Chapter 386: The Story After (18) [Side Story, Part 18]

“If everything you told me before is true, then meeting your own people was when things truly turned into hell, was it not?” Arkemis asked Ketal.

In the past, Ketal had spoken to Arkemis about his life in the White Snowfield. He had told her that the real hell did not begin when he first arrived in that frozen land. It began when he met those who shared his form, the barbarians.

“It was,” he said, giving a crooked smile.

The first time he met a barbarian, he had been overjoyed. The figure that stomped through the blizzard toward him was not one of the twisted creatures he had been fighting until then. It was a person—a human, just like him. It was someone he could speak to. He had planned to ask where this place was, what kind of world it belonged to, and, most importantly, how to escape it.

“What are you?” the barbarian asked him, frowning.

The words that left the barbarian’s mouth were not from Earth. It was a language Ketal had never studied, never even heard. Yet the moment he heard it, his body understood. As if his flesh remembered something his mind had never known, he grasped every word and could respond without effort.

Haltingly, he opened his mouth.

“I am...” He reached for his name, and it came naturally. “I am Ketal.”

“Ketal?” The barbarian’s expression said he had never heard such a name before. There was a hint of curiosity there, but also wariness.

All the same, it meant they could talk. Ketal’s face lit up.

“It is good to meet you. Really, truly good to meet you,” Ketal said.

At last, he had met a human instead of a monster. At last, he had found someone who might give him information. Delighted, he fired off questions in a rapid stream.

“Are you a barbarian? You look like me, so you have to be my kind. Do you live here in this place? Do you know how to get out of here?”

“Get out?” the barbarian repeated. He tilted his head, as if the very idea were strange.

Not understanding, Ketal asked again, more clearly. “Is this not the middle of nowhere? This is a land no one should be able to live in. I want to leave this place and go outside. I want to reach the land beyond.”

“Outside?” the barbarian said. He did not answer. Instead, he asked again, genuinely confused. “What is outside?”

Ketal faltered. Something felt wrong. The conversation refused to fit together, and their words collided and fell apart instead of meeting in the middle.

His smile faded. Before he could frame another question, the barbarian wrapped his hand around the handle of his axe.

“You look unfamiliar,” the barbarian said. “But you seem to have some strength.”

His lips peeled back, baring teeth. In an instant, killing intent and the desire to fight surged up like flame.

“Wait,” Ketal said, instinctively taking half a step back.

“Die!” the barbarian replied.

The axe came down toward Ketal’s skull, a brutal, simple strike meant to split his head in two. Ketal barely managed to lift his own axe and catch the blow.

“So that barbarian tried to kill him the first moment you met?” Arkemis said, listening with a twisted look on her face.

“That is right,” Ketal answered.

“I knew the barbarians in there were rough, but hearing it from you like this feels different,” Arkemis replied, frowning.

“Barbarians in the White Snowfield are that sort of people,” Ketal said. “You know that much yourself.”

“I do,” she said. “It is just strange to hear how it felt from your side.”

Ketal gave a small shrug.

“If I continue the story,” he said, “I won that fight.”

He had pushed the barbarian back, knocked him down, and disarmed him. The barbarian, sprawled on the ice with his chest heaving, had laughed in a booming voice and told him to kill him.

Naturally, Ketal had no intention of doing that. He had a hundred questions left to ask, and this was the first person he had seen in this world who could answer them. Confused but apparently accepting the idea that victory gave Ketal the right to choose, the barbarian had obediently responded to his questions.

Ketal had kept it simple.

“How can I get out of here?”

“Get out of where?”

“Does this world have elves?”

“No.”

“Does it have dragons?”

“No.”

“Does it have magic?”

“What is magic?”

Silence settled over them, and in that stillness understanding arrived. That was when Ketal finally realized the truth. The world he had been thrown into was not a fantasy. It was hell.

“After that,” Ketal said quietly, still looking at Arkemis, “I lived on because I could not die.”

Through that barbarian, he had been brought into the tribe. He had tried asking others the same questions, but the answers never changed. No one knew of any outside. No one knew elves or dragons. No one understood magic. In the end, he gave up completely.

