He would be fine. He had told himself so for hours on end, and then, the waters froze so fast the sediment in them had no time to escape, remaining trapped in the now brown ice. Unnatural stillness overtook the area around the ship, stopping even the wind in its tracks.
Nobody screamed it: they knew this was Wintertoll. He, she or it, the gender didn’t matter, only that the Masterwork arrived without fanfare or vainglory. The entrance wasn’t some grand or terrifying happening: it was the calm of a desert, a silence words feared to break.
Everyone aboard, but ald, knew what they had to do. They left their cleaning ro guarding duties, some with more hesitation than others, Nalaq the most unsure of them all. The day captain woke Fuldra up. The visit of Wintertoll was not an event to sleep through.
Ald swore they were approaching him on the sly. As he kept on cleaning a stain from the deck with a piece of cloth, noticed how the crew members took one step away from him for every two towards. How some of them came to his side to throw garbage into the river.
They thought him distracted, and they thought him unfortunate. Someone thought it would be a death as horrible as any other granted by Wintertoll. Someone else wondered if those Wintertoll took were truly dead and not merely frozen in place, forever aware of their torment. A brother or sister advanced from the left or right as he or she regretted what he or she was about to do. Some held swords, some clubs, and some alreay had their hands at the ready to draw them, even if it looked like said hands were just resting on the handles.
“I am tribute for Wintertoll, should I assume? If so, I’d prefer to avoid the violent subjugation of my person.” Ald said without raising his gaze from the stain on the deck. “I am a farmer. I am a blacksmith. Ald Elvisatcaught, to whom Elvisat instructed in uncountable facets of our culture. I am not a misshapen. I am not a criminal, despite what you may believe.I am civilized, and I trust my story enough to consider there is no need to fight back. I only ask of you that my mouth remains without a muzzle, that I can scream and curse if I have to face my end.” Ald said, in a tone unbecoming of a man that was about to die.
Fuldra heard him from the command compartment, and wished she could go out there. Yet somebody needed to be in charge and steer The Menagerie if push came to shove. And if a captain had to get killed out here, better him than her.
Ald stood and disembarrassed himself from his weapons and their scabbards. “Ulgamos, take care of them until Wintertoll departs. I will need them when I reach the shore,” Ald said with a mile that denoted confidence.
Ulgamos poke out of the semicircle of crewmates and received Ald’s belongings without a complaint or a glimmer of doubt. “You better know what you are doing, young one.”
Ald extended his arms, hands opened, wrists pushed together. “Tie me up, you with the rope. This is a chance to prove all of you I am no criminal, and just a demented brother on a mission. Hurry, before Wintertoll arrives.”
The bulkiest of brothers took Ald’s hands and coiled the rope around them. He deftly made a noose and Ald struggled a bit to see if it would budge. “What’s your name?”
“Kaljoen,” he answered flatly, maintaining the face of a man that didn’t make friends often.
“Kaljoen, brother, this is a very adept job.”
Kaljoen smiled briefly, and then, each single spine in scene got ran over by a chill.
“Wintertoll!” Nalaq exclaimed, pointing at the frozen brown waters.
The ice beat like a heart, changed shape without cracking. It elevated like a mantle with a finger pushing underneath, or a worm trying to eat its way out of a corpse. Ice was not supposed to behave as liquid, but in the presence of Wintertoll, it did. In the presence of Wintertoll, the mist was no different from the howling souls of the damned, crawling up the rising spire there, halfway through the Worldvein. In the presence of Wintertoll one felt his heart freezing, life sustained merely by terror and wonder. No Felsian in the boat had become stone yet, but nobody dared move, not even those who had seen Wintertoll a hundred times.
An appendix shaped somewhat like an undulating fan emerged from the hill of ice as if said ice were a thin layer of water, not causing a single speck of the substance to break away. Uncountable intermingled lines of white, throbbing stalactites of ice hanging from the borders of this gigantic fin.
Ald didn’t blink, but trembled, with half of the tremor attributable to the onsetting atmosphere of polar cold.
In the sky a formation of clouds broke, allowing an unlucky ray of the evening sun to collide with the second of three fins. As the light touched the lattice of cold threads, it slowed down, becoming a sort of heavy, gelatinous mass as it came out the other side. In the end, this light formed a sort of frozen lance that broke off and fell upon the ice, shining like the star from which it had been cast, slowly melting back into its natural state.
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Ald could swear the air around him was as solid as the metal of his blades.
The main body of the masterwork got revealed —a lattice of millions of white threads, or maybe a single one longer than the planet entangled, depicting unorganized and transitory curls and edges and eyes and teeth. And only then, Ald began screaming. He knew he was surrounded by his siblings, an impenetrable wall of riverfarers. He knew there was nowhere to run amidst the Worldvein.
“Mother! Save your children from their own sin!” he pleaded to deaf ears. And knowing he was likely doing so, he changed the target of his prayers. “Unkindness! Aid me!” he pleaded she who heard, yet didn’t come. She believed a “disgraced chosen one”, first and foremost, should be disgraced. “Mother! Unkindness! Someone!” He started calling, falling prey to paralyzing desperation, on his knees at the deck, unable to stop gazing at Wintertoll. “Elvisat! Elvisat!”
