Chapter 125- Frozen Promises
Wrighty gave a rundown of what had happened in the ridge.
He spoke between bites, his voice shifting between casual and heavy depending on the memory. Grub sat beside him on the curb and listened without interrupting, his enchanted notebook closed for once. Some things didn't need to be written down or analyzed. Sometimes it was better to just listen in the moment.
"After you left," Wrighty began, staring at the Winged Boar dog in his hand without eating it, "I was messed up for a while."
He didn't realize how much he had been relying on the gloomy boy until there was no longer anyone there to rely on. Grub had been the first person he remembered clearly. The first person he saved. The first real connection that made this world feel less empty. he first face attached to a memory that actually belonged to him. Having Grub nearby meant having proof that his life, however strange and new, had a starting point he could hold onto. Without that anchor, the weight of not knowing who he was pressed down harder than it ever had before.
"I was in a pretty dark place for a few days," Wrighty admitted. His grin faltered briefly. "Couldn't really get out of my head, ya know? Everything felt kinda... pointless."
He took a bite but chewed slowly.
"Luckily, someone really amazing pulled me out of it."
Snow.
The white-haired girl with the cold personality and the ever-present fur coat had planted herself at Wrighty's side during those dark days and refused to leave. She didn't offer comforting words or cheerful reassurances. That wasn't her nature. She just sat near him in her quiet, steady way, her presence constant and unyielding, until the fog in his head began to thin on its own.
Over the next three weeks, Wrighty and Snow grew close. They trained together, ran patrols together, and fell into an easy rhythm of companionship that filled the gap Grub had left.
"She didn't really say much," Wrighty said, a soft smile crossing his face. "She'd just sit there. Sometimes she'd bring food. Other times she'd tell me to stop moping and do something useful." His smile deepened. "Her version of being nice was telling you to shut up and eat."
Meanwhile, Five stepped into leadership naturally, explaining concepts the survivors had no framework for. Such as, what plants were safe to cultivate, basic structures for governance, and resource distribution. He organized trade with nearby settlements that nobody else knew existed and introduced the concept of Anima to people who had never heard the word. Still, no one knew where Grub had gone.
Sheila worried about Grub constantly during that period, according to Wrighty. She asked about him often, wondering where he had gone and whether he was safe. But neither she nor Wrighty had any leads. Grub had vanished into the wilderness without so much as an idea where he was off to.
"Then one day," Wrighty said, his voice flattening, "everything changed."
He and Snow had been leading an expedition through the forest, searching for a group of survivors that Five's scouts had reported seeing. They were deep in unfamiliar territory when the trees started shaking.
Then the creature made of an amalgam of human remains. the same creature that killed Chop, the bone monster, returned.
It came without warning, the same impossible presence from before. The air around it felt wrong, like reality had to bend just to let it exist.
"Same thing as before," Wrighty said grimly. "It was massive and repulsive. It even seemed angrier than last time." He flexed his hand absently, staring at the calluses on his palm. "I tried to fight it and gave it everything I had."
His jaw tightened. "But it wasn't enough."
The creature had overwhelmed him. Its bone body deflected his strikes and its raw mass pinned him against the forest floor. Blood poured from a dozen wounds as the beast bore down on the small group of terrified survivors they had been trying to rescue. Wrighty couldn't do anything to stop it, he was beaten, broken, and seconds away from watching people who wanted to protect die right in front of him.
Until Snow stepped forward.
"She just walked past me," Wrighty said quietly. "She didn't even look scared. She just put her hands up and everything around her got cold. Like, COLD cold. Frost spread across the ground, our breath began turning to crystals, the whole deal."
Something had awakened inside her during that desperate moment. The air around her dropped in temperature so fast it felt like the world itself was exhaling ice.
Snow fought the bone monster with a ferocity that belied her slight frame. Frost crawled up the creature's legs with each touch. Ice formed across its bone plates, seeping into the cracks. She struggled and fought, pouring everything she had into the assault, until the beast was encased entirely in a shell of frozen white. Then she crushed it, shattering it into broken fragments of thick ice. What Wrighty would later learn was called a Forte manifested within white-haired girl when she needed it most.
For a moment, everything seemed like it went alright, like it was all over. But often times when things feel over it ends up that they had just begun.
Soon, something else arrived.
Wrighty described it carefully, his brow furrowed with the effort of recalling details that still didn't make sense to him. It didn't walk in like the monster before it. It floated, as if gravity had stopped applying to it entirely. The figure was humanoid, but incorrect in ways that made it hard to focus on. Its body looked thin and starved, like it hadn't eaten in years. It hung in the air cross-legged, its body scrawny and sunken beneath a long purple robe, while its sickly pink skin was covered in strange markings.
