Across the fire, Const's eyes flicked over to them. Just once. He smiled the small polite smile of a man who had absolutely not been able to hear them from where he was sitting.
A thin trickle ran from his left eye.
Aim's chewing stopped.
Isolde's hand, halfway to picking up another piece of dried meat, froze in midair.
Vine, on the other side of the fire, had also turned to look. Her purple eyes settled on Const's face. Her expression did not change — but something behind her eyes did. A small calm narrowing. The look of a person doing rapid arithmetic with a result they did not particularly enjoy.
The blood that ran from Const's eye was not red.
It was deep, slow, dark blue.
Const reached up with one casual finger and wiped it away.
He looked at his fingertip.
"Something the matter?" he asked.
Isolde — who had spent the last two months question this man, eating his dried meat, watching him patch his own coat by candlelight, sitting beside him on transport boats let out a long slow breath.
"You know," she said, "every time I think I have gotten used to you, Const, you find a new way to be unsettling."
Const, who had just wiped blue blood from his own face, managed to laugh. The small occasional laugh he had.
"I guess so."
"Don't apologize. Just — tell us what it means."
Aim said nothing. His jaw was set. He was looking at Const with the specific carefully neutral expression he had once used at the South Gate when a refugee said something that did not quite add up. He had not blinked in several seconds.
He cleared his throat.
"That looks like the blood of those deep-water creatures from the books we read as kids," he said, carefully. "But — it can't be that. Obviously."
Const laughed again.
"I'm not a squid, Aim."
Across the fire, Vine had still not moved.
She did not ask any questions.
She did not need to.
Her eye just fixed, mouth shut sealed in demeanor of egoist scholar would do when they are curious.
Whatever the answer was, she had already started to assemble it from the inside.
---
Morning came in white.
The snowstorm had rolled in from the northern ridges sometime before dawn, and by the time the four of them broke camp it had reached the kind of intensity that turned a path into a guess and a horizon into a wall. The wind was hard enough that Aim had to lean slightly forward to walk into it.
He, Isolde, and Vine were wrapped in heavy coats with the collars turned up. The artifact at Vine's hip — small, copper, etched with marks Aim could not read — was pulsing in a slow steady rhythm, and the air around the four of them stayed marginally warmer than the world outside the radius of its glow.
"It's really helpful that you have all these artifacts, Lady Vine," Aim called over the wind, in the slightly-too-cheerful voice of a man trying to lift the mood. "Without yours, we wouldn't be at the northern edge of Orenthel in just two days."
Vine did not respond.
Aim cleared his throat and resumed walking.
What had been bothering him, though, was not the storm.
It was Const.
Const had no heavy coat. Const had no artifact. Const was wearing the same dark shirt and trousers he had been wearing since he ever saw him. with the long coat open at the front as though it were a mild autumn day. He is not even bothered that the snow had been dusting his pale hair for moments now.
"Hm? Something the matter?"
Const had turned his head and met Aim's eyes.
"N-Nothing."
Aim looked away.
He fastened his pace and caught up to Vine, who was walking at the front, faster than someone her build should have been able to walk in this weather.
"Lady Vine," Aim said, with the practiced friendly tone he had used at countless palace functions. "You must come from a great family. Anyone carrying this many artifacts at once would have to be from a very prestigious—"
Vine kept walking.
She did not respond.
From slightly behind them, Isolde let out a small dry laugh. "Hahaha. So obvious, Aim. A grown man, still single, still craving women attention."
"Tsk." Aim's brow furrowed. "I was making conversation."
Const fastened his own pace to catch up alongside them.
"Now, now, Miss Vine," he said, in the warm calm tone he used when he was about to be lightly impossible. "If you'd just answer him—"
"Don't speak to me as though we are close," Vine said flatly, without looking at him. "I have no intention of—"
The wind changed.
Not gusted. Changed. The sound of the storm itself dipped for a fraction of a second, the way water goes briefly still before something large moves through it.
Then the shapes came through the fog.
Three of them. Then a fourth. Four-legged, heavy-shouldered, moving at the speed of a galloping horse, low to the ground in the silent committed charge of predators that already knew exactly where they were going.
The first one came at Isolde.
Aim moved before his brain caught up. The artifact at his belt — Vine's lend, small and quiet, the kind that augmented speed in short bursts — flared. He crossed the distance, scooped Isolde under one arm, and ran.
"Const—!"
He shouted it without turning. The kind of shout you give when your whole body is committed to motion and you trust the person you're shouting at to handle it.
He did not get an answer.
He did not see Const turn. He did not see Const draw anything. He just felt the absence of the answer he had expected.
"...huh."
Three more shapes came in from three different directions.
"Aim, RUN!" Isolde slapped his back hard.
He ran.
---
The Vine-given artifact made him fast. Almost twice the speed of a galloping horse at full burn. But carrying Isolde — small as she was, light as she was — added drag he could not work around. The four creatures behind him had closed half the distance in twenty seconds.
