Longest Night: Logs

Who: Chilchuck and Clark
What: A rescue
Where: Outside the Pole
When: Daemon day
Warnings/Notes:

"You have got to be kidding me."

The last thing he remembers is the nightmarish sight of the Lunatic Magician summoning all those dragons, and the terrifying thought that had passed through his mind:

They're going to get Marcille too. And no one will ever find us down here.

Then the ice dragon had loomed up before him and he'd felt its icy breath suddenly blast at him, the frost burning his skin and eating even deeper into his flesh. His blood had run cold and then slowed and stopped running at all.

He's alive again but the cold is even worse now. He'd landed in a snow drift and his already chilled limbs - just barely revived - are already starting to go numb thanks to the cold of the storm around him. It's a rare summer storm today at the Pole. The sky is clouded over, the wind has picked up, and the snow has been falling in freakish amounts. And it's pure powder, Chilchuck could cast off every single thing weighting himself down and not be able to walk on top.

Quickly standing up, he can only just barely see over the snow drifts. If he weren't tall for a half-foot, he'd likely only be able to see the snow around him. Those extra few inches save his life. In one direction: a cliff he might have accidentally wandered off. In another, the grandest mansion he's ever seen in his life, built into another cliff. There's firelight shining through every window.

Eyes wide he looks around for walls, for any sign at all he's still in the dungeon. He calls out the names of his companions, but there's no response. He hugs his arms to himself, not just because he's freezing.

"Am I dead? I better not be dead." If this is some kind of weird purgatorial struggle towards paradise, he's going to ditch and go haunt Laios (if Laois survived the dragons, that is) for convincing him to follow him into this whole mess.

He casts off his pack to be lighter on his feet. It's as he quickly puts on his cold weather gear (not that it's warm enough to do much against this nightmarish chill) and wraps the blanket of his futon around himself in desperation, that he sees, of all things (of all things!) there's a stoat in the snow next to his body. Just...randomly there. In the snow. If it weren't shivering he'd worry that he'd killed it by landing on it or something.

He almost leaves it.

"Probably a monster in disguise," he mutters. "If you take it with you, it'll try to eat your face for all you know. You've got other things to worry about."

He tries to walk away but something clutches at his heart and some strange instinct makes him turn back to look at it. It looks strangely stunned. As if something beyond the cold has put it into a state of shock. And it also looks a little pathetic. Maybe he did land on it after all. He tells himself he's not going to let a sense of guilt over possibly squishing it make him risk taking it along. He's not going to do it, absolutely not -

The half-conscious stoat lets out a forlorn little squeak.

He sighs, and grumbling, he squats down and take it into his his hands, briefly letting go of the blanket.

"I can't carry you; you're going to have to hold on on your own," he says, putting it up near his neck, hoping his scarf can help hold it close. (And also hoping it doesn't rip his throat out.) The stoat wraps around his neck on instinct, clinging but not strangling him, hiding in his scarf for warmth. Then clutching the blanket at his throat again, Chilchuck starts his desperate scramble towards survival.

If he were the size of a tallman, it would have been different. A difficult push through waist-high snow drifts, certainly. But he'd have been able to make his way close enough. Yetis on watch would've seen him and come out to greet him with even warmer blankets and snow globed him inside. But he's short enough to not be seen, especially as the wind tosses powder to and fro. His strides are half that of a tallman, so it's twice the distance. And pushing through snow drifts nearly as tall as you are is far more exhausting than doing it against ones that reach your waist.

And worse: wetter. He's soaked through before long, the snow clinging to his clothes and skin, melting because of his body heat until he's soaked. He sweats too much from the effort, too, and before long, his breath comes hard, his legs burn, his teeth chatter. His body shivers so hard, it makes his legs feel like his bones have been replaced by slime. He stumbles over and over, having to flatten the snow in front of him to make any progress at all.

And the whole time, the cold steals into his already chilled limbs. His blood runs cold again and his heart clenches up. Even as he stumbles a last time and can't get back to his feet, he starts crawling on his belly, flattening snow with his arms as he shoves himself along, crawling.

Half-foots usually run hot but he'd already started off a little chilled. And being smaller meant it was easier to lose body heat faster. After what seems like an eternity of trying to crawl, his shaking arms eventually collapse under him. One last kick helps him look over the snow to see...the building is still impossibly far.

He has nothing left and he collapses face down in the snow. Then rolls over on his back.

Annnd that's when the sun comes out. Of course. Of course the sun comes out now, when he can't feel it.

You should've just retired. You should've turned Laios down and retired early but you had to take one last job, didn't you. You could've earned the rest of the money for the shop some other way on the surface, it just would've taken longer.

There'd always been a chance before. That maybe someday he could fix things with his family. After what Marcille said, he thought maybe it'd be worth a try. But that chance is gone.

"Was it worth it?" He hears a woman's voice and knows he has to be hallucinating because it seems to come from right near his ear but no one is there.

He'd never see them again. Whether this was some test of the afterlife he'd just failed, to fade away into nothing, or his final, real death because the dungeon hurled him somewhere miserable, he'd never see them again.

He's quiet for a while, just breathing and he suddenly understands a moment he'd misunderstood before.

"The sorbet was good though."

He feels ice on his cheeks. He tells himself it's just sweat and snow from the storm.

He finally feels the stoat nip his chin so hard it draws blood, its final act seemingly to hurt him as a thank you for his attempt at rescue. Somehow, it feels appropriate.

"You're an idiot, you know that?" the unknown woman says.

"Tell me something I don't know." His body is still, all movement has stopped, all the shivering and shaking and chattering of teeth, and he's falling asleep.