Heir of the Fog

CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

Of Cold Birth and Crimson Hearts

Despair is the most loyal companion the Abyss offers—never noisy, never absent, merely waiting just behind one's shoulder. In the past I had grown accustomed to its presence, but even that cold familiarity failed to brace me for the warlock of Sjakthar who broke my climb.

The warlock—Winged Death, as I named that terrible vision—marked the moment despair took on a new flavor. The creature's beauty unsettled me more than its power: four vast wings shimmered like stained glass, each scale reflecting dusky violets and fever-bright crimsons; within their calm beating lay a promise of inevitability. One look from its multifaceted eyes told me it was made for godhood, a design polished until no mortal flaw remained.

Against such grace and magnitude I, even at my best, would not have a chance against it. The encounter lasted only heartbeats, yet it stretched inside my thoughts like a scar that would never finish knitting. When my severed form struck the floor of the Abyss, the familiar hush of the long sleep gathered me, the library's threshold opening as if on cue.

The certainty followed: on waking I would find the Abyss re-shaped once more, the walls farther away, the ways upward already folded shut. Sjakthar was no fool; he understood the rules better than I did.

And so I found myself again in the dream‑library, yet different; or rather, I was different. The endless tiers of shelved memories stood unchanged, the vaulted roof still lost in haze, but the perspective had shifted. Where I once drifted like a guest, half-blind, I now arrived with full clarity, respiration steady, senses sharp.

Not long ago, my arrival in the mind library always came with clarity. It felt bowered rather than shared, and that same clarity bled away the moment I woke, as though my fragmented mind feared burdening the waking self with its whole truth. But most of that inner fog had parted. I arrived this time already clear-minded, not bowered but shared amidst the fragments of myself walking the same library.

No longer as strangers whose memories tugged at mine, but as equal threads of the same weave. We converged without words, sharing a single, seamless intent

Our goal was unchanged: escape the Abyss. Yet mortal flesh, even flesh already bent beyond its mortal blueprints, had reached the summit of what brute adaptation could purchase. We reviewed possibilities with the calm precision of scholars dissecting a theorem. My tentacles had proven invaluable for movement and climb, but the walls of the Abyss didn't offer enough area for its hold, nor would allow itself even to be scratched, turning my tentacles useless in this climb.

A few of my echoes proposed reshaping those limbs. Yet every design ended in the same quiet failure. The Abyss mocked leverage; its rock refused to yield, and even if the tentacles could anchor, Winged Death, a beast that could fly as fast as sound, would uproot them in a blink.

The library hushed as a single answer settled on every tongue at once: ascension. The next Rule, whatever lies beyond crimson, was the only door wide enough. Not here, inside dream-glimmer, but out there in blood and stone. Our mortal coil had stretched to its final boundary; no re-shaping would change that truth. We must reach upward not with hands but with essence, cross the threshold Gods walk.

The fragments closed the scrolls, returned books to their shelves in perfect choreography. We understood: when waking came, it would be to the deep Abyss again, to the arena that kills or crowns. And in that waking world, despite my misgivings about the deep abyss, it was a place prepared to make us understand the next rule, whatever it was.

***

Terror greeted me first—the same raw despair that had flooded my veins the day the bridge above shattered and flung me into perpetual night. A heartbeat later a filament of reassurance slipped through the dread. "Rogara," my voiceless whisper crossed the gulf between surface and depth, brushing her thoughts in the lower caves.

She answered not with words but with a pulse of fierce resolve, an ember of belief so warm it bled through the link into my frozen chest. I had thought warlocks might exist mostly to magnify a god's will; now I felt the inverse—how their faith could anchor the master. Whether gods require such pillars I cannot guess, but in that instant her certainty grounded me more firmly than any ledge ever could, reminding me that sky and sunlight existed beyond this crypt of titans.

The calm shattered beneath a concussion of thunder. A new crimson horror lumbered from the darkness, a behemoth worthy of Vadis legend, something Sharn would truly consider a worthy Baruk.

Even among demigods, this thing towered. Its aura surged in pulses of lightning so dense they burned ozone into the air, casting brief, unnatural light through the Pit's endless dark. Its shape was maddening: as if several other crimson horrors had been consumed and never fully digested, their features melted into its hide. Faces blinked where no head should be. Tongues slithered from its spine. Six recurved legs clawed the ground, each one taller than any building I'd ever seen.

The Abyss had carved a single principle into that mass of fused flesh: consume, absorb, become. Everything it had devoured still lived inside it, each defeated demigod half-digested yet eternally awake. The real horror was not its size or strength, but the choir of minds trapped beneath translucent skin, shrieking for release in a hundred unknowable languages.

It had no arms. It needed none.

The land shuddered beneath each step. Its aura spread like a net, coiling and crackling, ready to snap. I didn't flinch. I merely breathed, and frost began to bleed from my skin.

