The Terror

Crozier regains consciousness, discovering that he’s in a tent made of skins. Silence is tending to him by extracting the bullets from his body and applying poultices to prevent infection and keep him alive.

Over several days, he regains strength, though he remains bedridden. At times, she attempts to communicate using an intricate string game that Crozier cannot yet decipher.

Eventually, Silence dresses him in clothing scavenged from the remains of the dead and the wrecks of the expedition. She also constructs a traditional Inuit sled. Once it’s complete, Silence bundles up Crozier and drags him across the ice.

Crozier has another vision about Sedna and the creation of the world. Shamans, or angakkuit, maintained harmony with the spirits by learning to communicate with them.

The Tuunbaq, the creature who had followed the expedition, is a spirit created by Sedna to kill the other two great spirits: The Spirit of the Air and the Spirit of the Moon. Though Sedna’s creation failed to destroy them, it became too dangerous to exist in the spirit realm, and she banished it to the far north, where it adopted the form of a monstrous polar bear and began consuming human souls. It decimated villages and spread fear throughout the Arctic.

To stop the Tuunbaq from destroying humanity, the clairvoyant sixam ieua arose, who could communicate with the Tuunbaq through mind-speech rather than words. They struck a bargain with it: In exchange for peace, the Tuunbaq would be fed animal offerings and revered in its icy domain. The families of the sixan ieua withdrew from the rest of society to live in the remote north.

Silence describes a vision passed between her and her father of the man she would marry, and her father’s death at the hands of a white man.

Crozier wakes with a headache and mental fatigue from the dreams that plague him. He now lives in a snow-house, reliant on Silence. Despite Crozier’s repeated pleas to return to his remaining men, Silence never responds to the requests, neither with expression nor with her silent string language. He has tried to leave on his own three times, each time becoming lost in the wilderness. Every time, Silence finds him, rescues him, and brings him home. He’s come to believe she understands him, even his thoughts and dreams, and feels their identities almost blur together.

He joins her on the sea ice as she hunts seals. After waiting for hours, she harpoons a seal, and together they haul it from the ice. Afterward, she passes water from her mouth into the seal’s to honor its spirit so future seals will return.

Back at the snow-house, they eat seal meat. When Crozier points out how greasy their faces are, for the first time, he thinks he sees her smile. Later that night, she initiates sex with him, and they collapse in exhaustion in each other’s arms.

In a poem about the origins of light, the world exists in total darkness until Tulunigraq, the Raven Trickster, hears two men dreaming of light and sets out to find its source. Flying inland, Raven discovers a snow-house where an old man lives with his daughter, who is blind. Suspicious that they are hiding light, Raven sneaks inside and sees two skin-bags hanging in the smokehole. One contains darkness and the other, daylight. Using thought-sending, Raven encourages the girl to ask her father to play with the “ball,” which is the daylight wrapped in caribou skin. The father takes it down. Raven again uses his influence to prompt the girl to push the ball outside, right into his waiting grasp.

He takes the ball and runs, but is pursued by the old man, who transforms into a peregrine falcon. As the falcon dives at him, Raven tears open the skin-ball with his beak, releasing the daylight across the land. A shouting match ensues between Raven and Peregrine, one crying out for daylight, the other for darkness. Their struggle creates a balance, establishing the cycle of the seasons and the natural order.

Crozier and Silence leave their snow-house and embark on a long journey north with their sledge, sharing the labor of pulling it. Silence is pregnant, though neither says anything about it.

They travel along the coastline, and Crozier considers multiple paths forward: Returning south to search for survivors, heading east to find rescue at Fury Beach, or disappearing entirely. Though capable of surviving on his own now, he cannot face returning to England in disgrace, nor does he believe Silence could survive if they fled together.

After eight days of travel across unstable ice, they stop. Silence asks if he’s ready, and Crozier affirms. Together, they construct a crude tent using parts of the sledge and animal skins. For three days, they prepare. On the final night, Crozier has a dream in which he hears his unborn son singing a death song. He awakens, realizing this is a farewell from his former self.

Crozier and Silence leave their tent wearing minimal clothing and begin throat-singing. The ceremony lasts for hours and, as it ends, Silence withdraws. Crozier strips off the last of his clothes and kneels at the edge of the ice. The Tuunbaq emerges to loom over him. Though terrified, he tilts his head back, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue as one would for communion.

In May 1851, Crozier, now known as Taliriktug, learns of objects from the expedition surfacing in southern Inuit villages. He and his wife, Silna (Silence), travel south to investigate. They are accompanied by their two children, and some of her people, including Asiajuk and his wife—the only survivors of Hodgson’s massacre.

Upon reaching a village called Taloyoak, they find items from Erebus and Terror. They continue westward to Back’s River, where they meet an old hunter named Puhtoorak who describes a three-masted ship trapped in ice. They follow his directions to find Terror frozen off the Adelaide Peninsula. Boarding the deserted ship, Crozier finds a mummified corpse with elongated teeth in his old bunk and an unsettling atmosphere that confirms something terrible occurred there.

Realizing the ship is tainted, Crozier spreads gunpowder and lamp oil throughout its decks and sets it aflame, burning it to prevent the horrors aboard from ever being discovered by future searchers. After watching Terror sink beneath the ice, Crozier, Silna, and their family return eastward.