“Poor lad…” Ulgamos said, pulling a bitebranch out of his pocket and starting to bit eon it, moving as if he didn’t feel the pressure Wintertoll exerted upon them. “Going to stretch the legs for a bit, yes? Stash the man’s belongings somewhere safe,” He patted a paralyzed companion on the shoulder and walked away. Maybe he had lived this too many times to care anymore. Or, maybe, and this was closer to the truth, he didn’t want to be watching when Wintertoll would take her offering.
Ald didn’t blink, and yet he felt like he did. Wintertoll was not getting closer, and neither were they moving, but somehow the Masterwork drew nearer, occupying more and more of its field of vision. He heard the troubled breathing of his brothers and sisters behind him, but no heartbeat, not even his own. The blood inside his very veins felt stagnated.
As Wintertoll and the boat seemed to be drawn to the same point due to the space between them becoming smaller and smaller, without either of them moving, Ald began admiring the detail of Wintertoll’s body. The uncountable transitory eyes were not as undetailed as their ephemeral nature would susgest. The threads swiftly drew and redrew hyper-detailed figures. , with ever line you could find in the iris of a Felsian carefully weaved onto the creation, even if for a lone second. Hands that turned to tentacles that turned to teeth to hands to ears to fins to horns sprouted from the main body. In a paused fashion. Ald realized Wintertoll was still at each instant in time, it didn’t move between any two positions. Following the same principle as the trick of rapidly shuffling leaves with similar drawings to create the illusion of movement, Wintertoll was a collection of statues of itself.
Nobody noticed the realm of halcyons that were now circling high above The Menagerie. Nobody but one, anyway, and the one who noticed was too busy getting its tendrils closer and closer to Ald.
The threads touched his face and any pretense of scream got banned from Ald’s body. His whole being burned with cold, a pain comparable to what he imagined burning on a pyre would feel. And yet he didn’t know the quid of the question: had he already been turned to stone? Not a muscle could be moved, not even the ones of the eyes. He was forced to behold his torturer in silence, to be unable to cry in pain as the cold consumed every fiber of his body. This had to be the most horrible way to die, or so Ald managed to think as his mind got torn apart by the overwhelmeing sensations.
Then, Wintertoll let him go, and shivering, he fell on his side, stare lost on the horizon, lips spastic.
“Bring me the sinner.” Wintertoll demanded, its voice a glacier breaking down.
“It speaks!” Nalaq exclaimed, expressing everyone’s first thought.
Everyone started muttering: Ald had survived. Either he had told the truth, or an innocent had been sent to his death against his wishes.
“Bring me the sinner. You have it abroad.”
The kingfishers descended from the skies over the control room, and Fuldra started yelling at them and trying to claw the birds away from her as they dragged on her clothes. “Let me go, pests!” she exclaimed and everyone on board turned away from the unconscious Ald.
Kaljoen was the first to break formation. “Sure thing, boss. “he said to wintertoll, and nobody stopped him as he made his way to the night captain.
She unsheathed her sword and began stabbing the birds, but more came, and one turned into a deft hand that disarmed her.
“Call me Crown when I wear this guise, Fuldra,” said the bird that perched from her scalp.
The ice below the menagerie broke and the boat rocked. “Stray, Crown!” ordered Wintertoll.
From the kingfisher’s bodies the entirety of a woman with a grasp stronger than steel manifested. She was dressed in blue and green feathers this time.
“Well Winty, I am helping you today, as you let my little toy live. No need to be upset.”
“I despise your kind,” Wintertoll stated, despite both of them being Masterworks.
“I am well aware of that fact. A Masterwork who hates Masterworks. That makes you my favorite cousin.” She said as she dragged Fuldra in a chokehold, with the Felsian woman stabbing Crown’s back in vain. “There is no kidney here, just more birds under the surface. It’s birds all the way down.”
“I’ll tolerate you this once. Bring me that sinner. Help me cleanse the world form Masterwork makers.”
Fuldra screamed and kicked and cursed, but there was no escape from Crown’s grasp.
Kaljoen took his captain by the heels, restricting them, helping Crown and her birds carry her to the edge, in front of Wintertoll.
“Greetings, Fuldra Talamcaught, mother of Telesa Sinborn.”
Fuldra tried to scream, but she felt her eyes drying. She got so heavy that Kaljoen let her feet go, and Crown flew away. She crawled through the deck, feeling her muscles become rigid, her articulations as if they were encased in her own bones. She tried to scream, and grabbed her throat after feeling how her vocal cords became crystal-like and broke off I, choking her.
“You proudly bear your sin on your face, your daughter’s claws. Behold her as she cokes on her own past, behold the appearance she will always have, Felsians.” Wintertoll commanded, and nobody dared speak against it.
Fuldra was encased in her own body, feeling the stillness overtake even her memories, her thoughts. Her soul.
In the end, the tendrils came and , in a series of still images, dragged the statue of the woman into the waters. Then everyone blinked and the ice and every single clue that the masterwork had been there had been erased, as if it had been a waking nightmare.
A Kingfisher descended upon the unconscious Ald, and addressed the Crew.
“Take care of my disgraced chosen one, you all, I await him on the shore.”
Then crow flew away, and after a few minutes of mourning, the crewmates recovered their positions, with a couple of them taking Ald to a warm compartment and the new Night captain heading for a needed nap.