Chapter 390: Book 6-17.1: Reckoning

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Gwendith goggled at Yuriko’s display of strength. It was mind-boggling how a relatively slender girl could drag a heavy ice floe that should have weighed thousands of Jin across the river, standing on a slippery and muddy riverbank too.

However, it was the casual display of how prehensile Yuriko’s Protective Field was that was actually much more interesting. Kalla, the blue-haired and grey-eyed scout who followed along behind Yuriko, looked with interest at the golden wings sprouting from Yuriko’s Field.

Hmm, that probably wasn’t Protective Field, now that Gwendith thought about it. What delicious secrets did the gorgeous girl hide behind her perfect face and oh so innocent eyes?

Yuriko had already achieved the Knight level, at least that’s what she told Gwendith. But her level of strength and grace far exceeded that of her grandfather. Maybe it was just that he was already close to the end of his lifespan, at two hundred and seventy years old. And it was also because her family focused on elemental techniques rather than physical, which might explain the discrepancy.

But no, she didn’t think her grandpa could soar across a river using nothing but shaped Animus, and he certainly couldn’t create constructs out of Animus when he was her age.

Ah, it could be that her own judgment was impaired. Gwendith couldn’t help her feelings. A year and a half in captivity, hoping that her family would save her, but who was it that came to her rescue? Perhaps the Threads of Fate had just spun circumstances this way. Still, what could have kept her family, or House Kinnock from sending aid? She hoped to find her answers when they arrived at the base camp.

For now though, she and Kalla needed to focus on building their bridge. Although, why couldn’t Yuriko just carry them across? That would be much simpler, right?

The girl held on to the rope securing the floe against the bank. Perhaps if her arms were exposed, her muscles would be tightened with strain. But Yuriko’s face didn’t look as though she was straining at all. Gwendith’s pulse started to quicken. Hmm.

She was certainly infatuated. What to do about it though. Gwendith shook her head and pushed such thoughts aside, even if a rebellious part of her said that after all she’d gone through, life was fragile and she wouldn’t know what would happen the next day.

It didn’t help that same-sex unions in the Empire were tolerated at best. There were certainly no legal marriages for such couples, and even if Gwendith’s preferences ran to such things, she would still be expected to marry a boy and have children, if only to pass on the Sharine Heritage. What she did outside of wedlock was nobody else’s business but hers and her future husband’s. Or she could swear off the Sharine name and become a handmaiden?

Nothing she’d ever considered honestly. She wasn’t even sure if she liked other women that way or simply because it was Yuriko. And her captivity had her swearing off men, at least for the immediate future. Still, it was barbarian men that she hated, even if being close to the male scouts had her feeling a bit jittery. Staying next to Yuriko calmed and soothed her.

The Chaos Lord, Songstress of Heartfelt Desire. A petite woman, pretty and pert. Gwendith felt a bit of jealousy when she looked at her. She certainly didn’t envy the fact that she practically licked Yuriko’s fingers every few hours or so. Nope, definitely not.

The small Chaos Lord hovered near Yuriko at the moment. Gwendith walked up to her friend and asked, “Don’t you think it’ll be easier to carry all of us over the river? The way you jumped over…”

Yuriko shook her head. “That looks a bit far for me to jump. And I’m not comfortable risking your lives for something so chancy. I think building an ice bridge is safer, er, relatively.”

“Alright,” Gwendith agreed.

She walked towards the floe and touched the edge. The cold leeched the warmth from her hands until she reined it in using her Facet. Then she took a deep breath then extruded her Animus from her fingertips, and suffused it across the ice.

A feeling of complacency overcame her. Laziness, stillness. The idea that she didn’t need to do anything and that it was nice and comfortable just drifting around, going with the flow of the water. Ice and snow, the cold air. Gwendith’s Heritage had much to do with the cold and nearly unbidden, the memories of her Ancestors flooded her mind.

Cold was the absence of warmth and the dominion of the Sharine was over that process. Leech warmth away from a foe, do it quickly enough and the merest touch could stop the strongest warrior.

But the cold could nurture too. It kept Gwendith safe when she left the mountain fortress to harvest the blades of blue-veined grass. It kept her away from the grubby paws of those rotters who had nothing better to do than get drunk, fornicate, and sleep.

Her family treated cold as a weapon, and her own experience was that it was her guardian. Gwendith felt herself at the cusp. Of what, she didn’t really know, but she shrugged and focused on what she needed to do at the moment.

“Can you catch another ice floe and stick it next to this one?” Gwendith asked, “I can fuse them together and that’ll be quicker than freezing more water. “

“Alright. You’ve got this secure?”

“Hang on for a moment,” Gwendith muttered as her Animus covered the parts of the disc that was near the banks. She nudged the ice to extend, moving its volume rather than making more of it. It cost less Animus that way. So, she made the ice narrower but thicker on this end and she managed to fuse it with the bank, which was more pebbles and gravel than mud. Underneath was the frozen earth, which was a good enough anchor. After a few minutes, she got about a five pace wide portion anchored. “Go ahead.”

Yuriko nodded and jumped onto another ice floe. This one was a bit smaller than the first one but it was the biggest piece within easy reach. She did the same thing as before and created an anchoring spike, threaded the rope through it and then leapt back to the banks. Then she dragged the floe towards them.

“I’ll take over for this,” Kalla said, walking up to Gwendith. “Rest and recover your Animus.”

