Priscilla stalked back and forth inside Fortress Al-Mir’s temple chamber, shooting the occasional glare at one of the statues despite her lack of proper sight.
Arkk tried to ignore it. He wasn’t sure what she was upset about or even why she had come back to the fortress from Leda’s tower. She must have heard about the statue’s appearance and wanted to see it for herself, but she hadn’t said anything. Was she upset? The glares made it seem so but it was hard to tell with the ice covering part of her face. Her pacing, however, made her look more nervous than angry.
“Marvelous!” Yoho shouted into the room, performing a slow pirouette that made the bells dangling from his collar jingle.
Arkk turned away from the confusing dragonoid to meet the glowing red eyes of his skeletal guest. Priscilla wasn’t someone Arkk could focus on at the moment. Yoho wanted a tour of this side of the portal, so Arkk figured the temple was a good place as any to take him. They could head out above ground afterward.
“A temple thou hast dedicated to the full Pantheon? I haven’t seen such sights since I scrubbed the last sinew from my old bones,” Yoho said with such elation in his voice. Arkk could hardly imagine being that excited about a simple room, even if it was some magical gateway to the realm of the gods. “Thou art missing a few spots,” he said, stopping in front of one of the empty pedestals. “But thine earnest dedication nonetheless pierces my heart.”
“I have a theory that filling the empty pedestals will resolve the Calamity—or at least be one of the steps toward fixing it,” Arkk said slowly. “It is one of my long-term projects. Based on recent experience, it seems that I need either something of significant relation to a god or to connect to their realm via the portal. But I probably won’t do any more until my researchers finish their analysis of the Calamity and its effects on both this world and others.
“The magical toxicity of the Necropolis and the Underworld is something that cannot happen here,” Arkk finished.
“No. I concur,” Yoho said with a solemn nod of his head. “Such a diverse pool of life would be a tragedy to lose. Necrovale houses few warriors, but we doth possess vast knowledge. Shall I provide researchers who may be useful in thine task?”
Given what had happened to the Necropolis—all its living population had inevitably perished because of the overabundance of magic—Arkk wasn’t quite sure how useful those researchers would be. Still, he wasn’t in much of a position to decline. “That would be most welcome—”
“Oi,” Priscilla grunted. “Bonebag. You—”
Arkk teleported Priscilla out of the temple in an instant. He tossed her into a random corner of the fortress, somewhere deep and labyrinthine. Without teleportation of her own, she could very well take weeks to walk back into a populated section of Fortress Al-Mir. “I am so sorry for her,” he said, considering leaving her there for every one of those weeks as punishment.
“Thou hast such lively subjects,” Yoho said with a good-natured chuckle. He didn’t show even the mildest surprise at Priscilla’s sudden disappearance. “I take no offense. Allow thine lady to speak her question.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Arkk mumbled to himself. He wasn’t sure if Priscilla had an actual question or if she just wanted to insult someone. Priscilla didn’t exactly get along with anyone, even if she had taken Leda under her wing.
But, it was a request from his guest. Mentally preparing himself for whatever apologies he might have to give, Arkk teleported the now definitely angry Priscilla back into the temple room.
She promptly snarled, lunging toward Arkk. He didn’t even flinch. A second teleport put her back a few steps. A third teleport put her back a few steps more when she lunged a second time.
Warning bells from the [HEART] went off in the back of his mind. The sudden alarm made him tense. It was something he hadn’t felt very often. Only once or twice. Someone straining against the link. It wasn’t breaking. Probably only because Priscilla had her own experience with minions and contracts. She was deliberately pushing on it without breaking it.
“Can’t teleport me if I cut our bond,” she snarled.
A dozen of the shadowy scythes vanished from the armory. Arkk teleported them straight into the temple, burrowing them into the ground to keep them in place. They were positioned around Priscilla so that if she moved more than a hair in any direction, she would start losing limbs.
“No,” he said. “But if you want to fight me, probably best to do it outside my territory.”
The warning bells in the back of Arkk’s mind went silent as Priscilla showed off the sharp teeth in her mouth. It wasn’t quite a smile, but close enough.
“Sometimes,” she said, losing the tension in her arms, “you almost make me like you. Then I smell the human stench that hangs around you like a poisonous cloud.”
Arkk sighed, teleporting the scythes back to their places. “Have you cooled down now?”
“Funny,” she snapped.
Yoho certainly thought so. He clapped his bony hands together as he laughed. “Wonderful. Thine performance is truly a blessing from my Prince.”
“Huh?” Priscilla grunted, curling one side of her lip up as she turned her head to Arkk.
Arkk returned her confused look with a shrug that she probably couldn’t see.
“Perhaps Necrovale ought to bring back one of the old gladiatorial festivals…” Yoho mused to himself. “Though violence is detestable, a good sport isn’t.”
“Right,” Arkk said slowly, turning to Priscilla. “The First and Last Primeval Lord,” he strained the title, trying to hammer its importance into the obstinate dragonoid, “asked that you be allowed to speak the question you had before I threw you out of the temple.”
