His legs didn't want to work.
Each step was a negotiation. Lift the foot. Swing it forward. Plant it. Lift the opposite foot.
Ow. Shit.
His muscles screamed. His joints felt like they were grinding bone against bone. Elias was so tired, he'd forgotten to shift his weight. Fallen in the sea of snow and ice, his landing wasn't particularly painful. But the speed at which his body was forced to move, to try and recover did hurt.
Lift the foot. Swing it forward. Plant it. Shift weight. Lift the opposite foot.
But he kept moving.
The frozen river stretched endlessly in every direction, a vast white wasteland broken only by pressure ridges and hairline cracks that spiderwebbed across the ice like scars. Snow fell in lazy spirals, adding to the several inches already blanketing the surface.
Elias walked forward. He didn't know which direction—he'd guessed based on nothing but gut instinct and a vague memory of the ship's heading. Upstream means north. North means closer to the island he belonged to. And north means I can catch up, find that ship. Find all of them.
The cold had settled into his bones. His clothes were still frozen stiff, cracking with every movement. His fingers had gone from numb to a dull, throbbing ache that told him frostbite was setting in. He flexed them periodically, forcing blood flow, watching the white tips slowly fade to mottled red.
He walked.
Time became meaningless. There was just the crunch of snow beneath his boots, the rasp of his breathing, the endless white horizon.
His mind started to drift.
Elias couldn't help but think about the horrors he could see in this scenario. Odd as it was, it was the best possible follow up for his situation. Sure many of the creatures were much more powerful than him, but for this much ice to pack up, not sink through for such a long stretch, for him to be walking so fearlessly–in regard to falling in the water– him and the large majority of beasts would be separated by multiple feet of ice. The real threat was evading the birds, and the small things that could crawl up. But the sharks, the animals like that were of little threat to him. His biggest threat was himself. He could easily freeze, actually–
How did I not freeze? It was a thought that kept Elias lost, he was soaking wet, and buried under snow in weather that could freeze the body of water that held almost all life. Sure, he'd lost feeling in all of his appendages, he wasn't far from death's door, but how had he survived so long?
The gods. I must be favored. Elias chuckled to himself. Well who else could it be targeted at. They want me to do it. To kill those which are unholy.
It was an irrational thought. Lunacy at best. But it kept him warm in a way the frozen clothes couldn't.
He walked.
The first change in scenery appeared in the distance after what might have been an hour. Or three. He couldn't tell anymore.
At first he thought it was a mirage—a trick of exhaustion and cold playing games with his vision. But as he got closer, the shape solidified. Dark stone. Flat top. It was nothing more than another peninsula, a bit bigger this time. Elias could only see it because this was maybe 3-4 feet higher than the level of the snow. Something about the constant span of flat, constant, and eerily unchanging snow made Elias feel a special type of emotion he wasn't ready to explore.
He came to a sudden halt and stared intently at the horizon. He looked around him, but the ice all looked the same—a vast, white, and featureless expanse that offered no landmarks. The sun, or at least the pale glow that passed for it behind the thick veil of cloud cover, was starting to sink toward the edge of the world when he finally spotted the first movement beside his own shadow. It was dark and low to the ground, moving steadily across the frozen waste.
Elias stopped. His hand went instinctively to his pocket, fingers closing around the pathetic ice shard he'd pried from the rock.
The shape moved again. Slow. Lumbering.
That's that toad. That chased me out the water.
Elias's heart rate picked up.
It's still alive.
Of course it was. The freeze had trapped it just like it had trapped him. And now it was out here, starving, desperate.
Dangerous.
He should avoid it. Circle wide, give it space, keep moving.
But something stopped him.
The creature looked weak. Its movements were sluggish. The mangled back leg dragged uselessly behind it. It kept stopping, lowering its head, like it was struggling just to stay upright. But most of all.
It tried to eat me first. Did that toad also think it was better than me? Superior?
Elias scoffed.
But if I kill it, I can eat it. And then he can be a part of a greater goal. A divine plan.
The fact that the toad had also survived freezing–so by his logic, was also sparred by whatever gods Elias supposedly gained favor from. But his stomach clenched at the thought. He hadn't eaten since before the ship. Two days? Three? He'd lost track.
But how do I kill it?
The stone in his hand was laughable. The creature was huge—easily three times his weight. Even weakened, it could crush him with one lunge.
Unless I get him before he notices me.
