CHAPTER 121
Crossing the Abyss
District 3, where I had spent most of my life, was nothing like the forest’s green beauty. It was a place that was surrounded by horrors on all sides and in the past, the watchful gaze of Sjakthar.
Even from afar, the chainrunners noticed the change as we drew closer. The ominous sensation of being watched still lingered despite Sjakthar’s death.
Abyss, as I chose to call it, was a worthy name, despite the City of Ice that lay within. A city the Frostkin and I had raised, but its beauty was swallowed by darkness in the deepest part of the Abyss, far beyond any human could see, even if the fog wasn’t present.
I felt envious of Thelora and her ability to show them the beauty of her domain, which made me want them to see the City of Ice below. Unfortunately, even if somehow we managed to descend there with humans one day, it was a place where crimson thrived.
A place surrounded by countless crimson beasts was bound to make the fog so dense that any human who entered would be fully corrupted in moments, perhaps even before any of the auras down there could end their lives.
Still, the City of Ice would not remain entirely hidden to them, as its influence had begun to reach the surface world.
At first, it was the Isari, scouting ahead, even though they could only go so far with gods lurking in these lands. After them came the warriors, Frostkin meant to fight and secure a hold at the other side of the Abyss.
They could stay only for days before returning to the mist. Any longer was a risk none of them could take without an aura to empower them. That limitation still allowed the sculptors to begin expanding the city’s reach toward the surface.
Their first true step into the surface world was a bridge, built under my command. It offered us passage at the very place where I had once failed, and it was meant to serve the Frostkin as much as it served us.
And so they rebuilt the bridge that had once linked Districts 3 and 4—this time, one worthy of the City of Ice.
***
As we neared, the wind changed. It rose from the pit in slow, cold breaths. The mist’s aura had grown with the Frostkin’s numbers, and some of that cold was bound to leak upward.
The inner lines started to shiver first, men and women who hadn’t been moving much, who hadn’t been warmed by battle. The outer lines kept their heat through motion and adrenaline, but even they looked less comfortable as the cold pressed in.
“Hey, gramps,” Artemis called from the wagon, voice bright with mischief. “Throw me a coat, will you?”
Gustav looked at her, a bit annoyed, but complied as he took out a coat from the storage ring and threw it at her.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered under his breath.
Soon, the bridge came into view for all, the work of Ciren and Miran. It wasn’t merely a replacement for the shattered Via Appia or the bridge that stood there before. It was a sliver of the City of Ice brought into the surface world.
Great pylons rose at intervals along the span, each one an ice tower fused into the bridge’s spine. From those towers ran thick, arcing lines—ice forged suspension cables, not rope but hardened, translucent ribs that held the roadway steady over the void.
A bridge made for giants, far wider than the Via Appia, and there were no railings. No walls. No forgiving barrier for the uneasy. The bridge was built for Frostkin, who didn’t fear heights and didn’t stumble. If a chainrunner stepped wrong, the Abyss would accept them without mercy.
It was art as much as engineering, its surfaces crowded with carved lines and deliberate symbols that told the history of the Frostkin. The bridge pillars descended into the Abyss like spears thrown downward, vanishing into the darkness down below.
Statues stood along the bridge, giant figures, but nothing like the intricate constructs that housed the will of the Frostkin.
Hollow forms meant to resemble their heroes and fallen, to show anyone crossing by the hands of whom this path had been earned. The largest of them waited at the entrance on the right—Haldrin.
On the left, a smaller carving waited, human-sized, almost modest beside the giant forms. It showed a cloaked figure not wearing its hood, a human rather than Frostkin. Me, not as I truly was, but as I preferred to be remembered, not the abomination the Abyss created.
I had not asked for that statue, nor shaped it myself. Yet they placed it there anyway. In their eyes, I belonged among their heroes and their dead, as surely as if I had been carved from the same ice.
When the bridge loomed close enough to shadow the road ahead, the chainrunners slowed on instinct. Their eyes took in the broken edges of the district, the enormous void where District 3 had once been.
Reluctance spread through the lines, a clear fear of the unknown. They could see only so far, and none of them could see the end of the bridge.
“You weren’t lying,” Cairen said. Then, quieter, as if speaking too loudly might wake something below, “District 3 is… truly a hole in the ground.”