This was hell. It was a punishment laid upon him for daring to long for fantasy. Once he decided that, everything inside him went cold.

“Out of all the time I have lived,” Ketal said, “those days in the White Snowfield were the worst.”

Looking back, it was almost a miracle that he had not taken his own life. More accurately, he had not even had the strength to do it. He simply drifted forward, waiting for death to reach him eventually.

“Then,” he said, “things changed.”

“The explorer,” Arkemis said.

“The first person to bring me true hope,” he said, nodding. “The first person to show me that this world might actually be what I wished for.”

***

The wind screamed across the ice. It was not just cold. It felt like a living thing, a blade of air that wanted to slice open his flesh and tear his lungs apart.

Ketal stood in the middle of it all, his expression blank. He took the freezing gusts the way a penitent took lashes, as if he believed he deserved every cut.

A barbarian approached from behind him, boots crunching in the snow. It was the same man Ketal had first met in that world.

“What are you doing out here?” the barbarian asked him.

“Go away,” Ketal said. His voice came out stiff and dull.

The barbarian, used to this sort of answer, did not seem offended.

“It will be time to eat soon. Come back and have food,” he said.

“You lot can eat without me,” Ketal muttered.

“Weird bastard,” the barbarian said. He looked at Ketal the way one might look at a strange animal.

Ketal did not care about food. He did not enjoy fighting either. Among the barbarians, who lived to eat and fight, he was an anomaly.

With a dismissive snort, the barbarian walked away. Ketal watched him go for a moment, then turned his gaze back toward the endless white.

Should I die

, he thought.

It would not have been difficult. He could have raised his axe and brought it down on his own head. He had turned that thought over in his mind thousands of times, yet he had never carried it out. He no longer had the energy to even attempt it.

Gods

, he thought.

Is this the punishment you chose for me? Is the sentence you passed on me to wait here, helpless, until death finally arrived on its own?

He let out a long breath and turned his back on the howling wind. Whatever he felt about living, if he wanted to keep his body moving a little longer, he needed to eat. He trudged toward the barbarians’ village, step after heavy step.

“Hm?”

As he drew closer, he noticed something strange. The village was loud, and noise by itself was nothing unusual. Barbarians were always fighting, injuring one another, and killing one another. A quiet village would have been far more suspicious.

However, the sound that filled the air today was different. It was not the roar of battle or the savage thrill of a raid. It was confusion and unease. He frowned and stepped into the village. A crowd of Barbarians had gathered in the center, forming a ring around something.

“Hm...”

“What is that supposed to be?”

“Do we kill it? Or not?”

“It looks like it would die on its own if we left it,” one barbarian said. “Is it even worth killing?”

“What is it?” another asked.

“What are you all doing?” Ketal said. He walked up behind one barbarian and smacked him lightly on the shoulder.

The barbarian glanced back with a confused look. “Something showed up. We do not know what it is.”

“Something?” Ketal said. Puzzled now, he pushed his way through the ring of bodies and stepped into the open center.

His feet stopped. There, lying in the snow, was a man. He had collapsed on the ground, half-conscious. It looked as though he had crawled all the way here with the last of his strength, only to faint at the very end.

However, that was not what mattered. The man wore a thick fur coat. A leather backpack rested against his back. His boots had spikes hammered into their soles, clearly meant to keep him steady on the ice. In his gloved hand, he clutched a flat, leather-covered rectangle.

“What is he holding?” one barbarian asked.

“I have no idea,” another replied.

They stared at the object as though it were some exotic beast.

Ketal knew immediately that it was a book. He stepped forward as if drawn by a rope.

“Hello...?” he said as he grabbed the man by the shoulders and shook him gently. The man did not move, and a flicker of panic rose in Ketal’s chest. He shook him harder.

A faint groan slipped from the man’s lips. He was alive.

Ketal’s vision swam for a moment as his heart pounded so hard that his chest ached. He turned and placed himself between the man and the circle of barbarians, then spoke loudly enough for all of them to hear.

