NOVEL NEXT Chapter 146: Last Frontier
Part Seven: Down and Out At Snowy Rock Bottom
A shrill wind cut through Calaf's remaining armor and Jelena's well-kept thieving outfit. There was not a tree for leagues around. Not even a bush. Frozen waste loomed in every direction as far as the eye could see.
Calaf groaned. Every limb was icy cold to the point of pain save for his ruined left hand, which he could barely feel at all.
"I've got you!" Jelena said.
She'd hastily assembled some dressing to staunch the bleeding. Doing so had covered the Brand. She gently stroked Calaf's wrist, causing pain to sneak through the numbness.
"A-ah!" the Paladin instinctively reached over to grab at his wrist. Jelena stopped him.
"We've got to get you out of this cold," Jelena said. She pressed at his wrist softly but firmly. "Calaf, can you use your Inventory?"
With a groan, Calaf shook his head.
Jelena moved a hand up to her eyepatch. She remembered her own experiences in scouring a Brand. "It… it should be 'pull only', keep any holy artifacts from being lost by a scouring. We can pull stuff out, but you won't be able to bring anything back in."
"I… understand," Calaf managed.
Within his personal inventory were many 'Camp' items. He could summon one and they'd have some meagre form of shelter and an accompanying fire for the next few hours.
Calaf closed his eyes. Accessing the Inventory without a brand or Menu would be difficult. He'd been born with the Brand. His earliest memories were using the Menu to receive breakfast at the Riverglen orphanage by a Trade window, selecting the gruel, and 'Using' it in the Menu. A tent. He envisioned a tent, the centerpiece of the Camp item.
A frayed portal opened a half-pace ahead of Calaf. It was wild, unregulated. Jelena crawled back quickly. A tent exploded out of this miniature portal, growing as it emerged. The tent landed on the ice with a fwip and rapidly began to unfurl.
"No accompanying fire." Jelena frowned.
"Spare wood… in the Inventory." Calaf concentrated again, and summoned forth an unorganized pile of assorted firewood.
"Only take out what you absolutely need," Jelena warned.
A usual Camp item produced between four and five tents, enough for a full party. This was just the one.
"Uh. What is this?" Jelena asked.
"The tent," Calaf said weakly. "The holy relic."
Jelena groaned. "Roland's tent? The Paladin's Fort Duran-Issue War Tent?"
"Tent of." Calaf coughed. "The Immaculate Conception."
Neither was in any condition to recall the exact item description, but this was the ancient artifact within which the ancient heroes Paladin Roland and Cleric Mia conceived their holy offspring. That was several hundred years prior, but the item description ought to be sound. The tent had blessings upon it.
"We'll just… have to keep that in mind for later," Jelena said with a nonplused, neutral frown. "C'mon. I've got you."
Jelena dragged Calaf into the old war camp tent as the winds continued to howl.
It grew hard to keep track of the time out here in the far northern snow plains. The sun did not set at an appropriate time. Normally, they could at least tell the time of day just from the sun's position, but grey, overcast skies covered everything. Calaf swooned, woozy. Perhaps he was recovering, or maybe this was just one last reservoir of strength before his condition worsened.
"Stay here," Jelena told him.
She disappeared from the tent for some time. A fire crackled outside, manually set by Jelena using some flint and a rock. Camp-provided, Item-based fires lasted exactly twelve hours. There was no telling how long this 'manual' fire would endure, though it was the last of their firewood.
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Calaf waited, the bandages on his left wrist soaked and bloody. The sound of boots stomping and sliding on ice announced Jelena's presence.
"Slipped twice there and back," Jelena said as she peeked through the tent. "Enkidu's out there. Got pincushioned by multiple swords. Do not go near him. I suspect I know what's going to happen."
"Is he… alive?" Calaf was feeling well enough to sit propped up on his shoulders.
Jelena frowned, a puzzled look on her face. "In a sense? That fall shouldn't have been survivable. Swords through his heart would have been hard to come back from for any normal human, but…"
Her voice died down. What else could she say?
"I'll… I'll take a look," Calaf struggled to his feet. He could not rise without help from Jelena for balance.
Outside, the howling winds had stopped. It was still overcast and it hadn't once become dark enough to be considered 'night' per se. Eerie quiet reigned. Even in the deserts of Firefield, life still creeped about the dunes in abundance if you knew where to look. The pair were unaccustomed to such a barren landscape.
A body sat maybe eighty paces from their makeshift camp. Calaf took off at a limp. At least we've managed to staunch the bleeding. Still, his head was warm, and his spear-hand was numb.
"We're… in a settlement," Jelena said. "You can see where they ran some poles into the ground. Probably for their own tents, manually, off-Interface."
