For most people, the most shocking thing about waking up in a bathtub full of ice was the ice. 

For you, though? That part is refreshing. Familiar. Reminds you of home. Reminds you of war. Reminds you of the gales on the North Sea, the cracking glaciers of the fjords, of leaping from the prow of your longship into the frosting water of home. You carried the bite of that ice all through your life.

No, what gets you is the [i]bathtub[/i]. They had bathtubs in your day of course, but they weren't like this. A digital control panel (you know what all of those words mean?) with automated temperature modulation (you mark a rune and the tub never goes cold?) with a full bonus feature selection? You could ask it with your voice to fill the bath with bubbles or brightly coloured soap powder or herbal remedies and it would mix it on demand instantly. You know how to use this miraculous machine and you know, too, that this is not the luxury of a sorcerer king. Anyone could obtain such a thing following a brief barter with a Technomancer. It's more disorienting than being called to fight frost giants on the battlefields of Ragnarok. You might have imagined, before this day, how to kill a frost giant. You have not imagined that the art of bathsmithing had come so far.

But even with this strange knowledge of the modern world you cannot imagine why the bath might have come to be filled with bloodstained ice.

The answers lie with the young... you almost thought she was a boy, or less than a boy: one of those halfmen priests, who slaved in dark crypts in service to their dead god's book. Her baldness, the robes, the unhealthy slouch, the way she is holding the mead bottle as though ashamed of it - but no. Her robe is as bright an orange as ever seen in the locks of Ireland, her muscles are as wiry and thick as any shieldmaiden, and her knuckles have the scars of a great many brawls. You have heard tales from the Varangians about the exotic Turkic warriors who served the Emperor of Rome, and just like you knew the mystery of the bath, you too know that she is something of that lineage. A warrior priestess, an exorcist of devils and spirits, marked with the stigmata of mastery carved in bloody lines along the back of her shaven head.

Yes, this wretched and broken thing is your Master. She stares at you with shock, drunkenness and exhaustion. There was nothing deliberate here, even though it is her blood that stained the ice that called you. All across the floor are the traces of blood as she dragged herself, injured and shivering, out of the cold. One bottle is broken and one bottle is empty, the white... refrigerator where they were stored hanging open.

And outside the window, over verdant lands dressed in the dying days of summer, silver towers reach into the sky like ladders to the glorious full moon. 

You have arisen.