree root! Tonight will be your first test as a newborn witch! Do not step away from your glade at night, no matter what you are promised!"
"Promised what by whom?" I asked, feeling very woozy even in my horizontal position as if my inner ear decided to go on vacation. “What mushrooms?!”
The Yaga stuck her staff into the ground.
A circle of tiny yellow-pink mushrooms suddenly bloomed at the Yaga’s feet, their delicate caps unfurling like the petals of a flower. Her figure shimmered and wavered, and in the blink of an eye, she was gone as if her body simply folded away.
As I remained on the ground, the pull of the earth seemed to intensify, as though gravity itself had conspired to draw me ever closer to my newfound domain.
My head slammed into the earth.
I felt myself sinking into the ground.
At least I wasn't so cold anymore.
Alien, stinging fire filled my body, rushed up across my nerves, a million of star-like violet and silver sparks flickering and dying in my eyes forming into incomprehensible gibberish. The patterns of gibberish seemed to follow some mathematical structure—it wasn't random noise.
I focused all of my will to understand the pattern, to comprehend the information. My brain felt like it was boiling from within, but eventually the noise formed itself into runes. I focused harder trying to understand some semblance of meaning behind the runes.
The wobbling runes rearranged themselves into understandable text.
The absurd text pulsed in my eyes for a few moments and then exploded, detonating across my entire head like violet fire, sending my consciousness careening sideways into the abyss.