Chapter 365: Barbarians of the White Snowfield (2)

Ketal had warned them that a barbarian festival was not the sort that ended with song; even so, the tribe did not fight from the first shout. The clash came as a crown, a bright rim at the end. Before that, they did what people anywhere did when they gathered for a festival: they ate, laughed, traded boasts, and tried to out-sing one another while stamping patterns into the snow.

Cheers leapt like sparks. Barbarians danced with easy joy, heels thudding on packed snow, shoulders rolling under fur and cord. Helia watched, blank with surprise, as if her thoughts had paused in the wind. The sight could have belonged to any village after a good hunt. It was simple, human, ordinary.

Yet this was the White Snowfield. These were the ashen-haired barbarians. She stood inside the legend rather than hearing about it from someone else, and that truth struck her again as solidly as a drumbeat.

“Here. Eat.” Hekate thrust something into Helia’s hands before the Saintess could step away from the circle. “You are far too thin. Do you think you can fight like that? Fill yourself. Put weight on your bones. Feed the muscle.”

“Ah. Thank you.” Helia accepted it on reflex. Only then did she look down and understand what she held, and the color left her face.

It was a red piece of meat. Even after a boil, it seemed to twitch, as if the heat had failed to drive its life out. Edible was not the word that came to mind. She glanced at Ketal for rescue, but he merely inclined his head in a small nod that gave no room for refusal. It was a gift that could not be thrown away.

Helia shut her eyes, lifted it to her mouth, and bit down. The texture resisted, rubbery and slick, as if it tried to wriggle from her teeth. She fought the reflex to spit it out and ground it to pulp. She forced it down, bit by stubborn bit, and felt it slide into her stomach. At least it carried no poison.

The taste was another matter. She gagged, hand over lips. It was awful beyond words. A gelatinous film clung to her tongue and would not lift, no matter how she swallowed. She wanted water, anything clean and cold to wash it away, but this was the White Snowfield, and liquid water existed only as a theory unless one worked for it. She bowed her head and mastered the urge to retch.

Serena fared no better. With cheeks bulging full, she stared at the sky as if prayer might melt the bite for her.

“No matter how I chew, it refuses to go down,” she muttered through her nose.

Ketal ate beside them. The thing writhed once on his tongue and then went quiet under the unbothered grind of his teeth. The taste was terrible. The feeling as it passed the throat tried to make the skin crawl.

He remembered it. Before he had taught them to cook, they had eaten like this every day. Before the lessons took root, every meal had been a trial. He swallowed and rolled his jaw.

Around the ring, fights began to spark. One pair and then another seized each other’s forearms and lifted axes in greeting. Steel rose and fell. The White Snowfield answered each collision with a tremor that ran underfoot like a buried river. Helia could not keep the breath from leaving her in a long, quiet sound.

“There are so many with the strength of Heroes,” she said, and incredulity roughened the line of her voice.

On the Mortal Realm, those who bore such weight numbered scarcely more than a dozen in any one land, their names recorded like comets. Here they stood shoulder to shoulder and fought as if they were common soldiers in a training yard. Each time their weapons met, the air cracked and shivered.

Between those booming duels, Hashvalt was dragged from one clash to the next. An outsider warrior had wandered into their midst; no barbarian with blood in his arms would let the chance pass. He parried and pivoted, guard high, jaw clenched hard enough to ache.

He will survive,

Helia thought, measuring him with the same habit that measured prayer. With his strength, he should live through this. The barbarians who had hovered at the edge, studying Ketal sidelong like wolves weighing a bull, began to edge closer.

“My king!” one called, eyes bright. “Fight me!”

They gathered with eager stares, and Ketal picked up an axe with a small nod, the iron sitting in his palm like an old truth.

“All right. Come,” he said.

Helia and Serena witnessed what followed. Every barbarian who bore the weight of a Hero challenged Ketal that night, and every one of them fell. Some dropped in a single exchange when they overreached into the calm of his timing. Others lasted a breath and a half more. None found purchase. Strength, technique, and presence met in him without seams.

Neither woman found words afterward. They watched in simple silence as night rounded to its end.

The festival closed, and dawn opened its white lid. The next day, they stepped out of their hut, stiff yet whole. The barbarians were already walking the paths between the fires, speaking, laughing, checking the edges of their tools and the binding of straps. Helia stared and doubted what she saw.

“They all look fine,” she said. “As if none of them were wounded.”

The fights from the night before had been savage. Limbs had come near to being severed. Ax heads had lodged in ribs. More than one fighter had coughed blood thick with the dark of torn bowels. She had expected moans and stretchers. Instead, she found easy strides and bright eyes, and more than one face wore the loose, airy ease that followed a long run in clean weather.