“This man is mine,” he said. “Do not touch him.”

Complaints rose immediately. They shouted that he had no right to claim a new

thing

for himself alone. That every prize brought into the village was to be shared.

However, Ketal’s answer was simple.

“If any of you have a problem with it, come at me!” he shouted. His voice turned low and cold. “I will cut off all four of your limbs and feed you gruel for the rest of your life. You will lie there, unable to move, and eat and sleep until the day you rot.”

The barbarians went silent. Death did not frighten them, but the thought of lying helpless forever, unable to fight or walk or lift a weapon, terrified them.

The threat worked. With no one willing to push further, Ketal hoisted the man onto his back and carried him to his own crude hut on the edge of the village.

He lit a fire until the air was almost too hot to breathe. He covered the man with layer after layer of animal pelts, tucking them in tight. He boiled water, let it cool enough not to burn, and trickled it into the man’s mouth. He chopped meat until his arms ached and fed him bite by bite. He cared for him with a desperation he had never shown himself.

Eventually, his efforts bore fruit.

“

Ugh... ugh...

” The man groaned and opened his eyes.

“Yes!” Ketal let out a shout that was almost a sob.

Even now, so long after, he could still feel the shock of that moment clearly. It was buried under countless ages, but the memory remained bright.

“I managed to bring him back,” Ketal said to Arkemis. “After that, we started to talk.”

At first, their words did not match. The man’s language was different from the barbarians’ tongue. Ketal understood none of it.

So he learned. Fortunately, the man was someone who was used to teaching others, and Ketal, with nothing else in his life worth clinging to, threw himself into the lessons with terrifying intensity.

Within a few days, they were able to hold simple conversations. Once they could speak, Ketal began asking questions, and little by little, as the man answered, Ketal began to understand.

The gods had heard his prayer. Outside the White Snowfield, beyond that twisted frozen prison, there was a world where elves lived, dragons flew, and magic existed. The fantasy world he had dreamed of was real, and it lay beyond the horizon.

In a life that had become nothing but despair, hope had finally returned. Ketal spoke with the man again and again, absorbing every detail he could. With each conversation, he grew more certain that the world beyond the White Snowfield was the fantasy he had begged for.

Arkemis gulped and asked quietly, “What happened to him?”

“He did not last a month,” Ketal said. “His body was already broken by his journey through the White Snowfield. Surviving as long as he did was a miracle.”

Ketal felt a familiar, dull ache settle in his chest. He had wanted more time and more words. He had wanted to hear about the outside, to hear about it until he could picture it in perfect detail.

He remembered their last conversation.

“

Cough... cough!

” The man spat blood onto the fur covering his chest.

Ketal rushed to his side and wiped his mouth, adjusting the furs and lifting his head.

“Rest,” Ketal said. “You should not talk anymore.”

“No,” the man said. “I will not live long anyway. Before I die, I have to pass on as much as I can to you.”

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and looked up at Ketal with a faint smile.

𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

“Barbarians, living in a Demon Realm like the White Snowfield,” he said. “If the scholars outside ever learn of this, the whole academic world will erupt. I hate that I am going to die here without telling anyone.”

***

At that point, Arkemis lifted a hand.

“Wait,” she said. “Ketal, something about this is strange.”

“What is?” he asked her.

“If everything you have said is accurate, then that man did not know there were barbarians in the White Snowfield at all,” she said.

“He sounded surprised,” Ketal said. “As if it were the first he had ever heard of it.”

“That is strange,” Arkemis said.

There was an old legend—the tale of an emperor who challenged the White Snowfield and returned alive, alone. Because of that story, people Outside already knew that Barbarians lived there. Explorers capable of entering that Demon Realm would never have gone in ignorant of that fact.

So there were only two possibilities. Either the man had been a fool who knew nothing, or he was someone from an age before that legend had ever formed.

“Ketal,” Arkemis said carefully. “What was that man’s name?”

Ketal answered without hesitation.

“He called himself Albraham,” he said.

Arkemis’s pupils dilated.