Elias scanned the ice. Looked for an advantage. He was reminded of his conversation with Kallena, he believed he could kill her had she been poorly prepared. This toad was not nearly powerful enough for an evolved to struggle with.
There.
A pressure ridge. Maybe ten meters to his left. Jagged ice stacked in uneven slabs, creating a narrow gap at the base.
If I can get it to follow me, lure it into the gap, trap it—
It was a terrible plan, honestly–it wasn't a plan at all, but it was still better than doing nothing at all. Elias began to move toward the ridge, keeping his pace slow and his footsteps as quiet as the biting wind would allow.
Despite his caution, the toad noticed. Its heavy head lifted, and those filmy yellow eyes locked onto him with sudden, predatory focus. It let out a croak—a wet, rattling sound that seemed to vibrate in the cold air—and then it began to close the distance. It moved far faster than it had before, its ungainly shape blurring with surprising speed.
"Shit," Elias muttered to himself, and then he turned and ran.
His boots slipped on the ice. He stumbled, caught himself, kept moving. Behind him, the wet slap of the toad's body against the frozen surface. The scrape of claws.
Faster.
He reached the ridge. Dove into the gap between two slabs.
It was tighter than he'd thought. Barely enough room to squeeze through.
The toad reached the entrance and came to a halt, its broad head completely filling the gap as its nostrils flared with the scent of its prey. It began to push forward, forcing its bulk into the opening. The ice groaned under the strain, and the heavy slabs shifted slightly beneath the creature's immense weight. Elias pressed his back against the far wall, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
The toad pushed even harder, wedging its body into the narrow space with mindless persistence. Its warty skin scraped harshly against the frozen walls, leaving behind thick, glistening streaks of mucus. Elias realized then that the space was too tight; the creature was stuck. He didn't hesitate for a single second.
He lunged forward. Stone raised. Brought it down hard on the creature's skull.
The impact jarred his arm. The stone cracked.
The toad thrashed. Its jaws snapped, barely missing Elias's arm.
He swung again. And again. Aiming for the eyes. For the soft flesh around the nostrils.
The creature squealed. A high-pitched, keening sound that made Elias's teeth ache.
He kept swinging.
The stone shattered on the fourth blow, fragments scattering across the ice.
Elias didn't stop. He grabbed a larger shard, lunged forward again—
The toad's head whipped sideways. And out came a steam that Elias' nerves could not comprehend.
Pain exploded white-hot through his arm. The contrast of numbing cold to scalding heat was harrowing. The toad snapped its jaws against Elias' arm.
Elias screamed.
He tried to pull away. The teeth sank deeper. He could feel them scraping bone.
No. No no no—
Then, the sky died.
The pale, filtered light of the sun was suddenly snuffed out by a shadow so dense it felt like a physical weight pressing down on the ridge. A high, thin whistle—the sound of air being sliced by something moving at terminal velocity—cut through the toad's wet gurgling.
THOOM.
The impact didn't just shake the ice; it shattered the pressure ridge. A silhouette, carved out of a solar eclipse and wreathed in a dying, flickering corona, slammed into the toad's back.
The bird was broken—its auburn tinged feathers were molting into ash, and the "backwards R" branded under its seemingly right eye glowed with a sickly, fading heat.
It looked weak, deranged, but Elias felt even less sane than the bird looked.
Why is it here? Was all Elias could really think about. He was being attacked by a toad, and that toad had gotten attacked by– a bird? A scavenging bird at that, and lost. Nothing made sense. But even moreso, the bird was still here, sure maybe the ice and snow made it hard for the falcon to hunt underwater, but it didn't seem to actually have any intentions of eating the toad.
Elias looked at the Falcon curiously, while dragging his arm from the mutilated body of the toadback. Away from the falcon, which was staring intensely at Elias.
You think your gonna eat me?
Elias chuckled nervously, did the bird want to taste human flesh as badly as he'd wanted to try this famous taste of chicken? The meat of birds? Elias was thrown back, his arm slick with the toad's gore. It was pathetic. The only beast to have ever been cursed by god, it was shivering.
The falcon's head swiveled on its neck and those amber, eerie eyes found Elias with a focus that made his stomach drop, and before he could process what was happening it crossed the distance and drove its beak straight into his arm.
Straight into the wound the toad's mouth had left.