Whoever called this snow plain home they were not present now. Calaf still wore his studded boots, about the only element of his armor they hadn't been forced to discard. They gave him some traction as he slowly, painfully limped over to the body that had warped to this strange place with them.
Enkidu lay face down on the ice. Snow piled up on him, but not enough to obscure his wild mop of hair. His own sword, the rusted-red gladius, sat straight through his heart. Two more exit wounds jutted out diagonally where General Perarde's claymore and Walter's long blade had impaled him as well. Walter's sword was nowhere to be found; Enkidu must have lived long enough after plummeting the length of the Demon Lord's Fall to pull it out. Despite gnarly and gaping wounds, there was no blood seeping out onto the frozen wastes. It was as if the swordsman was hollow inside.
At once, Enkidu jerked about like his muscles were spasming. It was sudden enough to make even the injured-and-out-of-it Calaf flinch back.
"After all that, he's alive?" Calaf muttered.
Enkidu gazed up at the sky, not responding when questioned. His eyes grew glassy, and while he did not appear to be perceptibly breathing, all evidence pointed to the fact that he was still alive.
"By the—gah!" Pain rocketed through Calaf's arm. "How?"
The wildman had fallen the length off the Demon Lord's Fall. To survive that fall, Enkidu would have to be...
Jelena held her hand out, keeping Calaf back. "Wait for it. Again, I think I know what's going to happen…"
The pair stepped back several spans.
"Come to think of it." Calaf peered at the strange swordsman.
I don't think I've ever seen him breathe heavily when exerting himself, thought Calaf.
Enkidu opened his mouth wider than strictly natural. A strange webbing burst forth high into the sky, then spread out like a tent.
The webbing coalesced into a mound, and then a ball. It solidified fast, Enkidu somewhere deep in the center of a perfect sphere. It looked almost like the pearls hidden deep in dire-clams off the Port Town docks. It was spat out, formed, inflated, and solidified in the span of perhaps three minutes.
"Don't touch it," Jelena said.
Calaf nodded. "I've… I've seen this before."
In the Firefield desert. It felt like it was so long ago, now. A Collector Demon. Jelena had been entirely incapacitated, ensnared by the foul demon's song. She wouldn't remember. But Enkidu had been there, possessing encyclopedic knowledge of demonic life cycles…
Last time, the Collector Demon had reached out from its cocoon to 'consume' some of its enthralled victims. It had inherited a human countenance from this process, as well as a Menu Brand from one of its victims. Calaf hoped their tent was far enough away to avoid such a calamity.
Enkidu's anomalous cocoon remained on the snow plains, rhythmically pulsing like a heartbeat. With life so scarce here on the glaciers, it was unlikely to absorb any wandering people or creatures.
Shuddering, Calaf returned to the tent. Jelena went with him, and the pair huddled for warmth as the fire died down outside.
"Getting dizzier," Calaf said as the cold seeped into the tent.
Even a standard 'Camp' item was more suited for the temperate Pilgrim's Path than these untamed wilds. They'd need to find furs or blankets. Something to keep the cold at bay. But Calaf wasn't going anywhere in this condition, and Jelena wasn't about to leave him.
Calaf again slipped into unconsciousness, his head resting on Jelena's lap. She'd done her best to dress his ruined Brand. Perhaps the cold would forestall gangrene. Or perhaps frostbite would take the rest of his limbs as well.
There was no telling how long had passed, with Calaf lapsing in and out of consciousness and the sky refusing to change. When Calaf fluttered back into awareness, he noticed Jelena was gone.
"Hey! Hey! Don't touch that thing. Don't even get close!" His love's signature vocal twang came from outside the tent.
Try though he might, Calaf failed to rise from his cot. His head swung back, delirious.
Muffled shouts came from just outside the tent flap.
"Careful, now. We've got a grizzly-injured fellow here," Jelena said. "None of you are Branded. Do you have any doctors at all? You simply must attend to his wounds. He's going to…"
Calaf lapsed unconscious once more as the tent flap opened.
The next thing Calaf realized, everything was in motion. Wooden skates scraped against a bed of glacier-smoothed rocks. Warm gloves stroked his face, tossing a bit of blonde, blood-matted hair back.
"We're almost there," Jelena said consolingly. "They say they have healers. Just stay with me a little longer…"
Visions of the past week fluttered through Calaf's head. Someone—surely Jelena—forced cool water into his mouth from a bulbous water bladder. With everything blurry and spinning, this was the extent of his vision.
Calaf muttered something incoherent even to him. Those warm hands surrounded his face. His head was resting on Jelena's lap.
"Don't worry. I'm here for you," Jelena said. "No matter what."
A single thought pervaded Calaf's mind, conscious or not. Bede. Bede. The Paladin clenched his good hand.
We're going to have to kill Bede.