Chapter 385: The Story After (17) [Side Story, Part 17]

Ketal stirred with a low murmur as he drifted up from sleep. The soft bedding was wrapped around his whole body, warm and heavy with comfort. Out of long habit, his hand reached out to the side. This time, his fingers closed on nothing. He opened his eyes and pushed himself up.

“Ah. You are awake?” Arkemis’s voice came from the kitchen.

She moved easily between the counter and the stove, dressed in simple, comfortable clothes. With practiced motions, she lifted a pot and moved it to another burner.

“I was trying to have everything ready before you woke up,” she said. “But you beat me to it.”

“Breakfast?” he asked her.

“Yes. I thought I would be the one to cook this time.”

“I look forward to it.” Ketal smiled and settled at the table.

Arkemis ladled a thick stew from the pot into a bowl and set it before him. Ketal lifted a spoonful and tasted it. She watched him with a nervous expression, her hands clasped together.

“How is it?” she asked him

“It is good. It would be even better with a little more seasoning.”

“All right. I will try that next time,” she said, relief softening her shoulders. She smiled, small and genuine.

When they finished their meal, Ketal collected the dishes and cleaned up the table. Afterward, he went in search of Arkemis and found her already seated in her laboratory, surrounded by glass tubes, engraved plates, and hovering clusters of faintly glowing Nano dust.

“Does it still need adjustment?” he asked her, sitting down in the chair next to her.

“Yes,” Arkemis said, her tone caught somewhere between confidence and frustration. “I finished shaping it and gave it proper function, but the fine-tuning is proving more complicated than I thought.”

Arkemis wanted a child. To reach that impossible dream, she had used Nano to construct an artificial womb. She had succeeded in creating it and integrating it into her body. Yet success in theory did not mean an immediate pregnancy in practice. The structure had taken form inside her, but that alone did not guarantee that a new life could take hold.

They needed to search for errors. They needed to examine, adjust, and verify. That meant long, patient work.

Ketal rested his elbow on the back of her chair and said gently, “Do not be too disappointed. I will help you.”

“All right...” She nodded with renewed determination.

From then on, their days settled into a quiet rhythm. They spent their time together while she continued her tests, and whenever a result failed, she returned to her diagrams to recalibrate the structure, rewriting arrays of runes and adjusting the minute patterns of Nano flow.

Ketal stayed at her side, offering both practical help and silent support. He fetched materials, stabilized Myst flows when she needed two extra hands, and listened whenever she muttered through a new idea.

Months slipped by like that. One day, as they paused between adjustments, Arkemis looked over with a slightly uneasy expression.

“Ketal...,” she said. “Are you not bored?”

Ketal had spent several months now without leaving her side, living with her in the house tucked into the forest by the elven sacred ground. She knew Ketal loved freedom and wandering, and always seemed happiest on the road, discovering new lands and strange sights. She couldn’t help worrying, wondering whether he felt caged or whether he was enduring all of this solely for her sake.

“Not particularly,” he said. He genuinely felt no burden at all.

“Really?” she asked him.

“On the contrary, I feel very relaxed.”

He was not flattering her. Day after day, he lazed around the house, helped with her work, and shared meals and small conversations with her. For the first time in a very long while, he felt as if he were truly resting.

The ceaseless pressure that had gnawed at the back of his mind for ages was slowly draining away. Not in a hollow way, but in a calm, steady release, like air slipping from a tightened lung. It felt like he had finally found a refuge—a place he was allowed to stop and breathe.

“Arkemis,” Ketal said softly. “You and I are family.”

They would be together for a lifetime. No one would stand closer to him than she did.

“Family lends its shoulders to one another,” he said. “They lean on each other without counting costs or weighing benefits. There is no calculation in it. They simply stay together.”

That was what family meant to him.

“So do not hesitate. Lean on me whenever you need to. That is what I want.” Ketal finished in an even tone.

“Okay...,” Arkemis said.

She gave a small, breathless laugh and threw herself into his arms. Ketal caught her easily and held her close, his smile mild and content.

Time moved on. Arkemis continued to refine her creation, trying to close the gap between theory and reality. Error measurements shrank, parameters lined up one after another, but the final step refused to come easily. In the end, she grew tired before Ketal did.

