Chapter 129 – Fracture (2)
(Erynd)
It's me.
Again.
Different.
Clothes this time.
Winter gear, thick and heavy, fur-lined hood scratching at my neck, boots biting into powder that goes up to mid-calf. The cold is a knife against my cheeks, numbness creeping in under the wind.
And someone's shouting at me.
"Son! You done pissing yet?"
The voice is deep, roughened by wind and years. Local language, tongue I don't remember learning sitting perfectly in my ears.
I turn my head.
There's a man about thirty paces away, standing beside a huge wolf.
Not "dog that looks kind of wolfish."
A wolf.
Shoulder level with his chest, fur a dirty white streaked with grey, eyes pale, intelligent. Harness of leather and bone strapped tight around its chest and shoulders, reins looped loose in one gloved hand.
The man wears the same kind of clothing I do: fur coat stitched from hides, bone toggles, thick mittens, boots that disappear into the snow. His beard is short and frosted, his hair braided back tight to keep it out of the wind. Lines at the corners of his eyes from squinting into snow-glare for years.
I know his face.
But it's not my father from Earth.
Not the tired man at the kitchen table with the newspaper and the cold tea.
Not my "father" from the Viester household, the noble who looked at me like an asset he couldn't quite appraise.
This is someone else.
And every part of this body knows him.
"Yeah," I call back before I can stop myself. The word comes out easy, automatic, carried on breath that fogs in the air.
"Good." He jerks his chin to the side. "We're heading out. If we're late, the herd'll be picked clean and we're eating bone scrap for a month."
I stand there for a heartbeat, processing.
Snow.
Wolves.
Herd.
My breath doesn't fog right.
Too shallow.
Too quick.
Cold sinks into my bones.
Not just physical.
Mana.
I reach for it, tentative, like checking a limb after a break.
It's there this time.
Not rich.
Not dense.
A thin, steady hum, like a line of low-voltage wire running under the ice.
I reach for qi on top of that, habit stacking systems.
Nothing.
That familiar loop—from breath to bone to blood—is gone. Or blocked. Or never existed here.
System?
Silence.
Even the mocking blue text has abandoned me.
"Great," I mutter under my breath. "Partial functionality. Love that for us."
"What?" the man—my father, in this version—calls.
"Nothing," I say quickly. "Just… snow in my boots."
He snorts.
"That's how you know you're doing it right."
He swings up onto the wolf's back with the ease of long practice, one leg then the other, settling into a saddle that's mostly rawhide and stubbornness. He pats the wolf's neck, and it huffs, breath steaming.
I look down.
I'm straddling a wolf too.
When did that happen?
My hands are on the reins.
My legs are already in the stirrup loops.
Muscle memory is doing things on autopilot while my mind plays catch-up.
We're on a ridge.
Below us stretches an endless white plain, broken by ridges of ice, jagged outcroppings of blue-glass frozen water. The sky is a flawless, painful blue, the sun low but vicious. The glare off the snow is blinding.
It looks like morning, but here that might mean anything.
I squint.
The light punches right through my pupils and lodges behind my eyes like an ice pick.
"Gah—"
My father watches me, then sighs in that world-weary way that says he's had this conversation before.
"Boy," he says, "did you hit your head?"
"Maybe," I say.
He grunts, dismounts again, walks over. From his belt pouch he pulls… something.
A piece of carved bone, curved to fit the face, with narrow horizontal slits cut into it.
Snow glasses.
He fits his own pair onto his face first, the bone resting against his nose, tied around his head with leather.
Then he thrusts the other at me.
"Put them on," he says. "Unless you want to go blind by midday."
I fumble them on.
The world dims instantly.
The snow loses its murderous edge. The sun becomes tolerable.
It's… surprisingly effective.
I reach up, adjusting them, feeling the rough grain of the bone, the leather strap against my hair.
Modern, in a way.
Primitive, in another.
