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For a native of the Anchor’s frigid peaks, more so for a shieldmaiden chasing glory, and worst of all for a hollowed-out woman who craved children, forty-five was the age at the edge of possibility. But this fine morning, the earth showed Siggi a mercy, even as she trod on its frozen face with blood-soaked leather for boots.

Dawn coaxed soft colours out of a bruised sky and a pebbled hillside, so that the new day would not hurt her sensitive eyes. An autumn wind sliced itself along pale grass to bring her fragrances that had ripened for a full summer, so that she could not smell the rot festering beneath her second skin. There was silence enough to hear the very pulse of this place, silence enough to drown out the small voice that lived at the end of her hearing, whispering that she was dying and too soon.

She found a smooth rock on the hillside, one large enough to carve a throne from, and lay her palm against it. The stone was cold, still coated with frost from the night before, even as the sun rose from its grave in the east.

Siggi pressed her palm harder against it, waking the morning pains in her wrist, exciting the tremble that never quite left her fingers. There. Beneath the unyielding surface, a deep churning that hummed through her hand. It was almost a song, wordless, and yet all the time chanting - at last.

"Is this it?" Tugann’s deep voice carried over the dewy plains.

She winced at the broken silence and withdrew her hand from the rock. For a moment, her handprint stood out on the stone, bone white against its black surface, then it faded like a memory.

[color=PapayaWhip]"No, but it's close enough,"[/color] she said, abandoning a half-formed lie.

Tugann’s heavy footfalls sent gravel skittering down before him. [i]Too loud,[/i] Siggi thought.
 
[color=PapayaWhip]"You're up early,"[/color] she said, huddling her cloak tighter against the wind with one hand, resting the other on one of the two axes hitched to her belt.

"A captain always is." His smile was as big as he was, his beard a fierce old bush of brown. "Besides, dreams like the ones you paint make it hard for a man to sleep."

[color=PapayaWhip]"And your men?"[/color] she asked. [color=PapayaWhip]"Have they slept off their bruises?"[/color]

Tugann laughed, oblivious to how he shattered the morning's peace. "After the last ambush, hardly a man wanted to shut his eyes."

[color=PapayaWhip]"Funny,"[/color] she said, [color=PapayaWhip]"how some men can be kept awake by dreams, and others by nightmares."[/color]

"Ha!"
 
A murder of crows broke from the trees in the valley below, swirling into the sky like shadows loosed from the world.

"It shook them, for sure," he said, "but nothing keeps a man down when he's hunting for glory.”

He swayed a little, like a half-drunk who thought he was sober, before he righted himself. Captain Tugann was the only man in his company who indulged in neither drink nor the mushroom that abounded here. His only vice was greed. It was the only thing Siggi liked about him. That and his aura, an odd amber that reminded her of a butcher-turned-lover she once had.
 
She started back up the hillside, the frozen grass crunching beneath her leather-wrapped feet. Tugann's panting was loud behind her. When she glanced over her shoulder, she could almost smell him breaking into a mild sweat, despite late autumn's bite in the wind. His aura turned a sickly grey color, swallowing his sweet ambers and electric blues.

[color=PapayaWhip]"Well, there will be enough glory to repay your trust and your lost men, Captain."[/color] [i]Liars die last but alone.[/i] A milkmaid's saying. [color=PapayaWhip] "For your men, the hard part has passed. I do not think the Skinwalkers ever come this close to the peak. Besides, your men walk with the Chosen."[/color] A little more truthful, but it soured her mouth to say it aloud. [color=PapayaWhip]"Were that not the case, we would have died a while back."[/color]

"Wretched fockers," he said, half-chuckling, half-breathless. "I only lost six men for two we put down."

