A series of background narratives.

The boy stared, rapt, as the glowing embers crawled with fire-worms.  Eyes unfocused, mouth slightly agape, the child’s eyes appeared fixed on some distant place.  Seated before the tiny, smoldering fire, he rocked back and forth with barely perceptible motions.

“Listen, grandchild.” The old man spoke, his wizened face peering from a heap of caribou skins draped around his skinny frame.  “I have told you of the old-fire, those contained within the hidden trees in the Upeametska.  The spirits of the old-fire yearn to free themselves from the imprisoning wood, but the wood-spirits resist…and their battle is long by our reckoning.  Thus the slow battle warms our tents during the Long Days and keeps our bones from joining the Sky-Demons during the Long Nights.”

The boy nodded dreamily, eyes still lost in the dim glow cast from the embers.
“Listen, grandchild.” The old man spoke again, his voice melding into a sing-song cadence.  “I have told you of Our Family…before Grandmother Sky was eaten by Her Children.  Cousin Sun and Mother Moon are still Family—the Others, we do not truly know.”

“Listen, grandchild.” The old man spoke once again, his voice sharpening and eyes taking on a crazed, feral look in the shifting light of the fire’s embers.  “We are far from our People, but we can return.  I have found a Way…” the man faltered.  “I have found a Way…we must eat only three souls to pass along this Way.”  The old man pulled dried meat of some sort from a beaded satchel, but stopped to stare at the lank strips of desiccated flesh in his hand.

The boy’s mouth, ajar, began to stretch wide as giggles erupted from his thin, heaving chest.  Jaw elongating to impossible lengths, the boy began to retch forth a many-eyed vermiform pillar of putrescent stuff, snapping lamprey-like mouths ringing each of the myriad eyes.  The old man leapt to his feet, his rapid movements belying his age.  An old, rune-covered long bone—a femur from some human or other anthropoid—appeared in his hand, and he shattered the child’s skull with sickening ease.  The writhing pillar of eyes and mouths swirled and dissipated.  The old man coughed harshly, twice, and gave a low, strangled moan.  He carefully wiped the child’s hair, skull fragments, and bits of brain from the runed bone club, and tucked it away.  He considered the small corpse, briefly eyeing the legs and arms, but turned away as the child’s flesh began to twitch and heave as if alive to some subcutaneous tumult.

The old man carefully collected the embers of the fire in a blackened stone pot, pausing only to gather his caribou skins and a beaded satchel, before setting the hide tent alight with one small ember.  He shuffled through the snow and ice in the frozen blackness of the deep night—the terrifying stars blazing in unholy immenseness above.  “Listen, grandchild,” the man murmured softly and somewhat confusedly, “I will return to my tribe when I find my way from this Place to There.”

This message was last edited by the GM at 08:59, Thu 08 May 2014.

The salmon and char run quickly in the so, so brief melt moons.  Up the streams, and if the Spirits of the Waters were kind, we would spear some of our Cousins for food...smoking and drying them for the Long Nights.

My father, he would travel to the River to spear the biggest of our Cousins, careful of the Bear Clan and the River Men.  He and a few men would bring back Cousins beyond count.  In the last of the Long Days, men threw his skull to our tents and told us he had fed their dogs.  They took my sister and clubbed many of our men before we fled.  We found bones when we returned--empty of flesh.

The Long Nights are here--Cousin Sun is gone.  We are hungry, and have little to eat. My little brother is dead.  Cold is here, it is among us.

We are hungry.  We are cold.

We are hungry.

One day we awoke, with pale light beginning its song through the black sky as a weakened Cousin Sun drove the stars and Sky Demons from our midst.  My sister's body was staked to the ground outside our tent, pierced through with a heavy spear.  The two warriors who were watchers during the night lay dead...their throats cut and mouths slashed upward into terible caricatures of red smiles.  The River Men had returned.

Why?  Our tribe has no resources, no wealth, little food, and little hope.  We are a small group beneath an uncaring blue bone bowl of sky during the day, and tormented by unholy stars and Sky Demons by night.

Why?  My little brother is Spirit-touched, his eyes turned inward and prone to rocking his malnourished body and keening softly.  He told me, once, during a time of terrifying nightime Sky Demon colors..."We are all touched, brother, and we are marked thereby.  We will be sought, we will be hunted, we will be extinguished."

I do not know what this means.  I do not know what to do.  My little brother has not spoken since.  We are hungry.  We are cold.

We are hungry.

"Stop.  Cease your mouthings."

My mother held my head, lifted from the blankets inside the freezing tent.  Her eyes glittered with a silver sheen.

"Your little brother has moved onto different snowfields...he is no longer in the Here.  You must stop calling him."

I peered at her, her face tucked into a caribou-lined hood, and sighed.

"My mother, you passed five or more Dark Cycles ago.  Why do you come to me now?  Why do you you counsel me to avoid my brother?  We are a family.  He is my brother."

She peered at me, something softening in her chiseled face with the silvered eyes.

"Only grief will come of this, but I have laid down my burden in telling you so."