This world keeps stealing pieces from everywhere.
"Father," I say.
The word tastes strange and right at the same time.
He's already swinging back onto his wolf.
"Yes?" he says, not looking back yet, scanning the horizon like he expects something to crest it any second.
"What are we hunting?" I ask.
He pauses.
Turns to give me a look like he's trying to decide if I'm making fun of him.
"Boy," he says slowly, "did you hit your head?"
"You asked me that already," I point out.
"Then give me a different answer," he snaps. "You went out with the other lads last moon. You know what we hunt. We've been doing the same every year since you could sit a saddle."
I search the local memory.
Nothing comes up.
Blank.
My mind remembers forests and rivers and dinosaur screams. My body remembers wolves and cold and the shape of this man's shadow across snow.
The two sets of data don't overlap.
He watches me a second longer, then huffs out a breath.
"Fine," he says. "Be moon-addled. We're hunting shoggoths."
He says it like he's saying "elk" or "boar."
My hand tightens on the reins.
"Shoggoths," I repeat. "We're… hunting shoggoths."
"Yes," he says. "Unless you want to starve. We're not exactly wading in deer out here."
"Why?" I ask before I can help myself. "Why shoggoths?"
He blinks.
Looks genuinely confused, as if I'd asked why we breathe.
"We're eating it, of course," he says.
Of course.
He turns his wolf with a squeeze of his knees, starts down the ridge.
I stare at his back for a second, then at the bright, endless plain, the little puffs of vapor from wolf nostrils, the faint shapes way, way out there on the horizon that could be snow ridges or something else entirely.
Shoggoths.
Outer beings.
The things that clawed their way through wards and human minds in my last world.
Here… livestock.
Something about that sits very wrong in my gut.
I cluck my tongue, press my heels lightly.
The wolf under me moves.
Smooth.
Powerful.
I don't fall off.
Apparently, some part of this body actually knows what it's doing.
***
The sun is brutal.
Even with the bone goggles, the reflected light is a constant assault. The cold is worse.
Not the "coat and hot drink" kind of cold.
The kind that eats your hands from the inside.
Air so crisp it feels like it's cutting your lungs; a wind that slides through fur and cloth and skin and settles in the joints, promising future arthritis.
Every breath is a little pain.
Every exhalation a reminder that heat is finite.
We ride.
Wolves lope effortlessly over the snow, paws splaying just enough to stay on top instead of punching through. My thighs burn from the effort of staying balanced, my hips complaining in a way that says this isn't the first time this body's done this, just the first time my consciousness has bothered to notice.
Behind us, a faint trail of disturbed snow marks our passage. The wasteland stretches on.
Time becomes measured in tiny, practical things.
The rhythm of wolf breaths under me.
The way my father occasionally raises his head, nostrils flaring, eyes narrowing, then adjusts our path by a degree I wouldn't have noticed.
The sun inching along the sky.
The quiet.
After the jungle's endless noise, this world's soundscape is… sparse.
Wind.
The soft whuff of paws.
Leather creaking.
No birds.
No insects.
No trees groaning.
It's like the world's volume is turned down to three.
My mind, unhelpfully, fills the space with questions.
I have mana.
I can feel it.
Thin, yes, but present.
When I reach for it, it responds in a sluggish, obedient way, like a dog that's been asleep for hours but is willing to sit up if you insist.
There's no qi.
None.
No sense of life-force cycling through bone and marrow.
No System.
No Authority weight humming under my skin.
Just… me.
And whatever rules this world runs on.
"Father," I say after an hour of silence, my voice swallowed by the air.
He grunts.
"What?"
"How do we cast?" I ask. "Magic. The… words. The… shapes."
He gives me a look over his shoulder that says he's now upgraded my status from "hit his head" to "possibly cursed."
"The same way we've always cast," he says. "You breathe. You remember. You move. Stop talking like a city scholar. It makes my teeth itch."
