The Glaciermen #48: Epilogue

Early access prepublication manuscripts of "The Glaciermen"

Hello Dear Readers,

Today is the day. The very last segment of The Glaciermen. It’s bittersweet for me, but also a relief—but only as a short respite, as I’m looking at weeks of editing to polish it up before official digital publication. There will possibly be a print edition to follow, depending on some economics.

What that means for you is that I won’t be posting as much until that process is done. I’ll likely pop in with an update every few weeks to let you know how it’s going, or to share the official cover, etc.

Once the book is officially live, I plan to grovel and beg for your Amazon reviews to please the Bezos-powered algorithms so they might bless me with free visibility. Until then…

Your Chance to Add Your Voice

Since these are “pre-publication manuscripts,” that means the edition here on substack is not the final draft.

As such, I want to hear your feedback!

Please, let me know what you think about The Glaciermen, good and bad. I’ll mull over all of your feedback as I edit the draft to make this the best possible story I can. You can be as general as thoughts on overarching plot or pace, or as specific as liking or not liking how a particular scene played out, or even noting typos.

Without further ado…

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(Here’s the previous segment if you missed it, and the first chapter and index, if you’re new).

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Recap (spoilers!): The shaman presents Lee with a tantalizing offer, slaying some of the crew to trigger the true power of the godseye. Lee must choose between good and evil, paying a great price either way.

Epilogue

Tyra kicked the cage door for what felt like the hundredth time. The hinge creaked, then a final kick broke the gate away. She crawled out from the pen into a wide room carved into stone. It had square corners, and there was an electric lamp hanging from the ceiling. The air was cool, but not cold.

A faint boom in the distance gently vibrated the room for a moment, making the lamp on the ceiling swing gently as if an invisible breeze. A few showers of dust shook free from the ceiling.

Tyra limped past a neat bed, a few cabinets and shelves, and a wide desk with a large pin-up board behind it covered in papers and map charts depicting the frozen continent. On the charts, she spotted a few dots along the coast with scribblings of a language she did not know—naming what she guessed were the populated settlements—but she could not decipher some of the other markings. Red X’s and squiggly dotted lines criss-crossed the white-colored parts of the map.

She shrugged and limped on.

There was only one exit to the room, a steel door with a large bolt locking it to a steel frame embedded into the ice. She slid back the bolt, then pulled hard against the thick handle. The heavy door creaked on its hinges as it swung open. Behind it was a small chamber that opened into two possible paths forward.

One was a long stairway leading up into the ice, carved with sharp corners like the room, also illuminated by electric bulbs strung along a power wire hanging along the ceiling. Tyra could barely make out a steel door way up at the top of the stairs. It was at least ten stories above. A beam of light shone through a tiny square window in the door.

What Tyra did not know was that she was quite near the surface of the glacier, and that the door at the top of these steps opened onto the surface. The room behind her at the bottom of the steps was actually carved into the peak of a mountain long buried in the ice.

The second passage was different, more primitive, a rough hewn tunnel leading sideways into the ice. It was short enough that she would have to hunch down to walk through it.

Tyra looked between the stairs and the rough tunnel. After a short moment of deliberation, she crouched into the tunnel. She went for only a short time, rounding a few bends before coming out into a circular chamber that was about a sixty feet across. The scene and stench were so unexpected that she nearly lost the contents of her stomach.

There was a large donut-shaped pool in the middle of the chamber, with a small island in the center. The pool was about half-full—the top several feet of its contents were splattered across the floor and walls of the chamber as if cast by an explosion. Among the ooze of dimly glowing gel were dark red bits and pieces of something that stank horridly, and the island in the center of the pool was covered in the grisly spatter as well.

Around the perimeter of the pool were several posts, and next to them were five people. Tyra did not recognize them, but they were dressed in modern clothing, not the savage garb of the people from under the ice. A man and a woman were on the ground, gaping wounds across their throats explaining their lifeless stillness. A young dark-haired woman was kneeling next to the man, somberly pulling her hand across his face to close his eyes. A blond man and woman who looked related were collecting long curving blades that were strewn about.

The dark haired woman noticed Tyra.

“You must be Tyra,” she said in English.

Tyra could understand it well enough after the month of practice in the hiding place on the rocky shore of the chasm lake.

