I guess I got this written up too late.
Nevertheless, here goes...
You run raggedly to the edge of the nearly frozen, gelid river. The sky is clear and the moon is nearly set, but smoke occludes the night behind you. Fire rages over your heaving shoulders, the reddish-orange glow seen over the edge of the woodline obscuring the city. It burns uncontrollably now, screams of terror and fear mixed freely with the distant sound of wooden timbers cracking and shattering beneath their own weight as fire consumes the bones of the buildings being eaten away. Every street was ablaze when you stumbled out, half-blind and half naked with the smell of flesh splitting in the air of improvised pits of flame, and of blood sizzling black and cooking from open wounds.
They had razed the city in the early morn when the darkness is thickest and the air the most still. While everyone slept and all was quiet, slaughter had come to substitute the peace of slumber with the disaster and rape of invasion.
You had escaped in the ruinous confusion, but all your gear was lost. Your winter clothing probably now burned to ashes along with the house in which you had but moments before rested comfortably. Your friends were likely now disfigured corpses, or fled into the frigid dark without guide and without hope of long survival in the press of deepest winter. You stood aghast and without clear plan of your own, knowing and listening to the sounds of the enemy scouts starting to comb the outlying areas for survivors to butcher. You have nowhere to turn. Backwards and into the maelstrom of the pursuing horde is certain death. Or much worse before death of a most vicious kind. From the pattern of fires it seems as if you are surrounded. You see the bridges guarded, or smoldering in flame. The river before you is too deep to wade or ford, and too wide to swim in temperatures that would freeze the bone and blood of thick-coated timber bears. Still, the shock of being frozen and then drowned is to your mind preferable to that of being cooked alive on stakes, mutilated by heated blades, or cast alive into fiery buildings as if you were kindling for the cremation of your city.
Three months ago you had, with your old companions, set out for dangerous and foreign lands in order to rescue and retrieve the nephew and niece of your king, who were held for ransom, torment, and opportunity. Constantly being moved from camp to camp in order to foil hope of deliverance, you had nevertheless finally located the pair, and in a daring and venturesome night-time raid had retrieved the half-mad boy, but had found the girl dead from exhaustion and much rough abuse. Furious at the treatment of your sovereign charges you had killed many of the captors as they slept, some others in running and pitched battle, but your ambush had been effective and almost complete, and you suffered few losses of your own.
The boy returned to the king your reward had been generous, fine and fitting. You made an important officer of a small frontier's city, all your companions given positions of their own. Along with homes and treasures and lucre and fine horses and livestock with which to make a stake of life along the restless borders of the foothills to the west and north of your homeland. It seemed an auspicious start of a better and ever expanding career, your bravery having been rewarded richly in goods and fame.
Yet now you stand before a chilling river, fire consuming your new home, your neighbors dead or dying, your goods consumed in flame, and even your new and proud mount lying in the blood soaked streets, having been shot down with many arrows. The invaders had not even cared to capture the useful, hardy animal, but had rather killed it merely for the cruelty, waste, and carnage of it all.
It seemed to you that it could be no coincidence at all that these events were in some way linked to your own nighttime raid against those who had stolen the kin of the king. Somehow you had been patiently tracked, watched, and then your city ambushed, just as you had acted against your own enemy, and their mobile camp. Except this time there was no effort to sort out guilty from innocent, to control the level of destruction, and most importantly of all, this time there would be no rescue in the dark. The dark had come again, and come not this time as a covering of hope, to conceal and cloak an underlying mission of mercy, but as a shroud of spoilage and massacre. And in this dark all roads lead finally to death.
You collapse to sit heavily upon the wet and icy bank, preparing yourself for the moment, not now long away, when you must freeze and drown yourself. Preparing for the sharp and almost slicing pain of death by unremitting cold. You see your breath rise in the air like a forlorn mist, directionless, and scattered, dispelling into bleak nothing before the end. You stand again before it is too late or you suffer capture, despondent yet resolved, and walk purposely into the river. Your naked lower legs are almost instantly and frightfully numbed, your heart shocked, your breath stopped momentarily by the pain. Nevertheless you fear much worse to turn back, and push forward, forcing yourself, almost leaping into that section of the river deeper than your own height. As you submerge your eyes seem to freeze, your skull pounds in anguish, your joints seize and lock in protest. Your very bones ache with the effort of preventing your entire body from instantly freezing.
But some last instinct of survival forces you to the surface, one last time to breathe before you are consumed completely by the cold, and sink to the river bottom, hardened like timber preserved in ice. You hear a muffled shout, something strikes your head, something heavy cutting through the water. The impact gashes open your eyes, your own blood, feeling much warmer than the river flow floods into your sight. Through the gore and current you see hands reach down to take you, haul you from the river, and roughly deposit you onto the deck of a crude-made raft. Faces huddle over you, their breath like a summer breeze compared to your labored attempts to breathe. The water itself had seemed a warmer tomb than having been submerged and then hauled again into the frigid air like this. You shiver sorely and uncontrollably.
You hear a voice, muffled, or controlled by whispered tension and stealth.
"We have no decent covering for you. We have no extra clothes or wraps. You will have to survive this on your own until such time as we can reach safety. I am sorry."
You sense, but very dimly, that several people huddle on the raft, some men, a few perhaps women or children. One seems to be directing others, a soldier perhaps, giving quiet orders, guiding the raft away from the ruined remains of the city. Then you hear another voice, much closer, but also quiet. A voice you recognize. One of your old companions.
"I do not know of any of the others in our party survived. But we must get well clear of this place or the invaders will hunt us down. Stay alive of you can. Dawn is three or so hours away. Then we will know what must be done, and if we will live another day..."
