GRP Chapter 10

Garthe's hand closed around her wrist and pulled.

She came limply, weightlessly, her slight body brought against his chest. She lifted her head. Their eyes met at a distance close enough for breath to reach.

He looked into her eyes. Pink pupils, clear even in the dark.

"Your eyes are pretty."

He stated the observation as it came and brought his hand to her throat. Despite the threatening contact, she did not blink.

No—she was genuinely not blinking.

The moment he registered something was wrong, her eyes rolled slowly upward—and then flipped over in an instant—and her slight body collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. He caught her as she fell against him.

The hand that had been about to kill her drifted briefly in the air.

There was the option of continuing where he'd left off.

"Hm."

He exhaled and looked down at her, limp across his arm. Instead of closing his hand around her throat, he pulled out the dagger that had been lodged in his heart the entire time and dropped it on the floor.

He draped her across the sofa. Then he retrieved the candle from the floor, lit it, and set it on the table.

The room came dimly into light, and there were things now visible that had not been before.

A beautiful face—but with a nose and cheeks flushed red. Elegant, fine fingers and toes, delicate as craftwork—but these, too, were red.

She had the look of someone who had borne all the cold in the world alone.

Garthe moved to the window she had come in through and looked out. Below, what appeared to be a coat was slowly disappearing under the accumulating snow. She'd shed it on the way up the wall—it would have been in the way. He tilted his head and raised one eyebrow.

'What on earth is that.'

Over time, imperfect gods had appeared on the continent. Not omniscient. Not powerful. Unable to commune with natural things. Short-lived. The world was full of such half-gods—but Heimdrykze was different.

The frozen primordial range existed outside the flow of time. The domain of complete gods. Frost giants from the age of the world's birth moved through it in packs. Ancient gods powerful enough to warp the course of nature breathed at every turn.

Complete and flawless. Strong and beautiful. Great and mysterious.

They killed or preserved lives beneath their notice with abilities that read as disaster or miracle. The closest thing that existed to what most humans meant when they said the word god.

Which raised a question about the Heimdrykze god currently unconscious before him.

Divine power barely sufficient to qualify as divine power. A body that, inexplicably, felt cold. And beyond that: sufficient nerve to faint at the sight of a dagger in a human's heart.

Whether she was genuinely Heimdrykze-born was a question he had. Probably yes. The quantity of her divine power was minimal. The purity of it, however, was rare enough to be counted on the fingers of one hand—a grade he had encountered in almost no other god. Only Heimdrykze—where the purest divine power concentrated—could produce something like this.

Slightly defective goods, but quality material nonetheless.

He sat at the table and watched her for a time. She was frowning in her sleep and making small sounds of distress. More expression than she'd shown while awake.

It was while watching her that he noticed it. The curse had peaked. Now, it was ebbing. The pain that had been flooding every nerve, from crown to heel, was now—barely—perceptible.

Someone's idiotic prophecy rang through his mind—a clanging, unwelcome bell:

'Yes—the one who came to you like the wind, she is the destiny you have spent your whole life searching for!'

Mariaeks blinked. She was standing in a wide field. How long had she been here? An hour? A year? It felt like more than a hundred.

A sweet scent reached her. She turned in the direction the wind was coming from. A tree so enormous it seemed it might blot out the sky stood there.

The wind came again. She caught a leaf that came fluttering toward her.

THUNK!

The ground shook without warning. Mariaeks went rigid. A vast shadow fell across her. She turned.

A land turtle large enough to obscure a mountain moved with unhurried deliberateness. Its shell was like a patch of wild ground transplanted whole—trees and stones, flowers and moss growing dense across it. Butterflies and birds moved through the air above in quiet loops.

She looked at the turtle. The turtle's eyes moved to her.

She was generally afraid of large gods. This turtle did not frighten her at all. She was certain it would crush her if it stepped wrong. It felt, nonetheless, like something at whose feet one could sleep.