The most disturbing feature was its head. Four wings sprouted from the skull, spread wide and motionless. And two additional arms, separate from the pair folded calmly in its lap, extended from the top of its head. Those hands covered the creature's face completely, fingers splayed across its features, concealing whatever expression lay beneath. Those hands never moved. Not once.
"It just floated there," Wrighty said, his voice strained. "Watching us. Or I think it was watching. Hard to tell with those hands covering its face."
Snow was already in bad shape from the bone monster fight. Her breathing was ragged, her body trembling from Anima depletion. The poor girl could barely even stand.
Slowly, the floating creature drifted toward her struggling form.
Wrighty, still injured and shaking, forced himself forward and advanced toward the floating organism. He was bloody, exhausted, and running on nothing but adrenaline and desperation with his fist cocked and murder in his eyes.
The creature didn't even look at him. One hand lifted slightly, and the air itself seemed to snap. Wrighty was thrown backward without contact, slamming into a tree hard enough to knock the breath out of him. His vision blurred as he struggled to stay conscious.
The being apathetically continued forward and through the haze, Wrighty heard the creature speak. Its voice was layered and strangely hollow, as if coming from the bottom of a dry well.
"You have the spark," it said, with a calm voice. "You will be powerful for us."
Those words were the last thing Wrighty heard before consciousness left him.
The curb went quiet. Wrighty had stopped eating entirely, the remaining dogs sitting untouched in his lap. Grub watched his friend's face cycle through emotions that didn't belong there, a mixture of pain, guilt, and helplessness. Wrighty's expressions were usually simple and transparent. Seeing complexity in them felt wrong.
"When I woke up," Wrighty continued, his voice barely above a murmur, "the creature was gone. And Snow was..."
He trailed off before starting again.
"She was crying. Everywhere around her was covered in snow. Real snow, falling from a a completely clear sky. It was not just that she was also… glitching."
The word sounded bizarre in Wrighty's mouth. But it was the only one that fit. Snow's body was flickering the way the bone monster had flickered, the same way the Anomaly at the village had flickered. Reality around her felt unstable, like it couldn't agree on what she was anymore.
Her skin was now partially blue, and her eyes had changed into black sclera with glowing blue pupils that didn't belong to anything human. She trembled as the blizzard spread outward from her body.
"She kept saying 'I'm so cold, I'm so cold, what's wrong with me' over and over." Wrighty's hand clenched against his knee. "But she wasn't talking to us. She was too lost in her own world. And she was attacking anyone who got close."
By the time Wrighty had regained consciousness, Sheath and the others had arrived from the Ridge. They were trying to contain Snow, but the blizzard radiating from her body made approach nearly impossible. Frostbite claimed fingers and toes from those who pushed too close. Ice spread across the ground in expanding rings, freezing everything it touched
Five stood at the perimeter with a calm look on his face.
When Wrighty staggered toward the blizzard, Five turned and grabbed his shoulder.
"Wrighty, you have to go to her."
Wrighty shouted and blinked through the blood running into his eyes. "What's happening? Where is that creature?"
Five's dark blue eyes bore into him with an intensity that felt foreign on his usually measured face. "My friend, you must go now."
So Wrighty went.
The cold hit him like a physical wall. Each step toward Snow felt like wading through liquid ice. Frost formed on his skin and eyelashes. His breath came in short, visible huffs that crystallized and fell like tiny glass beads.
Still, he pushed until he reached her.
Everyone else had been pushed back. The cold was too severe, too concentrated, too lethal. But Wrighty kept moving. His muscles shivered violently but his feet didn't stop. One step after another. Through the glacial blizzard and the freezing hell, until he was standing directly in front of her.
Snow looked up at him through tears.
Snow looked up at him. Her face was half human, half something else entirely. Tears were freezing on her cheeks before they could fall, creating tiny trails of ice that cracked when her expression shifted.
"Snow," Wrighty said, grabbing her shoulders. "Fight it. Look at me."
"I can't," she whispered. "It's inside me. It's changing everything."
She stared at Wrighty with those unnatural, glowing eyes. Confusion crossed what remained of her human features.
"How are you here?" The distortion in her voice deepened. "How are you not cold?"
Her frost-covered hand reached toward him.
"You feel warm," she whispered. "Everything is cold except you."
Wrighty didn't answer and instead pulled her into an embrace.