“They are hard to kill,” Ketal said without ceremony. “Broken bones and spilled guts do not end them. Give them a few hours and they heal.”

“Now that you say it,” Helia replied, “even those who once left the White Snowfield recovered unnaturally fast.”

No wonder they fought so freely,

she thought. She looked over the faces and realized a few were missing. “I do not see some of the men from last night.”

“If a neck is cut through or a heart split, they still die,” Ketal answered with the bluntness she had learned to treat as kindness. “They are not immortal. Five or so died. Fewer than usual.”

Helia said nothing. It had been a true battle after all, not a dance with rules. Through all her oaths and training, weariness rose anyway, and she let the feeling pass like a thin cloud in the wind.

Ketal glanced aside. Hashvalt leaned against the corner of a wall with his eyes half shut, pale and quiet as if sleep had found him there. He had weathered the storm on his feet.

“He is alive,” Ketal said.

He looked uninjured even at a glance. He had managed to endure without breaking. Ketal left him to his breath and walked to find Hekate. She had fought until the edge of her spirit dulled and now looked cleaner for it, as if battle had scoured her thoughts.

“So, chieftain,” she said.

“You are the chieftain,” Ketal replied. “Just call me Ketal.”

“K—Ketal,” she corrected herself, then leaned forward like a blade. “What will you do now?”

“I need to confirm something first.”

He was talking about the eternal battle between the Primarchs. He needed to know what had truly happened there and see it with his own eyes.

“You know that the Primarchs’ fight ended, right?” Ketal said.

“I know,” Hekate answered. “The world shook and then grew quiet. We went to look and found the bodies of two Primarchs. As for the other, I do not know where it went.”

“Take us there,” Ketal ordered.

Hekate nodded.

They followed her through the White Snowfield toward its deeper bones, a place where even those with the strength of Heroes could not keep the cold entirely from their marrow. The air grew sharp enough to cut thought. The land looked abandoned by even the wind.

They arrived before a scene that had worn destruction like a crown. The land was torn, the snow blown back like hair. Two corpses lay scattered in the ruin.

Helia and Serena both gulped, and Hashvalt’s breath lifted and caught. They were only bodies. The power that had animated them was gone, and the shells were empty. Even so, disgust rose, instinctive and thick, a rejection the mind could not soften. The fact of such things had existed was itself an offense to the senses.

“They are truly dead,” Ketal said, frowning.

“I do not know where the last one went,” Hekate said, confusion pinching her brows. “Its presence vanished entirely.”

Ketal knew the answer. He had only needed the last piece of the puzzle to fit. He finished his private confirmation and returned to the shelter with the others. There, he spoke to Hekate without preface.

“Come with me.”

“Come with you, chieftain—” she began, muscle memory pulling the word out first, then corrected herself with an almost comical stumble. “I mean... Come with you, Ketal?”

“Yes,” he said. “Follow me Outside.”

“Is there a reason?” Hekate’s puzzlement was honest. They were content with life inside the White Snowfield. None of them felt any hunger for the world beyond the ice.

Ketal asked her a question in return. “Where do you think the last Primarch went?”

“Where did it go?”

Ketal exhaled and let a thin smile show what he thought of the foolishness of his own attempt. “I have grown too used to the Outside. Asking you to infer this is pointless.”

He let the complaint fall and said what mattered.

“One of the Primarchs, the Twisted One, escaped to the Outside. I am going to kill it.”

Hekate shot to her feet as if a string had been pulled. Heat shook in her eyes.

“So at last!” she breathed, and then shouted, “At last we will kill that thing! We will make the White Snowfield truly ours!”

“That is not my reason,” Ketal said. “But you can think as you please.”

“I will tell the tribe!” she said, already turning toward the door. “We will leave at once.”

“There is no need for all to go,” Ketal said. “Only those who are strong enough will help.”

Not every barbarian was a monster. Some lay in the lower reaches of the Transcendent. Ketal judged that anything below the highest-level Transcendents would be little more than weight to carry.

“Gather those who can withstand your strike,” he said. “That will be enough.”

“I understand!”

Hekate burst from the hut and shouted to the tribe, her voice splitting the cold air. She called for those who would follow their king to hunt the Primarch. The answer came as expected—every voice rose, and every hand reached for a weapon.

Hekate struck like a hammer, her blow a test of strength that left only the resilient standing. When the chaos settled, roughly two hundred remained. The realization that two hundred warriors of the highest-level Transcendents stood gathered in one place drained the color from Helia’s face.

“Is this truly all right,” she asked Ketal quietly, “for the Outside?”

“It will be fine,” Ketal said. “They hold little interest in the Outside itself. Once the work is finished, I will lead them back. That ends it.”

