“Kidnapped….” Lukas trailed off.

“We were the greatest authority in the Eaborid Kingdom. Even the Shogun, Lord Straff, went out of his way to stay in our good books. Especially in Cyffnar, where we lived, we were the de-facto rulers. I was out on a monster-eradication mission in the Vecchian Plateau, where insurgents captured me. It… it was a nightmare.”

Tanya closed her eyes. Even thinking back to that day made her want to throw up.

“They had me tied with enchanted manacles, suppressing my lifeforce. I know the Cobalt Army uses them to apprehend criminals, but how those terrorists had them, I have no idea. They were saying something about selling me to desert-dwellers, which made no sense. I mean, no one lives in the Desert. It’s an anathema to all things living. I had heard horrifying tales of adventurers getting lost in the Desert and losing their souls. I had heard of monsters that stole your skin.”

She trailed off as the implication of her own words hit her. And from the growing pallid expression on Lukas’s face, he had arrived at a similar conclusion.

Could it be…

“The yokai?” He asked. “They were there in the anomaly. At least, that’s what you told me.”

She narrowed her eyes. Her instincts told her he was hiding something. Lukas had always maintained that he knew next to nothing about yokai. And yet, it was also true that the yokai had come after Olfric after he had attacked Lukas from behind. There were a ton of things that just didn’t match up. The sudden disappearance of Olfric’s kami, her deciding to attack Lukas out of nowhere. Frost-influenced or not, Tanya doubted she'd have gone after him on a whim.

If only I knew why.

There were other signs too. His knowledge of the customs of the svartalfars, as well as his ability to speak their tongue. It was the same with the muspels too. Had he been lying to her? Maybe he had also been attacked by a yokai and somehow managed to kill it and absorb its powers? Was that how he could perform conjuration and pyromancy?

“Tanya?” Lukas asked.

“Huh? Oh, sorry,” she cut short on her reveries. She had decided to extend a hand of trust to him. He had promised to share his part of the story with her. She’d just have to wait until then.

“It’s possible,” she shrugged. “I’ve no way of knowing who they were, or what they wanted. When I woke up, they… they tortured me.”

Something dark and frightening crossed his face. “Did they…”

She didn’t miss the implication. “No. Not that. They sl—slapped me up a bit, but that was all. Nothing a healing spell wouldn’t solve. I didn’t have a kami, and I couldn’t use lifeforce. I was bound, with nowhere to go, nothing to fight back with. And then… I heard it.”

“It?”

“A whisper. A thought. A feeling. I… I don’t know how to describe it. It wasn’t angry, it was… ecstatic. The next thing I know, there was a piece of jagged frost sticking out of one guy’s chest.”

She remembered it all too well.

…

…

A long, jagged spear of ice tore through his body like wet paper. Tanya watched in fascination as the ice slowly covered his body, the glimmer in his eyes slowly transitioning from surprise to fear to resignation, to nothing.

Killing him had been…surprisingly easy.

Distantly, she could make out the sound of something metallic shattering.

But Tanya didn’t care. Rubbing her arms, she turned toward the rest of the men as their remaining companions all rushed into the room at once.

“You—you killed him!”

Her lips spread into a gentle smile.

“Yes. I did.”

She raised her hand and called it forth. It needed no training, nor any additional knowledge on how to be used. The ice responded to her like a memory, like something she had always known how to use, simply waiting to be called upon once more.

Before the men in front of her could so much as twitch, ice spears tore through their stomachs and out their backs. But she was more careful this time. Instead of freezing them all at once, she held herself back. This time, it would be slower…more painful…

“No—wait—you don’t—”

“Shhhh…” Tanya softly chuckled, her palm caressing the closest man’s cheek. A moment later, he became immobilized as frost danced across her palm and onto his face. He was unable to do anything but suffer from a torturous cold as his very life essence was drained to feed her hunger.

Feed her Frost.

“M—monster,” another gasped, drawing her attention.

Once more, she gently smiled.

“Yes. I am.”

…

…

Lukas was hanging on to her every word.

“I… I don’t know how to describe it. It wasn’t me versus the insurgents. It was like… like I was at a feast. That these people were food.”

“I remember,” said Lukas, “you called me a food animal when we first met.”

Tanya looked away, embarrassed.

“What happened after that?”

Tanya unclenched her fingers. Just thinking about that event made her feel… dirty. Made her feel like a monster.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Next thing I knew, I had woken up in my bed. My father told me that they found me lying on the floor, surrounded by corpses, all of them impaled and bled dry. He, and the others thought I had killed them all. The look on their faces, the pride in his eyes… It made me feel dirty. Like I had committed a grave sin.” She met Lukas’s eyes. “The worst part was that I had actually Leveled-Up. Killing those people had given me a ton of experience, but more than that, I had lifeforce. Not just from the Level-Up boost, but like, like I had somehow stolen their lifeforce and leeched it into myself. But that couldn’t be possible, shouldn’t be possible. Lifeforce is produced in our very souls, so I feared, I feared that I had stolen their souls, eaten them by the eldritch monsters in father’s tales. I… I felt like a monster.”

