CHAPTER 130
Frostless
By the third night in the Ghost District, two more duos had vanished.
Fear started to seep into whispers. People started to fear leaving the manor or exploring the district unless they were heavily accompanied. Even trips through the manor itself were done in pairs now, and those pairs tended to drift toward whatever cluster of people was largest.
Nobody said anything about it openly. They just stopped going anywhere alone.
Yet that same night, something rather strange happened.
Marie and Mathew returned.
Twice.
Two Maries and two Mathews walked through the manor door within the same hour, each greeting the stunned chainrunners at the entrance with the casual relief of someone coming home after a long day.
They had the same tired eyes and the same story on their lips, and neither pair had any idea the other existed until the faces staring back at them made that impossible to ignore.
None of them was aware they had been missing for two whole days. For them, this was still the first day.
They were locked in separate rooms with guards at the doors, while those who mattered gathered down the hall to decide what to do with them. The rest of the chainrunners didn't sleep. They sat in the corridors with torches and weapons and waited.
The manor felt smaller than it had the night before.
“Those are doppelgangers, I know it, clear as day,” Cedric said to a room full of sleep-deprived people.
The light of the candles burned low in the large hall, casting large shadows of those who sat and even larger ones of those who stood by the table at the center. Drawings of maps from the district were scattered all around, separating the district into zones and marking the ones that had already been fully searched.
“And how exactly do you know that?” Gustav stood at once, facing Cedric, who also stood across the table.
I couldn’t tell what Cedric’s play was there. Maybe he was still trying to gather power in this run. Maybe he thought the same way Cairen took leadership, he could as well.
Cedric wasn’t a man who liked to follow. His father and all those before him in his lineage were the ones who led. Now he stood here, the first from his family without any status or command, just a regular chainrunner as any other, but somehow people would still listen and follow due to his family’s influence in the past.
Gustav wasn’t in a much better situation. I could hear, even if only faintly, whispers from Bloodreaver reaching his ears.
The slightest anger, the increase in Gustav’s heartbeat seemed to be enough for it to start whispering.
I could understand his pain, for I had long also dealt with ancient wills influencing me, though mine were many and his was only the will resting in the weapon. Still, I feared how long Gustav’s mind would last and feared even more him becoming a danger to those near him.
Deep down, I knew Gustav feared the same.
“I’ve read about it before, in the old texts. But it doesn’t surprise me that you don’t know, you probably haven’t read a book in your entire life,” Cedric spat.
“Enough.” Cairen raised his hand. He sat at the center of the table, his composure still noble, still showing he had everything under control. Though his rapidly beating heart betrayed that confidence, fortunately, I was the only one in the hall who could hear it.
“As far as we know, those are four humans, chainrunners, your comrades that risked their lives by your side.” Cairen continued once the silence had settled upon the room. He could tell everyone feared having them around, but he wasn’t willing to give the execution order.
As he looked upon the room, he didn’t find much support there. To keep those four alive, he would need to convince them, or else Cedric might truly take command from him.
This far away from actual civilization, power flows to whoever people choose to follow, and it can change hands often.
“What we do know is that doppelgangers, if they exist at all, haven’t been seen since before the fog. Everything we have on them is old and secondhand, probably wrong in half the details. Killing four chainrunners based on a child’s tale isn’t something I’m willing to do. They are still humans, and we will not kill our own.”
“Like hell they are.” Cedric hit his hand hard on the table, interrupting Cairen. “Those things we locked not far from us are beasts. They killed our comrades, took their faces, and now they’re here to kill us as well.”
Unfortunately for Cairen, Cedric was as good at commanding a room, if not better. He spoke to each and every person in the hall, his eyes scanning for support and finding more than enough, until they landed on me.
There, he stopped.
“You’d know, wouldn’t you, Omen. You, who have seen all types of beasts. Are those monsters wearing our comrades’ faces?”
Cedric didn’t give me time to reply; instead, he turned to Cairen, “he should be the one to tell us whether we should kill them or not, so I will abide by his decision and his decision alone.”
The entire hall turned toward me. I had not been at the table where the command stood. I had been standing near the wall in one of the corners of the hall, and most people hadn’t even registered that I was there.