The arm went out cold, Elias felt almost as if he'd never had an arm there to begin with as the limb dropped to his side, limp. Elias grabbed the bird's head with his good hand and wrenched sideways and the beak tore free, he thrashed out of fear and pain.
His dead arm swung by accident and the back of his forearm caught the falcon's beak sideways and forced it back not exactly far away. But he didn't pay that, or the relief he felt any attention. He turned and sprinted anywhere but where he was.
Behind him he heard the two animals meet each other and thought, with a desperate, stupid hope — yes. Fight. Please just fight each other.
It was unlikely that the bird specifically wanted him, nor the meat of human, it surely just wanted what seemed like the weaker, easier to claim prey. Elias hoped he was right, but he was not that fortunate.
He continued to run but he felt himself slowing despite his legs moving the same speed. Like running on a treadmill. There was a measure of force pulling him, or more accurately, dragging him backward across the snow one inch for every two he gained, and then the force became stronger, and he couldn't continue to move his feet without losing his balance. And he was then fully towed across the area. He was moving backward , but the falcon had not taken a single step.
Elias did not even have the time to wonder how the vile bird was pulling him back, adrenaline blocked him from feeling how misguided everyone's understanding of the thieving raven was, it could do more than simply pull jewelry and other shiny things, but could more or less pull anything if it had the strength to do so.
He grabbed the ridge.
The same gap. The toad's gap. His fingers found it and he held on and the pull went from uncomfortable to total, his whole body straining away from the ice, boots scrabbling. The toad somewhere inside the gap made a sound. But he did not care about that toad.
He held.
The pull stopped.
He fell forward onto the ice, caught himself on his good hand, and when he scrambled up and turned around the falcon was six feet away, on the ground, and Elias stood there breathing and looked at it properly for the first time.
One wing sat broken, seemingly smashed by what he could only assume was the force of the fall. And that meant it couldn't fly.
Elias thought about that for a short moment.
He outweighed it. He had reach on it. It had no teeth — just a beak, which meant it needed to be close, and he could control close. And most importantly no fingers.
"Stupid cursed bird," Elias said with a prideful, relieved chuckle.
This was, actually, a terrible matchup for the bird.
He rolled his good shoulder.
It pulled him when he charged, which he should have expected. The gap closed in about half the time and twice the speed and they met each other badly — his arm around its body, its talons finding his thigh, both of them making sounds that weren't dignified. He wrenched it sideways. It repulsed him — not a push, just wrongness, gravity briefly suggesting he should be elsewhere — and he stumbled but got his hand around its good leg before it could reset.
He had a bird by the leg. And swung it. Across then back, against one side of the ground the the next like a barbarian.
The first swing felt genuinely good. It hit the ice and he swung it back up and it hit the ice again, he was breathing hard through his teeth, the bird was screeching and as he wound up for a third, the falcon coming up in a wide arc.
It became as heavy as a refrigerator.
Not gradually. Between one moment and the next he had moved the bird with the ease of a pillow and then he felt like there was a large household appliance on the end of his arm still travelling in the direction physics had already committed to, which was down, and he was attached to it, and his feet left the ice.
He came down with it and the sound he made was not something he would ever repeat.
The bird sat squarely on his entire arm. His good arm was trapped underneath him at a wrong angle and his dead arm lay beside him contributing nothing, and the beak came down and he turned his head and it took a chunk out of the ice next to his ear close enough that he felt it.
He tried to push it off. The bird weighed as much as it wanted to. He tried again. Same result.
The beak came back up. At this rate, the bird would easily drill a hole in his head.
His face was already pressed into its chest from trying to turn away, feathers against his mouth, and the beak was coming down, his arm wasn't working and his other arm was pinned. There was nothing — no stone, no ice shard, nothing — just his face and whatever was in front of it.
Elias was gonna die. He smiled with his eyes watering, at least he could experience the one thing he did feel he deserved.
He thrashed his neck, attempting to place his face at the meatiest part of the falcon's leg, it gave another vicious peck that would've slammed his head into the snow again if he had even cared to protect himself. Elias bit down.
The bird seemingly jolted back at that point, and the weight vanished.
After that, was a blur, from what Elias could make out, he had temporarily went blind, like the falcon flashed the absolute brightest of light in his face, that didnt help with the strong nausea he felt after swallowing the falcon's meat.
Chicken is disgusting
The falcon cawed many more times, and Elias believed he even heard the toad again, maybe it'd finally gotten up, out of the gap — wrenched itself free somewhere in the chaos — and it caught the falcon.
