***First part of a two or three part episodic short story. It's basically a myth and serves more as practice writing than anything meaningful to me or shit like that. I originally wrote it for English class, hence the very bloated vocabulary. Also, while the first sentence basically says that the main character is naked, this totally isn't porn nor is it sexual. The character is nude for a reason, but it has nothing to do with sticking dicks into things. If you read this thinking that it is, you may be disappointed. Also, this stuff isn't anthro or anything. It's set in a made-up time period and on a made up version of Earth even if there are heavy references to Northern Germanic cultures. I only took Norse names and geography, these people are this world's equivalent of the Norse.***

Soren traveled unhindered by the artifice of clothing, clambering up the mount and up to the Dais of The Fjord to seek counsel. The winds bit at his unfiltered body, cold winds from far to the north where only the hardiest of God’s creatures dwelt. His feet had been bloodied by lingering artifacts of wars fought in far antiquity. Shards of rusty blade that failed to erode with time; charred and broken remains sharp as glass. But his mind dwelled elsewhere. On the woman he could never love again. On the woman whose name he could never again speak, for the act would only throw him further into the depths of the whirlpool of mania pining for his mind at the base of his skull.

A man in the village kilometers behind him had advised him to consult the Dais unencumbered. He said that the sages rejected anyone who traveled with anything more than their body and mind.

The old man then recited the guidelines for counsel from memory: “Bring something and you will have gained nothing. Bring nothing and you will have gained something. Be unfiltered. Be pure or be impure, but be you.”

The winds were starting to become more intense as the incline began to decrease into a more level form. The shards of broken swords and people began to depopulate the area. He found himself stopping less, but the winds made up for the lost media of pain. He had to endure. He couldn’t fail. This was his only chance for salvation. He glanced down at his skin. The blood had left the edges of his dermal sheath, retreating to some god-forsaken bastion within himself in protest of the biting winds. His arms and torso were beginning to turn clear. His feet had long become black and brown with his dried blood, but he found himself still kilometers away from his destination. He trod on.

The brush became denser up here, but Soren assured himself that the population of discarded weapons and unburied remains had diminished such that the brush held no danger. He could see the Dais quite clearly now. However, he could not locate the sages. Had he been chasing a local myth this entire time? He held steady and approached. After another kilometer, he could see the ocean toiling away meters below the steep cliffs of the mount and along the walls of the fjord, threatening to bring everything crashing down into the black, churning sea water.

As he completed the final kilometer, the sun had started to set and in this dying light, Soren could make out the details of his destination. The architects of the dais had built it so that it met the cliff edge and pointed directly into the sun’s daily path. This created an effect in which the dais seemed to meet with the sun. Soren had to look away from the dais to avoid hurting his own eyes unless he saw it from the side or from the back. But there was nothing beyond the beck end of the raise platform. The dais had been constructed from what he discerned to be granite and had been polished such that it shone with an unearthly gleam that scorched his virgin eyes with reflected light from the sun. At the Easternmost end, the end facing him, the stone table boasted a ramp with small imprints of feet worn into the rock. The architects had constructed the ramp out of limestone so it had eroded much over the years and lacked the perfect dimensions and form of the granite.

Soren sat on the limestone ramp and began to tend to his foot wounds. He had started to leak pus among the periodic excursions of blood. He grabbed a frond of some nearby plant and tore it. With the frond, he wiped his left foot gently, wincing as his protected hand glided over plethora of the minor wounds of his sole. Hopefully, the sages could heal his mind and his body in return for the perilous trek up the mount. He didn’t want to die yet. He wanted answers and salvation. He wanted to clear his guilty conscience.

The sages arrived shortly after nightfall. Even in the biting wind, Soren had managed to fall into light torpor hours prior; a few mild taps on the right shoulder awoke him. He awoke to meet the glance of a visage hewn by years of toil, an overwhelming look of confidence scrawled about its countenance. Presently, he took note of the immediate area, counting 9 other such individuals. All of them lacked clothes and to his surprise seemed to superficially resemble both men and women. The androgyne sage that had awoken him peered into his eyes with great intent, as if searching for something lost. The sage opened its mouth and spoke.

“There is someone who you love very much in this world, what is her name?” said the sage with a dualistic timbre that sounded of both sexes and none at all.
Soren looked the sage in the eyes and said “I know the name, but I’ve been obliged to forget it. I know only that I have wronged myself and that I want to be put right again.”

The sage turned to face its ilk. It began to speak, but not in any language he had ever heard. After a moment of discourse, the sage turned around.
“Please stand up child,” it said. “Please walk up the dais and await my instruction.”
Soren pushed himself onto his still raw feet and walked up the ramp, his blood staining the footprints with rancid blood and pus. He no longer felt his feet at all; his body had long yielded sense to the cold and most of his body had numbed. The sage followed alongside him on the lowered terrain, matching his movements.

