The First Snow of the Northern Empire
The First Snow of the Northern Empire
A deer bleated weakly. The terrified animal thrashed, eyes rolling, as the figure gripping its throat twisted sharply.
A dry crack—the sound of muscle tearing, bone splintering, the neck ripped clean from the body. The headless carcass slumped where it stood, twitching.
Blood sheeted over the corpse and spread across the stone, running along the channels carved into the floor.
At a glance, the pattern might have seemed merely decorative, but the symbol engraved there was the sign of the Self-Birthing Mother.
A tangled knot of beasts, serpents, and centipedes stretching long.
As the blood filled the grooves, a somber light welled up from within.
The figure standing over it was strange in form.
A head like a moose's, draped in a long robe, legs like a horse's ending in bovine hooves.
A monster bearing almost no trace of humanity, bent in the posture of human prayer.
The priest of the Self-Birthing Mother knelt in the pooling blood and offered her supplication.
A desperate prayer to a mother who would not answer, who could not be reached.
A prayer meant to tear her thoughts away from grief.
The prayer stretched on. It continued in silence, as if she lacked the will to end it herself.
It stopped only when a presence announced itself.
The moose-headed priest turned, unable to mask an expression of bitter coincidence, and saw the figure descending the broad basement stairs.
Another singular being.
A body blending wolf and human. A massive frame wrapped in a heavy robe.
The werewolf halted when their eyes met.
The moose-headed priest looked at the wolf and asked,
"What happened?"
The voice from the moose's head was human. A woman's voice.
To that sweet tone, the werewolf answered in an equally mellow male voice.
"All of them were killed. Master."
"I see."
The moose-headed priest's reply was heavy with grief. She stared back at the floor and let out a sigh.
Then she rose. As her vast body straightened, her blood-soaked robe slapped wetly against the stone.
The sound was like heaving a slab of waterlogged meat.
Making that sound, the priest walked slowly to the window. The prayer had ended, and with it, the grief returned.
*Whoooooosh.*
The basement had been carved into the cliff face and held an immense window.
A window in the cliff that revealed the world outside while hiding the interior, a pane of fine glass the cold wind hammered against.
Far, far beyond that window lay something like a dense white fog.
It was no ordinary mist.
It was the lingering trace of one of the mightiest Evil Gods, briefly manifest.
People called it the Faraway World.
Beneath it, scattered and blurred within the dense white haze, sprawled the ruins of the ancient empire.
Four thousand years had not rusted or decayed it. A dead city.
Land that had once been part of the Southern Continent, the precursor to the Northern Empire, and once moved at the empire's command.
A dead stretch of space-time, spreading and creeping outward.
The moose-headed priest gazed at the sight and sank into thought.
Watching a history she had not lived but that remained vivid, she turned over many things.
The glory and revival the Northern Empire should have claimed.
The tragedy of now—starving, tearing each other apart.
Her thoughts inevitably led to silence, and in that silence her disciple spoke.
"It didn't... go well?"
A careful question. The kind asked not from fear of angering her, but from worry that he might wound her heart.
A question he already knew the answer to. The moose-headed priest let out a quiet sigh.
A scene surfaced in her mind. A Watcher with jade-green skin, a master of the Restoration School.
His words filled her head.
*'I saw it as I crossed over. There's no hope. There's no way to reverse this. We can't slow the erosion or interfere with it.'*
The flat voice of the green-skinned one. Watching his pupils bleed mana so pale it was almost white, the Watcher had added,
as if delivering a terminal diagnosis.
*'The Northern Empire will be swallowed.'*
And so, with facts she already knew, he had pronounced the Northern Empire's death sentence.
She swallowed her grief over that freshly confirmed truth.
She had believed a master of the Restoration School could intervene beyond the human body, in objects and phenomena.
Even if not, she had thought she might at least gain a clue.
When she learned otherwise, she understood she had no choice left.
That choiceless, nearly inevitable struggle left her steeped in sorrow.
White Death, creeping across the reflection in the moose's red eyes.
Watching that immense authority kill even time and space, she remembered her first days as a priest.
The fields and fortresses that had once caught her eye then—now they lay somewhere inside that white death.
"It wasn't this close at first."
Her own words confirmed the truth anew.
One day, the Northern Empire would die, swallowed entirely by the authority of the Veil of Compassion.
That fact planted regret deep in her chest, and she shed it with a sigh.
"But a harvest is still a harvest, I suppose."
At his master's murmur, the disciple waited in silence.
After a pause, she spoke again.
"...So who was it this time? Red Mane? Bloodstained Axe? Perhaps Valder. They'd be drunk on the power we granted them, flailing around..."
The moose-headed priest clasped her hands behind her back, her voice trailing off. Watching her, the wolf priest spoke with difficulty.
"That's... I don't know."
The conversation between master and disciple concerned beasts.
Beasts tasked with erasing all trace of the ship and gathering the people nearby.
The moose-headed priest, unable to parse the words "I don't know," tilted her head. The wolf priest bowed low and said,
"Burned, split apart, pierced through. I suspect multiple factions have risen against us simultaneously, or another faction has accelerated its conquest, or perhaps it's the work of another god's priest."
Reasonable deduction. But far from certain.
The moose priest clicked her tongue and shook her head.
Then, taking a few steps, she began to change.
*Crunch. Crack.*
The hideous sound of bone and sinew realigning.
After an agonizing moment, the moose-headed priest stood as a woman, long black hair cascading down.
The woman, black hair gleaming and blue eyes shining, spoke.
