The seconds stretched as I stared the dog down, not wanting to kill it, unless it attacked me first. From somewhere deep within my throat came a growl, deeper than anything I had ever produced and I felt my lips curl into a snarl, willing the dog to give up and submit. I didn’t want to kill the furry critter, but if I had to, I would do so in a heartbeat.
Finally, the dog looked down, breaking eye-contact and slowly padding towards me, its tail hanging down, almost between its legs. It stopped about a metre away from me, clearly not intent on attacking, and plopped down on its belly, before starting to crawl towards me.
It was such an obvious show of submission that I mostly relaxed and sheathed one of my blades. Now, with one free hand, I squatted down, gently rubbing the dog’s head, realising that the fur was incredibly smooth and soft, giving me a wonderful, fluffy feeling, so unfitting to the bedraggled location that I had to stop, feeling around if there was a collar or something that indicated the dog came from some luxurious place.
By the time the checking and petting was done, I had found nothing that indicated such. Just a well-cared-for dog, with a simple collar and a need for scritches, nothing out of the ordinary. If one ignored that the Shattered in the room had obviously ignored the dog, while he had also been intelligent enough to try ambushing me. What that might mean, I had no idea.
After rubbing the dog’s belly again, she had rolled over at some point, with her tail starting to sweep the floor, I stood back up, planning to take another look around. As I did, the dog stood as well, moving over to the Shattered’s corpse, sniffing it a few times, before letting out a soft, mourning howl. It sounded so much like Ylva that my chest tightened for a second, a tear trickling from my eye.
For a moment, I wondered how my two friends had fared in Mundus, after I had kicked off the Fimbulwinter. I was confident that they would be able to thrive, even in an endless winter, but had the gods taken vengeance on them? They had accepted my plan for vengeance, had helped me to the best of their abilities, but what had they received for it?
I could only shake my head in wonder, asking myself why they had never even tried to convince me that kicking off the Apocalypse was a bad idea, even as I was deeply grateful for their loyalty and friendship.
But both of them were far away, or maybe even long away. There was that time-differential between Mundus and Earth, or maybe calling it Terra as the system announcement had made more sense. Either way, if one hour on Mundus was equal to thirty minutes on Terra, what did that mean for their physical relation? It was an impossible-to-answer question, there was simply not enough information known, let alone confirmed. I had only vague suspicions, not even knowing what I didn’t know.
And there were more important things to focus on, like the dog that was giving me the occasional glance, while mourning her lost master. Walking over, I remained somewhat cautious, even if my heart was telling me the dog wouldn’t attack me, my mind remained vigilant. The Shattered was, or rather, had been, most likely a homeless person, looking for shelter in the abandoned building. His clothes were old, with many mended rips and tears, more threads than fabric and while his body had been deeply changed by the Shattering, I could vaguely recognise some traces of hard living, badly healed scars, some blemishes and calluses, things like that. All of it, especially the metal, military tags still around his neck, could have told a tragic story but given the state of the world, I didn’t have the mental capacity to care. He had lived a hard life and now, we all would be living a hard life.
Shaking my head once again, trying to get rid of the cobwebs of exhaustion that were starting to wrap around my mind, I began dragging the body away. While I hadn’t made too many holes in it when killing it, the head was quite messed up by repeated strikes with a hard, frozen object and sharing my shelter with a corpse wasn’t going to happen. If I had more power, I would have simply destroyed the body but my magic was far from strong enough to get there. At some point, but for now, I could only drag the body off and shove them through the window, so I could drag it some more distance.
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When the dog managed to easily hop through the window, my lips curled into a grin, it was obvious that doggo had been living here for a while, especially when she quickly moved around the area, marking a couple of spots before returning to me. While she did that, I managed to drag her previous owner between a couple of old containers, leaving him there, somewhat hidden and sheltered.
It was amusing, I had killed over a dozen Shattered during the night, leaving them all lying where they died, but this one, I felt a little bad about my inability to give him a funeral. Maybe it was because his dog was grieving for him, the similarity to Ylva uncanny, despite the differences in their physical traits.
Shaking off the strange feeling, I made my way back into the building, the dog following along, after one last glance at her previous owner. Somehow, I could accept a dog behind me far easier than a human. At least the dog didn’t have hands, to hold the knife to backstab you with.
Inside, I began to explore the rest, making sure that there were no further enemies or other troubles, like the adorable furball that had decided to follow me around. That said furball was bigger, heavier and probably stronger than me didn’t change things in the slightest, it seemed that she had accepted I was the leader of the pack and she’d just follow along.
Either way, by the time the sun was rising outside, we had checked the rest of the building, finding nothing but a rather large, stinking area, complete with tissues and other traces that it had been the previous occupant's bathroom. That he used the interior of the building, while his dog had learned to take her business outside was mildly amusing, but there was only so much amusement I could have while next to a decently large puddle of… filth.
After managing to keep myself from being sick, I, shamefully, added to the mess, before retreating to the other side of the building, where I found the stuff the previous owner didn’t need any longer. Some clothes, some questionable foodstuff, a little money and some canine-care equipment. Amusingly, the stuff for the dog had the best quality, including the dog food I had found, it looked more appetizing than the human food.
Shaking my head once again, I took some distance and made my own camp, quietly watching the light outside get brighter and brighter, while the area I was in remained firmly in the shadows.
To distract myself from my upcoming experiment, I decided to take care of my hair. By now, it was nicely sparkling with the magic I could passively store within, intrinsically linking each hair to me, making them powerful tools for my magic - Or for others to use against me.
Sitting on the mat I had acquired before, I leaned against the wall, slowly brushing through my hair when a heavy weight plopped down on my lap. Looking at the furry monster that tried playing at being a lap dog, I could only smile, the fantastically fluffy fur managing to cleanse me of all my worries. What apocalypse, I had a furball with me, and no landlord to gripe about it.
Taking out one of the brushes I had found in the camp here, I began to gently brush her fur, making her wiggle in what I could only describe as canine glee. Her goofy actions managed to bring another grin to my face, as my mind slowly began to relax, coming down from the hyper-vigilance I had pushed myself into.
One slow breath after the other, the stress of the previous night was cresting within my mind, wave after wave battering against my self-control, as my hands started to shake and tears started to run down my cheeks.
My mind started to waver, between horror, spawned from the events of the night and the hardship that was sure to come in the future but also glee. How could I be elated when the world had literally been set alight, when countless people were dying and here I was, my heart filled with gleeful happiness?
Was I truly that self-centred that I could dance on a pile of corpses, happily laughing despite their demise, if it only meant I had a chance to reunite with Sigmir?
Reality was now answering the question I had never dared to ask myself in Mundus. The question, would I have taken the same vengeance, would I have willingly and knowingly tried to consign an entire world to the frosty hell that the Fimbulwinter was?
The answer was, quite horrifyingly, yes. It made me wonder, what would my mother have said about it. And at the same time, as I wondered, I realised that I wouldn’t have cared. If it was for my Sigmir, I would have sacrificed them, too.