[color=PapayaWhip]"Normally, this quest is taken by lone pilgrims and occasionally the milkweed looking to prove himself.."[/color] She gained the crest a moment before the Captain did. [color=PapayaWhip]"Me, I prefer to stack the odds when I can."[/color]

Below, the Old Companions broke their camp in the light of a blazing bonfire. The smell of smoke and sizzling fat snaked up the hillside to greet Siggi. Grip tightening on her axehead, she realised the smell would drift beyond her, further than the pilgrim stone, maybe even to the Anchor’s peak itself. That would not do. For all the care she had taken, all the years she had burned away in preparation of this morning, that would simply not do.
 
Removed from the hum of mana in the air, the little tremors bubbled up in her fingers again, alongside a dull throbbing in time with her quickening pulse.

She lifted her hand through the slit in her cloak, turned it to watch the veins running down the back of her hand, wending like the river of time, forever dragging her along its current. The wind swept her hair across her face, strands of pale gold, now woven through with silver. She brushed them out of sight.
 
[color=PapayaWhip]"Your men look in poor spirits, Captain. Seems they could use a drink."[/color]

Tugann clicked his tongue. "That brood could always use a drink, but they emptied the last of their kegs last night."

She could smell that too. What clean air the smoke hadn't touched was soured by the acrid stench of urine.
 
[color=PapayaWhip]"No great matter,"[/color] she said, descending down towards the camp. [color=PapayaWhip]"I saved a treat just for this morning."[/color]

The Old Companions cleared their camp the way drunks and drugged men did anything, with loose grips, weak spines, and limbs in possession of neither speed nor purpose. She could concede that Tugann kept a tight group, but they lacked his disdain for a sour cup. [i]A soldier is only as strong as his thirst[/i]. A jape among Ironskins, the male counterparts to the Shieldmaiden elites.

Lovi, Tugann’s second-in-command, looked up from his bowl of wayfarer stew and gave a smile that went no deeper than his yellow teeth. The reddish green of his aura smothered by grey and black hues. 

"Aha!" He staggered to his feet. "The woman we all suffer for. All hail the Sly Wolf!"
 
Siggi ground her fury between gritted teeth, and stretched her lips into some bastard thing between a smile and a snarl.

The Sly Wolf.
 
In her youth, her shield-peers had mockingly called her the Pup, until she went out into the woods, killed an old bitch ranging on its own, and pinned down each of those village brats as she made them kiss its still-wet maw. From there until the twilight of her prime, she was the Gold Wolf, for her hair and the bangles that climbed all the way to her elbows of her firstskin. When Gold turned to Old, she sold those bangles for wisdom, and wisdom brought her here, to the footstool of destiny, where a dying brute called her sly, not knowing the half of it.

[color=PapayaWhip]"How did you sleep, Lovi?"[/color]

He made a show of yawning. "Could march for days - even with a good woman on my side. Maybe especially."

[color=PapayaWhip]"Maybe."[/color] She bent down to her own sleeping mat, opened her carry bag, and pulled out a bulging wineskin. [color=PapayaWhip]"How about a little taste of gold for your belly in the meantime?"[/color]

He squinted bronze eyes. "What's that?"

[color=PapayaWhip]"Demon's piss from the Hearth-Home markets."[/color] An empty vial poked out of her bag. She slid it back in, very careful not to touch the corroding stopper.

Lovi hesitated. "Shieldmaidens don't drink."

[color=PapayaWhip]"Small wonder I'm offering it to you, then."[/color]

Like any good Ironskin, Lovi's intellect bowed down to his thirst. "Any good?"

[color=PapayaWhip]"I wouldn't know, now, would I?"[/color] She winked. [color=PapayaWhip]"Man I won it from says it tastes like I fight."[/color]

He cut another one of his empty smiles. "Nasty, gritty, and bloody. Don't think I fancy a taste." He gave a cough that could have rattled a boak's lungs. "Give it here anyway."
 
[i]Nasty, gritty, and bloody.[/i]

The Shieldmaidens she had trained with in Hearth-Home had all stood a head taller, moved with a touch more grace, equally pious before the statues of Boris, god of strength, mercy and the holy mountain. Shieldmaidens did not just have to be fierce warriors like the Ironskins, but a lucky charm on the battlefield too, and gods-be-damned if one didn't offer quarter to an enemy who begged after it, gods-be-damned if they weren't on their knees before an alter whilst their brother-warriors were on their knees beneath a beer-soaked table.
 