"Then go investigate it yourself. And return."
"I will."
The wolf priest bowed his head, and the woman walked slowly out of the basement.
Her expression was resolute as she considered it.
Whatever had happened, whatever variable had arisen—
The plan would not change.
She would save the Northern Empire.
*
"They're all dead."
At Aslan's words, the two North Empire men stepped outside. Crossing the creaking deck, the old man and the youth surveyed the rows of corpses.
Twisted beasts. Monsters that could clearly tear a grown man apart.
Most lay dead, unable to withstand even a single stroke.
Precise, swift, and devastating strikes.
They had targeted body mass and vitals with exacting aim, leaving bodies torn or scattered in pieces.
The majority had died in one blow, unable to endure Aslan's sword. Those that hadn't were killed by thrown daggers that pierced their vital points.
The sight of one man having slaughtered dozens of beasts left the two North Empire men reeling.
"Monster..."
Aslan didn't react to the word, but the old man who'd let it slip glanced nervously at him.
The language was one everyone present understood.
Aslan's strength was that unnatural.
A normal man would have reached his physical limit, yet Aslan fought on without tiring.
Extraordinary endurance. The preternatural capacity of a being far beyond human.
That was why he could tell the North Empire men to enter so confidently, but the two felt an eerie dissonance they couldn't name.
It didn't last.
"Ah, the village! We must go to the village! My lord! The village is in danger...!"
"He's right! There aren't many who can fight there! If we chase them now, we can catch up!"
The beasts that had attacked them weren't the ones that had gone toward the village. The ones with clear intent to attack.
The old man's frantic cry set the youth off too, but Aslan silently gestured toward the village with his chin.
—*Wooong.*
A small sun bloomed in the air.
Light enough to stop the mouths of both youth and old man. When they had fallen silent, Aslan elaborated.
"No need to worry. My companions and the general are there."
The North Empire men's eyes flickered with doubt, as if they thought this couldn't be a human phenomenon, but the fact that they needed to return to the village didn't change.
The three men left the ship and headed for the village. They walked for some time before arriving.
In front of the village lay countless beast corpses.
And Aslan's companions, clearing them away.
A few beasts still clung to life. Aslan paid the expected result no mind and walked toward Rumel, who was stabbing one of them dead.
She'd been staring at the bodies with an indifferent eye, but when she saw Aslan, light caught in her gaze.
Then she spotted the North Empire men behind him and immediately composed herself, adopting a performance.
The woman feigned the general's manner.
"How did the investigation go?"
A question asked with deliberate gravity.
Having witnessed the entire abrupt shift in her demeanor, Aslan couldn't help but smile. She was endearing.
Rumel's expression flickered toward a pout at that grin before she smoothed it away.
"The ship they saw—the one presumed to have been plundered by Valder's faction—was indeed an imperial vessel. I encountered a group of enemies on my return and dealt with them on the spot."
For an instant, Rumel's face almost showed worry before she caught herself.
She studied Aslan's body for a long moment, then nodded.
"Good work with the investigation. Get some rest."
"Thank you."
The staged exchange was about to end when the old North Empire man behind them spoke.
"Then... what will you do now?"
A question from the old man who'd been listening.
Rumel shot Aslan a look, as if asking what the question meant.
"Understood."
Aslan nodded as though it were an order.
Before Rumel's expression could turn puzzled, Aslan stepped forward, glanced at the old man, and then looked at Eric.
"Eric. Can you guide us to Valder's faction?"
"...The faction's location? Why..."
Eric stiffened. He clearly hadn't expected to be addressed.
At the hot-blooded North Empire man's confusion, Aslan smiled faintly and thought.
His purpose in the Northern Empire wasn't simple.
To thwart the priest operating in this land—whatever her goal and plan—and to draw the Northern Empire into the alliance.
With the factions splintered, that was a distant aim. He recognized he needed a different approach to achieve it.
Something made possible because Rumel was here, carrying the general's sword and perfectly capable of playing the part.
Turn Rumel into the general of the Northern Empire. Make the others kneel. Weed out the priests. Create an emperor and forge the alliance.
The path he was on now was one step among many toward that end.
Unify the Northern Empire through forced subjugation.
In any other nation, this method wouldn't work. But the Northern Empire was different.
Those who claimed succession from the ancient empire valued strength above all else.
And strength was one thing his party had in abundance.
So the first step: grow stronger.
Which meant seeking out Valder's faction—the ones most likely holding a Watcher of exceptional skill prisoner.
That wasn't the only reason.
*'Those tracks. They definitely belonged to a priest.'*
The tracks that had stopped the Watcher's illusion and made him surrender willingly. Heavy imprints that called to mind the weight of cattle.
Aslan suspected they were a priest's tracks, or the tracks of a monster indelibly marked by one.
Not the level of a merely monsterized human.
A warrior good enough to be a Watcher—who had killed dozens of beasts before that—had chosen surrender, judging he had no chance.
Unmistakable evidence of a priest.
And within that context, it was Valder's faction that had plundered the ship.
Aslan believed there was someone in that faction linked to or in contact with that priest.
Valder's faction wouldn't be the only one the priest had reached into, of course.
He didn't yet know what was being plotted, but nearly every faction's leader bore the influence of monsterization.
So Aslan intended to combine the clues he had and start gnawing at the most vulnerable target.
And a suitable justification was ready.
Aslan voiced it, answering Eric's question.
"The general wishes to test whether Valder is worthy of being Emperor."
A justification no mere youth could argue with.