GRP Chapter 10

Garthe reached out and took hold of her wrist and pulled. She came without resistance and collided against his solid frame. She looked up. At a distance close enough to feel breath, their eyes met.

Garthe looked into her eyes. Even in the dark room, the pink irises shone through, clear.

"Your eyes are pretty."

He placed his hand against her throat. The threatening contact produced nothing—not even a blink. Truly, she was not blinking.

The moment he noticed it, her eyes drifted upward and then rolled back entirely. The slight figure folded and came apart like a puppet with its strings cut. Garthe caught her with one arm as she fell.

The hand that had meant to kill her wandered for a moment in the air.

Finishing what he’d started was also an option.

"Hm."

A short exhalation. Garthe looked down at the woman draped across his arm. Rather than closing his hand around her throat, he pulled the dagger free from his chest and dropped it on the floor.

He laid the woman on the sofa. Then he retrieved a candle from the floor, lit it, and set it on the table. As the room brightened to a faint glow, new details became visible.

A beautiful face—but the nose and cheeks were red. Fingers as delicate as fine-wrought work, toes as fine—and they were equally red. The look of someone who had personally experienced every variety of cold the world had to offer.

Garthe moved to the window she'd come through and leaned out to look below. A shape that might have been a coat was gradually disappearing beneath the accumulating snow. She’d apparently shed it on the way up—a nuisance. He straightened, tilting his head slightly, one eyebrow rising.

'What, exactly, is this—'

As time had passed, incomplete gods had begun appearing across the continent. Not omniscient, not strong, unable to communicate with the natural world, and short-lived besides. Fractional gods of every variety filled the world now—but Heimdrykze was different.

The frozen primordial mountain range existed outside the flow of time: a complete divine realm. Frost giants who had been present when the world was born still moved in packs. Ancient gods who were strong enough to bend the workings of nature breathed in every corner. Complete and perfect. Strong and beautiful. Magnificent and mysterious. Capable of killing or preserving insignificant lives through powers that ranked as disaster or miracle. The closest things in existence to what ordinary people meant when they said god.

So what, exactly, was this Heimdrykze god collapsed in front of him? Divine power too meager to justify the title. A body that felt cold. And the nerve to faint because a man had a dagger in his chest.

It crossed his mind to question whether this was genuinely Heimdrykze-made, but on reflection, yes—that origin appeared to be correct. Her divine power might be meager in quantity, but in purity it was among the highest of any god he'd encountered. Only Heimdrykze, where the most unsullied divine energy concentrated, could produce something like this. A slight defect in the product, one might say, but the base material itself was excellent.

Garthe settled at the table and spent a while simply observing the woman on the sofa. Her brow was deeply knitted, and she made small distressed sounds. More expression, here, than when she'd been awake.

He watched her unhurriedly, and then he noticed.

The curse that had been reaching its worst had grown quiet. From the top of his head to the soles of his feet, the pain that had been pouring through every single nerve—it was present only as the faintest trace. Into Garthe's mind came the ringing of some idiot's prophecy, like a bell struck for no reason.

'Yes, the one who flew to you like the wind—she is the fate you have been searching for all your life!'

Mariaeks blinked.

She was standing in a vast field.

How long had she been here? An hour or so? A year? No—something closer to a hundred years, she thought.

A sweet fragrance reached the tip of her nose. Mariaeks turned her head in the direction the wind was coming from. An enormous tree stood there, tall enough that it might block the sky.

The wind came again.

Mariaeks reached out and caught a falling leaf.

Thunk.

The ground shook. Mariaeks startled, her body going rigid. A vast shadow fell over her. She turned. Her eyes went wide. An enormous land turtle moved at a careful pace, large enough to put mountains to shame. On its shell, which looked like a section of forest transplanted whole, trees and stones and flowers and moss grew in abundance. Butterflies and birds flew across the shell in peace.

She looked at the turtle. The turtle's eye found hers. Mariaeks tended to fear large gods, but this one held no fear for her at all. Despite the obvious certainty that being stepped on would kill her, she felt she could curl up at its feet and sleep.

Thunk. The turtle placed another foot down. A small bird lifted off the shell's forested surface and rose into the sky, grazing her hair as it passed.