He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her against his chest. As soon as he did, the cold intensified. Ice crept up his torso, across his shoulder, and down his arm. His breathing turned shallow, his strength fading with every second he stayed close to her.
Snow's fingers tightened on him and stared into his face with an expression that fought between the girl she was and the thing she was becoming.
She caressed his cheek before leaning close and whispering something in his ear.
Wrighty didn't share what she said. His jaw clenched when that part of the story arrived and his eyes went somewhere far away, somewhere Grub couldn't follow. Whatever Snow whispered, it belonged to them alone.
For a brief moment, the storm stopped moving.
In the next instant, Snow pulled away. Her glowing blue eyes held his for one final second. Then she turned her power inward.
The blizzard collapsed, the spreading frost reversed, and the cold that had been consuming the world around her folded back into her own frame. Layer upon layer of ice formed across her skin and clothes building upon itself in crystalline sheets until she was encased completely.
A cocoon of her own making.
Silence fell across the once frozen landscape.
Suddenly, Wrighty collapsed beside the cocoon, his body convulsing from the cold exposure. Frost clung to his dark skin in patches of white that took hours to fully thaw. But he survived the close encounter anyways. His body seemed accustomed to taking punishment that would kill anyone else.
The survivors were shaken but alive. Nobody had died. The bone monster was destroyed and the floating creature had vanished without a trace. By every tactical measure, the mission was a success.
Yet nobody celebrated.
In the aftermath, Wrighty sat in front of her for hours. His hand rested against the ice like she might still feel it on the other side. He talked anyway, even when there was no response.
Days soon turned into weeks.
"We moved her to the center of town," Wrighty spoke, his voice rough, " We all tried everything to get her out. Heat, anima, Gravel's throw, Sheath even tried cutting the ice with his sword." He shook his head. "But nothing worked. It's like the ice is invulnerable."
Grub listened in silence, his blackish-green eyes fixed on Wrighty's profile.
"So she's just... there. In the middle of the village. Frozen." Wrighty looked at his hand. "I'd sit with her every day and talk to her. Telling her all bout what was happening. What Five was building. Who showed up that week."
His voice cracked slightly.
"Even though I wasn't sure she could even hear me."
Two months or so, passed like that. Wrighty trained, helped with construction, ran patrols, did everything the growing kingdom needed. But every evening he returned to the frozen statue at the center of town and sat with the girl who had saved his life and lost herself in the process.
Until one night, Five came to him.
"I know what you want," Five said quietly. "A way to fix her."
Wrighty didn't answer.
Five nodded slowly. "The answers aren't here, Wrighty. This village doesn't have the knowledge or the resources to undo what happened to Snow. But the world out there does. Somewhere."
He placed a hand on Wrighty's shoulder.
"Find Grub. He's the smartest person either of us has ever met. If anyone can figure out what happened to Snow and how to reverse it, it's him." Five squeezed once. "And along the way, learn everything you can about what caused this. The anomalies, the transformations, all of it. Bring that knowledge back."
Wrighty finally looked up. "You want me to leave?"
"I'm suggesting it," Five replied. "Travel. Find him. Learn what this world actually is. Learn what causes things like that."
His gaze hardened slightly. "Because if there's a way to undo it, it won't be here."
Five placed a hand on Wrighty's shoulder. "My friend," he said. "This is just my suggestion."
Wrighty left the next morning. He carried his weighted staff, a pack of supplies, and a promise he made to the frozen cocoon..
I'll fix this. Whatever it takes.
He took a final glance at the frozen cocoon, and walked out of Eden.
Wrighty followed Grub's trail across the wilderness. Weeks went by of tracking and searching. Until smoke rose above the trees and the sounds of battle reached his ears. Soon, he burst through a tree line and found a dying woman about to be swallowed by a walking nightmare.
"And here I am," Wrighty finished. His grin returned, thinner than usual but present. "Found you. Just like I said I would."
Grub sat in the silence that followed. The evening had deepened around them, the village settling into the exhausted quiet atmosphere. Lanterns flickered in windows. Somewhere nearby, a hammer struck wood as repairs began on the first wall.
Grub looked at his friend. He saw scars that hadn't been there before and emotion behind eyes that used to carry nothing heavier than enthusiasm.
"We'll figure it out," Grub said.
Wrighty glanced at him.
"Snow. The transformation. Whatever that floating thing was." Grub's voice was quiet and steady. "We'll figure it out."
Wrighty stared at him for a long moment. Then the grin widened back to its full, stupid, unbreakable width.
"Yeah, Doc. I know we will."