Cold met current. The charged air recoiled.

The creature paused, confusion flickering across its shifting features. Its aura, once unchecked, buckled under the challenge. It had expected prey, not parity. The storm it carried turned chaotic, lightning darting in panicked spirals as if seeking escape. And from its dozen mouths came no words—only howls, gurgling languages twisted by flesh that was never meant to speak.

It was a fractured thing. Fragmented in form, where I was fragmented in mind. A mirror, in some grotesque way. But not an equal.

Above me, I summoned a disk—ice stretched across hundreds of meters, impossibly thin, spinning with the breathless stillness of winter's heart. Around me, the frost deepened, folding light inward. My aura didn't shine. It silenced.

The beast struck first, hurling bolts of lightning like spears, arcs of raw force slamming into my frost. But by the time they reached me, they were little more than static. I felt nerves twitch, veins singe. Minor pain. Irrelevant. My body could knit such things before breath even left my lungs.

I gave the disk a push.

It drifted forward with deceptive calm, a blade woven from stillness and rotational hunger. The beast began to move, perhaps to leap or burrow, but too slowly. The disk passed beneath it, and in a heartbeat all six of its legs dropped in pieces. The ground shuddered as it collapsed, the impact a drumbeat across the abyssal plain.

It screamed. Not in defiance, but in panic. And through that scream, I sensed others: watching, waiting. Crimson horrors who had been circling, scenting blood, eager for their chance at glory. But they did not descend.

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I felt their hesitation ripple through the air, their intentions curling away like smoke. They feared me.

Not just my power. Something deeper. A territorial pressure, the instinct that warns a beast it has wandered into a domain ruled by another. My aura swelled in response, not from pride or rage, but from a blooming sense of inevitability.

This place was mine.

No—not in ownership. In dominion.

The sensation was alien at first. I had known strength before. I had known victory. But this—this was something more ancient. A thread that connected every creature in this chasm. It told them what belonged, and what didn't.

And in that moment, I belonged. I was no longer prey, no longer a climber scraping at the walls. The horror I felled had been a predator of predators and I had ended it in seconds.

Something inside me shifted.

It wasn't the next Rule, not yet. But the taste of it brushed my thoughts. Not brutality. Not guile. But presence. The certainty that where I walked, others should retreat. The sense that any who dared step into my shade would do so knowing the price.

I stood amid the broken pieces of the beast's legs, frost curling up from the cracks in the stone, and I waited. None came.

The mist thickened. But I no longer saw it as a cage. It was a veil and I was the shape beneath it.

***

One of the deeper truths of the Abyss, a truth I had overlooked while scrambling for purchase on its walls, was that no single creature, however magnificent, could endure the onslaught of rivals forever. To survive, one must first dominate a fragment of this endless hell. Endurance demanded dominion: a patch of ground staked and held against all comers. At last, after too many deaths, I carved out my own.

A five-kilometer disk of frost spread outward from where I stood, glazing shattered stone and frozen carcasses alike. Mist billowed low, muffling light until only a sterile glow lingered beneath the canopy of perpetual grey. Within that ring my aura lay thick as hoarfrost, and hostile crimson horrors felt it before they ever glimpsed me. They came still, drawn by hunger, pride, or the whisper of my accumulating cores, but each arrival ended the same way: blood frozen into rubies, cores claimed, silence settling once more.

Those confrontations taught me the second half of a lesson I should have mastered long ago. Every crimson creature wore its aura like a throne dragged behind it: a tool not only to conquer but to hold. The realization tasted like iron—obvious once swallowed. It was surely braided into the Third Rule, the mystery that barred crimson from divinity. Conquest was insufficient; one needed to keep.

Inside the hush of my frostbound camp I felt a strange peace. My dominion was imperfect, always shifting at the edges where new horrors tested the ice, yet it was mine. When challengers fell I consumed their flesh for strength, but their crimson cores, each a blazing reservoir, piled inside my storage ring. I could consume no more.

Idle they could not remain. Power is a poor thing when bottled. I needed servants and I knew it would take a long time till Rogara could reach the deep Abyss to join me. I then decided to use my ability to grant blessings, despite still being crimson, to find an advantage the others did not have.

The answer lay in numbers, in the ancient concept the people of Araksiun once called golems. I had forged one before: Wulric, my greatest and strangest creation, birthed through an alignment of chance, desperation, and half-understood principles. Even now I could taste the awe of that moment. Wulric could channel floods of mana, many times more than any crimson beast. Yet, for all that grandeur, he could not cycle mana; he served only as long as I manually recharged his reserves. He was a siege engine tethered to his creator.