"Right," I say. "Breathe. Remember. Move."
No circles.
No sigils.
No carefully aligned vectors.
No "Merlin said this is tier three and that's the cap for apprentices."
Just… breathe, remember, move.
I file that away.
Ahead, the horizon shifts.
Shapes rise.
At first they're just shadows in the glare, darker smudges on white.
As we get closer, they resolve.
Not mountains.
Too low.
Not ice ridges.
Too… fluid.
My palm starts to sweat inside the mitten.
***
They look like tumors someone fed after midnight.
A herd—
yes, a herd—
of black, glistening masses sprawled across the snow like someone dumped oil that refused to obey gravity.
Dozens of them, maybe more, spread over a wide valley between snow dunes, their bodies constantly reshaping. Tentacles push out, test the air, then get reabsorbed. Eyes open and close across their surfaces, blinking in asynchronous, unnerving patterns.
They pulse.
Slow.
Rhythmic.
Like breathing.
Or like the world's heartbeat has surfaced in the wrong place.
"Shoggoths," my father says, as if presenting deer at pasture.
The wolves slow.
They don't like this.
I can feel it in the way their shoulders tense, the way their ears go back. Their breath comes faster, not from exertion, but from that animal calculation of fight or flight when both options are bad.
"Don't worry," Father mutters, reaching down to pat his mount's neck. "We're upstream. Wind's in our favor."
Upstream.
The word feels wrong applied to air.
But then—
I feel it.
A breeze.
Cold, but consistent, moving from us toward the herd, carrying our scent away instead of toward them.
Smart.
Practical.
He's done this before.
So have I, apparently.
Just not with me in the driver's seat.
"How do we kill them?" I ask, keeping my voice low.
My father frowns at me.
"The usual way," he says. "You burn them. You know this. You beat this out of Karo the last time he almost got himself eaten."
Karo.
The name has weight.
Belonging to some childhood friend this body had that I never met.
The dissonance is getting loud.
He motions with his chin.
We dismount.
The wolves sit, haunches down in the snow, but their eyes never leave the herd. One growls low when a nearer shoggoth extrudes a pseudopod, the sound rumbling in its chest like distant thunder.
My father steps forward until he's maybe twenty paces from the nearest mass.
His breath plumes in the air.
He stands there for a moment.
Then he moves.
Not elaborate.
No grand gestures.
A breath, drawn deep, chest expanding under fur.
A word, too low for me to catch fully, more like a shape in the throat than a syllable.
His hands—
bare now, mittens dangling from cords at his wrists—
trace a simple pattern in the air.
The magic is…
Wrong.
Not in the "sacrilege" sense.
In the structural sense.
This isn't structured like Merlin's work. There's no tiered framework, no vector math, no channels.
It's raw.
Direct.
Like someone reaching into a fire and grabbing a handful instead of carefully building a stove.
Flame bursts from his hands.
Not a slow gathering.
Not a gradual ignition.
One moment there's nothing.
The next, there's a jet of fire roaring out toward the nearest shoggoth, blue-white at the core, orange at the edges, heat slamming into my face even from behind.
It doesn't come from mana I can see.
No core flares in his chest.
No external array lights.
It's as if he reached between the world's ribs and hauled a piece of its heart out.
The fire hits the shoggoth.
It screams.
Not with a mouth.
With every part of itself.
The sound is inside my head and outside my ears, a grinding, bubbling howl that makes my teeth ache.
The surface of the thing writhes, boils, bubbles. Eyes swell and burst, spilling black goo that hisses as it hits snow. The mass shrinks, thrashing, throwing pseudopods into the air that disintegrate before they land.
The smell is beyond foul.
Burning tar, spoiled fat, the reek of old, rotten meat boiled alive.
I swallow hard.
My father holds the stream for a long count, then lets it cut off.
The shoggoth lies there, half its mass gone, the rest quivering, dark fluids already cooling into a congealed mess.