“Just Yoho, please,” the skeleton said in good nature.
“Yeah, whatever. You worship the Laughing Prince, right?” Priscilla said before jerking her thumb to the Prince’s statue. “Is that what he looks like?”
Yoho turned to the statue. A tall, thin man in a fine suit. The statue had a fleshy, humanoid face but his smile stretched from ear to ear, showing off far, far too many teeth. Looking at it almost hurt the eyes. Or the mind. There were more teeth than could possibly fit in the mouth.
“It is recognizable,” Yoho said after a long minute of staring. “But unfamiliar. The statues honoring the Skeletal Lord in the Necropolis tend to be more… skeletal. But who can say they know with any accuracy the true form of any god? Or, should a god wish it, why can they not alter their form on a whim and whimsy? And the Master of Ceremonies is a most whimsical god indeed.”
Arkk raised an eyebrow. Less at Yoho. What the skeleton said made sense enough. He was more confused with Priscilla. “Why do you ask?”
Priscilla gave him a glower. She couldn’t help but frown at that. It seemed she was still upset. Still, she looked to the draconic statue of the Permafrost, pointed a sharp claw in its direction, and said, “This is not the Permafrost.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“What? How is it not?”
“The Permafrost isn’t just a big dragon,” Priscilla snarled. “The Permafrost is a blustering storm. THEY are a frozen cap on a tall mountain. THEY are the chill down your spine when you realize the futility of your actions. THEY are the silence of a snow-covered forest, where every sound is swallowed by the icy stillness. The Permafrost is the relentless march of time, freezing moments into eternity. THEY are the embodiment of inevitability, the cold truth that no matter how much we struggle, some things are beyond our control.”
Arkk shivered, feeling some unnatural cool seeping into the room. He might have thought it was coming from Priscilla had he not been staring directly at her. She wasn’t the source of it.
His eyes slowly drifted over the statue. The icy sculpture was staring at him. Its cool blue eyes almost looked searching, like it expected something from him.
“That’s all well and good, Lady Dragon,” Yoho said with a tinge of amusement in the back of his throat. Not that he had a throat. “But how doth thou fashion a statue to embody a shiver down thy spine? I have beheld more spines than thou may care to imagine and yet remain unable to conjure an image of a statue of a chill.”
Just like that, whatever spell the statue had was broken. With one last breath of frost in the air, the room temperature felt normal. The statue instantly transitioned from staring at Arkk to staring at some vague point in the center of the room. Neither of his two companions seemed to notice the change. Or, if they did, they didn’t mention it.
Priscilla ground her teeth together, glowering at the skeleton for a long moment before snapping her head to Arkk. “You did something. You did this.”
Arkk let out one last breath, making sure that there wasn’t any frost misting in the air. “While I appreciate your opinion of my artistic capabilities, I can’t take credit. It did it itself.”
“Pray, tell me,” Yoho said, stepping closer to the draconic statue. “Were thy thoughts upon the young lady when the statue did manifest?”
“Young?” Priscilla said with a note of aggression in her tone. She opened her mouth. Arkk could hear the complaint before she actually said it. But, with a click of her tongue, she decided to remain silent, huffing slightly as she looked aside.
Perhaps she realized that the First and Last Primeval Lord might just be a little bit older than she was.
For his part, Arkk scratched at the back of his head, not quite sure how to answer. “Maybe. I don’t think it was deliberate, but Priscilla is my closest connection to the Permafrost.”
“Though hast the notion… Our inward preconceptions of the gods can alter our perception of them.”
Arkk raised an eyebrow. “Because I thought it might look like a dragon, it became a dragon?” He didn’t believe for a minute that he had that much power over a god.
“Well, no,” Yoho said with a small chuckle. “As I said, the gods manifest how they will. As for the Permafrost, it mayhap hearkened to thy desires and conformed to meet thy expectations. Why? To remove ambiguity? For the fun of it? Who can truly say their hearts know the intentions of higher beings?”
Based on everything he had heard about the Permafrost, Arkk doubted that fun was the reason. The Laughing Prince, maybe. The Fickle Wheel, maybe. But not the Permafrost.
A low growl interrupted his musings. He turned to find Priscilla hunched over low enough that she was practically on all fours. Her claws dug into the tiles.
“So it was you,” she said, turning her iced-over eyes to Arkk. Priscilla unfurled her wings like she was about to leap at him again, only to pause before Arkk could teleport her off into one of the dungeon cells.
Priscilla slowly stood upright, relaxing her claws and her wings, and looked at the draconic statue. As a dragonoid and one heavily attuned to ice magic at that, Priscilla wasn’t one to shiver.
So, when a terrible tremble wracked her body, Arkk grew imminently concerned.
He didn’t feel anything himself. That unnatural chill in the air from earlier had vanished entirely. The draconic statue was still sitting in its neutral pose, the same as it had been when it first appeared. It wasn’t even looking at Priscilla. Yet she stared directly at it.
