Rousing The Beast

A viking warrior wakes up on the shore of a river with his ship smashed into pieces and no sign of his crew.

                Gunnar lay face down on a riverbank with his legs dipped halfway into the icy water. When consciousness came to him, it was fractured and distorted. He would catch brief glimpses of the evergreens in the distance, or feel the cold river current tugging at his feet, and then his mind would slip away, back into the land of half dreams.   

When he roused, everything came back to him fast and hard as if some ethereal hand had slapped him awake. His eyes snapped open, he clenched his fist onto his claymore and he hopped to his feet ready for battle, but his numb legs were not ready and he flopped back onto the muddy riverbank like a drunkard. The adrenaline spike faded and he could feel the soreness in his back and arms from wildly swinging his sword. There were two things Gunnar hated about fighting in a frenzied rage, first was that it was easy to overexert himself and he would wake up the next morning feeling like he had drank too much mead. The second was that the rage blinded his rational thought and he would wake up with very little memory of the previous battle. It kept him alive though, and that was nice.

After the prickling sensation of one thousand needles faded from his once numb feet, he stood up and brushed off the mud that was caked onto his chest, but missed the mud on his beard. He wandered the riverbank staring at the freshly charred planks that peppered the shore and gritted his teeth. With no sign of his longboat or his crew anywhere nearby, he didn’t have to use too much imagination to guess where these planks came from. Fury tensed the muscles in Gunnar’s chest and released in a howl as he hurled a plank into the river and cursed into the wind. He picked up his sword from the gritty mud and started towards the woods hoping to find his crew, or at least find out what happened to them.

Author's Note

I need to get this damn thing out of my head so that I can move on with my life. Review if you like, but do so knowing that this chapter is nowhere near finished.