NOVGO.NET Chapter 476: Drawing Breath, Again
Chapter 476: Drawing Breath, Again
The wind atop Solania had a voice, a thin keening like glass rubbed at the rim until it wept. It slipped through the ravines and over the torn faces of cliffs, combing the snow with cold fingers, and its chill touched Ludwig before the thought of movement found him. For a long, blunted instant he lay as he had fallen, half-buried in a drift whose crust had hardened while he burned, and the world was only weight and white and a silence loud enough to ring.
He took a breath.
It was nothing at first, habit, an old human reflex that should have been as meaningless to him as blinking is to a statue. Yet the air went in. It went in sharply and cleanly, with the sting of steel drawn from ice-water, and it spread down the throat and out into the emptiness where no lungs had any business answering. The cold filled him. The cold answered.
He took another breath, because the first had startled him and because the second proved it had not been a trick. It came with a tremor that shook his shoulders in the snow. The tremor did not stop. It multiplied and ran through his ribs and set his teeth softly knocking together like dice in a cup. Shivering. He was shivering. That simple, foolish, ordinary thing, so far beneath the notice of the dead, had come home to him as if it had been only waiting at the door all these years.
“Mm.” The sound left his mouth more like a fog than a word. He lifted an arm that felt too heavy and too light at once, and the fresh ache that came with the effort was so precise and clean that he almost laughed at it. Pain, small, bright, lawful, sat in the joint like a coin. He rolled, broke the crust of the drift, and sat up. Snow sloughed off him in crusted sheets. Wind crawled under his collar and bit the nape of his neck with little square teeth.
Something thumped once in his chest.
The sensation was wrong in the way that sunrise would be wrong at midnight. He stiffened. It thumped again, firm, measured, insistent, as if to knock on the door of his attention. His hand moved before thought could, half panicked, half greedy, and pressed flat to the place beneath his regalia where no warmth should dwell. Leather was stiff with frost. Cloth scratched. Beneath it his palm found a rhythm under skin, steady as a war drum heard through walls. A powerful beat… the beat of life.
He could have sworn the mountains drew back a pace.
The notifications came like owl-feathers falling, one after another, white text on the white hiss of the wind, and yet each line thudded into him with a weight the gale could not shift.
[Eternal Quest: Usurpers of Death]
You have slain the Wrathful Death. The Soul of Wrath has been claimed by Necros.
You have been awarded, Heart of Wrath.
You have been awarded the trait, [Living Vessel]
[Living Vessel]: Permanent Passive. Your Heart of Wrath contains the Life force of the Wrathful Death in his prime.
Death while having Living Vessel does not revert time. Instead it changes your condition to Undead for a second chance. Only when dying in the Undead Form will you be sent back to your Death Point and use up your souls.
He read them through twice, the way a condemned man might read a pardon and then read his own name a second time to be certain the ink had not lied. The wind pressed cold fingers against his cheeks. He lifted his glove to his teeth, bit at the seam, and peeled it free. The air stung the damp skin of his knuckles; the color that rose there was a living flush, not the lacquered pallor he had carried like a badge. He turned the hand in the light. The faint map of veins traced its old roads beneath the skin, and when he flexed, the tendons leapt with the familiar small pain of a body that had opinions again.
“Wait,” he said softly into the empty, the word smoking from him. “Does that mean… I’m alive now?”
He swallowed, because it seemed the sort of question that should be followed by swallowing, and the swallow went down and worked in his throat with the crisp little ache of cold. He lifted his other hand and touched his face. The stubble rasped his fingertips. There was heat there, not much, a frail ember in a winter grate, but it was his and it answered his hand.
“Disable the camouflage,” he said to the lantern at his belt, the voice steadying as he spoke the command. “Show me what I am.”
The lantern’s faint pall changed. Its surface shed the ghostly veil with which it had been bribing the world to look away. No bone-glow surfaced beneath his skin. No dead sheen hardened his features. What the light found was merely a man’s face, color leached by cold, yes, but not the quiet chalk of the grave. The veins in the wrist he had bared pumped with that secret pressure that had been missing for so long that the sight of it made him blink.
He flexed his fingers again, harder this time. Pain pricked and then settled, agreeable as a cat kneading into a lap.
“That’s a pretty damn good reward,” he murmured, and the wind stole the curse and tossed it down the slope. “Necros… Hah.” He ducked his head, an embarrassed tilt that felt unpracticed. “Damn. Thanks, man.”
It was not eloquent. He had never been good at thanks; the word snagged on old habits and old pride and the dry humor with which he usually shook off miracles. The mountains, however, did not ask for grace in speech. They only kept on standing, and the beat in his chest kept on counting the seconds with an obstinate faith.
“Do not faint on me for the novelty of oxygen,” Thomas said dryly, alighting on his shoulder in a ruffle of cold air, as if he had always been perched there and the last five years were a brief distraction. “Still, pretty cool no? You’re alive again…”
Ludwig huffed a laugh that smoked in the air. “Yeah, Never expected this… though I can’t technically call it being alive…” he said, still holding his hand to his chest, unable not to. “But this is pretty damn good still.”
“Mm. Your joys can wait,” the Knight King said, his voice traveling up from the shoulder of Ludwig “Test the edges. See what holds. New gifts are knives, beautiful, but liable to cut the hand that admires them.”
“Right.” Ludwig dragged breath in, let it out. The cold bit deep but did not reach the marrow as it once would have; there was marrow to reach now. He rocked to his feet. The snow sagged and squealed under his boots, another small miracle, that weight, that pressure, that give, and he rolled his shoulders until the ache loosened into something he could live with. Live with. The phrase startled a grin out of him before he could catch it.
More text fell through the wind.
[You have Obtained: Mythical Item: Nightbreaker]
He blinked at the name floating in the air, then glanced around the scoured plateau. “What,” he said, genuinely baffled, “in all nine hells is Nightbreaker?”