“If so, then I am relieved,” she said, though nerves still tightened the corners of her eyes.

One hour was all it took to decide who would go. In most lands, a march demanded lists, grain, and wheels. The barbarians needed none of that. Hekate returned, face bright as a torch.

“We are ready,” she said. “Ah. One problem.”

“What is it?” Ketal asked her.

“We are out of food. We should hunt.”

“Understood.” Ketal nodded at once. “I will come. It will be quick.”

“I will join,” Hashvalt said through clenched teeth.

He had looked dazed since morning, a man who had seen his reflection for the first time and found it was not the face he had imagined. He had believed he could live here without difficulty, and that belief had held as long as he clung to the boundary where the White Snowfield loosened its grip. Survival in the deep region neared impossibility for anyone not born to it.

However, he did not want to accept that truth. He wanted to prove himself against the cold and against the judgement sitting behind Ketal’s eyes. Pride carried him forward.

“Do as you like,” Ketal said, understanding the shape of the man’s heart and not mocking it. “Perhaps your pride will learn to bend. Helia, Serena, you need not come. It will be dangerous.”

“Yes,” Serena answered at once.

“I understand,” Helia said.

Hashvalt followed Ketal and a knot of barbarians into deeper cold. They came soon to a hole vast enough to erase the horizon, a bowl sunk into the world.

Hashvalt looked down and lost his breath. A sea creature writhed in the pit, all legs. It looked like an octopus built by an enemy of the sea, each limb crowned with barbs and knobs, thousands of them, coiling and uncoiling like a storm of ropes.

Its rank pressed the senses flat. If Hashvalt fought it a hundred times, he would lose a hundred times. He knew that without needing to test it. His hand tightened on his sword as if the grip could hold his shaking still.

“It is an octopus,” Ketal said, as if naming a neighbor. “Like the Ugly Rat or the White Serpent the Outside world uses for tales. Its legs regenerate too quickly to count. The taste is poor, but for long storage, it serves perfectly.”

He raised his eyes, and the barbarians bared their teeth. Without hesitation, they leapt.

“

Wahahaha!

”

“This time I will kill you, octopus!”

The pit answered with a roar that rattled ice on distant branches. The sound pulsed like a throat the size of a mountain. Two hundred barbarians fell into war with a creature of legend.

Hashvalt did not move to join the chaos. He stood apart, sword hanging forgotten in his hand, as the scene before him unfolded in raw, impossible motion.

Bodies split open and stitched themselves together again. Arms were torn off in savage bites, only to grow back in the same breath. Blood hung in the air like ribbons of red silk before freezing midflight and falling in glittering shards. Laughter rose from the carnage, sharp and broken, then faded into a low murmur as the writhing mass twisted, shattered, and began to knit itself together once more.

Hours later, they returned with meat and stories and scars that would be gone by evening. Hashvalt returned to Helia and told her in a quiet voice that he would go back up to the Mortal Realm with her.

***

When all preparations were done, Ketal stood before the gathered barbarians.

“Then we go,” he said. “You cursed lot—if you cause trouble, I will kill you with my own hand. Carry that truth in your heads.”

“Do not worry, chieftain!” they shouted back, grinning like boys fresh from the river. “When have we ever disobeyed you?”

𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

“That is all I can remember.” He clicked his tongue and turned to Helia. “I need your help.”

“Yes,” she said, and nodded, face set.

That day, Helia’s voice carried the Sun God’s authority as it traveled the long road from the White Snowfield toward the Empire. Her words reached towns, cities, and small kingdoms scattered along the path, resonating in every square as though she stood among them herself. Her message was clear and unrelenting—unstoppable warriors were descending from the north. Leave your homes. Empty your streets. Flee while there was still time.

People panicked, but no one argued. No one had the courage to ignore a divine broadcast from the Saintess of the great Sun God. They snatched what they could carry and fled from the road.

They returned the next day and stopped with empty hands. Their towns had been swept clean as if by a giant’s palm. Even the roots were gone.

***

Helia stood among the stunned and bowed her head.

“I am sorry,” she said. “You have lost your homes because of us.”

“It could not be helped,” Ketal said. “No one can predict how the barbarians will act when they meet strangers, and bending the route would have been worse. We could only run straight.”

“We will apologize properly and arrange compensation,” Helia said.

“I will help,” Ketal told her, and a small smile touched his mouth. “After everything is finished.”

They led hundreds of barbarians and reached the Empire’s capital. The city’s bones rose from the plain, walls throwing long shadows, towers catching the late sun and splitting it.

The Twisted Primarch was there. Ketal spoke the words under his breath as if they were a promise he had already made to himself.

“Let’s end this.”