"What do you mean by that?" Deacon asked, the question half-caught on the swallow of beer, he almost spluttered across the counter. "How does someone just –change their race? Are we like vampires? They're the only ones I've heard that can change other races into their own?"
Bjorn huffed a low laugh at Deacon's reaction, expecting this confusion from the very beginning. "I thought you would have picked up on it when I mentioned that our family had the blood of witches in it," he said, his tone easing into something lighter as he rolled the cold neck of the bottle between finger and thumb. "Your father and I were Witches; it's why those rabid animals sunk their claws into your aunt and kept your father and I alive for so long; they wanted to use us and our blood."
"Both Mattias and I underwent a ritual that provided us with a race change option when we attempted to Tier Up," Bjorn said. "But I'll get to that in its own time." He took a drink from the can Deacon had handed him, though Deacon could tell from the way Bjorn didn't even blink that the alcohol barely made a dent. Still, Bjorn seemed to appreciate the gesture itself more than the drink.
"When Mattias and I arrived on Floor Twenty-Four," he continued, leaning forward slightly, as he saw Deacon's brow furrow – in doing so, he managed to catch sight of the side of Deacon's hair beginning to lose its dyed black color. "Our Floor Quest was… not what we expected. We were assigned as lighthouse keepers for a cliffside village with a population of roughly two thousand five hundred people. The village was built along a crescent of pale stone cliffs that overlooked what they called the Astral Sea."
Deacon frowned at the name.
"The Astral Sea?" he repeated slowly. "Is that some sort of Hidden Floor Wonder?" Deacon asked, trying to recall if he'd ever heard of a Hidden Floor Wonder with that name. "Like Brandy Beach on Floor Twelve – Sake Springs?"
"No," Bjorn said, cutting in with a small shake of his head. "It's just a name the locals gave the sea. At night, it sparkles like the night sky — the corals, the kelp, and the creatures below all glow in the dark…In the daytime, it looks just like a normal sea."
"Oh," Deacon said, slightly disappointed by his uncle's answer.
"Our job," Bjorn continued, rolling his eyes at Deacon's disappointment, "was to maintain the Lunar Wards carved into the cliff face. They kept the creatures below from manipulating the tides into a massive tsunami that could swallow the whole village. We had to keep those wards stable for an entire moon cycle — and that meant dealing with wave after wave of sea beasts trying to destroy them."
"The largest and strongest creature Mattias and I ever faced was something called a Tide-Wyrm," he said. "It was nearly fifty meters long, covered in armor-plated scales, with a spine ringed in crystalline fins that formed on any part of its body. And atop all of that, it was incredibly fast."
"Needless to say, fighting that thing, along with the rest of the sea beasts, while trying to stay afloat on open water was a massive pain in the ass."
Deacon grimaced, not at the mention of the Tide-Wyrm, but at the mention of having to fight in water.
Bjorn snorted at his expression. "Don't worry," he said.
"I'll teach you how to run on water with mana, and then how to do it without mana. And if you get good enough, well…" he took a slow drink and tightened the cap back onto the bottle just enough to make the metal groan. "You'll be able to run on lava, poison swamps, snow, and even on the air if you get really good at it."
Deacon's eyes widened. "Really?"
"Of course," Bjorn hummed. "However, that's only after you finish the first mission I'll assign you later."
"Deal," Deacon agreed without hesitation.
"Anyway," Bjorn said after clearing his throat. "Back to the story."
"When Mattias and I reached the lighthouse and the cliffs, we followed the switchback path up to the village built behind it. At first glance, when the locals appeared on their village's watch towers, they looked human enough — dark hair, pale hair, freckled skin, brown eyes, blue eyes, a painting's worth of variation, and our Identify was still at initiate tier, so we couldn't Identify them from that far."
"But we did end up learning that they were unlike any other group of people that we had ever met ever since entering the Tower," Bjorn muttered with a disbelieving shake of his head.
"Ever since entering the Tower, Mattias and I were used to people whose first instinct was to hide their children, use them as shields, or sell them to avoid being killed. So, to walk into a place where kids were just… running around, laughing, yelling, chasing one another — and adults weren't panicking over it — it made every hair on the back of our necks stand up. And the fact that all of them were Level 0, and an entirely new race we'd never seen before? The warning bells in our heads were so loud the whole forest could've heard them."
Deacon's jaw tightened slightly at that, because he remembered how confused he had felt seeing Arne's "[Human Lv 0]" when he'd first Identified him.
"Level 0 meant unsynced," Deacon murmured.
"And then," he said, "they spoke English, a language everyone learned to speak while climbing the Tower due to how widespread it was before everyone got teleported into the Tower."
Deacon blinked. "…Wait. They were unsynced… But they managed to speak English?"
"Fluently at that," Bjorn confirmed. "Which meant someone had come by them earlier and had taught them. And that could have only been from another Climber."
"Which, of course, put us even more on edge," Bjorn continued, his voice settling into that low, steady cadence he fell into when memory took the reins. "Because by then, Mattias and I had already climbed through twenty-three Floors, fought in more skirmishes and battles than I cared to count, and we hadn't heard even a whisper of a new race living on Floor Twenty-Four despite Mattias having every decent informant on our payroll."
Finishing up his drink, Bjorn noticed that Deacon's skin had begun to turn slightly flushed – a sign that the temporary boost the Blood Pill he'd given him was beginning to wear off.