This time, armed with dozens of dormant crimson cores, I envisioned lesser giants—Frostkin—sculpted from winter itself. Using Wulric's silhouette as template, I packed snow and condensed vapor around a lattice of interlocking ribs of ice. Each finished shell stood eight meters tall, chest broad as a fortress gate, plates translucent but thick, pulsing faintly where blue‑gray veins, frost‑hardened mana channels, ran beneath the surface. Jagged ridges crowned their shoulders like frozen battlements.

Modifications were necessary. Wulric's uncharted genius would not replicate; instead, I leaned into simplicity and redundancy. The Frostkin would each house a crimson core, set behind the breastplate where a human heart might beat. Those crimson cores, treasured relics in the surface world, promised steady cycles of mana no mortal craftsman dared imagine.

Each would be worth enough to ransom an entire district, and yet here I gambled dozens on trial and error. I doubted even Lucious Vren, the master artisan from District 97, would risk crimson cores on such complex constructs. A single flaw was enough to make it detonate, the mana cycling causing an implosion. And indeed, it took dozens of ruined cores before the first Frostkin was born.

Some shells split the instant mana flowed, littering the ground with glittering shards. Others seized, their cores screaming with feedback until the housing burst. Each failure etched lessons into muscle memory: broaden this vent, thicken that joint, inscribe stabilizing runes deeper to bear the core's throbbing cadence.

When the twenty-eighth attempt finally exhaled a misty plume and remained intact, I felt a tremor of grim satisfaction. Yet victory exposed a new deficiency: mind. The Frostkin stood like statues. Power thrummed within them, but intelligence was as thin as newborn ice.

By contrast, Wulric could follow complex orders and think by himself. Even now, while far away, I trusted him to guard the district in case of another breach. My prototypes possessed strength, not judgment. They would stare into the dark while predators tore them apart.

In old Araksiun, constructs relied on true intellect cores, AIs with personalities as nuanced as any mortal's. Kara had been one such mind. Lacking that miracle here, I turned to the artifact pressed against my chest: the whispering lens. The monocle bit cold into my fingers when I lifted it. Through its glass the living world dulled, and murmurs of the dead sifted into hearing, a choir gathered somewhere between heartbeat and silence.

I faced the first Frostkin, a hollow giant awaiting purpose. Fog swirled in its empty helm. I placed the lens over my right eye, letting its chill seep into the socket, and whispered across the boundary, "A willing soul."

The response arrived as a rustle of hushed syllables, "The one who walks in between." Recognition gentled what once had been terror. Most of the dead no longer saw me as they once did. Instead, they regarded me as distant kin.

My words carried intent but no dominion. The souls were free. Yet some were drawn by the promise of a frame, of action, of reaching the living world once again. Wisps condensed, coalesced. One by one they touched the rim of the lens, petitioning entry. I channeled each through a narrow conduit of will, guiding them into the Frostkin's waiting chamber.

The ritual cost me. Blessing inert matter with the principle of life felt like tearing threads from my own tapestry and weaving them anew. Every transfer left faint cracks in my resolve; exhaustion yawned like black water as my will diminished before my own eyes. But when the soul met the core and the lattice between flashed with pale lightning, the Frostkin shuddered and inhaled its first breath of frigid wind.

Ice beneath its feet groaned, settling under fresh weight. Veins brightened, circulating mana in patient pulses. It knelt, massive head bowed, not in subservience but in acknowledgment, a soldier greeting commander. Purpose welded us.

Encouraged, I repeated the rite. Fifth, sixth, seventh Frostkin rose, each birth dragging a sliver of warmth from my chest, yet returning something fiercer: an expanding sense of we. By the ninth, sweat crusted over my brow in fine rime; my heartbeat marched unevenly, but the frostkin stood sentinel along the perimeter, a wall of silent glacier warriors.

Their minds were simple but not hollow. Each possessed a spark of the volunteer soul's former self—memories blurred yet desires sharpened into two instincts: protect and endure. I tested them with thought alone. Form a line. They obeyed, synchronized, towering forms casting milky reflections across the ice. Hold until relief. They locked stances, spears of condensed frost sprouting from their forearms in answer.

Beyond my aura's edge, crimson nightmares prowled, sensing the shift. One stepped forward, horned and plated, then halted as a dozen faceless helms pivoted toward it in unison. The horror reevaluated and sank back into the fog. My dominion had teeth now.

Fatigue draped over me, yet beneath it pulsed exhilaration. Creating these guardians had siphoned will, but it had also filled a hollowness I had never acknowledged: the ache to build, not only break. With each Frostkin's awakening, the Third Rule's outline sharpened in my mind. Conquest was foundation, yes, but creation, planting ordered life where chaos reigned, was mortar between the stones.

As the final Frostkin took its place, breath misting like a newborn blizzard, I felt my territory settle into a tranquil hush, a heartbeat quieter than before. Twelve colossal silhouettes stood watch, their cores glowing dimly beneath plates of moon-dull ice.