Priscilla stumbled backward with a flinch like someone had struck her square in the face. One foot went back, but not so much to catch her. It was more of a reflex than anything. The momentum made her take another step, then another. She wasn’t even trying to fight it, not with the draconic might Arkk knew she possessed nor with her wings.
Another step and she would fall into the silvery pool of the temple. Already, her tail skimmed just above its surface. Seeing that snapped Arkk out of his confusion. He teleported her, picking her up and dropping her just behind him, making sure that he was between her and the draconic statue.
He couldn’t just teleport them all away. Yoho wasn’t his employee or prisoner and thus would be left alone and defenseless. The skeleton didn’t seem perturbed by the goings on. Yoho simply looked around, watching with that grin that he couldn’t get rid of.
Without moving through the intermediate space, the statue faced him. A rush of cold billowed out from it, sapping the warmth from his fingers, arms, and nose.
Arkk held his ground. A bright red light flooded over the temple, touching everything he could see.
“Leave her alone,” Arkk said, focusing all his ire on the statue. “She is my employee. I won’t take kindly to anyone trying to harm her or… take her back,” he said with a flick of his eyes to the silvery pool that connected to the realm of the gods. “Not even one of the Pantheon.”
“I’m not yours,” Priscilla whispered from behind him.
“My employee,” Arkk repeated.
Priscilla let out a growl, but she didn’t protest again. Nor did she try to move out from behind him. He could feel her, hovering close to his shoulder. But he didn’t feel her blind gaze on him. A quick check through the employee link showed her head fully turned toward the statue once again. He saw her nod her head.
The cold stopped. The statue stared off into the distance. The temple switched from imposing and unnatural to business as usual in the blink of an eye.
Priscilla dropped to her knees, panting and… sweating? Arkk hadn’t known that dragonoids could sweat.
Or was that condensation that hadn’t yet frozen on her icy scales?
“Are you okay?” he asked, kneeling down at her side and gently resting a hand on her shoulder.
He quickly pulled back when she turned a glare at him. She didn’t bite or snap at him.
She let out a long, sorry sigh. “The Heart I once held belonged to the Permafrost, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. THEY aren’t happy that I broke it. I have some amends to make, it seems.”
“Amends?”
Priscilla’s claws gripped the tiles of the temple floor, not doing quite as much damage as she would have done were it not for the magical reinforcement of the fortress. Shallow scars still marred the tile when she moved her hands away. Arkk was going to have to get one of the lesser servants in here to repair all the damage she had caused today. Not that it was a big deal. It was just a few gold coins worth of scars.
He waited, letting her speak at her own pace. If she even wanted to at all.
Her wings spread wide. The clawed ends dug into the tiles as she used them to push herself upright. He stared at the newest marks on the floor, wondering if he should actually start charging her.
“Amends,” she repeated, drawing Arkk’s eyes up to the ice over her face. “I’ll need your help. But later. If you would relocate me to my room, it might give me a higher opinion of you.”
“Alright. Whenever you’re ready, feel free to come to me,” he said. He waited another moment, just in case she had something else to say, and finally teleported her off to her quarters when she didn’t.
Arkk turned back to the draconic statue, glaring at it for a moment.
It sat there, staring without movement or change in temperature.
Letting out a short breath as he scanned the rest of the temple—it would be just his luck for something else to have changed—Arkk ended with a wan smile to Yoho. “Sorry about that,” he said, earning a hearty chuckle from the skeleton.
“Verily, what a lively temple this is,” Yoho said, clasping his hands together. “I have not beheld aught of its like since ere I did resurrect myself. Though art most blessed, art thou not, Mister Arkk?”
“Blessed? Hah. Or cursed?”
“Nonsense. Activity in the Pantheon. What an age to be undead,” Yoho said with a shake of his head. “Praise the Laughter.”
Arkk looked at the thin figure of the Laughing Prince. “He ever talk to you?” Arkk asked.
“Talk? No. Not since granting the final gift of undeath to those who recently departed His realm oh so many years ago now. Yet I still feel the honor of His Smile upon all our festivities.”
“I see,” Arkk said, not sure that he saw at all.
Certainly, the Abbey preached that the rays of the sun were the Light itself shining down on them. But, even including that, he wasn’t sure that he had ever felt the presence of any god. Outside the obvious interactions, that was. His encounter with Xel’atriss, the gift from the Laughing Prince, and the letter from the statue of the Holy Light were interactions. It was the distant observations that the Abbey preached of that he had never really experienced.
With his intentions toward filling the remaining empty pedestals and connecting to other realms, he had a sinking feeling that these more lively—as Yoho had put it—encounters were only going to increase.
“I think that was enough fun with the Pantheon for one day,” Arkk said, turning his back on the temple as he swept a gesture toward the open door. “You wanted to see the surface, did you not?”
“I am most eager.”