GRP Chapter 6

Ullri and Baen wore identical expressions on their identical faces. The sky might as well have fallen.

The twins banished the despair from their faces, then looked at each other. Sharing thoughts. Mariaeks waited, unhurried.

"Spilled a little while making it. Ullri did."

"No. Baen did. So today's is a little short."

"Oh."

“…Yes.”

"Then why is it only reindeer meat?"

The twins looked at each other again. This time they held the look for a good while. At last they raised their chins with great dignity and answered.

"We forgot to go get ingredients."

Once a month, Ullri and Baen descended from the mountain to gather food for Mariaeks. Nothing grew inside Heimdrykze to eat, which meant crossing the frozen river—the boundary of the divine realm—to the other side. Mariaeks knew well enough that beyond it lay barren land smothered in the same white snow. How they managed to come back with such abundant provisions from those conditions every single time, she had never been able to work out.

When she'd once let this puzzlement slip aloud, the twins shrugged as if it were nothing to speak of. "Humans come from distant lands to worship the master's beauty and greatness," they'd said, "and build altars at the foot of Heimdrykze's mountains and leave offerings of their own accord."

Something about it seemed off, but—well, what could you do. Thank you, always, she would say, and every time she did, the twins snapped their eyes at her in identical reproach. Great gods don’t do thank-yous. It was only after meeting them that Mariaeks came to learn just how many things a great god wasn’t supposed to do.

We just bring it back. That's all. It’s nothing, really.

That was what they used to say, once, when she thanked them. Their voices still came to her clear enough. Time had passed, it seemed.

"Going every time is such a bother. We’ll head down tomorrow—whatever.…."

Ullri and Baen answered with the air of teenagers who had somewhere better to be. Had late adolescence finally come to find them, somehow? Her heart wouldn’t settle.

The adolescent wolves didn't run out to play when the snow fell heavily at noon. Mariaeks couldn't stop noticing the change, and by evening she'd failed to read, which was her habit at that hour. And for some reason, when the black night arrived, the ground didn't vibrate.

Everything from start to finish had come out wrong. The one fortunate thing was that this hour was caught at the very tail end of today. Mariaeks closed her eyes and imagined tomorrow's Mariaeks. Tomorrow's Mariaeks was repeating, once more, the same day she had repeated for a hundred years. It looked a bit dull, but it didn't look bad.

'I want tomorrow to come quickly.'

It was nearly dawn before Mariaeks could finally fall asleep.

The sound of a fierce wind knocking at the window brought her dimly to consciousness. The window rattled in its frame. Then again. The moment her groggy awareness surfaced, Mariaeks sensed that something was wrong.

She crossed quickly to the window and shoved the snow from the sill, then pushed it wide open. Cold air wrapped around her entire body in an instant. She stood without even blinking, watching the sky flush toward the color of a late sun, still as something frozen.

Mariaeks left the bedroom. The thought of closing the window didn't come to her. She looked through every familiar space in turn—the cracked corridor, the rough-edged storeroom, the worn kitchen, the prayer room piled with odds and ends, the open ground outside the shrine. She couldn't find the two spirits anywhere.

Great gods do not go looking for their attendants first. Call their names and they come running, Master. The bright ring of Ullri and Baen's voices surfaced in her mind.

Mariaeks let their names out into the white spread of her breath.

"Ullri. Baen."

There was no answer.

Mariaeks crouched at the shrine door to wait, thinking they might have gone for provisions. She lifted her head and watched the sky—only the sky—as the sun went down. But when it had become completely night, and the welcome sound of the frost giants' footsteps came through the ground, Ullri and Baen didn't return.

The next day.

And the day after that.

Heimdrykze—the land where the Void is sealed, the force that could unmake the world. If there was a reason the place was called a divine realm, those who thought about it sometimes suspected it wasn't because great gods lived there, but because only great gods could survive it. A joke people told, now and then.

Heimdrykze was a land where beings far stronger than the gods the continent prayed to had taken up residence. The savage monsters and formidable gods alone were enough to make any approach unthinkable, and the ferocious cold left nothing further to say. Not humans, not animals, not insects, not a single weed. The absence of food was the most fundamental reason ordinary living things couldn't survive there.

Olgidphaenn bordered the divine realm with only a river between them. The brutal cold didn't become warm air just because you crossed one river, and strong monsters had no fear of crossing a frozen one. Every condition was more or less the same as in the divine realm itself. In fact, Olgidphaenn simply had no name like sacred territory to soften the look of things, which meant its essential nature showed through with perfect clarity. Ah—a death-land. A place nothing can live.