“Did you talk to anyone?” Lukas asked.

Tanya gave him a ‘Do I look stupid?’ look, and shook her head. “No. I’d have to be crazy to do that. At first I thought those bastards had done something to me. I mean, they had bound my lifeforce and were talking about desert-dwellers. I was frightened, I thought maybe….” she trailed off, noticing the spark of recognition on his face.

“Maybe what?”

“...nothing,” she shook her head. “It was so confusing. Not the frost part, I mean. I had seen aquamancers with a Temperature Modulation skill conjure pillars of ice and frost out of water. Seen them subtly change water from liquid to gas to solid and so on. There were nights I wondered if it had something to do with my mother. I mean, I had never seen her. Maybe she was a… a — a deviant. A hybrid. I mean, I’ve seen himthursars. They’re the counterpart of the muspels. Giants with the ability to conjure frost. I thought maybe my mother had diluted himthursar blood in her, and maybe a little of that corruption had passed to me. It was the only thing that made sense. Well… almost.”

“Almost?”

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She nodded. “I’ve met himthursars back when I was hiding in the Baramunz mountains. They’re just like the muspels. Giant, muscular, battle-maniacs with too much lifeforce and too little brains. But I knew it couldn’t be them. I mean, what kind of ice devoured lifeforce? It was… it made no sense. It was alien and wrong. And then one night, under the accursed light of the Black Moon, I found my answer.”

“Where?”

I’m not under the bed, young one.

She shivered. “In my bed.”

Lukas sat up.

Tanya closed her eyes..

…

…

She warily watched the edge of her bed, ready for anything to appear, but when nothing happened, she knew she was the one who had to make the first move. Swallowing nervously, she crawled on her hands and knees, making her way forward. She had barely lowered her head enough to look into the pitch-black darkness beneath—

“I am not under the bed, young one.”

The voice came as a thin whisper, right next to her ear. Tanya could feel something cold breathing down her neck, and she shrieked loudly, before losing her balance and falling head first onto the cold wooden floor. Lifeforce flooded into her arms and legs and her instincts kicked in.

“Who—whoever you are, don’t come near me!” Tanya warbled. “I’ll—I’ll kill—”

“Of course you will, youngling. That is what you’re born to be.”

Managing to limit her reaction to the barest of flinches, Tanya flooded her palm with lifeforce. It glowed with a familiar blue light, one of the easiest tricks her father had taught her with the esoteric power.

What wasn’t familiar to her, however, was the eerie coldness that accompanied it.

She couldn’t help but shiver as the strange voice laughed in the darkness.

What was happening?

“Stop laughing!” Tanya yelled, no longer holding back her tears. “Who—whoever you are, stop playing your dirty tricks with me.”

“Oh, but I am not, youngling.”

She had long ago learned about the spirits that roamed the lands during the Black Moon Rising. Things that the wards of their homes kept them safe from. Wraiths, spirits, monsters of the vilest kind that made people’s skins crawl by mere mention of their name.

“Listen,” she intoned, putting on a brave face despite the wetness of her cheeks. “My father is very strong. He’ll kill you no matter what you are. So if you want to live, come out and face me!”

A brief silence followed the declaration, before it was broken.

“If you insist.”

…

…

“What was it?” Lukas asked. “A yokai?”

Tanya shook her head.

…

…

“…Where are you?”

She felt a strange pressure on her skin from her left. Tanya turned, but found nothing except the ornate mirror on the edge of the bed.

“Come closer.”

She didn’t know why, but she crawled across the bed. Until she was right in front of the mirror.

That was when Tanya saw it.

Frost.

Spikes of ice jutted out from “her” right hand, coating the bed with sheets of dense hoarfrost. Tanya squealed and looked at her own hand, and found nothing. She looked back into the mirror. The frost was slowly climbing up her reflection’s entire right arm, like rings of thorns coiled around the stem of a rose, contorted in random meandering patterns. Jagged barbs, their chilling surfaces serrated like the edge of a knife, sat in rows across her skin. First her breasts, then her abdomen, her left shoulder and left hand, until her reflection appeared to be encrusted in frost.

“This is—this is—an illusion,” Tanya screamed, pushing herself back, touching her own skin. Everything felt normal. She glanced at the mirror again.

Glacial white eyes met oceanic blue.

“An illusion. That’s what this is,” she repeated. “YOU HEAR ME? I’M NOT AFRAID OF YOUR ILLUSION. I’M NOT AFRAID—”

Hoarfrost erupted out of her fingernails, coating them in white.

“LOOK AT ME!”

The command in that voice was so overwhelming that Tanya couldn’t fight it. Her entire body was shaking, her heart beating a million times a minute. Every bit of her instincts screamed at her to run away. To her father. To the elders. Someone. Anyone. They’d take care of this frost. Of this—of this—

Slowly, cautiously, she trudged toward the mirror.

She’d face it.

Face her distorted reflection.

Face her—

Wait. Where did she go?