The gentle wind that moved through her hair made Mariaeks close her eyes. When she opened them, the place was different. Air bubbles rose from her mouth in strings.

She was underwater.

She looked around at the deep darkness surrounding her, then looked up—because light generally came from above.

At that moment, the space began to brighten faintly. Not from the direction she'd expected. From below her feet, a blue light pulsed and began to spread, rippling outward in the dark. As if moonlight were drawing a picture deep in the sea.

The light gathered and took on a complete shape. An enormous jellyfish. Its body transparent and round, beautiful patterns inscribed in it, luminous. Below it, hundreds of long lacework tentacles drifted and glowed. Like a dress shifting in a wind.

The moment that jellyfish appeared, small lights came into being everywhere. Tiny things with the same fluorescent glow. The sea, which the enormous jellyfish alone had not fully lit, blazed with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of small points of light. Mariaeks thought she had gone inside the night sky she had always only looked up at.

The night sky she had vaguely assumed would be cold was warm.

She let her eyes drift shut.

The comfortable weightlessness vanished. A familiar cold wrapped around Mariaeks instead.

She opened her eyes.

The world was white in every direction. The opposite of that dark underwater space. A place Mariaeks knew. A place she had lived her entire life.

The land of the gods, covered in snow that had not melted in thousands of years—Heimdrykze.

A driving blizzard blotted out what she could see. But Mariaeks knew where she was standing. At the very peak of Heimdrykze's highest mountain. At the center of the frozen lake at that peak.

Mariaeks dropped quickly to her knees and began clearing the snow piled thickly on the lake surface with her bare hands. Fat snowflakes poured down as though beating against her. The tips of Mariaeks's fingers grew steadily red. But she did not seem to feel the cold—she went on digging without rest. Soon the tips of her fingers met the frozen surface of the lake.

She cleared the last of the snow away and pressed her face to the exposed surface, nose against the ice. She narrowed her eyes and looked through the cloudy ice at what lay below.

An existence more beautiful and more magnificent than anything in this world lay there with eyes closed, submerged beneath the lake. The most exalted being in this world.

Ruler of Heimdrykze.

Mariaeks's god.

She exhaled in relief. Good. He was still asleep.

Crrk.

Something hard, splitting along its grain. The hair along her spine stood up. The sound of fracture grew louder. Sharper. Faster.

Mariaeks's pink eyes followed the sound. And she understood that it had already reached just beneath her. Slowly, she lowered her gaze. Through the only channel through which she could see the god, a deep crack was driving.

Her breath stopped.

In the dozens of cleavage planes the crack had made, a single image refracted and multiplied. The sleeping god's eye. Dozens of eyes, large and small, resting calmly closed.

Mariaeks could not move at all—she only stared.

Crack.

Dozens became hundreds. And the god opened his eyes.

"Hah—"

Mariaeks pulled in a sharp breath and blinked. The brief dream burned off and left only feeling behind. Her heart was racing as if something were chasing her; she breathed in shallow gasps for a moment. As her breath steadied and her eyes found focus and her vision cleared, she was able to take in the fact that she had landed in the middle of an unfamiliar situation.

An unfamiliar room. An unfamiliar bed. And an unfamiliar face.

Everything that had been always the same across a hundred years—the surroundings, the people in them—had been replaced entirely.

A man was asleep right in front of her. Mariaeks stared at his face. She spent several blank seconds like that, and only then remembered who this human was.

Last night. Mariaeks had infiltrated the humans' settlement to rescue Ullri and Baen. She had waited for evening to fall, avoided the building where a gathering was taking place, groped her way along the outer wall. She had even sacrificed her one coat—and barely managed to enter the darkened room.

The joy ended quickly. The man had been sitting in the dark room as though dissolved into it, without a sound, and she had met his eyes.

He was strong. She hadn't needed to test it. The fierce divine power radiating from inside him filled every inch of the surrounding air, as though it meant to swallow her at a step. Power that stood shoulder to shoulder with the gods of Heimdrykze—no, power that would surpass even an ordinary god.

Mariaeks had understood in the moment she faced him. He was the hero Rhaevydie had spoken of.