This struggle for command didn’t interest me. Honestly, the whole discussion seemed a waste of time. I doubted anyone would go through with executing four people who had fought by their side on suspicion alone. Not even Cedric would go through with it.
Or at least I hoped he wouldn’t. Maybe if that was the price to win command, then he might.
But I had to consider it seriously for a moment. Doppelgangers were supposed to be masters of deception. They take the forms of their prey, their voices, and even some of their memories.
However, not even I had seen such a beast, nor did I think such a tactic would survive long within the fog where raw power dominates. I didn’t doubt such beasts existed somewhere, but not here, not in this city. And even if they did, I didn’t think they could hide their cores.
“They’re human,” I said. “All four of them. They have no cores, and every part within them is human. Whatever a doppelganger is supposed to be, those aren’t it.”
It was strange to see the room shift so quickly over mere words, but people seemed to trust my word more than I expected. Even Cedric, upon hearing it, remained silent.
Cairen’s expression didn’t change, but some of the tension left his shoulders, and I could hear his heartbeat slow. It seemed not even he had been entirely sure. “Are you certain?” he asked.
“Yes. Though I have no explanation for why there are two of each of them,” I added.
That last part wasn’t entirely true. I had something, not an answer, but a direction.
I now knew this wasn’t the elf. Whatever was happening in the Ghost District, it had nothing to do with shadows. This was something else, some other claim from another God. It had to be.
Artemis had clearly had enough. “We should release them. Questioning them further is pointless. Their stories match because they’re telling the truth, and that’s all. There’s nothing more to get from keeping them locked up.” She looked at Cairen. “Besides, this whole search is pointless. If there were still people here, we would have found them by now. We are losing precious time.”
“So what should we do now? Go to the next district and ask them what happened. What if the people there are gone too?” Cedric asked.
“Not yet.” Cairen pressed two fingers against his temple. “We came here for resources. We didn’t find what we hoped for, but the district is intact. The stores are full. The facilities are still usable.”
Artemis nodded, as did many around. Cedric didn’t seem pleased. “Are you suggesting we pillage?”
Cairen paused for a moment. “Indeed, I am. This district is abandoned. We shouldn’t let what they had go to waste. We should end the search and begin collecting what we need. Not only that, we could fire up some facilities and produce more. Gorin,” he said, looking across the room to where Gorin stood, “take a dozen chainrunners and find out what we can produce here on short notice.”
Gorin nodded. “Understood, but what about the others who vanished?”
“I hope they return before we leave,” Cairen said.
***
Nobody wanted to stay in the Ghost District any longer than they needed, so the pillage started the very next day.
I joined the work myself. Structures were torn apart, metals melted down, and cast into ingots. Batteries were carefully dismantled into smaller components that could be rebuilt later. Anything of value that could be broken down and carried was broken down and carried.
By the sixth day, certain facilities had begun producing again. Raw materials could be refined into something more compact, easier to store in the storage ring, and far more useful once we returned to New Araksiun.
But there wasn’t enough manpower to run most of the facilities. Even with every chainrunner working in shifts, we barely had the hands to keep two running at once, and there were over a dozen worth salvaging.
So I turned my attention to something else, to my claim—the act of creation.
I summoned ice into my hands, felt the frost gather around me, and even felt the sky shifting above. The already grey clouds thickened further as snow began to fall upon the district.
I hadn’t called upon it, just like any other claim, mine also had side effects on the world around me.
Rogara stood not far from me, her eyes burning bright with fascination upon witnessing my claim. So did others who had never had a chance to see me working within my closed workshop.
I cherished such visitors, for most of them saw me only as a bestial hunter, a being of death, not of life. So I didn’t mind as the people gathered.
Round lumps of ice floated in front of me, only a few at first, but they quickly became hundreds, taking over the road for at least a mile.
I walked among them for a while, inspecting the size of each one. Then I stopped in front of one, raised my hands, and started cutting the ice apart. Like a sculptor working from a block of stone, the round lump quickly began taking form beneath my hands, yet that form was far from precise.
I worked fast, shaping a being not much taller than the average human that used to run these facilities.
The first one to rise and open its eyes drew a breath brought forward by new life, not one from the Grey.
It raised its arms, clunky and slow due to the lack of proper ligaments, and despite having a mind behind those eyes, it was thin and dull, with little purpose of its own. Only a will to obey.
