GRP Chapter 7

The quiet commotion was enough for the castle to take notice — Garthe had returned. Those who came out to welcome him found him at the gate.

"Anir? You were alive after all. I'd begun to wonder where you'd gone off to die..."

A year had aged Samthyeon considerably. He fixed Garthe with a look that fell somewhere between a glare and a reproach — the resentment of a man whose lord hadn't been where lords were supposed to be, who had been made to suffer for it, simmering plainly in his eyes.

"Samthyeon? Good lord, I nearly didn't recognize you. How did you get so old?"

Samthyeon's face crumpled sharply. The words landed harder than they might have coming from anyone else — Garthe's skin was as taut and luminous as it had always been, not a single line anywhere on it, unchanged from any year prior. In practice, Garthe had lived twice as long as Samthyeon, but the disparity in divine power meant that time had not treated them equally.

Garthe watched Samthyeon suppress his irritation, then turned his gaze toward the castle wall.

"And what happened there?"

"Nothing serious. There appears to have been some dispute among the frost giants in Heimdrykze. Several masses of ice — believed to be roughly finger-sized, by their standards — were flung loose. One came down on the castle wall. One fell in the street."

"My."

"Fifteen people were taken to God's embrace, it's true..."

"My, my."

"The Bountiful Moss tavern narrowly escaped damage and is intact."

The fortress's only establishment worth calling a proper dining hall had been spared. Garthe's eyes narrowed into a smile.

"Good."

The brief exchange concluded, the two moved inside. Samthyeon led Garthe down to the castle's underground level. Descending the stairs, Garthe noticed that ice crystals had packed themselves dense and close against the walls in formations like castle battlements. The temperature had been dropping with each step...

A cold energy paced and churned somewhere at the dungeon's lower depths.

"Didn't I tell you to hold the house down while I was gone?"

"You said no such thing."

"Is that right?"

Garthe let it go without resistance. Samthyeon exhaled with irritation.

The dungeon they arrived at was equally covered on all sides in dense white ice crystals. It resembled a cell carved entirely from ice. Garthe's gaze moved to the barred enclosure. Two white wolves bared their teeth and snarled. Each time the wolves surged and rampaged, the thick collars densely inscribed with ancient script flared with light and sent them rebounding. They were suppression tools developed by the Thul'Mhoriae Alliance — devices built to restrain divine power. These were no ordinary wolves. That much was clear from the dungeon's condition alone.

Their size and appearance were identical to ordinary wolves. But the fur shone silver, and the eyes were a clear, vivid blue — like the surface of a still lake. Northern spirits. Northern spirits, whether they took the form of rabbits, foxes, wolves, or yaks, all shared the same hallmarks: silver fur and blue eyes.

Recently, a particular piece of nonsense had spread across the continent — that consuming the heart of a spirit granted immortality, or enhanced divine power. The precise target was "the hearts of gods and spirits," but inevitably it was spirits who bore the brunt of the consequences: they were pure beings formed of divine energy, but they were not as strong as gods. For this reason, spirits that had been living in peace were being found slaughtered in incidents scattered across the continent. The Thul'Mhoriae Alliance had declared that zealots who put faith in this nonsense — calling them regressors — would be identified and punished without leniency upon discovery.

"Samthyeon."

"No."

"Have you decided to change professions while I was away?"

"The habit of not listening to others hasn't changed a bit."

Samthyeon rebutted the pointless accusation without expression and continued.

"Recently, there have been several theft incidents inside the fortress."

Winter meat stores had been taken. Several bottles of the finest wine had gone missing. Dried herbs had vanished without a trace. Someone had made off in quantity with rare cordyceps that grew only in the west. Reports and complaints of a similar pattern had come flooding in.

For a place where many different kinds of people gathered, such incidents were not entirely unheard of — but this many occurring simultaneously was unusual. The apothecary who had lost his cordyceps in particular, eyes bloodshot with fury, expressed his firm intention to hire mercenaries and see the thief dead without fail. A considerable investment paid off. The thief wasn't killed — but a clue was obtained.

"I always say: a long tail will always get caught!"

Remarkably, the thief did indeed have a tail. A fluffy tail that glowed faintly in the dark of night. No one in Olgidphaenn could have mistaken what that meant. The thief was a northern spirit.

With the involvement of a being from Heimdrykze now established, this was no longer a private matter. That was why Samthyeon had stepped in — the man who held full delegated authority from Garthe, lord of Olgidphaenn and Fox's Den.

Looking at what had been taken over the course of the thefts, the spirits had rather refined tastes. Samthyeon prepared various provisions suited to a spirit-thief's palate in several storehouses throughout the fortress. There was no need to wait many days. That very same evening, two spirits walked straight into the trap. One had golden carp from the south in its jaws. The other held a medicinal herb said to be capable of resurrecting the dead.