She sprawled across the bed with a soft groan, and twisted back and forth in exaggerated misery.

In truth, Arkemis was not the sort of person who liked to sit still either. She had left the elven sacred ground partially because its people did not share her values, but also because the unchanging days bored her to the point of suffocation.

She rolled across the mattress, then flopped onto her back and stared at the ceiling. After a while, a thought struck her, and she turned her head.

“Ketal,” she said. “You lived in the White Snowfield, did you not?”

“I did.”

“How long was it again?”

“I do not know,” Ketal replied, shaking his head.

He had lived there for so long that the span could no longer be measured, even in his own memory. The years had piled up until any human sense of time lost meaning. Only one thing was certain. No human mind could have comprehended its length.

“How exactly did you live there?” she asked him, watching him with quiet curiosity.

She had heard a broad outline before, but never the details. Now, with nothing in particular to do and no enemies at the door, she felt ready to listen to his story.

Ketal hesitated for a moment. Those memories were not ones he particularly wanted to revisit. The White Snowfield was cold, harsh, and cruel, and that cruelty lived on in every recollection he had of it.

No...

, he thought.

There is no need to avoid it anymore.

He was free now. He had become a resident of this world in truth. There was no reason left to push those memories away.

“You know about my past before the White Snowfield,” Ketal said. “From before I came to this world.”

“I do,” Arkemis said.

Ketal had not been born in this world. He was an outsider from another universe entirely. She knew that much from his own telling.

Ketal continued in a calm voice, “In that world, I prayed.”

He had prayed every night, begging to be taken away from that miserable hell, a world without wonder or Myst, without magic or dragons or anything that shimmered with the impossible. It had been a colorless hell.

He had begged to be allowed to leave it behind and cross over into a true fantasy. He prayed countless times, shouting words that no one seemed to hear. And then, one day, that prayer was answered. The way it was answered, however, was warped and alien.

***

As on so many nights before, he had finished his prayer. He had poured his heart into it for hours, sending it up toward something unknown, and at last exhaustion had claimed him. He had fallen asleep in his own bed.

When he opened his eyes again, something was wrong.

“Huh...?”

Cold pressed in on him. A murderous, slicing cold that felt as if it would flay his skin and freeze his lungs in his chest. His entire body felt so numb that his mind misread it as burning heat.

What is this?

he thought.

Fear jolted through him. He had gone to sleep in his room; he was certain of that.

Panicking, he tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids felt frozen together. He forced them apart and cracked the crust of ice that had formed over them. Only then could he see that he was half-buried in a glacial wall of ice.

[Quest #1]

[Survive for one week.]

A translucent window floated into existence in front of his eyes. Words appeared on it, written in clear, unmistakable letters. He had no time to think about what they meant. His skin was turning blue. His body was numb, his fingers stiff and unresponsive. If he did not get out of the ice immediately, he would die of hypothermia.

“

Urgh...!

” he cried as he lunged and twisted.

Crack.

His movement slammed his shoulder into the ice. Thin fractures spread outward from the point of impact. There was just enough space now to move his hand. He drew back his fist and hammered it into the ice again and again.

Clang, clang, clang.

The cracks grew wider. He gathered his strength and drove his fist forward.

Crack-crack-crack.

The ice shattered with a roar, and he spilled out onto the frozen ground. He caught himself on his hands and knees, fingers slipping against the frost.

He panted heavily. Even out of the glacier, he had escaped only the worst of it. The killing wind sliced across the surface of the snowfield and cut straight through his thin clothing.

He quickly scrambled behind the broken edge of the ice and pressed himself into its shadow, using it as a crude shield against the wind.

“Where am I...?” he muttered, staring blankly at the world spread out before him, a vast land of ice and snow.

Everything in sight lay buried beneath white, and even when sheltered behind the shattered glacier, the cold seeped deep into his bones until his body began to shake.

I went to sleep in my bed,

he thought.

So why am I here? Why am I in a place like this?

He stared for a long time, mind blank, until suddenly something flared in his eyes.

𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

“Could it be...?” he whispered.

