Awakening: Book I of The Forgotten Path Saga, a historical fantasy by Hrafn Kjalunes

The Western Fjords

Steep fjord country at the island's north-west: narrow water, high walls, and farms that see the sun late. Hrafnes stands at its southern end, where the fjords give way to open coast.

The Shieling

A summer hut with turf walls and no roof: the roof went with the household that once grazed there. Walkers on the road north still use it for a night's shelter from the wind.

The Northwest

Hrafnes, Stone Ford and the farms between answer to the Raven Thing. There are no kings here and no king's men: power is custom, memory, law spoken aloud, and debt.

Hrafnes · Raven's Headland

Turf houses above dark basalt cliffs: eleven households, two six-oared boats held in common, and no chieftain. The first settlers' ships landed on the strand below, and the ravens that met them gave the place its name. Here stands Oath-Hand's Stead, the oldest farm in the district, its gate-posts cut by the founder's own axe.

The Standing-Stone Hill

A humped, dark hill at the valley's head. On its crown stands a lichened stone half again the height of a man, leaning a little south, with no carving at all. For nine generations it has been the district's bearing-mark on the skyline. On the good shelf below, Snorri is building a new steading.

The Fissure Country

Where the headland's grazing runs out, grass turns to moss, then to old lava cracks, knee-wide, then waist-wide, crooked as root-work. A path of cairns threads them to the last cairn. At dusk the dark rises out of the ground while the sky above still burns.

Steinfell · The dead stead

A settlement half-buried in old lava flows, emptied in a single autumn seventy years ago. No bodies were found, and there was no burning. Lintels and doorways hold up nothing now. The district does not go there, and does not say why.

The Northern Strand

Three households' worth of driftwood shore, the timber thinner every year. In the fathers' day a man could gather a winter's timber here in a morning.

The Raven Thing · Assembly of the northwest

Twice a year the district assembly gathers on the plain below the Sacred Barrow Hills, in sight of the ancestors' mounds, for suits, betrothals, hirings, and the year's reckoning. Law here is not written down. It is recited aloud, from memory.

Stone Ford

A trading village at the northwest's only easy river crossing: a beach market, boat-sheds, a smithy working imported iron, and the chieftain's hall on the terrace above. New money lives here, and Snorri Auðunsson bought its chieftaincy outright.

The Frost Valleys

Climbing country of deep valleys, frost white on the rims and slow steam in the bottoms. The river that runs out of them reaches the sea at Stone Ford.

Viðidalur · Deepest of the Frost Valleys

Frost lies white as salt on the rims, yet the valley floor is green and threaded with slow steam. The stacks are fat, the beasts sleek, and the old customs are kept here openly. The Elder's House stands at the valley head, where the steams gather.

The Black Coast

A long south shore of black sand, sea-stacks and cave-mouths. No boat is drawn up anywhere along it, and no one has built so much as a drying-frame.

The Black Coast

A coast of black sand running east out of sight. Sea-stacks stand out of the surf like the roof-posts of a drowned hall, and cave-mouths show and hide with the swell. Driftwood lies thick as a merchant's stock, and there is no sign of human work anywhere.

The Black Sands

Tide-ribbed black sand between the last grass west and the first grass east, under a mist that never lifts. A toll-cairn stands halfway, every stone worn round by handling.

The Holm

A whale-backed rise of grass and rock, well above the highest wrack. On its top is a ring of set stones older than anyone can read, around a fire-black hearth that every crossing has used.

The Lava Country

East of the green valleys the land gives out by degrees: grass to moss, moss to black lava, and steam standing up out of the ground in still air.

Hraunholt · The breathing lava

A day's width of cracked black lava under moss so deep it swallows light, with scores of steam-threads standing straight up in the still air. A cairned track runs along its southern hem, mended by no human hand anyone knows of.

Eldborg · The fire-fort

A squat crater-mountain that has never quite gone to sleep. On still nights a red seam shows at its lip, snow never lies long on its shoulders, and its old flows run down toward Hraunholt like spilled pitch gone cold. Herders say the ground on its slopes is as thin as a pot-lid.

The Open Fells

High, treeless grass and frost-heave under a hard east wind that leans on a traveller all day like a debt. Nothing breaks the skyline here but one black peak.

The Far East

Beyond the open fells, one lone black peak, and past it the Ash Mountains, where everything the western districts know about their own island runs out.

The Troll's Watch

A single black peak, sharp-shouldered and alone, rising off the fells the way a post rises from a plain floor. Men say a giant is imprisoned there for its wickedness, and tell their children it eats them.

The Ash Mountains

Far in the east, a country of ash and old fire that nobody from the western districts has walked. The map-makers of Hrafnes simply stop drawing here.

Elsewhere

The Alþing · The great assembly

Every midsummer, chieftains, lawspeakers and litigants of last resort make the long ride to the island's great assembly. Few from Hrafnes have ever seen it. It is a name, and a place where bigger quarrels than theirs are settled.