Gustav stared across the gap, jaw tight. Then he looked at me. “Do you know what did this? Captain Lirien didn’t mention any of this when she came back.”
“Yes. A God,” I replied.
The chainrunners turned toward us, taken aback by my statement. Cedric, who wasn’t far, came closer. “A God? Do they really exist?” he asked.
The Great Ward had sheltered Araksiun for so long that gods had become something like superstition, half-forgotten, half-dismissed. Even old legends barely mentioned them, with few naming them directly. So their disbelief didn’t surprise me, despite my warning to them that we might encounter such beings in this run.
But here, with this impossible wound in the earth in front of them, disbelief weakened. District 3 didn’t look destroyed. It looked as if it had been removed, as if someone had reached down, grabbed a piece of the world, and torn it away.
“Yes,” I said. “They wander the city now. And their power makes crimson beasts look harmless by comparison.”
What they did not know was that I had become one of them.
Gustav’s eyes stayed on the Abyss as he asked, “Any chance we face that… God?”
“No. That God is dead,” I told them honestly.
“I thought gods don’t die,” Cairen said, frowning as if the idea offended him for some reason. “Aren’t they supposed to be all-mighty?”
The others didn’t argue. Their silence took Cairen’s side.
“There is always something worse lurking in the fog, and everyone dies eventually. Even gods.” Without noticing, I had repeated a statement I heard long ago, from a time in which I had no mana of my own.
At that time, I didn’t know that I was in the presence of a God. He was the one to tell me what I just said wasn’t the whole truth, the one to tell me that I couldn’t die.
At the time, I barely gave it a second thought. The long sleep mended wounds that should have ended me, but I never truly believed myself immortal. I assumed it was another of those half-truths.
When I became a God, that illusion shattered. It was not a half-truth. It was a law that simply did not apply to me. And that realization haunted me more than any wound ever had. From the very first moment I opened my eyes in the fog, I had been exempt from a rule that even Gods couldn’t disobey.
Sometimes I wondered if it was a punishment for a sin I no longer remembered. To be bound to walk those lands without an end, to outlast the districts and the wards, perhaps even the beasts that lurked in the fog.
Because of that, I couldn’t allow the Great Ward to fall, to reach and preserve what protected this world from an ending was my only path. Anything else would mean wandering an ended world, forever alone.
The chainrunners on their part dreamed of the day they would reconnect with the other districts, no longer cast aside. To become part of the long line of districts as they once had been.
And it wasn’t only pride. Machines were failing across the districts, one after another, because the lower districts produced the materials we no longer had. Without reconnection, it was only a matter of time before even Great Araksiun’s districts began to rust and collapse.
So, despite our fear, we pushed forward, following Rogara’s lead as she stepped onto the bridge with her horse.
As they crossed, their eyes drifted to the human-sized statue near the entrance. Then they drifted to me. Fingers rose. Whispers moved through the lines. They saw the resemblance and they knew it wasn’t a coincidence.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
When we returned, they would demand answers. No more omissions, no more convenient silences. They would ask why this bridge, of all things, was made of ice, and why a statue wore my shape. But not now. Not with the Abyss under our feet, waiting for a single careless glance, a single misplaced step.
“Move, maggots. This is only District 3,” Gustav bellowed. “Now is not the time to slow down.” He shoved the formation forward with sheer force of voice, already angling to ride up and take the front beside Rogara.
“Don’t,” Cairen said, stopping him.
He shouldn’t. Perhaps it was Bloodreaver feeding his thirst for blood. In any case, they would switch with Rogara soon, but not yet, not here.
Rogara was the right spearpoint for this crossing. The bridge was a corridor of threats, with beasts that surged from the fog and things that climbed from the Abyss below and she had the power to answer both.
The first wave poured out of the fog like a tearing seam in the world. They came with the blind drive to purge corruption, shrieking hard enough to make the ice vibrate beneath our mounts. Yet the bridge held—solid, indifferent—while the beasts threw themselves at us.
Their claws scraped at the carved surfaces as they swarmed. A statue near the edge took a blow, a shoulder cracking free with a sound like splitting glass.
Among the swarm moved a crimson, smaller, less imposing than the first we had faced, yet unmistakably Abyss-born. It carried the same sensation that those who once followed Sjakthar did.