His heart pounded, not from fear now, but from excitement. Heat rushed through his veins, driving back the numbness. His fists clenched so hard his knuckles ached.

“Could it be,” he said, voice rising, “that I finally made it?”

He wondered if he had finally come to a fantasy world and if his prayers had finally been granted, and his eyes shone with pure, unfiltered joy.

***

“Wait a moment.” Arkemis, who had been listening with keen interest, raised her hand. She stared at him with an expression caught between shock and disbelief.

“So you mean,” she said slowly, “you liked that?”

He had gone to sleep and woken up buried in deadly ice, moments away from freezing to death. And he had liked it. She could not quite wrap her mind around that.

Ketal, however, nodded as if nothing were more obvious. “I believed I had finally reached the fantasy I longed for. I had no reason not to be happy.”

“If anything had gone wrong, you would have died there,” Arkemis said.

“Even so, I would not have minded.”

To die in the fantasy he had dreamed of—that, in his view, would have been a perfect ending.

Arkemis could find no words for a moment. She had known that his longing for fantasy was deep, but this was beyond anything she had imagined.

“In any case,” Ketal said, shrugging slightly, “it did not take that long for me to realize I was mistaken.”

***

Screeches tore at his ears.

“

Kyaak! Kyaaaaak!

”

Something unnatural, made entirely of vile, slimy masses, hurled itself toward him. The creature surged across the snow, stretching itself out to engulf him and melt him alive.

Ketal wrapped his fingers around an axe and swung once. The descending blade split the ooze cleanly in two, and the halves shrieked.

“

Kyaaaak!

”

They did not die. Instead, the creature divided, its body splitting again and again as it tried to coil around his limbs and chest to crush him. Ketal stamped his foot in irritation, and the impact blasted the slime away from him. He stepped forward and hacked at it, his axe whistling through the air.

The mass ripped apart, shredding into dozens of chunks, then a hundred. Only when it had been chopped into far more pieces than seemed necessary did it finally stop moving.

He bent down, picked up a shard of the congealed slime, and put it in his mouth. A foul, horrible taste spread across his tongue, strong enough to wrinkle his whole face. He swallowed anyway. If he did not eat things like this, he would not survive.

He chewed slowly as his gaze drifted toward the distant horizon. White stretched endlessly before him, nothing but white in every direction. The land spread out without end, a prison of frost and snow where the scenery barely changed, no matter how far he walked.

The only things that appeared were not dragons or goblins or any other monsters he had once associated with fantasy. They were creatures like the slime he had just killed, nameless and malformed and deeply wrong.

After several days had passed, a single doubt began to creep into his mind.

Is this really the fantasy world I wanted?

He wondered whether this was truly a world where dragons flew, elves walked beneath starlit trees, and magic sang through the air, yet nothing he had seen supported that dream. All he had found was a broken, twisted, and alien world.

“No...,” he muttered, shaking his head.

He had to be in a fantasy world. There could be no other possibility. He forced himself to reject every thought that suggested otherwise and lifted his axe once more. The axe bit into the glacier beside him. Chunks of ice broke free. He popped a piece into his mouth and bit down, the cold crackling between his teeth.

“This really is a good axe,” he said, gazing down at the weapon in his hand.

A strange gemstone was set into the head. When he had first come to, half-buried in the ice, he had found this axe frozen nearby. He did not know why it had been there, but it was strong and keen, and it cut through ice and monsters alike without so much as a nick.

He had no idea that the axe was the embodiment of Abomination itself. It had already burrowed into him and fallen asleep within him, yet he remained unaware of its nature. To him, it was nothing more than a useful tool he had been fortunate enough to find.

“Hm.” He paused, thinking.

He had only been in this world for a few days, far too soon to draw any conclusions. Perhaps he had simply fallen into some remote and accursed corner of a much larger fantasy world. If that were true, then all he needed to do was find his way out.

It’s going to be fine. It has to be,

he thought. He chose to believe that and kept walking.

“And at the end of that road,” Ketal said quietly, looking at Arkemis, “I finally found them.”

He smiled faintly as he spoke.

“My kin,” he said. “The barbarians of the White Snowfield.”