GRP Chapter 6

Ullri and Baen made the same expression on their identical faces. As though the sky had collapsed. The despair was forcibly erased from both faces—

Then they looked at each other. Sharing thoughts. Mariaeks waited calmly for the answer.

"We spilled some while making it. Ullri did."

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

"Was that so?"

"Yeees."

"But why did you only put reindeer meat in?"

The twins looked at each other again. This time, the silence between them stretched somewhat longer. After quite a long while, they lifted their chins with full composure and answered.

"We forgot to go get supplies."

Ullri and Baen went down the mountain once a month to gather food for Mariaeks. Since nothing could be obtained within Heimdrykze, they had to cross the frozen river—

The boundary of the divine realm.

Mariaeks knew well that the land beyond was also bleak and buried in white snow. How they managed to return with plentiful provisions every time under such conditions, she had never been able to work out.

On the occasion when Mariaeks had let the wondering slip aloud, the twins shrugged as if it were nothing remarkable. Something to the effect of: In order to worship the beauty and greatness of our lady, humans travel from distant lands to build altars at the foot of the mountain and voluntarily offer tribute.

Something about this seemed a bit off, but they were the ones who said it, so what was to be done. "I'm always grateful," Mariaeks would say—and every time, the twins immediately sharpened their eyes. Great gods do not say thank you.

Since meeting them, Mariaeks had come to learn for the first time how many things a great god was not permitted to do.

We're just bringing it. There's nothing worth acknowledging. Ullri and Baen's voices still rang clear in memory—and yet time had passed all the same.

"Going every time is such a bother. I'll go down tomorrow and come back..." Ullri and Baen answered with a somewhat delinquent air. Had a belated adolescence come for them, of all things.

Mariaeks's heart was thoroughly, helplessly unsettled.

The adolescent wolves did not go out to play in the heavily falling noon snow. Mariaeks was unsettled by the change and could not settle into her afternoon reading as usual. And then—

Strangely. Even when the black night arrived, the earth did not tremble.

Everything, from beginning to end, was a twisted day. The one fortunate thing was that this moment was hanging at the very end of today. Mariaeks closed her eyes and imagined tomorrow's Mariaeks. Tomorrow's Mariaeks was repeating the same every day she had repeated for a hundred years.

It looked a little boring. It did not look bad.

'I hope tomorrow comes quickly.'

Mariaeks could only barely fall asleep near dawn.

She opened her eyes faintly at the sound of a fierce wind knocking at the window. Rattle, rattle. The window shook again.

As her dazed consciousness surfaced, Mariaeks sensed something was wrong.

She moved quickly to the window and swept the snow piled on the sill away, then threw it open wide. Cold air seized her whole body at once. She stared at the sky dyeing itself in the colors of dusk without blinking, as though she had frozen.

Mariaeks left the bedroom. She did not think to close the window. She moved through every familiar space—the corridor with its cracked and splitting walls; the dilapidated storeroom; the worn old kitchen; the prayer room heaped with odds and ends; the clearing outside the temple.

But in none of them could she find the two spirits.

Great gods do not seek out their inferiors first. Just call our names and we'll come running, my lady. Ullri and Baen's bright, ringing voices surfaced in her memory.

Into the white cloud of her own breath, Mariaeks spoke their names.

"Ullri. Baen."

No answer came.

Mariaeks crouched in front of the temple door and waited for the twins. She had thought perhaps they had gone to collect tribute. She raised her head and watched only the sky as it deepened. But even when night had come in full, and the familiar, dear sound of the frost giants' footsteps reached her at last—Ullri and Baen did not return.

The next day, either.

And the day after that.

Heimdrykze: the land where the Void that could annihilate the world lay sealed. The reason this Heimdrykze was called a divine realm was not, strictly speaking, because it was the land where great gods lived, rather—

Wasn't it because it was the land where only great gods could survive? It was a joke humans sometimes made.

Heimdrykze was a land inhabited by beings far stronger than the gods on the continent that humans looked up to. The existence of fierce monsters and powerful gods alone was enough to make approach unthinkable; add the brutal cold to that, and nothing more needed saying. Humans, animals, insects—not even a single weed showed itself. The absence of food was the most fundamental reason ordinary living things could not survive there.

Olgidphaenn was a region that bordered the divine realm with only a single river as its boundary. Brutal cold would not transform into warm air simply by crossing one river, and strong monsters would not fear crossing a frozen one. Its circumstances were not, in essence, much different from the divine realm. Olgidphaenn had, in fact, rather less than the divine realm: it lacked even the name of a sacred territory where gods resided, which meant the true nature of its environment was on full and unambiguous display. Well... not a place one could call livable—

A land of death, really.

