"My lord."
Fredo spoke to a silhouette standing outside his bedroom door.
It was dark and the figure's features were invisible. Its fingers moved and pointed toward the window.
'The statue is that way. Does it want me to check on it.'
Fredo got up from his chair, grabbed his coat, and headed out of the room and eventually the house.
Outside he was not the only one moving in that direction. A group of people hurried past him, taking the same road and way.
"Where are you all headed."
He asked a group passing by at a brisk pace.
One of them looked at him and immediately recognised him. "Ah, Chief. Our lord told us to gather near the statue. It came in a dream."
That was more or less what he had expected. It was the same reason he was going.
By the time they arrived, nearly a thousand had gathered in front of the demonness statue.
The entire village population was there standing on the wide stone square at the center of Inumaki where the main roads converged.
The massive bronze statue rose above all of them, her five arms clutching sowrds in each hand, and there was an altar steps below her dusted with fresh snow..
"Move. Let me pass."
They stepped aside quickly, clearing a path for Fredo through the crowd.
He had almost reached the altar steps when the statue moved and something unexpected happened.
The arm growing from her back began to swing on its own vibrating back and forth, pivoting at the shoulder joint like something had woken up inside the stone and was stretching itself awake.
"Our lord has possessed the statue!"
The murmuring spread fast through the crowd.
Fredo saw it too, everyone did, and before any of them could make sense of what they were looking at the hand released its sword.
The blade flew from the square, over the low rooftops of the eastern houses, and disappeared in the direction of the outer fence on the far edge of the village.
The far side, where the road ended and the mountain drop began seperated by a abrrier. The side was where Atiya and Leishna had crossed.
Fredo turned to the nearest villagers.
"Follow the sword."
A handful of them broke into a run immediately, moving east through the narrow road between the houses, heading in the direction the blade had gone.
Then the statue spoke.
Its eyes fixed on Fredo, bronze and unblinking, and the voice that came from it was not loud but carried across the entire square without effort.
"The boy has escaped to the Ascent peak. I will lend you my powers, go and bring me that boy."
Fredo's expression shifted, barely, but those standing close enough caught it.
If the boy had escaped then he knew. He had found out he was a sacrifice and he had run. That much was simple. What was not simple was how.
The answer came to him almost immediately.
Leishna.
The crowd had arrived at the same conclusion. A murmur moved through them, low and uneasy.
"Has the frost child betrayed us."
"It cannot be," someone said from the back. "She is bound by an Ascension 3 skill, designed specifically for people like her. She cannot break free of it unless someone of a higher ascension than our ancestor intervenes. That is not possible."
Then a different thought surfaced, quieter and more uncomfortable than the first.
What if the boy had been hiding his yai use all along.
"If he were a yai user Chief Fredo would have detected it. He examined the boy himself when he first arrived." The voice came from somewhere in the crowd, directed squarely at Fredo. "What is the meaning of this."
The gathered faces turned toward him.
Fredo was quiet for a moment.
"If he was able to hide it from me," he said, "then he is at minimum beyond Ascension 2. But if that were truly the case he could have killed every last one of us without resorting to any of this." He paused. "He chose a roundabout method. Which means he could not. Which means whatever he is, it is not that simple."
The crowd absorbed this.
"I understand your concerns," Fredo continued, his voice settling into the register he used when a decision had already been made and what remained was simply to carry it out. "But what matters right now is catching the boy before whatever he is planning runs its course."
Nobody argued. The demon itself had come down into the stone to speak. Had offered its power, temporarily, so they could cross beyond the barrier they had not left in centuries.
That alone told them everything they needed to know about how much the boy mattered.
They could not afford to lose him.
Almost the entire village dispatched within minutes, moving out through the eastern road under Fredo's lead, leaving the square empty behind them and the statue standing silent above the abandoned altar, its eyes still open, its one empty hand outstretched toward the mountain.
Meanwhile, Leishna and Atiya were making their way across the glacier.
The surface was wide and pale and flat in the way that made distances deceptive, the far edges bleeding into the dark sky without a clear boundary between them.
In patches smooth snow had compacted into ice underfoot, and the wind that moved across it had no obstruction for kilometers in any direction before it found them.
Atiya was limping as he walked though he did not complain about it.
"This is actually where I found you, somewhere along here." Leishna turned in a slow circle as she walked, taking in the expanse with the easy wonder of someone entirely unbothered by the cold. "It was such a beautiful sight. Oh, did I ever tell you?" She glanced back at him. "Your thing was out and burning while you had a boner."
Atiya opened his mouth.
The wind drove itself directly into his face and whatever he had intended to say dissolved into nothing. He closed his mouth and kept walking.
Leishna fell into step beside him, undeterred.