“The world ends off to the west beyond the horizon. You must jump into the ocean and swim into the void at the end of the world,” it said with certainty. “It is there that you will find the answers, and if you are strong, you will land at the bottom and if you can handle what lies at the bottom, you will emerge a new man. And if you are not, you will fall into the chasm and you will never reach any bottom.”

Soren had nowhere left to go. He had no alternatives. He walked the length of the 9 meter long dais and stared over the near vertical edge into the abyss below. He knew he could do this. Without much thought, he tumbled off the edge like a lemming, maneuvering his torso around to look at the sage staring back at him as his body yielded to the forces of nature. If he died upon meeting the sea, well, best to not think of that. It took him seconds to hit the water. He landed like a knife into the freezing water, immediately propelling himself up into the raucous chaos of the surface. Despite his landing and the numbness of his body, he felt pain for the first time in hours. But he wasn’t considering abandoning his quest now. He struggled to overcome the waves as they threatened to suck him back under or into the walls of the cliff. It took a toll on his body but within the hour, he had traversed out of reach of the cliff and into the heart of the sea.

Midway on his journey to the very end of the world, Soren began to feel different. It came about first as a change in belief. Soren’s father Sten had fished for a living but had hated the sea with a passion. He fished because he could do nothing but fish; there simply was nothing else that he could claim to be good at. He would always linger about drunk at home or at the mead hall complaining about how he’d never rid the sea’s stench from his nostrils. Sten was partially Proctish on his Father’s side and believed in the gods of the Procts. One major Proctish legend spoke of the origin of the sea. It said that the ocean formed when the god of creation Gatz shattered himself into countless pieces which scattered to each and every end of the Earth. The pieces reformed in his original image and became the fish. These fish originally had nowhere to swim, resigning to flopping about and collecting around the low basins of the new Earth.

“It was when Gatz’s fish began to piss that the collective found an answer to the problem: they’d piss themselves a home!” he once recounted to Soren while putting him to bed.
This impurity in the creation process of the sea figured into many of Sten’s lectures.

“I’m like the pearl, Soren,” he had said once after coming home drunk. “I’m born of vileness and I revel in mischief, but I’m a wonderful person on the inside and I want you to know that I love you with all of my heart.”

Shortly after, Sten had drowned at sea. But Soren kept his father’s religious beliefs as a sort of moral framework for himself and a constant memento even in the wake of newer, more modern belief systems. But now, he had started to fall deeply in love with the sea. The hate that his father had instilled in him had become love. Love for what? He really did not understand how this could happen. The sea was frightful. It smelled and the freeze of the ocean was beginning to shut his body down.

The water had been exhibiting behavior indicative of a recent swell, but for him, swimming had somehow managed to become a calming experience. He felt anticipation now for his impending arrival at the end of the world. He wanted to utter her name again without feeling a nauseous guilt overcome him. He wanted her love and acceptance again.

The second change proved even more drastic than a simple change of opinion. Soren’s hair had begun to fall away. He didn’t notice it until half of his hair had already fallen out. He had started to see strands of hair floating on the waves in the faint light of the half-moon. His distress was overshadowed still by his anticipation and he progressed onwards, with the added action of periodically tugging at loose locks of hair.

The third and final change came as he neared the end of the world and as the last strands of hair extricated themselves from his scalp. He had felt gentle tugs from time to time over the course of his journey, but their frequency increased with his progress. Currently, Soren was being tugged under by invisible forces for seconds at a time every few minutes. He was starting to become scared about what lay below him in the murky abyss. He found the answer when a black mass emerged from the water and bit into his left arm. As Soren struggled, he immediately recognized the mass as a shark. Perhaps they had followed the wake of blood he left? Perhaps they identified him as a weak, lost individual who was easy pickings? Maybe Gatz disapproved of Soren for seeking out occultists to solve his problems? But he wasn’t about to give up just yet. He swiftly began to punch at it with his free arm. The shark let go of his arm but had ripped the skin off of his entire arm as if it has been the sleeve of a tunic. What lay beneath shocked him: scales had formed under his skin. Soren looked at his other arm and realized that he had been shedding like a snake. The sharks had been eating away his old skin. They were preparing him for his journey into the abyss at the end and at the beginning of the world.

When Soren reached the end of the world, he appeared very different than from when he had originally jumped into the sea. In the light of dusk, he appeared black with plate-like scales covering every part of his body save parts of his face, joints, and the soles of his feet. The edge of the world was magnificent; a continuous waterfall stretched as far as the eyes could see, the abyss dominated by more clear sky. Here, Soren felt not afraid, but rather as if a weight had been lifted from him. As if the sea had baptized him and absolved him of his sins. As he reached the edge, he finally felt able to say her name again.

“Asmoth.”
He fell into the sky and into a new world.