The mirror was empty. There was no reflection. Nothing. It was as if she wasn’t standing in front of the mirror at all. It was like—

“Looking for me?”

Tanya whirled around, and looked up.

The creature in front of her looked absolutely fiendish, with two bulbous, blue eyes staring right at her. Tanya felt like she was sitting in the nude with the way its gaze stared right through her, as if it looked beyond her outer skin and flesh right at her soul.

A pair of sharp, ivory fangs showed themselves next.

Its arms were too large for its misshapen body. Its hands were too large for its gargantuan arms. It was…this was…a nightmare made manifest.

“You—” Tanya pointed an erratically shaking finger toward it. “You’re a monster.”

“Yes,” the monster replied. “And you are me.”

…

…

Lukas sat silent, his eyes lost in thought. Tanya could almost see the gears running in his mind, trying to fit the new knowledge with what he already knew of her powers. For all the time she knew him, Lukas always had an air of mystery around him, wearing it like armor. Worse, she knew that there were a lot of things about the events in the anomaly that were still shrouded, secrets that only Lukas could tell her.

This was probably the first time that she was on the other side of the table, with Lukas trying to play catch-up.

Part of her actually felt giddy at the thought.

“What’s going on in your head?” she asked, unable to keep her curiosity under check.

“Just… thinking,” he said, his face still scrunched up in thought. “That thing you saw, was it— did you see it again?”

She shook her head. “Why do you ask?”

His lips twisted into a frown. “Never? Not even if you close your eyes and focus on it?”

“I don’t need to. I could hear its whispers. Always there. At the back of my mind—”

There is only you and me. No one can hear me except you. Just you and me. As it always will be. Everything will perish at your touch. I can see it, the destruction we will bring. Civilizations we will turn to ashes. Death will be your only legacy, and with your bloodsoaked hands I shall—

Tanya shut her eyes. It had taken a miracle to gain the sanity she had gained. Remembering those days, talking about all of this—

“This… this is a bad idea. A very bad idea. I shouldn’t have— I shouldn’t have—”

“Tanya?”

She opened her eyes and found his brown orbs, staring at him. There was apprehension in his eyes, as were confusion and… concern? For her? Why?

“Are you alright?” he asked. “We don’t have to talk about it if you’re feeling uncomfortable.”

Tanya wanted to scream. Now he wanted to make her feel comfortable? After digging the skeletons out of her past? After—

“I’m fine.”

She had unearthed those coffins. She might as well share them now. She might never get another chance again.

“I couldn’t talk about it, so I tried to ignore it. I began training in the psionic arts, while continuing my lessons and Levelling-Up. Only this time, it was far, far easier. Just touching anyone with the frost was enough to leech away their lifeforce. Killing them afterwards was child’s play. I could fight longer, run faster, throw in more lifeforce without caring for my reserves. So long as there was one more opponent around, I could keep attacking and keep devouring them. I… I was unstoppable.”

She paused, taking a deep breath. “Granted, I only used the frost against monsters. Creatures I had to kill. I didn’t know what my father, or the elders would do if they found out about it, so I had to be extra careful. In less than a year, I had gained three more Levels. By the time I was sixteen, I was already pushing beyond Level-12. I had thousands and thousands of Soul Capacity saved up, and my lifeforce skills were already pushing beyond Level-2. But despite that, Ezzeron would just not bond with me.”

“Tough crowd,” he murmured.

That got a chuckle out of her. “You’ve no idea. Everyone was both amazed and frustrated with my performance. At sixteen, there was hardly anyone that had crossed Level-7, spiritist or not, and there I was, streaking past Level-12, but without a kami. The Elders knew that I had the best chance to bond with Ezzeron, but the constant failures were trying their patience. Even my father was running out of excuses. The Elders knew I was their best bet, so they did the only thing they could.”

She exhaled. “They upped the ante. They started sending me on official missions. Sometimes with family, and other times, with adventurers registered to the Cyffnar Shrine.”

Lukas laughed. “That must have gone well.”

“As well as forests and pyromancers,” she chuckled. “I had stopped cursing the Frost. For all its insane whispers, it was a boon for me. My ECR was tremendous. I was leveling up faster and faster. I even had a single Level-3 skill under my belt. It was almost funny, hearing the embarrassing apologies from other guys when they couldn’t keep up with me. They said I was too fast, too smooth, too quick to keep up with. Guys would develop an inferiority complex when I was around. People feared me, and they feared my family, and thus, kept their distance from me. Between that and my constant failures with Ezzeron, I grew bitter, My disappointments became harder and harder. I stopped being nice, became more impatient, harsher and… sadistic. The struggle to master Ezzeron was making me arrogant, haughty, dismissive and absolutely demanding. I became less… inhibited. ”

She paused, and controlled her breathing. “It started with a minor debacle. The new recruits of the Cobalt Army are always too full of themselves, too proud, as if becoming a glorified slave is a grand accomplishment. I… I was angry, and my self-control was slipping away. Things worsened, and one thing led to another and I…”

She met his eyes. “I used the Frost on him. In public.”

----------------------------------------