Book One – Chapter 12

They would talk, in time, but as of now, he needed to furn and Samasira needed warmth and shelter. There were two big blankets of dark, thick fur in the seating area, both claimed by Abar. She looked like an odd, messy creature that was all fur and no limbs. Like that, she had been studying their map, which she had spread out on the table before her. The table, just as all of their chairs, was nothing more than a large, flat rock. Kel-Khadar sat on the ground to her right, unaffected by the cold thanks to his thick coat of fur. He was sharpening his claws, which had suffered damage during the climb. The borman had carried both Samasira and Abar for long stretches, and she was eternally grateful for his help. As humans, they could not match the toughness, endurance, and skills of any their various companions. Samasira had always known, but after the challenging ascent, she was particularly aware and ashamed of her weakness.

As soon as Samasira arrived, Abar got up, pulled off one of the blankets from her shoulders and helped wrapping Samasira. With the blanket, Samasira threw herself on a rock-turned-chair, pulled in her arms and legs and wrapped the thing so tightly around herself that she became a parcel of fur and fluff, which somewhere, somehow, revealed a pair of human eyes.

Abar sat back down and did the same, immediately rearranging her own, remaining blanket. As they both struggled to sort themselves out, there was a moment, where Samasira watched Abar, and Abar watched Samasira, both seeing the same desperate, shivering blob of fur in the other. And then they looked at Kel-Khadar, who was just staring at them, and then back at each other. And then they both laughed. They laughed much harder than they should.

Samasira desperately tried to stop, because laughing forced her to draw in uncontrolled, deep breaths of the ice-cold mountain air, which felt like freezing from the inside. She saw that Abar tried the same, now with tears in her eyes, which made her laugh even harder. They tried not to look at each other, but at the same time could not turn away from this moment of shared suffering. When Samasira pulled her blanket all over her eyes and face, Abar doubled down, curled up and huddled so much that she became a ball of fur that seemed to grow out of the stone that served as her chair — At least for a moment, before she slipped off and tumbled to the side. At that point, Samasira lost it completely. She pressed the blanket against her mouth and even bit into it, but she could not stop. Abar lay on the ground and laughed and cried so hard that she could not get up.

It was such a silly, stupid, simple thing, but the relief was immense. It was a moment of joy that stood against the days and weeks of hardship and terror that the climb had demanded, and they clung to it as much as they clung to the furs; for dear life.