Publication Day for Fimbulwinter!
Nathan Alexander Ross's fantastic debut novel comes out today.
Today’s the publication day for Nathan Alexander Ross’s Fimbulwinter: A Ski Saga.
Fimbulwinter follows the adventures of Ian Winters (whose friends all call him Lan) and Linnea Starling, two ski bums who accidentally get caught up in a cosmic struggle to stop a powerful evil from bringing the end of winter and of all life itself.
To celebrate, here’s a chapter from the book that
called “fast and fun and a hell of a lot deeper than you might expect…”.In this chapter, Linnea meets a mysterious figure after performing a simple ritual of thanks to the land.
The frosty air sparkled like glitter in the morning sunshine. Linnea walked outside her apartment and took a deep breath, adding her own frozen cloud to the atmosphere as she exhaled. Bailey bounded through the fresh snow with joy and left some of it marked with a yellow tinge.
Linnea reached over and picked up a handful of the cold confetti from the railing and then brought it up to her mouth. It melted onto her tongue, and she smiled. Solstice was one of her favorite days of the year.
She called her mom and wished her a happy solstice, her version of the holiday which had so clearly been co-opted. Her mom told her all about the festivities she would be missing out on, her brother was home and it would be great if she could make it sometime; but of course, it’s so hard to get this time of year off of work. Maybe next year. She would probably have a different job.
What to do with such a beautiful day? She kind of wanted to keep reading her book about Norse mythology, but that could wait until after Solstice.
Sylvia was working and Chelsea was skiing. They all had plans to go to the hot springs later, but it was Linnea’s first full day off in a while. Skiing recently was incredible, and she certainly had been taking advantage of it, but with the tourists showing up for Christmas she didn’t want to deal with all that noise. Especially since it was the solstice, she wanted to be out in nature, in the woods in particular, with her dog, to enjoy some peace and quiet. Downhill skiing is great, of course, but it is so fast-paced sometimes: she wanted to move slowly today.
After breakfast, she gathered up all of her gear and drove to the pass. It was still snowing lightly, but the roads weren’t too bad. Bailey was overly excited, jumping around the back seat. Linnea had put her skins on her skis at home so she slid into her boots and clicked in. She let Bailey out, put her on a leash until they got out of the parking lot, and then let her run free.
Linnea already felt better. Her skis zipped across the snow on the ground as more fell all around her. Bailey came bounding over, her black coat now white: she had found the deep stuff.
At that moment, a few skiers came flying down the cross-country track. She didn’t need to deal with that right now; it was time to go off trail. Sure, it was deep, but one of Linnea’s favorite things to do is to wander through the forest, at a nice slow pace, without any trail at all. Skis help with that in the winter.
So much of outdoor recreation requires you to have a goal, and a trail implies you are going somewhere. She thought that the only goal should be to wander aimlessly, taking in the beauty of her surroundings, with no rush. It seemed to her the best way to connect with the local spirits, the faeries of the wood.
The sound of trees creaking in deep cold surrounded her while snow fell like marshmallows. She took her time, Bailey’s happiness enhanced her own, and the snow just kept falling.
After a while, she reached a clearing and decided this would be a good spot for a small ritual. Since it was the solstice, she wanted to do something to offer her gratitude to the land. She then burned some incense and poured some milk and honey out under a tree. She kept it simple and spoke aloud how appreciative she was of all the snow.
Suddenly, the mood shifted as a gust of wind swept through the clearing. The hair on her arms raised as she saw something out of the corner of her eye. Bailey growled. Linnea panicked and worried it was a moose.
Her heart beat quickly, thick fluff fell, the wind was now howling, and Linnea could see bright yellow eyes through the trees piercing her core as she reached down to get Bailey on her leash. A huge black wolf, just like the image from her dream, gazed back at her. Time became a long swirl of snow spirals, spinning Linnea’s vision ever toward the center of those wolfish eyeballs.
She was terrified.
A skier then materialized out of the blizzard, directly behind the wolf. Linnea squinted through the storm and couldn’t believe her eyes. The largest woman she had ever seen was on skis calling the wolf to her side. The wolf, which looked big before, now seemed smaller, like just a large black dog.
Bailey whined, and Linnea’s blood slowed. She shivered and looked at the massive woman whose coat shimmered with something like sequins. Her long white hair was decorated with feathers and crystals, her entire body reverberated a glass-like aura mirroring spectrums of light back into the dark forest.
As Linnea made eye contact, the woman’s cold eyes brought her warmth. Her smile seemed somehow to reflect off the snow all around them, and one side of her face was marked with tattoos.
“My dream,” Linnea muttered. “I saw your wolf — or dog — in my dream.”
The woman smiled again. “Dreams sometimes show the truth of what is to come.” She spoke with a thick accent, almost German, yet it flowed like honey to Linnea’s ears.
“Are you an angel?” Linnea questioned. “You are so beautiful!”
The woman kept smiling and sighed lightly. She seemed to ponder for a moment as if Linnea had asked her a difficult question.
“An angel?” The woman then glanced up at the sky. Large rugged snow slivers descended upon the two women with their canines by their sides. Linnea looked up as well. She felt ecstatic — she had never seen snow fall so hard. She focused, and her line of vision found a particularly exquisite snow crystal. When Linnea’s eyes arrived on this flake, a memory abruptly flashed through her consciousness.
She remembered being a tiny, minuscule drop of water vapor, flying through the sky, growing from a single droplet into a flowering crystal of hexagonal snow falling through the air; swirling, floating, interlocking, and branching intricately.
After a wondrous moment, Linnea was back in her own body, watching the fernlike stellar dendrite of fantastic frost find its way to the forest floor already blanketed with its family.
The woman finally responded. “I’m not an angel, my dear, just a woman with somewhere to be. Happy Solstice.”
Linnea stared in awe, unsure what had just happened in her mind. She looked at the dog again, and back at the sparkling woman. “Um, happy Solstice!” She said. “I don’t want to keep you.”
“You aren’t. I am glad we ran into each other. I have a feeling I will see you again soon. In fact, I know it. The Solstice is a time of endings and beginnings.”
This lady gets it. Linnea thought. But then the woman said something else, her light mood darkening as she spoke a different language. Linnea looked at her for a moment.
“I’m sorry what was that?”
“Fimbulwinter is coming,” she said cryptically and then turned to ski away.
Linnea gasped in disbelief as the woman slid away on her skis. The dog turned and gave one last terrifying glance at Bailey. It was huge again, and not a dog at all but a massive wolf, and then it ran off to follow the mysterious woman disappearing into the forest.
Fimbulwinter? Wasn’t I just reading about this?
Linnea stood there for a few seconds and then noticed something reflective in the snow where the woman had been standing. She skied over and saw the most incredible crystal. It was bright blue and had a shimmer to it like nothing Linnea had ever seen.
“Wait! You left this!” She cried out. But the woman was gone, her massive ski tracks already covered by the blizzard all around her. Linnea stood awkwardly in the quiet forest, holding what felt like a lost treasure.
Find out more about Fimbulwinter here (and take advantage of our 20% off Solstice sale!)
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