From EryriWiki

A story told by High-Hawk, one of the characters in a tabletop one-shot RPG called "The Snow Princess." Read by Lauren A.; written by Matt M. A mishmash of different fairytale bits; the "Gray Old Man" is pretty much Koshchei the Deathless, though.

[edit] The Gray Old Man

At some point while he was fulfilling a hundred incomprehensible tasks on behalf of a wise woman, or looking for his young bride who’d been abducted by a wolf, or some such, our nameless friend found himself grappling for his life with the Gray Old Man. It had started, as these things do, with some sort of favor—Carry me across that river, or Could you give me a hand up, young fellow?—and now the hero found himself likely to either snap like a twig or drown in the pool of half-frozen slush where they were fighting. The old bastard seemed to be unpinnable, untiring, and (once our hero began to feel he was struggling for his life) disturbingly un-throttle-able and un-neck-break-able as well. Just as he was blacking out, the hero heard the old man say: All right, that’s enough. Suppose I let you go your way if you do a few things for me first, how does that sound?

If the hero had had any strength left, he might have given a disgusted, infuriated little shrug. As it was it was all he could do to drag himself to the hovel where the old man was staying and wait until dawn for his instructions.

First, said the old man, you’re going to fight off a few people who don’t like the way I run my affairs. Believe they’ll be attacking at dawn . . . the people in question, unsurprisingly, turned out to be the rightful inhabitants of the land the Gray Old Man was terrorizing—but the hero, groaning in despair, raised his sword and slashed at them until a great many were dying and some were dead. Right near the end of the battle, if you could call it that, he cleverly let one of them loft an arrow straight at the old man, who was standing on a hillcrest watching the whole thing. The hero heard a grunt of pain from that direction and thought himself emancipated.

When the survivors had all run off, though, he turned and saw the old man tossing the arrow aside like trash. The head had gone straight through his heart, quite clearly, but it seemed to have done nothing but worsen his temper. Get out of my sight! he snarled. Go to that forest over there and hunt down the White Stag for me. I’ve got no interest in fetching my own dinner tonight.

It was a long hunt: the White Stag was magical and devious, and following in his path meant enduring all manner of visions and strangeness. Over the course of the day, our friend had to make his own bow and arrows; he found himself growing lean and woodcrafty, and once when he stopped to drink from the pool he saw that he’d grown a salt-and-pepper beard. At dusk he ran the Stag down, and with its bloody final breaths, it whispered a secret to him.

He went back to the Gray Old Man’s shack carrying the stag over his tired shoulders and let the carcass fall to the floor. He expected to be kicked over to the fire and made to cook the poor majestic thing, but no—the old man just fell on it and devoured it raw, in about three bites. Then he turned his flesh-grimed face to the hero and said Enh. Good. But not so filling’s I’d hoped. Go to bed now, go to bed, you have a big day tomorrow.

The hero slept, dreaming of his secret knowledge. Several hours before dawn he woke again, slowly, to the sssschnitt, sssschnitt sound of steel on whetstone. Cracking an eyelid, he saw the man readying all of his many knives, and knew that his third task would be to lie very still while breakfast was made out of him.

He rolled off the bed while the old man was still hunkered over his array of glinting metal. Feeling sixty years old but still quick as a shot, he leapt straight past the man and plunged his hand into the firepit. Coals tore at his flesh; the Gray Old Man howled and brandished a great cleaver; and then the hero’s hand closed around something very smooth and very cold at the heart of the fire, right where the Stag had told him to expect it.

He pulled it out: a little crystal vial containing his captor’s life. The old man reared himself up to do murder, but the hero just held the tiny vessel up and whispered to it:

Die. Die, you villainous old thing, die in your heart which I have found.

Later that morning, after he’d found a few eggs and some unbegrimed cheese and guiltily fried up the more edible remnants of the White Stag for himself, the hero strode out onto the white plain in search of new misadventures.