The night sprawled across the northern wasteland like a vast shroud, its chill a phantom touch upon all who dared to breathe it. Snow fell in a relentless hush, veiling the battlefield that had seen its peace torn asunder by blood and fury. Bjorn's body lay sprawled in the crimson-streaked snow, his breath shallow but defiant in its insistence on survival. Around him, the snow was painted red—not merely his blood but that of the masked figures he and his companions had struggled against.
Kilian stood towering over him, a figure carved of shadow and menace. The dark folds of his coat swayed in the icy wind, and his face was a picture of grim authority. "Brozek," he commanded, his voice like the groan of an ancient tree bending to the storm.
Brozek obeyed without hesitation. The man who approached was a giant stripped bare by the elements, his broad chest gleaming with a sheen of ice and sweat. He moved with an almost ceremonial deliberation, his bare feet crunching the snow as though consecrating the earth beneath them. His face was a cruel paradox: infantile softness married to eyes of impossible clarity, twin blue opals that seemed to pierce straight into the marrow of one's being.
"Is he dead?" Kilian's tone betrayed an undertone of worry, a crack in his hardened demeanor.
Brozek knelt beside Bjorn, the earth seeming to groan beneath his weight. He reached out, his hand enormous, a slab of flesh and sinew that engulfed Bjorn's head entirely as he checked for a pulse. A faint flutter greeted his fingers.
"Alive," Brozek murmured, his deep voice barely a ripple against the stillness. "He really is, Kilian."
Behind them, Mikkel stirred, his broken body a testament to the ferocity of the skirmish. He coughed, and the sound was wet and garbled, like stones tumbling through water. "Please," he managed, his words slurred and broken, "don't hurt him."
The trio of strangers turned their gaze toward him, their expressions unreadable beneath their veils of foreign understanding. Mikkel's tongue may have spoken a language they did not know, but his desperation needed no translation. The weight of his plea lingered in the air, fragile yet undeniable.
Brozek turned back to Bjorn. Slowly, reverently, he raised his massive hands to his face. His palms, weathered and calloused, pressed against his eyes, and a profound stillness overtook him. His lips moved, and the silence shattered into a cascade of strange, melodic utterances—a language not meant for the ears of mortal men. It was a sound that seemed to reverberate in the bones, to awaken something ancient and primal within all who heard it.
The chant was both beautiful and terrible, a hymn to powers unknown. Snow around Brozek began to stir, rising in slow, spiraling eddies as if caught in an unseen vortex. The already tense air thickened, and the invisible wall keeping Arne at bay seemed to pulse faintly, like the heartbeat of a slumbering leviathan.
Behind the wall, Arne pounded and kicked, his fists raw and bloody from the effort. His roars of anger were muffled, lost in the expanse between him and his fallen comrades. Ten meters behind him, families huddled in terror, their breaths frozen in clouds of disbelief and fear. Arvid stood among them, a shield against the incomprehensible horrors unfolding before their eyes.
Ingrid clutched Sigrid tightly, tears staining her cheeks as she whispered prayers to gods she no longer believed would answer. Erik, young and pale, stared wide-eyed at the strangers, his hand gripping Astrid's trembling fingers. Every person in that group, young or old, knew that they stood on the precipice of something vast and terrible, something beyond the simple cruelty of mortal men.
And in the center of it all, Brozek chanted on, his voice a bridge between the mortal and the divine.
Mikkel drifted away, consciousness slipping from him like a ship untethering from its dock. The pain of his broken body ebbed, replaced by a light—bright, unbearably bright. It consumed him, expanding without boundary or form, until he was submerged in a realm devoid of space and time.
Here, he was everywhere and nowhere. He was at all times, and yet no time at all. This was not a place, not in the way the physical world defined it; it was an abstraction, a construct of his own being. Mikkel floated in his own consciousness, an endless expanse of thought and understanding.
Then, like snow meeting the embrace of the sun, it began to melt. His understanding fragmented, collapsing inward. The bright infinity gave way to shadow, and he was pulled backward, through layers of himself, spiraling down to the core of his existence. He found himself again in the engine room of his past—a stifling, suffocating place of survival and despair.
The thick, greasy air filled his lungs as it had in those days. He was a boy again, crouched among the metallic skeletons of long-forgotten machines, gnawing on the remains of the dead to stave off hunger. The sensation of survival was raw and familiar, but something was off. This time, he was not scared. He was not desperate.
He was alone.
No Larse. No Gilion. No one to shield him from the vastness of the dark. The absence yawned before him like an endless chasm, and from its depths came a flicker of something primal: fear. A terror so deep it clawed at the roots of his being.
"Thou shall not be scared."
The words were not spoken, yet Mikkel knew them. They carved themselves into his mind as though etched by an invisible hand. They were not a sound, but a truth—a law engraved in the fabric of his consciousness.