“My name is Amanda,” the young woman continued, “Lee told us about you. We thought you were dead.”

“You know Lee?” Tyra said.

The young woman nodded, paused for a somber moment, then pointed to the small island in the center of the pool. “He was—I don’t know what happened. But he was there with that skull-headed freak, then there was a boom and a flash. The other psychos ran off, and Lee… he was gone too.”

“Gone?” Tyra asked, hoping for a way around her disbelief.

The woman simply nodded again. Tears threatened to leak from moistened eyes.

“My uncle?”

The woman did not have to speak the answer. Her face had already betrayed the truth.

Tyra slumped to the ground.

It can’t end like this.

She stared at the island in the center of the pool. The red spatter steamed in the frigid air. The half-emptied pool steamed, too. Wisps of moist, warm vapor rose off its glowing surface.

Glowing, she thought, then something clicked, and she rushed forward, sliding down the slick edge of the pool to the few feet of luminescent goo filling the bottom of the circular depression. She thrust her hands into the opaque gel, hunched in it up to her neck, groping around on the bottom.

Her fingers slid along the slick bottom of the pool, tingling with sensation from the chemically active gel, searching aimlessly until they ran up against something stiff. A leg. She followed it up until she found a torso, then hooked her elbows under the armpits and heaved.

With a suckling pop, she pulled the head and shoulders of the body above the surface.

The face was familiar, but the lips wore something she was not used to seeing on them. A smile.

Tyra held her ear underneath the nose.

A sickening lump threatened to knot her stomach.

Don’t let it end like this.

Just as she was about to go slack, to let the body slip back into the gel forever, she felt a tickle at her ear.

A breath.

Lee had breathed.

• • •

Pain. Aching pain, and total darkness.

“It’s a map, I think.”

A woman's voice—it was familiar, but Lee’s shell-shocked mind strained with futility against the pressing blackness and failed to conjure the face to whom it belonged.

There was a humming buzz, that of an electric lightbulb—a sound unheard by Lee for nearly a decade. A cool cloth was pressed to his forehead by an unseen hand.

A man spoke, gruff, accent thick of Scandinavia, words foreign and indecipherable.

“He says he thinks we are at this X, here,” a second woman replied when the man finished, her voice ringing with the same dancing accent as his.

“But then what about all these dotted lines?” the first woman said, “They could represent the tunnels, but that doesn’t make sense because of how many of them there are. Look how they loop all the way around the continent. There would have to be hundreds of miles of them—and what about all the other X’s? They can’t all possibly be…”

Her voice trailed off.

In the silence that followed, Lee remembered brown hair. The woman had brown hair.

The silence hung taut like a ripcord, as if the next word might trigger an avalanche.

A gasp.

“They can’t be…”

“They are, and that means there are more of them. A lot more.”

• • •

A heavy reverberating thrum beat at the air. Unnatural wind battered at Lee through layers of bandages and blankets wrapped around his body. Frozen flakes stung against the exposed skin of his face as many hands grasped his body and lifted him onto a hard platform of tread-plated aluminum. The stamping of boots on metal thumped around him, and he heard the slam of doors pulled shut with gusto.

With a force of will, Lee opened his eyes. Through a scratched and worn plexiglass window level with the floor, he saw twisting clouds of swirling snow. Then he felt himself lifted, carried up and up as the rythmic thrumming beat faster and faster to the purring whine of turbo-motors. Then the snow fell away, becoming puffy white tops of cloud. They filled a blue-beyond-blue sky and shimmered in the light of the rising sun. He watched them for a time, remembering an echo from long ago, and he could almost see little men snowboarding down their voluminous slopes of sparkling white, and he hoped to one day join them in what looked like great fun.

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Not the Normal Schedule

Thanks for reading! Unlike my normal weekly cadence while composing, I’m in the editing stage now, so I will be switching to less frequent updates (likely every few weeks) until the book is published and I begin work on the next one.

Keep an eye on your inbox, because once it comes out, I’m going to ask for your help with leaving some good—honest—reviews to boost me in the old Amazon algorithms.

(Learn more about possible upcoming books here).

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I sincerely appreciate it.

– Xavier Macfarlane
Author, The Glaciermen

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