Rogara didn’t waver. She drew mana from me, broke formation, and surged forward. Both hands rose. White flame answered, bright enough to stain the ice with pale light. For a heartbeat, it looked like she would carve straight through the wave, then she snapped her aim left.
Then she swept right. The flames were not meant to kill, but to push. Force with heat, creating momentum enough to break footing.
Beasts shrieked as their legs skidded on ice, bodies colliding, balance stolen. One after another, they spilled over the open edges, dropping into the Abyss.
Even the crimson at the front was beaten before it fully realized what was happening. Bested by an onyx in a way it would never forget.
“Great, she can sweep the entire bridge,” Artemis said dryly.
The others nodded in approval, awed by her display. No one else could do what she was doing on the bridge, and her efficient handling of the beasts there made her the clearest way to pierce through them and force a path forward.
However mighty her magic was, the path through District 3 was long. Without the Via Appia to shorten it, this stretch was by far the longest, and again and again, Rogara had to come back to me for mana.
Besides, our passage did not go unnoticed by those who lived down below.
The City of Ice had become the deadliest domain within the Abyss, but it was still only one among many. Once the others united under the single goal of purging corruption, even our territory was challenged.
Far beneath us, Frostkin fought to hold their ground and stop the most ancient horrors of Araksiun from climbing, but there were too many.
I widened my senses, spreading my will across the entire battlefield at once.
My body stood still on the bridge, but my will moved elsewhere. It climbed into the sky where winged horrors were cut down mid-flight, and it sank into the depths where Frostkin and ancient monsters tore at one another in the dark.
From above, beasts fell like rain, some crashing onto the ice bridge, most disappearing into the Abyss, where still more waited to receive them.
I hoped we would cross before the horrors reached the surface. Still, their attacks began to reach us from far below. Their shrieks rose in unison and the bridge trembled; the cables thrummed, strained.
Cracks spidered across the bridge’s surface, and I had no choice but to answer with the mist of the City of Ice. I called upon its domain power in a way I had hoped to avoid, fearing harm to the humans, even with the bridge shielding them.
Thrum.
A deep, rhythmic pulse rose from the Deep Abyss, like the beat of a heart buried beneath the world. With each thrum, waves of frost were exhaled across the Deep Abyss.
Thrum.
Frost expanded outward, reaching the Frostkin fighting near the mist.
Thrum.
Even the most distant domains were not spared, as the cold spread across the Deep Abyss, turning any beast there below crimson into lifeless ice.
Thrum.
Horrors began to stiffen, their movements dragging, breath turning to pale fog beneath the crushing cold.
Thrum.
Frost reached the Abyss wall where beasts were climbing, the same place where many Frostkin had already perished trying to stop them, and where even more of them were still locked in battle, cutting and dying far from the mist as they struggled to hold them back.
Thrum.
The stone turned slick and treacherous, offering no purchase as ice claimed it. The climbers lost traction, lost momentum, slid back into one another. Frostkin, even those far from the mist itself, were empowered by the domain and surged into the slipping mass, slashing and cutting many of them down as the pulse took their footing away.
At each pulse, it was as if the entirety of the mist covered the Deep Abyss for a moment, giving me the vision I lacked of what happened below. My senses expanded further and further as I halted their advance.
But it came too late. The bridge was already shuddering, its cables singing under strain. Riders lost their footing, mounts skidded, and bodies slammed down onto the ice in a chaos of falling riders.
Two wagons snapped wheels at the same time, and statues along the path cracked, toppled, and fell into the dark.
“Hooooold!” Gustav roared, but before the run could fully halt, Harold and three other riders lost footing with their mounts and slid off into the void.
The Abyss was about to claim their lives, and they knew it as they screamed for help. Those around tried to reach for them. Gorin, who had also fallen from his horse, lunged for Harold, boots skidding on the ice, almost pitching over the edge himself—then he froze, staring blankly as Harold slipped beyond his reach.
My senses were stretched across too many fronts. I caught it a second too late, but I acted, tearing tendrils of ice from the bridge and driving them downward. They extended farther and farther, chasing the falling riders. Yet the men were gaining speed too quickly, the void pulling them faster with every breath.
Corruption from the dense fog began to spread through them, swift and hungry. A few more moments and they would rise as abominations of the Grey. I would not allow it. Not here, not from my failure to catch them in time.
