Chapter 518: Questions [Bonus - ]

Chapter 518: Questions [Bonus Chapter]

The cavern was so still that Silas could hear the microscopic snapping of frost forming along the edges of his dried gore-stained collar.

"Fuuu... Fuu..."

Every breath he drew felt like dragging powdered glass across his bronchial tubes, but beneath his ribs, the Mythic Gold Core spun as it was radiating an internal furnace-like warmth that completely warded off the chill.

He stood three paces from the base of the colossal glacier, his traveling coat heavy with the congealed blackened ichor of the weeping eye and his left hand resting casually against the gold wire-wrapped pommel of his sheathed mythril longsword.

The woman entombed within the ancient monolith blinked her jewel-bright emerald eyes.

Very slowly, with an agonizing stiffness that made the thick ancient rime coating her jaw crackle like snapping dry twigs underfoot, she tilted her head a fraction of an inch to the left.

Then, after a painful pause that seemed to test the brittle resilience of her neck muscles, she leaned it to the right.

"Questions...?" she rasped.

The sound was wretched like a dry scrape that resembled rusted iron dragging across jagged slate.

It echoed off the vaulted ceiling of translucent blue ice, making the obsidian bird perching on a nearby basalt spire ruffle its dark plumage nervously.

"You... you stand there looking like an abattoir chimney, mortal," she sputtered, her chapped purple-tinged lips trembling with pure indignation. "I am offering you my celestial authority. I am offering you my soul, my obedience, my eternal submission, and a seat beside a living deity on a silver platter... and you want to hold an administrative job interview while my kneecaps have been frozen into solid crystal for centuries?!"

"Questions keep my people alive, and they keep my things from burning down to ash," Silas replied.

His voice was level and completely unbothered by her divine posturing. He had the upper hand after all...

"I don’t invite ancient relics into my territory without knowing what kind of baggage is tethered to their skirts."

He reached into the interior breast pocket of his stiff blackened coat and his gloved fingers found the edge of the wax-treated parchment he had pried from the petrified knuckles of the dead expeditioner on the shelf above.

Carefully, so as not to shatter the brittle vellum in the sub-zero air, he unrolled the stiff cylinder, holding it outward between two fingers so the legible lines caught the oceanic cyan light radiating from the ice walls.

"Recognize the handwriting?" Silas asked, tapping a scorched corner of the parchment with his thumb. "Recovered this from a corpse clutching an iron chisel a few leagues north... He spent his final hours scribbling a very frantic, very terrified record while your world was being wiped off the map."

The woman’s emerald pupils contracted into razor-thin feline slits.

She leaned her chin forward against the icy collar as far as the ice allowed, her gaze tracking across the faded water-damaged iron-gall script.

"Let’s start with the first contradiction," Silas said, stepping half a pace closer.

The radiant sun-warm heat bleeding off his core washed across the base of the glacier, causing a thin shimmering film of water to bead along the lowest edge before instantly vaporizing into clean steam.

"What I was told and from the Bird, the Forever Ice was made as a seal... and from what I can gather, it’s an unbreakable prison meant to contain the rampaging Goddess of Beasts but Entry Forty-Six tells a completely different story. It describes an active war. It says the ice was actively fighting against you, and that the frost didn’t fall from the clouds... it erupted straight out of the deep crust like an inverted spear. Why was the ice fighting you if it was supposedly forged just to cage you?"

The woman let out a wet rattling scoff that sent tiny needles of frost flying from her lower lip.

"Because mortals are superstitious illiterate idiots who write epic histories based on whatever rubble is left standing after the storm clears," she muttered bitterly, rolling her eyes up toward the dark stone arch of the cavern roof. "A holy seal? A divine containment? Don’t make me spit! It wasn’t a calculated judgment handed down by some grand council of sages either... It was a filthy street brawl."

She paused, taking in a shallow whistling breath that rattled deep within her frozen lungs.

