Of Ice, Death & Monsters

Chapter 67 : For What We Hold Dear

“Katya, I-” 

Godwin stood up, raising his arms between the Keepers and I. “Why don’t we calm down here-“

Katya’s Teni moved him aside as she walked up to me. “Peter Sai, what was it you were talking about? Can you care to repeat it again?”

It was like facing a parent. She was taller, leaner, and she had this angry look in her eyes as she stared down at me.

“I was the one who saved you all from Koschei. I was trying to defend you all!” I glared at Leonid and Kariya as I tried to swallow my pride.

“I just need to know what to do with my powers-“

“Let’s go hunting then.” Katya spoke with the bluntness of a wooden spoon.

“Huh?” I blinked as she grabbed me by the wrist and began to drag me along like I was a child.

“You believe yourself to be capable. I would like to test that for myself.” She then turned to the others. “Stay and defend the perimeter. I will deal with Peter by myself.”

Katya continued to drag me by as I tried to move out of her iron grip to no avail. “I-ugh I’m sorry okay!”

She wouldn’t let go, dragging me literally through the mud and grass and away from the others. I could see Godwin waving at me while Kariya and Leonid immediately looked away as if I was nothing.

“They started it! I was just trying to show them that I did more!” 

No response, Katya continued to just walk away, going through the wondrous forest. It would have been a wonderful spot to take a stroll, less so a spot for being dragged by until we stopped by a running river.

There, she took a deep breath, looking around before saying.

“I know.”

I looked up at Katya as she released her iron grip on my wrist, nearly causing me to fall if she didn’t pull me back up.

“H-Huh? What do you mean you know?”

“I heard everything. The entire conversation from start to finish. I know that it was my team that tried to provoke you.”

I blinked and opened my mouth aghast as I pointed to the tree in the distance. “W-What was that for then?! You nearly killed my ass!”

She stared at me as if I had said something incredibly stupid. “Wouldn’t you have survived?”

“I…” For a moment, I thought about it. That was a part of my powers that I never really tried or tested out as of the moment. Mostly because if I didn’t have it… I’d be dead.

“I don’t know, honestly. I don’t have the other souls in me, so I’m not sure what it would look like and if it would work. I’m honestly kind of stuck in the dark about this.” I gave her an honest shrug and sat back down on a rock.

“I see. Well, you managed to dodge it, so in the end, it doesn’t even matter. I apologize on the behalf of both of them. They have both been on edge ever since Nawia, and even more so thanks to Baba Yaga’s warnings.” She didn’t sit down, choosing instead to stare back at the river. 

“I’m… I’m sorry, I’ll try to help out. I just don’t know what to do now. I just woke up like an hour ago.”

“You need not worry. I understand that this was not your fault. That all of this… What happened, it was out of our control, out of our hands…” A sigh came across her mouth as she rubbed her forehead as if she were concentrating.

“…In a way, it was my fault…” I turned to look at Katya fully, now bracing myself to ask the question.

“So I ask, why did you opt to rescue me?”

There was a stunned silence for a moment before she asked. “How did you know that it was I who chose to rescue you?”

I got a stone and tried to skip it across the riverbed, but for some reason, I managed to get it to the other side of the shore without much difficulty. “Because Godwin only mentioned that it was you who stood up for me, nobody else, not even himself.”

Once more, the only noise I heard was the trees swaying in the morning wind, moving about gently.

“I see… We’re Keepers, we have been tasked to keep life in this world and to defend its inhabitants. You are one of them, no matter how much danger you brought us, that you will bring us… We swore an oath to protect all of you.”

Katya looked at her right hand, taking off a glove as the back of her hand glowed a bright green, revealing the symbol of a growing tree. 

“The Keeper’s Mark? I thought it was fading?” I grew closer to her to get a better look.

“It was, but after the events of Nawia, it started to regain strength… Enough so that I began to sometimes hear whispers of the Keeper.”

I took a cautious nudge to the right, away from Katya, while I was still seated. If I was correct, the Keeper and whatever the Original Spirit was would be at odds, considering it tried to devour everyone, or maybe that was just the Harbinger.

“What did they say?”

“They said that the Chosen of the Harbinger still lives, and that they’re growing in strength and in numbers.”

My eyes widened as I got out of my seat. “Jane’s alive! She’s out there?!” I thought after she became part of me that she lost herself to the River Smorodina, but apparently not. But… If she’s growing in strength and numbers, then she’s still planning for the big assault.

“Where are they now? How much are they? What do they mean by numbers?”

“The answers to all of your questions are sadly: I do not know.” Katya clenched her fist and leaned on a tree, staring at the passing fish with great intensity. “The Keeper only said that, and to also meet up with her Chosen, who herself is building an army.”