The shadows around him deepened, folding in on themselves. The suffocating engine room dissolved, replaced by a void that seemed to shudder with the weight of untold truths.
"A place like this shall not be a place for a soul to live in."
Mikkel felt the words as much as he knew them. They resonated in his core, a vibration that tethered him to the formless vastness around him. He tried to speak, to give voice to the confusion swirling in his mind.
"Who..."
The single word fell from his thoughts, but the act of forming it unraveled him further. Images exploded in his mind, a terrible flood of memory and nightmare. He saw Larse, dying again and again—an endless loop of agony. He saw Bjorn and Arne, their faces twisted with rage, striking the fatal blow time after time.
"Thou shall not think of anything but my thought."
The command was absolute. Mikkel's mind constricted, the flood of horrors halted as if by an unseen dam. In their place came knowledge—impossible, alien knowledge that poured into him like molten lead. It burned and shaped him, carving new pathways in his mind.
"Man you love so much is alive and well, but don't think about it. My voice and thoughts are the only ones you should know."
Mikkel yielded, the force of the words obliterating his resistance. His thoughts, once his own, were now tethered to the voice. Bjorn faded, Arne faded, even his memories of the engine room dissolved like smoke. There was only this moment, this singular presence embedding itself into the fabric of his being.
The knowledge was vast, incomprehensible, yet it settled within him as though it had always been there. Time slowed, folded, ceased to matter.
"Waking up is what will happen," the voice intoned. "You shall forget all that happened now, but our language thou will speak."
Mikkel was left with only a faint glimmer of self, the weight of the words pressed into his soul like a brand. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the void trembled. Light flickered. The vastness shattered.
And Mikkel woke.
Mikkel's body jolted as if flung from the void into the cold embrace of the present. His first breath was sharp, tearing through his chest like the scrape of a blade. The frigid air clawed at his lungs, but the weight of the world felt unbearable. For a fleeting moment, a single thought flickered in his mind—suicide. The darkness of existence seemed suffocating, an unrelenting tide that would not be stemmed. Yet, no muscle on his battered body obeyed him. He lay still, as if shackled by unseen chains.
A figure emerged from the gloom, moving toward him with deliberate, measured steps. Cloaked entirely in black, the man's form radiated authority. His name came before he spoke it, carried by some unseen force that seemed to press into Mikkel's mind.
"My name is Kilian," the man said, his voice as rough as stones grinding together.
Kilian's presence was overwhelming. His towering figure was a monument of power, his build impossibly tight and muscular, like the sinew of a predator poised to strike. His face was a grotesque contradiction—a warped, unnatural grin stretched from one high cheekbone to the other, a grimace that mocked any semblance of humanity. His eyes were a void, pitch-black pools devoid of life or warmth, yet they moved independently. One turned to glance at Bjorn's bloodied body lying still in the snow, while the other regarded Arne, still pounding furiously at the invisible wall in futile defiance.
Mikkel's mind reeled. Words flowed from Kilian's mouth, and Mikkel understood every syllable. It was as if the foreign tongue had been woven into his very thoughts. Was it some kind of sorcery, or perhaps the product of an unfathomably advanced civilization?
"Don't stress your mind too much," Kilian said, his voice rough, the deep timbre mismatched with his otherworldly appearance. "Even I don't know how the big guy does it." He chuckled, the sound as cold as the night around them.
Mikkel gathered the last scraps of his strength and forced the words from his lips. "What do you want?"
Kilian's smile, impossibly, widened. "I am sent by Bristol's Apostorijat of the Black Star Order on a mission to find Altera," he replied smoothly. His tone was casual, almost jovial, but there was a menace that coiled beneath it. "May you not be poisoned by hatred toward me and my two consorts."
Kilian glanced briefly at Brozek, who stood motionless a few paces away, his towering frame illuminated by the pale glow of the moon. Then his gaze shifted to Glympse, who lingered in the shadows, silent and inscrutable.
"We didn't know you were survivors borne of Altera," Kilian added, his smile now so wide it seemed to split his face.
Mikkel's mind swirled with the name—Altera. What did it mean? What connection could they possibly have to this enigmatic group? The questions clawed at him, but he could only manage one more utterance.
"What will happen now?"
Kilian's response came quickly, almost mockingly. "Well, we need to calm down the rest of the group, answer a few questions perhaps, and have a good talk about everything." His tone was light, conversational, yet it dripped with condescension. "I will also try to be transparent with you, of course."
Kilian crouched closer, the overwhelming presence of his grin filling Mikkel's vision. "Know this, man known as Mikkel," he said, his voice a mixture of mockery and finality. "From here on out, there is no going back. You've lost. All of you are now under my command."
He rose to his full height, his eyes—one locked on Bjorn, the other on the invisible wall—radiating a dark promise. "But I swear this: I will help you and your comrades."
The words hung in the air, heavy with implication, as the snowfall thickened, veiling the broken battlefield in a shroud of white.