"Her name isn’t worth carving onto a privy wall, but she was a high-order Deity of Ice... a petty arrogant glacier-strumpet from the extreme northern polar caps. She drifted south, took one look at the geothermal leylines running through the Umbral Basin, and decided she wanted to turn my hunting grounds into her personal skating rink so we clashed over the boundary markers. Initially, she fought from the sky. She opened the heavens and brought down a blizzard so dense and heavy it choked the daylight out of the sky for forty days... But my beasts were born for jagged scree and rough weather so my mammoth-crushers and iron-furred panthers tore through her frost-golems like wet paper and she realized within three days that she couldn’t break my beasts from above."

A grim hatred settled into the pale lines of the goddess’s face, washing away her manic humor.

"So, she cheated. She realized my beasts drew their stamina directly from the living earth, from the volcanic veins pulsing deep beneath the bedrock so she disengaged from the airspace, condensed her entire divine authority into a single spear, and drove it directly into the planetary marrow beneath the basin floor."

The woman took in a deep breath.

"She didn’t drop cold from the clouds anymore... she transmuted the aquifers, the magma pockets, and the mineral roots of the entire valley into absolute zero. The permafrost exploded upward, frozen geysers thirty leagues wide detonated straight through the floor, turning the stone into liquid glass and freezing my pack from the claws up before they could even turn their heads. This cavern... this shelf... it’s not an ancient tomb designed by architects. It’s the fossilized impact crater of her final strike."

Silas nodded slowly, his mind slotting the pieces together.

The unnatural vertical shafts he had seen on the way down, the smooth, circular boreholes cutting through thousands of feet of solid granite without a single pick mark... they weren’t mining shafts at all.

They were the geological scars of pressurized geysers that had flash-frozen as they breached the surface.

"That leads directly into Entry Forty-Six," Silas said, his finger shifting down to a heavily scorched tear running across the middle of the paper. "The journal mentions an abattoir... It describes thousands of people dying in the span of a single breath. The Umbral Basin is a lightless frozen wasteland today with trees and some berries, populated only by feral anomalies and necrotic mist. Why were there armed mortals operating in these northern trenches centuries ago?"

"Because before this miserable ditch was frozen into a dead zone, it was a thriving basin!" the woman snapped with a small trace of nostalgic pride bleeding through her gravelly voice. "Mortals lived here by the thousands, you ignorant whelp! They built terraced stone townships along the south-facing cliffs, forged irrigation aqueducts that carried hot mineral water through the snow, and, above all else, they dug. The mineral wealth of the Umbral Basin was legendary across this place. Star-iron, mythril marrow, compressed atmospheric crystals... the deep veins here could fund three empires for ten generations."

Her voice dropped with the proud tone crumbling into a quiet hollow rasp.

"They were caught in the gears, human. Mortals are fragile things. They are made of salt water, warm meat, and brittle bone. When two divine entities unleash localized conceptual domains at point-blank range, mortal biology simply surrenders... If the shockwaves of our clashes didn’t liquefy their brains through the bedrock, her absolute zero reached into their chests and stopped their blood mid-pump. The glacier swallowed everything. The townships, the refining forges, the transport hoists... thousands of workers and guards were frozen into crystal statues before they could even drop their tools and a blooming civilization was snuffed out between a morning bell and an afternoon whistle."

She clenched her jaw so tightly that Silas could hear the enamel grind.

"And my beasts..." she whispered, her emerald eyes trembling with helpless rage. "Every single divine hound I had nurtured from a pup... My apex serpents... My sky-tearing dread-hawks... Every creature bound to my soul was butchered. If they weren’t crushed under falling mountain faces, their life-force was siphoned into her conceptual freeze to fuel the lock. Right now..."

She looked down at the pale bare flesh of her exposed shoulders, an expression of bitter suffocating humiliation washing over her features.

"...I have nothing left. Not a single pup... Not a single cub... My spiritual domain is an empty barren field and I am completely stripped."