The chainrunners seemed wary of it, but they had seen the Frostkin fight for them. They wouldn’t fear what I brought forward.
“A worker. For the facilities and refineries,” I announced loudly.
Some cheered, some shouted in approval, and others simply grew more wary. Regardless, none felt inclined to approach a street filled with so many floating lumps of ice.
Many more rose just like that one. Fifty, then a hundred, then more.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Each Frostkin vessel took such a long time to form, even under my hands or those of one of the sculptors, for the intricacies hiding beneath the ice were immense. The many muscles and organs working together to pump mana efficiently across their bodies. But above all, a vessel had to be capable of enduring a highly developed will.
These were crude creations, not worthy of the Frostkin name, and so I called them Frostless, wrought into existence by necessity alone and never to be loved by their creator.
I sent the Frostless across the district as bait, using my connection to them to see the moment they vanished. If the danger hiding in the Ghost District would take them the way it had taken the chainrunners, then at least I would be watching through their eyes when it happened.
They did vanish. And I saw nothing. No flash of light, no trace of mana, no warning. One moment, the connection was there, and the next it simply wasn’t, as if someone had snipped a thread I couldn’t see.
Still, through repetition, I realized they always vanished in the same spots. So I sent even more Frostless to walk across the district, and each time one of them vanished, I marked that area on the map as dangerous and warned the chainrunners to avoid it at all costs.
The Frostless were expendable beings. They marched to their deaths aware of it, but they did so because their purpose was to obey, to follow.
The chainrunners guided them across the facilities, told them what to do, and they did it. Many hundreds of them were needed to power the facilities across the Ghost District.
Working day and night without any rest.
As expected, it didn’t take long for some of them to break down.
Artemis, Gorin, and a few other chainrunners came to me one morning. In a cart behind them, four of the Frostless sat. Alive, but lacking movement in certain limbs that had cracked under the strain.
“We found these four stuck in the battery facility,” Gorin said as the chainrunners brought them forward. “Couldn’t move on their own anymore.”
“Why did you bring them to me?” I asked.
Gorin seemed confused by the question, as were the others. None of them seemed sure of what to say.
Artemis stepped forward. “For you to heal them, of course. They worked hard and deserve to be treated for their injuries.”
What pulled the cart were two glacier steeds, great creations I had made, which I would fix any day if they broke. The Frostless, however, were far simpler. It was easier to discard them and make new ones than to repair them.
I raised my hands above the four Frostless, and the ice within them started to vibrate. Their forms began to shrink, cracking and thinning until their solid bodies were no more. They dissolved into a pale mist that the wind quickly carried away.
The chainrunners stared. Some took a step back. Others looked at the empty cart as though expecting the four to somehow still be there.
Human compassion toward life might actually be stronger than I realized. For them to feel worried over such expendable beings that had only just been born.
“There’s no need to bring them all the way to me,” I explained, hoping they wouldn’t do this each time a Frostless broke down. “You can simply push them aside, and they will die on their own.”
“That’s it then? That’s their reward?” Artemis questioned me where nobody else had the guts for it. They all disagreed with me, I could tell, but she was the only one to say it aloud. “You push them hard enough to break down and then discard them?”
“That’s their purpose. But worry not, tell the battery facility that sixteen more Frostless will join them soon.”
Artemis looked at me and deep down I knew she was thinking of punching me.
Had I been too harsh on the Frostless? I made new life all the time. Sometimes it lasted merely seconds. So what could possibly be wrong with this?
Maybe the purpose I gave them was wrong? No, that couldn’t be it...
***
“Master, are you alright?” Rogara asked, while we watched more than fifty Frostless run an entire facility with only four chainrunners guiding them.
“Just a bit worried. Trying to watch everyone at all times is quite tiring,” I replied honestly.
“So... don’t do it.”
I’ve always admired the simplicity in Rogara. She came from an orc city where her entire life’s purpose, as was anyone else’s there, was to become a Baruk.
Yet she left her city, her own world in the Abyss, joined the human civilization and their ranks of chainrunners, and still, somehow, never lost her simple way of seeing things.
Always only one thing ahead. Always confident in that one thing and always fully dedicated to it. If her task was to kill, she killed. If her task was to defend, she defended. Worry about other things found no place in her mind.