One hundred and thirty-five years ago, the 'god' of Heimdrykze descended upon Olgidphaenn. It had crossed only one river, but history books described it grandly:

Thus it descended, or it came down to the human land.

And these descriptions were not, in the circumstances, overblown. A great event had occurred that demanded no less. The reason was never known, but the god was enraged. As a result, all the land facing Heimdrykze, and every living creature upon it, froze in an instant and met death.

Tens of thousands of casualties.

The Great Disaster.

One hundred and thirty-five years later. Time had passed, but Olgidphaenn had not recovered.

The frozen land seemed trapped inside winter, refusing to thaw. Even now, bodies from that time were discovered with some regularity. That landscape, those circumstances, and the incident 135 years ago—

These were what had given Olgidphaenn the name it carried.

The danger was known even to islands far removed from the continent. Those with reason, and even animals operating on instinct alone, tried not to set foot in Olgidphaenn. The land had been sinking toward forgetting in the years since the Great Disaster—

And then, recently, the warmth of people had begun spreading through it again. Following the trail of a brave hero who had taken the first step, numbers multiplied with speed.

Those who believed that only gods born in the divine realm of Heimdrykze were true gods, and who wished to serve them. The priests of the Alliance Thul'Mhoriae, researching the secrets of the divine on the harsh frontier, too exhausted to be choosy about their circumstances. Mercenaries and young heroes who wanted to make names for themselves by subduing monsters. Criminals who could not live in the warm, safe, sunlit places. These made up the population. In a word—

"O great god! Destroy these insignificant humans and lead us to the land of salvation!"

On one side, a crowd of zealots praising a powerful god.

"Ah, I genuinely want to destroy insignificant humans..."

"Ah... I also want to go to the land of salvation..."

On another side, the Thul'Mhoriae priests—exhausted from nothing but research on this relentless frontier, their spiritual enthusiasm somewhat depleted.

"Hey, if you walked right into someone, you should apologize! An apology! You know what an apology is? The golden, glossy kind?"

In the back alleys, a rough, one-eyed sort of company with questionable credentials.

"My heart, overflowing with justice and love, has led my feet to this place! So this is Olgidphaenn? Is this the starting point where my name begins to be known? I feel a good premonition for some reason."

On the streets, young and righteously ignorant heroes were mixed in inharmoniously among all the above. Whenever you looked at it, it was truly a shitshow.

"Whenever you look at it, truly... an absolute shitshow..."

One of Garthe's men gave voice to what Garthe was already feeling.

"Miserable place to call home."

Another let his honest impression slip. Home. A fairly amusing word for this godforsaken hole. Garthe raised the corner of his mouth. If you counted the days, he'd spent far more of them wandering the continent than here—but in the sense that this was where he always ended up, it seemed to register as home.

For his men. For Garthe too.

Garthe raised his head and looked at the high, solid gray walls. The large and small gashes carved into them everywhere proved Olgidphaenn's history—damage wrought by the transcendent beings born in the divine realm's forbidden mountain range.

Below the walls, rubble and large chunks of ice lay scattered. Dozens of workers raised their rough voices as they repaired the walls. Many things, it appeared, had happened while he'd been briefly away.

Garthe moved his legs, which had paused for a moment. Divine power spreading from deep within his body extended outward in every direction. His black hair scattered like fire in the cold north wind. People grappling and grabbing at each other's collars in all directions stopped breathing and turned to look at him.

The reason people bowed their heads before those called heroes was not only because such heroes had saved many lives and achieved deeds worthy of praise.

Heroes could wield strength and power that ordinary humans could not. That power was rooted in the divine power that all living creatures carried—

But a hero capable of standing against transcendent beings carried divine power of the same order as beings called 'gods.'

Even in human form, they were beings that naturally inspired the same awe as a great god, a divine beast, the vast indifference of nature. Truly: a snow-covered mountain range wearing a human face.

A storm walking on the sea.

Garthe was among the most notable of these—

A possessor of divine power rarely found even in history. That his every step carried the weight of a giant's presence was only natural. In a lawless land where any crime could be buried under white snow, the sole law had returned.

The zealots retreated into the shadows. Mercenaries quietly replaced the wallets they'd slipped from others' pockets, with some care for the positioning. There was no splendid triumphal procession, no call of horns ringing high across the sky.

But everyone recognized that the lord of Olgidphaenn had come home.