Gwendith nodded. Her reserves had dwindled to about half. She sank down into a meditative trance and focused on breathing in the ambient Chaos and bringing it to her core. About an hour later, she was filled up. At that point, Kalla and Yuriko had created a footpath ten paces or so wide and covered about thirty paces of the river, a fifth of the entire width.

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Kalla sat in a meditative trance while Yuriko stood on the floe and diverted any ice chunks from colliding on their footbridge.

“I’m ready for the next one,” Gwendith yelled.

“Alright!” Yuriko jumped onto another ice floe, stabbed an anchor into it, secured it with the rope, jumped back to the bridge and pulled it close. Gwendith could see the rope glowing gold with Yuriko’s Animus, which explained why the thing didn’t break from the abuse the monstrously strong girl had put it through.

Once the floes were connected, Gwendith sank her Animus into it and shrank it down, making it thick enough to support their weight. She used most of this one to make a pillar to the bottom of the river, which felt to be around five paces deep at this point. Once she was done, she nodded to Yuriko, who snagged another ice floe which Gwendith then used to extend the bridge by another ten paces.

Once her Animus was at around half, Gwendith strode back to the bank to rest and recover. She and Kalla worked on the bridge for the next five hours. They broke for lunch and continued a couple of hours later. By mid-afternoon, the bridge spanned half the width of the river. They should be able to finish it by noon, the next day.

The next morning, Gwendith woke up and staggered towards the bridge, worried that there would be damage from ice chunks colliding on it. Instead, she saw Yuriko standing guard over a perfectly fine bridge.

“You didn’t sleep?”

“Hmmm, ah, no. I didn’t want your work coming undone. Don’t worry, I stayed up longer when I crossed the Chaos Sea.”

“Oh, thank you,” Gwendith said faintly.

“Go eat and get ready,” Yuriko said. “No need to risk mistakes from hunger or drowsiness.” She gave Gwendith a brilliant smile and she felt her heart skip a beat.

Smiling like that should be forbidden! A brief daydream of Gwendith having to beat boys away from an innocently smiling Yuriko had her shivering to her toes.

Ration bar stew was breakfast. It was also lunch and dinner and if not for the varied spice packets, it was close to unpalatable. Still, the Empire’s ration bars were all a body needed to grow healthy and strong. She and the other women had started to put some more meat into their bones. Unfortunately, Gwendith knew that their supply was running out. They had maybe a couple of weeks’ worth of the stuff left. There also wasn’t enough blue-veined grass to substitute, though the few that she found and harvested went into extending their supply.

Mid-morning and the bridge was nearly complete. Just a couple dozen paces left to the next bank. Gwendith and Kalla were resting at the moment, having pushed too far the last cycle. Yuriko kept her vigil over the bridge and looked fresh as flowers even though she had been awake for nearly thirty hours already.

For Gwendith, the building of the bridge had deepened her understanding of cold and ice, as this was the first time she’d struggled to manipulate this big a chunk. The separate ice floes had become one single floe and if not for her memory, Gwendith would not have known that they had been separate. She couldn’t even find the seams where they joined. Once again, she felt herself at the cusp of a discovery, but it felt that it was still a hair away from being able to touch it.

She could feel what it was now, though. An Ennoia. Of the cold embrace of ice and snow. Perhaps of the inevitability of a blizzard, and how the storm forced everything to stand still while it raged on. She felt it not only as the absence of heat but also the existence of cold itself. Perhaps her family was wrong, or the understanding was too shallow.

Cold wasn’t just the absence of energy and fire, it was something on its own too. But did that mean that hot and cold, being truly separate things rather than two sides of the same coin, could exist within the same space? How exactly did her Facet cause things that she touched to freeze?

If she followed the pathways of her inlay, she should be able to see the how. Ah, there it was. She drew in the heat and vented it into her core. It was also how she could keep her own body temperature stable and under her control. But that only meant that it wasn’t cold that she manipulated, but heat, didn’t it?

But what did she touch upon? Animus that took on the concept of cold? Chaos could be anything, couldn’t it? Then, in the north, why was it so cold? In Rumiga City, the Seasons held sway, but here, only the Season of Water reigned supreme. The other Seasons only expressed aspects of it.

She called upon her Animus to gather motes of ambient Chaos, and with her senses she sought out the Ennoia of Cold. Was it…here?

“To arms!” came Sheamus’ harsh call as he ran towards the camp from where he had kept watch. Gwendith’s eyes snapped open and she glared at the scout for interrupting her musings. But a moment later, what he said registered.

“A barbarian force! There’s nearly fifty of them, coming across the hills! They’ll be on us in half an hour.”

“Fifty?” Yuriko called out as she walked back to the bank. “So few?”

Sheamus pulled up short and gave the girl an odd look. Then again, Yuriko drove back a horde of them during their escape, so fifty must really seem like a small group.

“Elites, I think,” Sheamus said, “Pavo stayed back to get a better view. I hurried here so we could get ready.” He looked at the ice bridge. So very close to completion, but not quite.

“That’s long enough,” Yuriko said. “Two dozen paces is short enough to leap over. Bring the others and cross. Quickly! I’ll hold the barbarians back, and break the bridge after.”

Gwendith swallowed. Again the barbarians came and threatened her and her friends’ safety. Gwendith knew that she wasn’t that strong, but she’d rot in the Abyss if she just rolled over and let them have their way. Her Animus spread out from the bottom of her feet and she took control of the ice and snow. A dagger formed in her fist. It was shaped like the one that killed the barbarian who tried to have his way with her. It was a fitting weapon.

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