I envied her in that.
“I need to keep watching in case the enemy still hides.”
“But you know we’re alone in this district. Nobody hides,” Rogara stated, confused by my worry.
Through our connection, I think she could sense how divided I was. How I was present in one place but barely there at all, stretched across the entire district, merely trying to keep anyone else from vanishing.
Fourteen chainrunners had vanished by the time I managed to map the dangerous spots. Only Marie and Mathew had returned. The rest were simply gone. And I knew I hadn’t mapped the danger completely.
“You know how we knew Sjakthar’s power while in the Abyss?” Rogara continued, her eyes shining white. “How did we know he was real and a true God?”
“No.”
“When he took control over what you call Warlocks, his passage would often leave traces. The earth around us would behave strangely. Sometimes the ground would open up, swallow someone, and then close almost instantly. We knew to avoid the land he walked upon because it would always be full of danger. We merely watched from a distance.”
“That’s what you think this is? Traces left by another God?”
“Yes,” Rogara said. “A God has been here once, but is no longer here. Its passage through this district left a mark the land won’t easily forget.”
I honestly agreed with her. Just as my cold had left marks in the land where I battled Korrax, this could be the same. Pockets in reality where another God’s claim still lingered, strong enough to pull people out of existence.
But what would make them return doubled?
Even with the Frostless, I learned little. I watched many of them disappear with my own eyes, and there were no mana traces, no disturbances, nothing at all. They were walking one moment and the next, they simply weren’t. As if they had stepped into a pocket in space, invisible to anyone’s eyes.
Even mine.
Or perhaps... a pocket in time.
I attempted to use the Language of the World to bring them back, to press my will against reality, even to prophesy their return.
All in vain.
My will proved insufficient. All I could feel was the drain, followed by no change at all. Whatever held them was beyond my reach.
***
On the twenty-first day, one of my Frostless that had vanished returned.
But its design was not one I recognized.
It carried traces of my craftsmanship. My power over ice. Even the connection to me was intact. But the design wasn’t the same. The way the ice layered within it, the proportions, the structure of the joints. All subtly wrong.
It was effective. A design I could have built any day. Honestly, a touch more efficient than the one I had used, though the difference was almost none.
Yet it wasn’t the same. And I hadn’t changed it.
I disassembled the Frostless piece by piece, trying to find traces of who had altered my creation. I found none. It had never been altered.
It was as if this was the design I had always used for this particular Frostless.
But it wasn’t.
“Different path,” the Grey whispered, and their voice carried more influence over me than it should have.
That frightened me.
Could it be that my mind was slipping toward the Grey again? Had I depended on them so much that they found a way to breach their cage? Not through force, but by feeding my doubt until the walls cracked on their own?
On the twenty-second day, I started disassembling all of my Frostless. Every single one. I pulled them apart looking for flaws, for differences I might have made without noticing.
At all times, Rogara kept watch over me. Worry plain in her eyes.
“He’s gone mad. He stopped the assembly line out of nowhere and now he’s breaking them apart,” I heard Gustav say.
I didn’t care what they thought. I needed to know.
By the next day, I stood before a hundred of my broken creations in one of the courtyards of the Ghost District, dangerously close to many of the points I had marked as dangerous.
I had been careless in the disassembly. Their forms were too far gone to return to what they once were. Ice and purpose, scattered across the ground.
On my table sat the next of them, half broken. Its mind was far too thin to comprehend what was being done to it. Yet the life in its eyes was there as it looked at me.
For a moment, I felt something strange. Sadness, and a touch of guilt. I looked into its eyes and saw the same eyes I had once seen before, a long time ago, when I was still a starving child in the streets of District 98.
A street cat Meris and I had cared for was sick. One of the first lives I loved, and the first one I saw depart. The way it looked at me before the life faded from its eyes had brought a sorrow I had never felt before.
That same sorrow reached my heart as the connection between me and the Frostless on my table began to fade and at last, lost its light.
It had stood for one thing and one thing only for the entirety of the brief life I gave it. That same simplicity spared it from understanding the pointlessness of its end.
Not far from the broken bodies of countless Frostless stood a very long line. All of them, orderly, waiting for their execution. Their minds were simple, but they felt fear, even if they couldn’t understand enough of what had happened to their kin to know why.