Thunk. The turtle set a foot down. From the forest of its shell, a small bird lifted into the sky and passed close above Mariaeks's head.

The wind moved through her hair. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them, she was somewhere else. Small bubbles escaped from her mouth. Underwater. She looked around at the thick dark surrounding her—too dark to see anything—and looked up. Light generally came from above.

At that moment, the space began faintly to lighten. Not from the direction she'd expected. A blue light, brighter for the darkness around it, rippled and spread from beneath her feet. Like moonlight tracing a drawing in the deep.

The light took on a complete form. A vast jellyfish.

Its transparent, rounded body was inscribed with luminous patterns. Hundreds of long, lace-like tendrils rippled and shone below it. Like a dress moving in the wind.

The moment the jellyfish appeared, small lights began to emerge in every direction—small things glowing with the same luminescence. The deep, which the great jellyfish alone could not fully illuminate, blazed into sight with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of small lights.

It was like being inside the night sky she had always looked up at. The night sky, which she had vaguely supposed would be cold, was warm. Mariaeks let her eyes close.

The comfortable sense of floating fell away. Familiar cold wrapped around her instead. When she opened her eyes, the world had gone entirely white. A sharp contrast to the dark sea. A place Mariaeks knew. She had lived her whole life in this territory. The divine land of Heimdrykze, covered in snow that had not melted in thousands of years.

A driving blizzard obscured her sight. But she knew where she was. The highest mountain in Heimdrykze. The frozen lake at its peak. The very center of it.

Mariaeks dropped to her knees and began scraping away the snow piled thick across the lake's surface. Heavy flakes beat down on her as though striking her deliberately. Her fingertips went red. She didn't seem to feel the cold. She kept scraping, without stopping, until the tips of her fingers reached the frozen surface of the lake.

She cleared the rest of the snow and pressed her face close—close enough to touch—to the span of ice she had uncovered. She narrowed her eyes and looked down through the milky surface.

A being more beautiful and great than any other lay beneath the lake with eyes closed. The most august being in this world. The lord of Heimdrykze. Her god.

She let out a long, slow breath. Good. He was still asleep.

At that moment—krrrzk—something hard split along its grain.

Cold ran down her spine. The cracking sound grew louder. Sharper. Faster.

Her pink eyes followed it. The sound had reached her.

Mariaeks slowly lowered her gaze. A deep fissure was spreading through the frozen lens through which the god could be seen.

Her breath stopped.

In the dozens of fracture planes the cracks had opened, a single image refracted and repeated. The sleeping god's eyes. Dozens of eyes, large and small, all lying peacefully closed.

She couldn't move at all. She simply looked.

Then— crack. The dozens became hundreds.

And the god opened his eyes.

"Hh—!"

Mariaeks pulled in a sharp breath and blinked. The brief dream evaporated, leaving only the feeling. The urgency of something chasing her kept her breathing fast and shallow for a moment. As her breath gradually settled and the world came into focus, Mariaeks registered that she had landed in the middle of an unfamiliar situation.

An unfamiliar room. An unfamiliar bed. And an unfamiliar face. Every element—the very surroundings and the people themselves—that had remained constant for a hundred years had been replaced.

A man was sleeping right in front of her. Mariaeks looked at his face. She spent a few purposeless seconds like that before she remembered who he was.

Last night. She had infiltrated the human settlement to rescue Ullri and Baen. She had waited for evening, avoided the building where the banquet was being held, and climbed carefully up the outer wall. She had shed her only coat. She had managed, just barely, to get inside a darkened room.

The satisfaction had not lasted. A man was sitting in that dark room without a sound—as if he'd melted into it—and their eyes met.

He was a powerful human. She could tell without testing it. The fierce divine power radiating from inside him filled the air around her as if it would swallow her whole in a single stride. Power on par with the gods of Heimdrykze—no, power that surpassed even most gods. The moment she faced him, Mariaeks understood. He was the hero Rhaevydie had spoken of.