"Should I laugh?"

"It wasn't meant as a joke, particularly."

Though he said as much, Samthyeon had let out an involuntary laugh after capturing them. How utterly absurd it was. Worldly spirits with an unerring eye for anything of value...

"In any case, I was deliberating what to do about them..."

Samthyeon approached the bars. One of the wolves flung itself against the cage. The ancient script inscribed into the bars flared and sent the wolf rebounding. The wolf tumbled, then bared its teeth again, working its throat with a low growl.

"Their strength is weak. They appear to be young."

Northern spirits possessed strength that surpassed any spirit elsewhere on the continent. Had these been fully grown individuals, the collars would have been shattered and the bars would not have survived either. No — in truth, the likelihood was that there would never have been any question of capturing them alive; they would have been shot dead on the spot.

"What do you think should be done?"

The lord of Olgidphaenn had returned — it was proper that he make the decision. Garthe, arms crossed, watched the two audacious spirits gnawing away at the bars—nib-nib-nib—and glaring at him. His gaze moved to the bowl crushed flat under a pair of thick front paws and to the chunks of meat strewn across the floor.

Spirits, like gods, could live without eating. Some individuals did eat occasionally, but this was only seen in cases where a being had regressed across successive generations from what a spirit properly was. Whether something unable to constitute its body entirely from divine power from birth could even be called a "spirit" was, to begin with, a question.

The divine realm of Heimdrykze was a place where one could encounter gods preserving the primordial strength of ages — unchanged across millennia — as commonly as pebbles on a road. Spirits born in that Heimdrykze were, like the gods of that place, complete beings. To be complete meant to be without flaw. What lacked nothing needed nothing filled. Desires born of survival — hunger and the like — were the petty circumstances of inferior life-forms.

Samthyeon knew this as well as anyone, but having watched spirits make off with golden carp and reindeer meat, cordyceps worth more than gold and rare medicinal herbs, the confusion was understandable. He had even put meat inside for them.

Of course, as though to prove they were spirits, they hadn't touched the meat at all. One full week since capture, he was told, and they hadn't taken a single sip of water either. And still, they flopped and convulsed like fresh-caught carp, causing nothing but trouble.

If the crime wasn't one of necessity, then perhaps it could be read as a kind of sport. A desire to watch humans become inconvenienced? That much, at least, seemed to make some sense.

Garthe, who had been watching the spirits, suddenly furrowed his brow. Pain arrived without announcement. He pressed a hand against the frozen stone wall. The thick veins in his neck rose to the surface. Divine power and killing intent radiated outward, rough and wide. The spirits flung themselves backward and, crouched in the shadowed corner, eyes gleaming, watched the two of them warily.

Garthe drew a deep breath, then released it slowly. A single breath, and the killing intent and divine power settled into quiet. He exhaled white vapor and smiled — sharp, showing teeth.

"It isn't urgent. Shall we put this matter off for now."

Samthyeon changed his tone from when he had brought Garthe in off the road barely minutes before.

"It appears the fatigue of the journey has taken hold. You should rest well today."

A voice maintaining the pretense of calm rang like tinnitus from somewhere distant. Garthe kept the dark smile in place and moved his heavy footsteps forward.

Phweeet!

A whistle cut through the dawn air. The early-morning patrol soldiers moving along the riverbank grabbed their weapons at the sound and converged in a rush. The one who had sounded the wooden pipe was a young warrior who had come out alongside his father. His sharp eyes had found it even in the pale grey light of dawn.

The faces of the warriors who looked in the direction the boy pointed went rigid. Footprints crossed the surface of the river, unobliterated even by the falling snow. Small marks — the size of a child's, or a woman's. They were not the tracks of some enormous monster, yet the soldiers stood on guard. Because the footprints began from the other side: from the divine realm of Heimdrykze.

With bodies from the Great Disaster of 135 years ago still being found throughout Olgidphaenn, the meaning was larger than what was visible. A carrier pigeon took flight carrying a letter marked in red dye.

Thus spake the Ruler of Heimdrykze—the strength of all, the radiance of all, the nobility of all, the absolute magnitude of all:

'Down there, a swarm of insects. They are nothing. A gesture of My hand would snuff them out. Pathetic, frail things—unable to exist save for their parasitism. Their only boast? A fevered, wretched rate of reproduction.'

Each word he spoke was, to her, a revelation more sacred than anything else — and a law she was bound to observe without exception. When one worked through the arduous practice of following the law, one arrived at truth. Mariaeks had come to understand what those words truly meant:

'And so do not keep company with such insignificant and contemptible insects.'

Mariaeks looked up at the towering castle walls that rose like frost giants into the sky. In the phrasing of the Great Absolute, this place could be called an insect nest. It was precisely where humans lived.