The expedition departed covertly before sunrise from a hidden depot using lightweight sleds. They were pulled by tamed Razorflayers and devoid of the clan’s markings, the sleds’ rails shod with special, short-lasting covers that would cause them to leave no trail. The expedition members wore masks styled after predatory beasts, some wood and others bone, alongside clothing devoid of the Hulson Clan’s marks and typical stylings. Even Zefaris went so far as to dress the part, though she still stood out in how bundled-up she was on the sled. Her reason for not dressing more heavily was the fact the jungle itself was hot and humid, only their roundabout path over the ice sheet being cold.
All these pains were taken to conceal the expeditioners on the off-chance that an ally of the conspirator-clans saw them, thus making it acceptable within the honor system, if not necessarily honorable.
Zel saw them off on their way, returning to the Hulson longhouse by a roundabout route; partly to visit Ingvald, and partly due to a gut feeling, an impulse of malice hoping that some moron would break into the longhouse thinking that it was deserted. She had considered seeking out Victor, but it would still be two to three hours until dawn.
None among the longhouse’s respectable guard contingent had been alerted or harmed, but Zel couldn’t shake the feeling and went through her own, Jorfr’s, and Vic’s chambers. Notebooks, missing. Devilbone construct pieces, missing - especially belt prototypes. Several of Jorfr’s innocuous, yet valuable ritual toolkit pieces, missing.
She rushed to the underground ice tomb, and there found the thief, grasping the Broken Butcher in hand, its sarcophagus somehow thawed. The figure wasn’t exactly recognizable, lacking any identifiable clan marks or clothing elements, but she grabbed his mask and pulled it off, revealing an unmistakable combination of forehead-ornament and face tattoo. A member of the Eisen Clan…
…Or what was left of him.
Zel chuckled to herself as she reached for the Butcher, prying it free of the corpse’s mummified fingers; every iota of liquid had been evaporated from the fool's body.
“Did he wake you up? Let’s get you back to sleep. It’s not time yet.”
With aid from Fryg, Zel interred the Broken Butcher in one of the remaining pre-prepared glacierglass caskets. As for the corpse, it was also frozen, though not among the honored of the Hulson clan, but among their sacrificial beasts.
“Must the caskets remain down here?” Zel asked.
“Removing them will shorten their lifespan, but… That is a matter of long-term storage,” the ice witch said. “You should encounter no problems if you keep your blade elsewhere for security. Regardless, we will have to seal the lower levels and the entrance to Agartha until we discern the method of infiltration.”
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Indeed, she kept the hunk of glacierglass elsewhere - she wrapped it tightly in bandages and carried it in a backpack.
When dawn came, she departed the longhouse for her disciple.
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Victor had drifted in and out of uneasy sleep a half-dozen times. Each time, he awoke clutching the Ivory Scroll with painful intensity, feeling as if he had just fallen a hundred meters and awoken just before hitting the ground.
On the thirteenth time, he fell once more… But this time, he didn’t wake up.
He crashed into a boundless field of bones, verdant greenery growing all throughout the place, lakes and narrow streams scattered throughout, borne from the thawing of great glaciers that reached into the starless sky in whose darkness hung a brightly-shining, giant moon. In the distance he saw great frostborne towers blazing with monochrome flame, and he walked. On and on he walked, for days, months, years, decades, centuries, eternity. Time meant nothing here.
Victor walked until he reached the great citadel, its walls smashed apart and melting, and within awaited a gigantic beast armored in bone and flame, beneath its surface pulsing hot-blooded flesh, the stench of animalism mixing with smoke. It could scarcely be described, a thing of rib cages and uncountable segments, its skull-like head somewhere between a wolf, human, and drake. Its tail ended in a huge blade half as long as the beast’s own body.
Manacles of frost still bound its neck, limbs, and tail, broken chains dangling, its tail-blade half-encased in ice besides.
It lunged after him, maw agape. He felt its desire to swallow him whole, to become one in unbound fury, just as his anger surged so profoundly each time he came face to face with wretchedness.
He willed a wall of bone to rise up in its path. When it smashed through, he willed the rubble to coalesce around its form, jam its joints, envelop it and crush it down. Victor turned the ground beneath it to mud and great thorned vines he bid to rise from the pool to envelop the beast, to drag it into the pool.
The Beast blazed, and screamed, and struggled, and freed itself, erupting out of the earth and shadowing the moon. It gave chase and he fled, forming a chest-mounted rig with six spidery limbs, each ending in a thruster, blasting himself across the boneyard that was his thoughtscape.
He knew brute force wouldn’t work. Zel had already made that much clear, as had the scroll.
Victor flew from the Beast’s reach, and from one of the boneyard’s many lakes he erected a spire of frost atop which the Beast couldn’t reach him, numbing himself to its influence to buy himself time. As his Primordial Self gnawed and clawed at the spire’s walls of ice, Victor conceived of a monstrosity akin to that which Zelsys had spoken of, a monster which the Primordial Self would understand to be their foe, but which could not be defeated by either of them without the other’s assistance.
He conceived of a Von Wickten smart enough to make full use of all his abilities, a Von Wickten with the wickedness of his original self, his silver-armored self’s clarity of mind, with two extra tails tipped with paralytic venom-spewing stingers akin to Von Hoedorff’s, and the tactical know-how that the captain of the Dragon Knights rightly should have had.