She forced her chin up, looking Silas dead in the eyes with unabashed desperation.

"I will not lie to you, human Lord. You hold all the cards, and I am not too proud to admit what I am right now. In a straight brawl, I am useless to you... Centuries of conceptual stasis have sucked my divine reservoir down to the dregs as my meridians are brittle and my spiritual bones are cracked. Right now, a well-placed kick from an ordinary mortal foot soldier would probably knock my teeth out and give me a concussion. But...!"

Her irises flared with sudden feverish green fire.

"I am still the Goddess of Beasts! The authority over the fang, the claw, and the wild blood is carved into the very substrate of my divine core! You break this ice, you feed me, you give me shelter within your territory, and as I rebuild my strength, every drop of authority I reclaim belongs to you! I will tame the monstrosities of this basin for you! I will weave Beast contracts for your armies! I will forge mounts that can tear city gates off their hinges! And upon the shattered marrow of my ancient domain, I swear I will never raise a hand or a fang against you!"

Silas studied her face.

He didn’t see deceit at all, he saw her desperation instead.

"One more question," Silas said.

He turned the vellum, pointing his finger at the very last, jagged line of ink scrawled before the writer’s hand had succumbed to rigor mortis.

"The scout left a final warning. ’The seal was never meant to hold her... the seal was meant to contain the [------]... beware the deep mines.’ What is buried in the dark behind this wall?"

The goddess blinked.

She stared at the text, her brow furrowing in genuine uncomprehending bewilderment.

"Behind this wall...?" she echoed, tilting her head back against the ice shelf. "What in the nine hells is that dead fool rambling about?"

"You’re telling me you don’t know?" Silas pressed, his eyes narrowing into cold slits. "The expeditioner was terrified as he specifically warned whoever found his bones not to look for treasure, and that the ice was forged to keep something far worse from getting out."

The woman threw her head back and let out a dry barking laugh that dissolved into a violent coughing fit.

"Mortal paranoia!" she wheezed, spitting a fleck of rime onto the permafrost. "Total peasant nonsense! When people are dying in the dark, shivering in their own filth while the sky falls down, their little minds always invent some ancient lurking horror under the bedboards! It gives their deaths meaning! It makes them feel like they were part of some grand cosmic catastrophe instead of just collateral damage in a petty border squabble!"

She shook her head, her matted hair swaying against her pale neck.

"There was no slumbering primordial evil, human! There was no ancient world-eater tucked under the rocks! The Ice Deity wanted my territory, and I wanted to rip her throat out! The deep mines were just that... mines! The locals were digging deep into the crust to pull out high-grade ore, and when the Ice Deity inverted the mantle, she sealed the entire shaft system because that’s where the heat was rising from!"

Silas took a slow step forward, his gaze drifting past her exposed pale shoulders toward the dark monolithic wall of opaque black ice extending behind the glacier.

"Where does the main shaft sit, then?" he asked quietly.

The goddess went silent for a moment, her green eyes darting back and forth as she sorted through centuries of fragmented memories.

"Well..." she muttered, her tone suddenly losing its defensive edge.

"Right behind me, actually. The main extraction hoist of the Great Northern Borehole ran directly through the bedrock fault where she pinned me. The glacier filled the mouth of the tunnel like a cork driven into a wine jug."

’I see...’ Silas thought, his eyes hardening.

The pieces fell into place with chilling logic.

If the extraction tunnel lay directly behind her, then freezing her in this exact geographic coordinate served a dual purpose.

She was the anchor.

Her divine soul, locked in a stasis, acted as the weight holding the ice plug in place over the entrance to the deep mines.

Whether there was an ancient terror down there or simply millions of tons of unstable collapsed rock, Silas had zero intention of excavating it today.

’If there’s something sleeping in the deep crust, it can stay asleep. I’m pulling her out, but that shaft stays deadbolted.’

He exhaled a long breath, letting his posture relax as he looked back down at the shivering deity.