Yet they obeyed, because that was the purpose I had infused into them—to obey.
I had not made workers. What I had made was an entire species of slaves.
It was strange how easily that had been achieved with my claim. I knew I should have felt guilty over it, and yet I didn’t. Not even a trace. All I could see was convenience.
Hundreds of them in a day. Enough to keep this empty district running indefinitely. Enough to reclaim the districts that had fallen to the fog. Enough, perhaps, to build a world where no human ever had to work again—to expand New Araksiun’s production tenfold, a hundredfold.
The Grey noticed my intent, and for once, it agreed with me.
“What is one district, when you have all of them back? To rebuild the entirety of Araksiun to its former glory.”
The realization that not all of my creations had to be perfect and that I could deny them free will so easily made me feel elated with the possibilities.
Yet that moment by Meris's side kept coming back to mind.
"What would Meris say?" I whispered to the winds, hoping they could bring me the answers I needed.
“A creator that doesn't value its creations is no creator at all.”
The winds weren’t the ones to answer me. Instead, it was a presence that had been hiding not far from me, watching the disassembly and thinking she was well hidden.
Artemis.
The only one brave enough to venture into such a dangerous part of the Ghost District, knowing danger that could lurk around any corner, invisible to her eyes.
I looked at her and let out a smile that quickly turned into a sick laugh.
Artemis looked at me as if I were mad, no different than the beasts out there. She wasn’t wrong to think so, and I knew her instincts were screaming at her to run.
But she didn’t.
“Indeed,” I said, only once I managed to stop laughing. “Meris would have said something like that.”
I then looked at the long line of Frostless, hundreds upon hundreds of them, waiting their turn at execution.
What a waste…
“Your next order is... never to obey again,” I announced.
I wondered what they would do. Would that conflicting order break their minds apart? Perhaps. I honestly couldn’t say.
If it were me, I would probably turn and face the one being who had enslaved me. Try to kill the chainrunners, or at least hurt them. They easily outnumbered us, so that was a real possibility if I didn’t defend them.
Instead, the Frostless stood stunned for long moments and then began to walk.
Together they walked, avoiding the dangerous areas and everyone else. They marched as a unit of unfinished beings toward the ward and then into the world beyond.
When they crossed into the fog, my connection to them dissipated entirely. I couldn’t feel them anymore, but I knew they were still out there, free of bonds of any kind, roaming the fog.
All I could think was that this was a huge waste. To hold back from using my claim to its full potential. But Meris wouldn’t have liked that, and that was reason enough for me.
“You have become quite wicked, you know that, don’t you?” Artemis asked once she saw the last of the Frostless leave the place where so many of them had been killed.
“Yes, I know. But no matter, I have enough samples here to find what I need,” I replied, no hint of emotion in my voice. “Do you need my help finding your way out of here safely?”
Artemis looked at me. That awe so often present in the chainrunners when they looked at me was not present in her. In its place was something else. Maybe true fear. I couldn’t tell.
“I can find my way on my own,” she said, then left.
Just to make sure, I followed her with my senses. She did find her way out safely. Then I turned to the many broken Frostless still scattered around me.
The more samples to investigate, the more information I could gather. I would have preferred to break them all apart, but since I gave them their freedom, I had to work with the ones I had already torn apart.
By the twenty-seventh day, I realized how far I had let myself fall. All of the Frostless I broke apart carried the same design I remembered. Every single one. Only the Frostless that returned after vanishing had been slightly different.
One.
I accepted that I could not find the answers I needed. I chose instead to focus on the task ahead, to keep things simple, the way Rogara would.
Thirty-seven days after our arrival at the Ghost District, everything we could produce on short notice had been done. The storage ring held multiple tons of precious resources, enough to keep New Araksiun running for the next generation.
Almost.
There were still resources we lacked, ones we hoped to find along the line of districts beyond District 11. And perhaps, somewhere along that line, traces of civilization.
And so, we departed for District 12.
By then, people were aware that no enemy remained within the Ghost District and that all that was were marks left by another God.
What I kept from them was that, with each step we took toward District 12, that influence grew stronger—enough for even me to feel it.
We were marching toward the source.