"But we explained our Floor Quest; guarding the lighthouse and the Lunar Wards from being damaged by the hordes of sea creatures that would attack them, and they welcomed us into their village with open arms and invited us to a dinner, like we were family at a Thanksgiving Reunion…"
"That alone should have sent us running… But there was just something about the village… that after years of waking up to the taste of blood in our mouths, the smell of death that clung to us that set off any creatures nearby, and the weight of being despised by most people you'd meet, being welcomed so happily…" Bjorn paused, searching for the words to describe how he felt at that very moment. "It almost tore through our defenses as though they were made out of wet tissue."
Letting out a wistful sigh from his nose, Bjorn continued. "Unbothered by our rejection of their dinner invitation, they allowed us into their village to pass to the lighthouse and let us get to work."
"The only time they came near us was when they brought food they'd made 'extra' of, or when the kids ran up to ask questions; where we came from, what the monsters looked like, what the sky looked like above Floor Ten, whether snow tasted the same there as it did anywhere else we'd been." Bjorn let out a short mirthful huff, recalling the very scenes he spoke of as though he was watching them play out this very moment.
"Then they'd start telling us stories that their parents told them about the dangers of the Astral Sea, and terrors that live within them," he said with exaggerated emphasis on the terrors that resided within the Astral Sea.
"It was the first time in a long time," Bjorn murmured, "that we saw children who weren't... broken, or as messed up as Mattias and I were during our time in the Tower."
Deacon didn't speak.
"And realizing that terrified us," Bjorn admitted. "Because it reminded us of everything we lost. Everything ripped straight from our hands."
"It terrified us so bad that when the first wave of sea beasts began appearing and swimming towards the cliffs, and the kids had quickly run back into the village after we had told them to, Mattias and I dove straight into the water and started slaughtering every one of their heads that popped out of the water. Without even taking a moment of respite, we tore through wave after wave, shoving all of our frustrations onto the creatures we were killing."
"By the time the moon rose and the attacks finally stopped, we dragged ourselves to the shore beneath the cliffs and collapsed to our knees. And there, we wept like children; mourning the family and the innocence we'd lost just to survive."
He didn't look away when he said it; instead, his eyes softened as multiple faces began to overlap with Deacon's face.
"A week in," Bjorn eventually continued, "they invited us to Jól–"
"–Midwinter," Deacon said, before he could stop himself, unable to understand why he'd been able to translate the word he'd never heard of before until now.
Bjorn's lips curled in a small, knowing smile. "Yes, Midwinter, the celebration of Skoll and Hati, the wolves who devoured the sun and moon and killed the Aesir."
Deacon looked at his uncle in disbelief. "How did I know that?"
"Inborn Jötunn magic," Bjorn winked. "You'll find the language of the Jötnar will come to you naturally, the runic alphabet too. I'll teach you to write them later."
Seeing an excited, yet sluggish nod, Bjorn continued, wanting to finish his tale before Deacon would fall asleep.
"At the Midwinter Festival, Mattias and I finally broke. The wall we had built up over the years of countless thousands of corpses had come crashing down and we had asked them why they had been so kind to us, why they had no issues letting their kids run around us and not worrying that us outsiders would do anything — when we had seen them drive away every other Climber who had ever stepped foot near that village."
"And instead of giving us an answer, they led us to one of their nine temples they had, one with the sigil of a massive tree on it. There, they showed us something that shook both Mattias and I to our cores."
Deacon's drooping eyes narrowed.
"What?" he asked.
"They showed us a photograph," Bjorn said. "Of Mattias and me when we were fourteen and wearing the exact same clothes that we were wearing the very day we got teleported into the Tower."
"They… did research on you after you arrived?" he asked, though the words fell from his mouth already hollow because even he knew how thin they sounded. How could they have if they had yet to sync with the Tower and enter the previous Floors to learn about who they were?
Bjorn shook his head, "Impossible," he said. "Mattias and I never used our real names when we began climbing, never told anyone where we were from, never left any trace of who we were before Floor Zero. And don't forget — no electronics came with us into the Tower. No phones, computers, watches – hell, the closest thing to an instant camera was invented around 05, four years after everyone had been teleported into the Tower. There was no way they could've had a photograph of us."
"Then how?" Deacon asked.
"Gods," Bjorn answered.
"They received two prophecies, from two of their eight guardian gods," Bjorn continued. "And in those prophecies, they named both me and Mattias, and stated how they were to make us their Mortal Champions."
"And the moment I realized that," Bjorn continued, "I hated them. Because if gods were real, then they sat there and watched Floor Zero become hell, and they didn't do anything, didn't stop anything, didn't help anything. And neither of us wanted anything to do with beings like that."
"But Mattias and I weren't idiots. If someone, or something, had information that should have been impossible for anyone to have, then we needed to play along."
"So, we did; we let them talk, and talk. In between the increasing number of waves that we had to defend, Mattias and I learned almost everything about the Jötnar, and they were so willing to give it freely without demanding anything in return." Bjorn said, before letting out a wistful sigh.
"And it wasn't until we had climbers sneak into the village and kidnap a Jötunn woman, Skaði - your mother."
Taking hold of the cup that was beginning to slip out of Deacon's hands and placing it on the holo table, Bjorn realized that he would need to wrap up his story before Deacon passed out.
"Needless to say, with the way history turned out, Mattias successfully managed to rescue her while I captured the kidnappers and brought them in to be interrogated."
"By then, we were on the final day of our Quest, and being so overwhelmed by the love and trust they willingly gave to us, both Mattias and I decided that after we completed our Quest, we would take part in the trial of the guardian gods and attempt to become the mortal champions," Bjorn said, as he helped Deacon onto his feet and began leading him to the room where he would rest in for the night. "By the end of the trials, both Mattias and I received drops of ichor from the guardian gods of the respective trials we took, and upon reaching Floor Twenty-Five, we consumed the ichor just as we accepted our Tier Ups and became Jötnar."