Donnar shrugged. “He wanted to know everything. So, I let him.”

“Let him, what?”

“Know everything. The fate of each insect, each crawling worm and blade of grass, the individual tracks of the particles in the air, the marks in the snow. The deaths and births of all living things and their every single heartbeat, every single breath. Every single second of every single thing from the beginning to the end of the world, I let him know.” At those words, Donnar smiled.

Fear formed like a rock in my stomach, and I had to stop myself from taking a step back at the look on Donnar’s face. It was so easy to forget, sometimes, surrounded by the ones who I loved and who loved me, that despite everything, in some ways I was always going to be different. It was hard to remember that some of the people I cared for couldn’t experience emotions the same way I did and would never know exactly how to empathize no matter how hard they tried. It was even worse knowing that other goblins, svartelves, the creatures of the Permafrost in general didn’t care who I was and were perfectly fine with trying to drive me to insanity. Hel, Lydian managed to do it from beyond the dead.

The Permafrost could be beautiful and its creatures did possess some feral form of grace, but above all, it was brutal, unforgiving, a place where the wrong words to the wrong creatures could end my life before it’d even begun and there were no second chances, no take-backs. Brutal, severe, harsh, and cold.

“Knowing all those things?” I said when I managed to get over a bit of my shock. “They could—they’d have to—”

“Drive you mad?” Donnar replied. “Yes. They could. They did. Granted, he was already unstable before my ‘gift’ cursed him.”

“Why are you showing me this?” I asked. “How is this going to help me with my visions, with Lydian in my head?”

“Perhaps you should ask him, yourself,” Donnar said.

“Ask Lydian?”

“You’re the stag, communicating between worlds should come naturally to you.” He frowned at the look on my face. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how?”

I balled up my fists again in frustration.

“Ask him,” Donnar repeated. “I cursed him with the weight of knowledge. That weight would drive the strongest mad. He would never be able to speak about what he saw until his death. He’s dead. He’ll always be like this. He never was not. He’ll always be tortured by the endless stimuli of knowing, but at least now, he should be coherent. More reachable. Ask him and you will understand.”