"I am so curious, you know. It was quite small." She tilted her head with genuine childish like interest. "How did you rizz up Screja with that? Tell me. I need to know. Tell meeeee."
She grabbed his arm and shook it.
'This fucking girl.' Atiya stared forward into the wind, eyes watering. 'I cannot even speak and she has been going on about this for hours.'
He said nothing. There was nothing to say that the weather would allow him to say it.
They walked like that for the better part of half an hour, Leishna kept talking and led to more suffering of Atiya, until the glacier gave way to a steep rise of rock and compressed snow and the path narrowed to a single track leading upward.
The Ascent Peak sat at the highest point of the mountain, a blunt and wind-scoured summit with a cave mouth cut into the rock face at its base, dark and still against the pale surroundings.
"We have arrived." Leishna was already moving toward it. "Come on, let's go in."
Atiya looked at the cave entrance and then looked at the sky and then looked at his own hands, which had stopped feeling like his hands some time ago.
'Please let it be warm inside.'
He followed her in.
****
"Repeat after me." Zelaine locked eyes with Mavine with the gravity of someone about to deliver a military briefing. "Take as much food as would be enough to feed us for as long as it will not rot."
Mavine stared at her.
"That is so long. Shorten it."
"Just say whatever is appropriate, but you need to give me your word." Zelaine held her gaze. "Our survival depends on this theft. It is very important."
"I will pack as much as I can."
Zelaine looked at her for a long moment.
"Why do I feel like it is my fault you do not act your age." She sighed through her nose. "Ah. You have a condition that made you grow up too fast. What a waste."
A sense of guilt sat in her chest briefly but she pushed it aside. If anything she had saved the girl, that much was true in whatever way anything was true.
If she had left Mavine there something else would have found her eventually and used her again. That was simply the reality of it.
"I am sorry," Mavine said.
"Why are you apologizing." Zelaine was already looking away. "Anyway. Let's go."
Once Mavine's motion sickness had settled they got back on the road, and some time later stumbled onto something neither of them had planned for.
A wedding.
It was being held in an open venue set back from the road, tables arranged across a wide courtyard, decorations strung between poles, the whole thing buzzing with the particular warm noise of a gathering that had not yet moved to the food portion of the evening.
The feast tables were laid out and waiting, covered and untouched, the spread visible even from where they stood outside.
Zelaine looked at it.
Then she looked at Mavine and her eyes gleamed.
The idea arrived fully formed and required no further deliberation.
They slipped in from the side, Zelaine's yaicraft keeping them unremarkable among the crowd, and found themselves standing inside the courtyard with some time still remaining before the feast began.
They found an empty table and sat down to wait.
The wedding ceremony ran its course to a round of applause and the warm collective noise of crowd congratulating them.
Alas chairs scraped and conversations picked up and the covered dishes on the feast tables were finally being attended to. The feast had started.
And something nagged at Zelaine.
She sat with it for a moment, turning it over, trying to find out what was it that was nagging her. All of the guest looked nothing extraordinary, other than abnormal yai oozing off them.
But there was a profound feeling of emptiness in Zelaine's heart, like a room where something had been removed or to put it simply, there was no substance.
'What is this. There is a high amount of yai oozing off these guests. Is this a wedding between yai users'
She scanned the venue quietly. If the number of yai users among the guest was high then it was a problem.
Their presence would eventually register regardless of her concealment.
But the more she looked the less it fit.
'They are not yai users. And yet the yai oozing off them is substantial.
However she pushed all of it aside as her stomach had clear opinions about priorities and the feast was being served.
'I wonder what they have prepared.'
Her eyes found the steaks immediately among other dishes that was on the feast.
The moment the feast began she loaded her plate and stuff a lumpful of steak in her mouth.
But she frowned instantly after just taking the first bite.
*Fuck.*
There was no taste, it was bland.
Neither the texture or heck even the meat was not present.
It was sensation without substance, like eating the idea of a steak rather than the thing itself.
*How did I not notice it sooner.*
She set down her fork, reached across the table, and took Mavine's hand.
"Let's go."
"What!" Mavine turned on her, genuinely aggrieved. "You were so excited about this."
"None of it is real." Zelaine was already moving, pulling Mavine up from her chair and steering her toward the edge of the courtyard. "Everything here is fabricated. The food, the guests, all of it. Someone built this out of yaicraft."
Mavine looked back at the feast tables as she was dragged away, her expression carrried a particular misery as she had not managed a single bite of a grand feast.
Zelaine did not slow down. Whoever had constructed this had done it with enough precision that she had walked straight into it without catching it immediately, which meant they were not someone to linger near.
If they had already noticed her presence inside it, staying in the area was not an option.
She got them out of the venue and kept walking, putting distance between them and the courtyard as quickly as Mavine's legs could manage.