I gave out an awkward laugh. “Oh fucking abyss… They’re going full-on warfare… I’m going to guess by army and numbers that they’re recruiting several followers to their sides…”

My mind raced to when Baba Yaga talked about how there were gods who could side with either one of the Keepers and the Harbinger. That… That one was definitely on me.

I sighed and rubbed my head again, giving out an awkward laugh before Katya spoke out.

“What exactly are the Chosen fighting for?”

“Hmm? Well, The Harbinger wants to devour-“

She shook her head. “Not what the ones who chose them wanted. I already know of the Great Spirit’s intentions from Baba Yaga. What I ask for is what the Chosen desire. You seem to have known them.”

“Uh…” I scratched my cheek in confusion, looking up at Katya with a strange and bemused expression. “Why do you ask?”

She looked up at the sky, scouting a few birds. “I wonder what they are fighting for. I wonder what they were chosen for. I wonder if the one called Jane understood the severity of siding with the Harbinger, and if the one called Marian knew of us Keepers. I wonder what that means for us, and how far they would take it.”

What they were fighting for… Huh, I guess after seeing that cat fight, anyone would ask what in the world they were doing. 

“Well, if you want the cliff notes version, I would say that Jane was a prisoner of Marian’s group, Ephitet, the one who brought us here. They tortured and used her, and now she wants revenge.”

Katya’s face grimaced a little, her hand shaking. “So that’s who I am supposed to defeat? That’s who I am supposed to take down? A prisoner? A victim of torture?”

“Yeah… It’s kinda fucked up, but I guess that’s just how the world works.”

“Why would this Marian hate her so much? Especially if she was her prisoner?”

“Because Jane’s group, called the Choir, once did a raiding mission that got Marian’s husband vegetablized.”

Katya’s eyebrows furrowed. “As in, he became a vegetable?”

“Haha… I don’t know if that would be funnier or more horrific than what actually happened. But no, his mind essentially broke, and he was unable to move his body on his own. He’s just a lump of meat now on a hospital bed somewhere.”

“…I see…” Katya sighed again, face-palming hard. “If you had to choose who to face and who to kill. Who would it be?”

The words got stuck in my throat as I tried to speak. I constantly raised my hand, as if I were answering in school, before I could finally even make a proper, cohesive voice. “I… I don’t know. I don’t want to know, I don’t want to choose. I just want to go back home.”

“Why do you want to go back home?” Katya finally stared at me, her piercing blue eyes felt like they were gonna drill into my core.

“Because it’s… Home? Because I know the place and I could survive in it. This place has been a literal death trap, I’ve died like… Four times since coming here in the past month.”

Why wouldn’t I want to leave?

“Perhaps, but whenever you tell of your home, you speak of something horrific that exists there constantly, then complain and nearly argue about it.”

“Was that about Epithet and how the Health Potions?” 

“Yes, and I find it quite absurd that someone would try and force that kind of law over others to try and make more money.”

“Well, I mean, they’re the only ones with the Names to be able to do it; they have to find some way to make money from it.”

“Didn’t you also say that all Magick and Names are owned by Ephitet in your Nation? Does that not mean they also control the number of people who could hold and use those Names?”

I thought about it for a few seconds. I mean, that was a possibility. There was a conspiracy flying around that they had a cancer-curing Name under wraps so that people wouldn’t ever find out about it and keep coming back for treatments to bleed them dry.

But that felt stupid because if there was a cancer-curing Name, they would price that shit up to the thousands and hundreds for a doctor to use it on them, and they’d get rich.

“I mean, I don’t think so. If you have the money and the connections, you could buy yourself a Name. And they don’t make you sign a contract for it either, you just need to pay for the subscription.”

“And if you don’t pay?”

“Then you get people coming after you…” I then remembered Charlie and began to wonder what exactly she was doing now. She seemed so distraught the last time I saw her. It was almost sad in a way. 

“People, I assume, also under Ephitet? And that they employ for this specific purpose?”

“Yeah, they’re like a private military… Well, they’re not really called a private military officially, it’s all in big quotation marks, and they’re classified as a ‘Security Force’, but legally speaking, they’re a private military.”

“What’s so wrong with private militaries?”

“Oh…“ I looked at her as I remembered that she had lived here her whole life and didn’t understand the political implications and ramifications of other worlds.

Oh, how I envied her.

“Well, governments get kinda iffy when you have a whole army by your side and can look like they can take over, but most of the government is already in the pocket of Ephitet, so it really doesn’t matter at all."

"So... Why do it?"

"I guess just to look good? To look reasonable? For people like us, normal people."

"...I see, so even after all of that, you still wish to be in your world? Why? Why would you ever stay in a world like that?"