The tendrils surged faster. With one last brutal spur of will, I forced them down so hard I barely had time to temper their speed before contact.
Even in the dark, they saw it: pale lengths of ice reaching for them. They stretched their arms toward it, frantic, fingers grasping air. Then the tendrils reached them—gently, deliberately—circling their waists and tightening just enough to hold. All four riders were caught.
Their mounts fell faster due to their weight and were lost to the Abyss.
“Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Omen,” Harold said, breath shaking, a smile breaking across his face. A true smile, pure relief after facing death so closely. “I knew you wouldn’t let us die. I won’t forg—”
Thrum.
Before he could finish, the pulse of ice came again. Frost crept forward, and with it came the cold.
It was no ordinary cold. It was the antithesis of life. Whatever it touched lost its spark, lost its motion, lost the thing that made it alive, and became only a solid fragment of what it once was.
Without the bridge to shield them, and with them hanging so close to the Deep Abyss, the pulse struck them directly.
It was a… painless death, too fast for them to notice it before it happened.
In the space where four men had been, there were four silent statues of ice. Their rhythmic, beating pulse of life was stolen by my own, coming from the mist.
Dazed as I was, the fight wasn’t over, and Gustav’s shout snapped me back to the living.
“Move. Fix the wheels, NOW!” Gustav snapped. He dismounted in one motion, reached into his storage ring, and brought out spare wheels he had prepared for such a moment.
Rogara held the front, blasting anything that came near, keeping the edges relatively clear. But the pause gave the rear beasts time to catch up. In those few seconds of stillness, too many onyx beasts reached us at once, and the back lines began to buckle.
On both ends of the bridge, all they could see was fog, giving no sense of progress or how much remained, even if they decided to turn back and retreat. Despair began to show, and the formation started to fracture under doubt.
“We need to reinforce the back line,” Cairen said. He and Artemis reached it in moments, with Gustav following shortly after.
No one planned for a halt on the bridge itself.
Down below, monstrosities began to climb, breaching through Frostkin lines, stepping over ice corpses as they rose to purge corruption.
“Let them come,” the Grey murmured, low and intimate, as if spoken right against the ear. “Let them try.”
The sound wasn’t loud, but it struck minds like a hammer. Those chainrunners far too close to me dropped to their knees, hands slack, faces pale.
The horses felt it too. Their bodies tensed and shuddered under the Grey’s pressure, hooves scrabbling on the slick path. A few riders lost their seats and hit the ice with ugly thuds, more startled than injured, but suddenly very aware of how close the edge really was.
“Silence,” I said aloud, before the Grey intrusion could strengthen.
I couldn’t be certain, but it felt as if the Grey was trying to draw abominations out of the chainrunners to face what was climbing from below.
It made me angry, but this wasn’t the time for it.
“Prepare the cannons!” Cedric bellowed. He had no authority, but with Gustav out of sight, the chainrunners on the wagons began preparing to fire.
“No, stop. Don’t you dare shatter the bridge we all stand on.” I shouted, some of my anger slipping into my voice.
The cannon crews froze mid-motion. A few stared at me as if they didn’t know whether I was ordering them or threatening them. It wasn’t how I wanted to be heard, but it worked.
“One wheel fixed!” Gorin shouted for everyone to hear.
Good. Just one more.
I divided myself across three fronts: sky, rear, and the dark below. Ice spears answered my will in quick succession, beasts bursting as they were struck, but it mattered little, because for each one we killed, two more took their place.
In motion, we could outrun the swarm, but during a halt, there was simply no way to end them all.
For a few moments, I considered abandoning the cannons, and I knew Gustav considered it too. But we were too early in the run to abandon our most advanced weapons against the beasts that would surely come for us.
As dire as the situation was in the back line, the front line was no better.
Rogara pushed herself past what a mortal vessel should endure. Veins rose at her temple. Blood ran from her nose, then from her eyes and ears. Even then, she turned back toward me within our connection, voice shaking. “Just a little more mana,” she whispered. “Just… a little more.”
When it seemed all was lost, a presence could be felt on the far side of the bridge. One whose mere movements, miles away, made the bridge shake.
It was Haldrin, risen from the City of Ice to the surface.