"Let me down!" Isolde was twisting against his grip. "We'll both die at this rate!"
"If I let you down, you die! We've been using this for two days, you know it doesn't kick in instantly!"
"Damn it!" Then, halfway through the curse, her voice changed. "...Aim. Look!"
He risked a glance back.
The creatures behind them were not — exactly — bears. They had the shape and the bulk of bears. They had the fur of bears. They did not have eyes. The structure where the eyes should have been was gone — not closed, not damaged, simply absent. Bone where there should have been sockets.
"Omen-corrupted, maybe," Isolde said rapidly. "Bear class. But — they have no eyes—!"
"What do you want me to do about that?!"
"FIGHT!"
"With bears?!"
"Yes, with bears!" Isolde wrenched herself loose from his grip — hit the snow rolling, came up in a crouch with her catalyst glove flaring and her rapier blade igniting in a clean orange line of flame.
"You absolute idiot—!" Aim wheeled around, came back, and skidded to a stop beside her.
Think. Think. Think. Material restructuring. Anything. Anything! Try Const's trick.
"Tentacle!"
His coat unfurled lazily in the wind.
"...huh?"
"What in the name of—! get over here!"
The first bear was so close to her, too close.
She had been bracing for it.
But it hit her rapier—
The flame caught fur, and the creature reared, screaming a sound that was not quite a sound — but the other two were already past her, charging at her sword.
Once her gaze turns toward them, their gaze not at her sword anymore—An ice blade come nudge their fur, not even strong enough to pierce.
Oh no oh no oh no oh no— his face went pale.
He threw ice. Basic ice magic — the first few thing the manual had taught him — but he threw it without restraint, in a spray, in a wall, in panicked bursts that wasted half his catalyst's reserve in fifteen seconds.
The bears slowed. They turned.
They came for him instead of Isolde.
"Damn it damn it damn it—"
Isolde was on her feet again, running back toward him. Her catalyst glove glowed. Her blade re-lit.
At the same moment Aim's own catalyst entered its dim cycle — the slow flicker that meant cooling, conserving, do not push.
Wait.
The bears — three of them now, the fourth still tangled in the snow behind them — turned again. Tracking the brighter magical signature.
"Sol — run—!"
Aim pushed the last of his catalyst's reserves into a wall of ice the size of a small wagon.
The three bears swerved hard, redirecting toward him.
"Throw me your catalyst!"
"What?"
"Just throw it!"
Isolde — half a step ahead of the lead bear — wrenched the glove off and threw it across the gap as she ran past him.
He caught it.
He shoved his hand inside.
His own catalyst was guttering. Hers, fresh, surged into him like a second wind. He stretched both hands forward and built the largest ice formation he had ever built — a solid wedge angled up from the snow, taller than him, sharpened at one edge —
"What are you doing—!"
"Trust me and keep running!"
He started running.
All four catalyst in his arm glowing nonstop.
His legs were giving out. His lungs were burning. The three bears reoriented and came after him in unison.
Isolde, abandoning all logical formation, ran beside him.
"I told you to go the other way!"
"No!"
The wind picked up. The snow thickened.
Then — somehow piercing through the storm — a voice.
"Both of you!"
It came through the fog like a song clearing a room.
Aim's body slowed without his consent. His vision narrowed. Time itself seemed to thin.
He saw — through the snow — a woman.
She was standing in the white drift, a mirror held up in both of her hands. Her hair was smooth and pale. Her dress was well tailored, in a cut Aim recognized from the early-period state paintings, the kind of beauty nobody had held in two hundred years. Her face was the face of a woman who could have been the replica of the early portraits of Goddess Flaure herself, the ones from the 1100s that hung in the lesser corridors of the Palace.
She was beautiful in a way that made time went slower in a man's head.
"Run to the mirror! Touch it!"
Aim and Isolde did not stop to ask. They charged the last twenty feet at a full sprint, the three eyeless bears closing behind them — and as Isolde's eyes lifted for half a second through the driving snow, she caught the edge of something in the sky.
It was not a shape, exactly.
Four edges meeting at angles that were not approximate.
The snow swallowed her vision and they hit the mirror's surface at the same moment.
---
Those bear didn't attack the woman.
They stood very still around her, as though waiting to be told what they were now.
The woman lowered the mirror. She looked into it once with a small private smile.
The air went quiet.
Not silent. Quiet — in the specific way that meant the sounds that should be there had been removed without warning. The wind.
The breathing of the bears. The shifting of snow under heavy bodies.
Then—
THRUM
Deep, sourceless, felt through the bones rather than heard with the ears.
The patch of snow in front of the woman, the three eyeless bears standing in it, and the ground beneath them simply stopped being there.
Just absence, edged in perfect impossible straight lines, leaving the cross-section of the earth below visible in clean layers of soil and rock that should not have been cut so cleanly by any natural force.
"Hm."
Then she stepped through afterward.
The mirror, held by no one, fell into the snow.
It did not break.