"See?" he pants, breath fogging. "Simple."
He wipes at his nose.
Blood.
Just a little.
He doesn't seem surprised.
He turns to me.
"Well?" he says. "What are you waiting for? Cast."
I stare at him.
At the herd.
At my own hands.
They're steady.
Too steady.
I step up beside him.
The shoggoths aren't entirely stupid. The rest of the herd is stirring now, pseudopods lifting, eyes pointing in our direction, that awful internal pressure building as they decide whether to flee or surge.
We have seconds.
"Breathe," my father says. "Remember. Move."
Right.
I reach for mana.
It comes.
Slowly.
Thicker than before.
Like the act of using it pulled more into me.
It answers like an old friend who hasn't called in years, wary but willing.
No circles.
No tier labels.
I build a vector out of habit anyway—
it's how my brain makes sense of it—
a direction, a push, a form.
Flame.
Not Vera Flamma.
That spell is built on equations and runes and Merlin's framework.
This is more primitive.
Less… civilized.
I picture a spear.
Then I get greedy.
Not one spear.
Many.
A cluster of them, fanning out from a single point, circling around each other like a school of hunting fish, ready to dart.
I breathe in.
The air burns my lungs.
I breathe out—
—and the world answers.
Fire erupts from my outstretched hand.
Not a jet.
Not a stream.
A spiral.
Spearheads of concentrated flame, each one the length of my arm, spear out from my palm in different directions, then hook inward, curving toward a central point over the herd.
It's… beautiful and horrifying at once.
The shoggoths shriek.
All of them.
The spiral slams down into the mass of them, spearheads punching into black flesh, burrowing deep before detonating.
Flame explodes outward in a ring.
For a moment, the valley is day inside day, snow turned to steam, shadows driven back.
When my vision clears, there's a crater.
A vast, blackened scoop in the field of white where dozens of shoggoths used to be.
What's left of them is a smoking, bubbling lake of something that isn't quite solid and isn't quite liquid, slowly cooling into ugly, twisted heaps.
The ones at the edges—those that escaped the direct blast—are fleeing now, rolling and oozing away over the snow, leaving trails of stinking residue.
I'm breathing hard.
Not because the spell was hard.
Because it wasn't.
My father is staring at me.
His goggles are pushed up onto his forehead, eyes wide, pupils pinpricks in the glare.
Slowly, he starts to laugh.
It's not… happy.
It's not horrified.
It's something in between.
Half pride, half fear.
"Ha," he says. "Ha! I knew it. I knew the elders were wrong. You have it."
"Have… what?" I manage.
He claps a gloved hand on my shoulder, hard enough to make the joints in my spine complain.
"Stronger than your grandfather," he says. "Stronger than any of us. You'll feed the village for a year."
He gestures at the carnage.
"We'll have to move fast," he says. "Before too much of it sinks. Come on. You know how quickly it grows back if you leave the meat too long."
He turns, already heading back to the wolves to fetch tools.
I stand there.
Looking at what I've done.
The crater.
The scorched snow.
The reek.
The twitching, charred lumps that used to be outer beings.
A dozen, two dozen—
more.
Dead.
Just like that.
"Too easy," I whisper.
Because that's what this is.
Too easy.
In my world, shoggoths were horror story fodder. Things you contained with circles and prayers and sacrifices, not livestock you roasted on spits.
Here, we hunt them.
We eat them.
And I can kill a herd in one cast without a core, without an array, without bleeding out my nose like my father did.
It sits wrong.
Like a puzzle piece jammed into the wrong spot.
My father is shouting something about hooks and sleds.
The wolves are barking now, high and excited, tails flicking.
The herd is still fleeing, those that can.
The snow, under the stink, smells clean.
I flex my hand.
Mana hums under my skin.
No System.
No Authority notification.
Just that image—
a spiral of flame,
and a thought I don't like:
Who built this world expecting me in it?