She pressed the skin into his hand, watched him sip, saw his eyes light up.

"Boris’ balls, where've you been hiding this!" Lovi took a long drag, coughed again, and gave a loud whoop. "Timund, come get a taste of this!"
 
Timund left his chores to come taste. The others converged on the drink like crows after a ripe corpse.

As they crowded around for a taste of demon's piss, she drew Tugann aside. [color=PapayaWhip]"Don't suppose, you're in the mood for a drink, Captain?"[/color]

"Don't think so," he wheezed, his stagger much more prominent now. The sunrise put a sheen to his sweating brow. "I gamble as much as these men, probably whore as much too. Captain has to find some way . . . some way to be better than his charges."
 
He scratched a red spot on his neck pebbled with sores, and at its centre, a little bump puckered around a tiny black hole.

[color=PapayaWhip]"Is that a hornet's sting?"[/color] she asked, as she ushered him beyond the camp's border. "Maybe a mosquito, let me down my second skin in the night." he said. "Hate the things. Night demons, I call them. Would kill them all if I could."
 
There was blood when he removed his hand, with an odd purple tint to it, the same colour as the vial stopper.

[color=PapayaWhip]"We should never set our sights on the impossible,"[/color] she said. [color=PapayaWhip]"Finding a mosquito in the dark is like finding a needle in all this grass."[/color]

"Odd saying."

[color=PapayaWhip]"It's an odd time, Captain."[/color]

They walked together towards an old cliff, where the hill fell away to a sheer fifty-foot drop. As they came to stand on the lip, he was coughing as well as panting.

She watched the sun crown on the horizon, dawn giving birth to a crisp, blue day that would soon irritate her eyes. But her gaze went beyond the east, beyond today, into some far future where her name rang as loud as thunder, even as her body rotted in the earth.

And her body would rot; she refused to hide from that fact. Immortality was not for the flesh. The sculptor did not live forever, but his statues rooted themselves in the world even as the sands of time swirled past them.

Atop the edge of the heavens, her chisel lay waiting.
 
[color=PapayaWhip]"I want to thank you, Captain. Without you, I would not have made it this far."[/color]

He furrowed his brow and nodded slowly, eyes unfocused, lips slightly parted. The raw patch on his neck had an angry colour to it now. His aura had turned a deathly black color. He opened his mouth to say something, gently rocking back and forth. A stronger wind could have knocked him over. Perhaps the earth wasn't that gracious after all.

His mouth hung half open, waiting for his mind to catch up. Siggi flexed her fingers to keep the joints from stiffening. She threw off her cloak so the sun could kiss her arms and warm the bark of her battered breastplate. Blue veins crept up the inside of her wrists like grapevines, climbing upward with the years, just as her bangles had. With a thought she willed her second skin over veins.

Still, there was some muscle in her axe arm, she thought, though not as much as before. Forty-five was not quite old enough for despair, but it was too old for blind faith. Gone were the days of dreaming of great deeds, and gone the strength to do them. But not the wit. The gods could not take that from her because they had never given it. She had clawed and kicked and bitten for every last scrap of it, rallied against her own backwater ignorance.
 
Tugann at last found half a word. The breath that pushed past his cracked lips sounded like "Glo-." Her mind twisted it to "Old."

[color=PapayaWhip]"Not yet, Captain. Not yet."[/color]

She pressed her hand against his back and pushed him over the edge.

[hider=Summary]
Siggi and a band of dwarves are making their way up the holy mountain at the center of the Anchor of the World, the holy site the World Mountain. They seek to scale it for glory. Siggi, known as the sky wolf, a disgraced Shieldmaiden of the Raigalli Order, poisons her band, maybe to claim the prize at the mountains peak. 

Quest: Claim the EarthShaker atop the World Mountain. 
[/hider]