But when Elias' vision came back, the entire backside of the bird had smoke coming out of it. Elias was dazed, that was until the toad came to finish what it'd started, jumping at him, covering at least a few meters in one feral leap.
Elias didn't have the strength to roll away. He simply threw a hand up, fingers splayed in a desperate, trembling shield. He felt the sudden rush of heat from the toad's open maw-and then, the air between them simply died.
There was no flash, only a dry, static hiss. And by the time its head hit the palm o Elias's hand, the flesh was already blackened and brittle, crumbling like old charcoal.
The toad's skin blackened instantly where the air had grown thin and dry. It didn't just burn; it withered. The thick, gelatinous protective layer-the only thing keeping its internal chemistry from drying out entirelyt-began to peel away in curling, parchment-like strips.
The toad's scream, once a sharp whistle of steam, turned into something worse. It became a wet, bubbling shriek as the heat finally breached the muscle wall.
Without the mucosal layer to keep the skin elastic, the creature's own movements tore its hide open.
It convulsed. Once, a violent spasm that sent a spray of useless, cooling fluid onto the ice. Twice, a smaller twitch of its back legs.
Then it went still, its body shrinking into a charred, shriveled husk of what it had been seconds before.
Elias stared at his hand
What the fuck was that?
He looked at the toad. At the charred ruin of its face. At the smoke still rising from the burnt flesh.
His hand had done that.
His hand.
He looked at the falcon dead, its disgusting leg torn from the hip. He gagged and flexed his fingers. And the frostbite that'd grown over the past– who knew how long– seemingly faded.
His hand trembled excessively. Both from the adrenaline and confusion that met Elias' consciousness.
Elias sat there for a long moment, staring at his hands, trying to process what had just happened. For a while, he considered that he'd been a victim of the fog, that he was simply hallucinating. After all Elias didn't know exactly how mental fog affected one's mind, nor did he know how long he'd been in between Isle two and Isle three. He also considered that he may be delirious, Elias hadn't eaten or slept in at least a few days. And as a testament to that fact, his stomach growled.
And he remembered: he was starving.
He looked at the falcon's corpse.
Food.
The smell hit him first when he started cutting into it.
He worked carefully. Used the broken stone to slice into the underbelly where the skin and feathers were thinner. Peeled it back.
The meat underneath was a pale brown, it smelled good, thought Elias was weary of fire.
In the stories of the past, though, people did use fire to cook their food, like chicken. So maybe that was the reason it tasted so bad, he hadn't cured it with any acids, it was raw. But cooked food, wasn't there a reason people did not dare to wield fire anymore?
His stomach turned. He was scared
You have to eat.
He turned away and looked at the dead toad. Held it in his hand.
It looked just as burned. Slimy.
It would probably make me sicker than the first time.
Raw, toad meat. Surely Elias would not be able to keep that down. He couldn't afford to throw up what remained in his stomach.
But–
Elias looked at his hand. Tried to imitate the feeling he'd exerted.
The warmth surged. His palm glowed faintly orange, not even enough for someone else to replicate.
He pressed the meat against it.
It sizzled.
The smell changed. From raw and foul to something almost... edible. Like overcooked fish left too long in a pan.
He pulled it away. The surface was browned, well mostly black and browned in places.
Elias stared at it. He burnt it. But still, he ate.
It tasted like shit. Rubbery and bitter, with an aftertaste that made him want to gag.
But it was food. He tried the chicken. Cooked it, and let out a deep sigh of satisfaction.
He ate another piece. And another.
As he chewed, Elias noticed the sensation first. The unnatural warmth in his palms was receding—not vanishing, but draining away like water through cracked stone. He stared at his hands, his mind racing to catch the thread of why.
He'd eaten the bird. The power had come from the meat. Or had it?
He stopped chewing the piece he'd seared over the small fire and looked at the raw carcass. Maybe the fire had ruined it. Maybe it had to be pure. He cut a fresh strip, the cold, wet muscle slick against his fingers, and bit into it.
Nothing. Just the copper taste of blood and the grit of the ridge. This time, Elias did in fact throw up.
He tried again, the slowly receding hunger allowing him to feel every individual rib against his spine as if he'd miraculously lost a hundred pounds. Closing his eyes this time, straining until his head throbbed, trying to "pull" that heat back from the meat. But the spark was gone.