A hundred and thirty-five years ago, a god of Heimdrykze descended upon Olgidphaenn. It had merely crossed a river, but the histories tended to write it as did descend upon us or came down to the land of men—language of great occasion. There had been an event that couldn't be expressed any other way. The reason was unknown, but the god had grown wrathful. What followed was this: every piece of land that faced Heimdrykze, and every living thing upon it, froze solid in a single moment and died. A great disaster that left tens of thousands dead or lost.

One hundred and thirty-five years later. Time had passed, but Olgidphaenn had still not recovered. The frozen ground stayed locked inside winter and showed no sign of thaw. Bodies from that time were still being found without much surprise, even now. That environment, that landscape, that event a hundred and thirty-five years prior—these were what had given Olgidphaenn the name it carried: the death-land.

The danger was known even to islands far out of the way of the continent. Not only rational beings, but animals guided by instinct alone refused to set foot there. The land that had been fading toward forgetting after the Great Disaster had recently begun to feel the warmth of people again. Following the tracks of one brave hero, the numbers had swelled in no time at all.

Those who believed that gods born in the divine realm of Heimdrykze were the only true gods and wished to serve them; scholars from the Thul'Mhoriae Alliance who studied the secrets of gods; mercenaries and young heroes who wanted to fell monsters and make a name for themselves; and, naturally, those who simply could not survive in the warm and safe places of the world.

Simply put—

"Great god! Strike down these worthless humans and deliver us to the promised land!"

On one side: a crowd of zealots praising whichever strong god was nearest.

"Ah, I genuinely… really want to strike down some worthless humans…."

"Ah… the promised land. I want to go too…."

On another side: Thul'Mhoriae scholars worn down from nothing but research on this barren frontier, muttering their own weary echo.

"Hey—you walked right through me, so apologize. Apple-logy! You know? Like an apple—round, shiny, preferably the gold kind?"

In a back alley: a rough-looking group of dubious quality, the ringleader with a single eye.

"The justice and love seething inside me have guided my feet to this place! Is this Olgidphaenn? The very starting point where my name will become known? I have a feeling, somehow, that this is good."

In the streets: young heroes full of righteousness and no knowledge of the world, mixed in without any sense of order.

“Every time you look at it…. A proper mess.”

The sentiment Garthe was feeling, one of his men gave voice to in his place.

“This damned place—still feels like home.”

Another let something private slip out. Damned place. That was fairly funny. Garthe lifted the corner of his mouth. Strictly speaking, the time he spent wandering the continent was considerably longer, but the fact that he always ended up back here was apparently enough to make it feel like home. For his men, and for Garthe.

Garthe raised his head and looked at the high, solid grey fortress wall. The large and small dents carved into it here and there bore witness to the rough history of Olgidphaenn. Damage from the transcendent beings born in the divine realm of Heimdrykze, the forbidden mountain range.

Scattered beneath the wall: several chunks of debris and large pieces of ice. Dozens of workers were repairing the wall, their rough voices rising. It seemed much had happened while he'd been briefly away from home.

Garthe set his feet moving again, after the brief pause. Divine power from deep inside him spread outward in every direction. His black hair scattered like flames in the cold north wind. People who had been grabbing each other by the collar and fighting in different parts of the street went still and turned to look at him.

The reason people bowed their heads before those called heroes wasn't only that they had saved many lives and built up achievements worthy of praise.

Heroes, unlike ordinary humans, could wield great power and extraordinary abilities. And that power was grounded in the divine energy every living thing carried. A hero with the strength to oppose transcendent beings harbored divine power as strong as any creature called a god. Even in human form, they carried a presence that called up awe as naturally as one might feel before a great god, a sacred beast, or an expanse of untamed nature. A mountain range covered in snow, taking human shape. A storm over the sea.

Among heroes, Garthe was one of the few who stood at the very top—a possessor of divine power rarely found anywhere in history. That each of his steps carried the weight of a giant was only natural.

Into a lawless territory where any crime could be buried under white snow, the only law had descended.

Zealots slipped into shadows; a mercenary quietly returned a wallet lifted from someone else's pocket to its proper place. No grand triumphal procession, no fanfare blown high into the air—and yet everyone understood that the master of Olgidphaenn had come home.