Chương 29: Chapter 28: The Road Ahead

The door closed behind me. I stood in the dark hallway for a long moment and listened. The house was quiet. Yato was on the couch — he'd watched me leave and he watched me return without moving. His tail gave one slow flick. I think I was being judged. The knife went into the sink. The core went onto the counter. My hand was still shaking. I stood there and let the adrenaline drain out of me in waves. It took longer than I wanted. The kitchen was dark.

The only light came from the hallway — the office door open, the screen saver drifting across my monitor. I didn't move. When my hands were steady enough, I picked up my phone from the desk. The screen lit up. A notification. Bill. Not the one from earlier. A new one. Multiple new ones. I opened the messages. dude? I don't know if you can see this, but there's an article they're linking it to your mom. Below them, a link. I opened it.

The article loaded slowly — the connection crawling through whatever gap existed between this world and mine. I read it by fragments as the page assembled itself. Missing. 24. Home completely gone. Damages exceeding $300, 000. Reviewing a missing person case from 2023 involving Evans' mother. Closed two years ago despite objections from the family. I read it to the end. Then I read it again. The phone was warm in my hand. The screen was bright. The words didn't change no matter how many times I looked at them.

They were reviewing her case. Three years. A closed file. An investigation that had been shelved and forgotten. Bill's next message was timestamped after the article. dude? Nothing after that. Hours of silence. I typed a reply. Watched the send button sit there. Pressed it. The message spun for a moment. Failed. I put the phone down. The night passed. I didn't sleep. Yato joined me at some point, settling on my chest with the particular weight of a cat who had decided I needed supervision.

I lay on the couch with the grimoire open beside me, not reading, just looking at the shapes until my eyes blurred. The sounds outside had stopped. Not the wind, not the snow, not the trees — there were no trees anymore after all. But the absence of movement. The two beasts I'd sensed approaching as I'd been walking home didn't reach the barrier. They'd found each other first. I'd heard them fighting. The sound had carried through the walls, muffled by distance and snow. Snarls that broke into yelps.

Impacts that shook the ground or the barrier. Then silence. I stared at the ceiling until the grimoire's lines stopped dancing and the first pale light filtered through the window. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Morning arrived without ceremony. I stepped outside. The battlefield had settled overnight.

The two remaining creatures lay where they'd fallen — a few dozen meters from each other, the snow between them churned into a dark mess of blood and fur. One had its throat torn out. The other had its ribs caved in. They'd done my job for me. I walked past them to the first of the older bodies. The one I'd killed yesterday was closest — the lightning-charged corpse, fur still singed, the wound at its throat clean where the knife had gone in. I knelt beside it.

The core was in the same place as the first beast I'd killed, weeks ago. Embedded in the sternum. Palm-sized. Warm. I pried it out with the workshop knife. The next body was older. One of the original convergence — the ones that had killed each other while I was still working on making my first circle. The snow had preserved it well enough, but the flesh was stiff. A lean creature, different from the horned ones. Longer limbs. A narrow skull. Its core was smaller — thumb-sized, tucked between two ribs.

I worked it free. The third was massive. A heavy, thick-hided thing with skin like old leather. The core was deep in its chest, surrounded by muscle. I had to cut deeper than I wanted. When I finally pulled it free, the stone was dull, off-color. Cracked. A fracture ran through its center. Useless. Or close to it. The fourth was a different species entirely — covered in what looked like the remnants of feathers, now matted and frozen. A bird-like predator, built low to the ground. Its core was tiny. Pebble-sized.

So small I almost missed it. The fifth was the rabbit-like creature. Its chest had been torn open by something larger — likely one of the other monsters during the convergence. The socket where a core should have been was empty. I kept going. Seven bodies. An hour of work. By the time I was done, my hands were numb and my pockets were heavy with stones. Back inside, I emptied them onto the kitchen table. They made a sound against the wood. A clatter of different weights and sizes. I sorted them.

The two palm-sized cores from the horned beasts — good condition. The thumb-sized one from the lean creature — intact. One of the pebble-sized ones from the feathered predator — also intact. That was four. The rest were damaged, undersized, or cracked beyond use. I pushed them aside. Four usable cores from seven bodies. It felt like a decent yield. I picked up a pebble — the smallest one, no bigger than a marble. The grimoire's warning surfaced without effort.

A badly carved circle stays permanently and reproduces the error every activation. In some cases, it can cause a disastrous explosion. I looked at the pebble in my fingers. If a bad circle could explode on purpose, that wasn't a flaw. That was a feature. A small stone, a flawed engraving, thrown at something before the circle activated. I set it aside with the other pebbles. I'd test the theory later. The four keepers stayed in the center of the table. I picked up the thumb-sized one from the lean creature.

It was warm from my pocket. Smooth. The crystal caught the morning light differently than the horned beast cores — clearer, less clouded. I held it and traced the Heat Transfer circle in the air above it. Simple. Lower stakes than lightning. I'd drawn it from memory a dozen times. I knew the shape by heart. I placed my thumb against the stone and began to carve. It took less time than the lightning core. The circle was simpler. The crystal accepted the pattern without resistance.

Within a few minutes, the Heat Transfer circle had settled into the stone. I held it up. The crystal glowed faintly — not the blue of the raw stone, but a soft orange warmth that bled through the lines I'd carved. I activated it. The heat spread through my hand, up my wrist, into my chest. Not burning. Not overwhelming. Just the steady, patient warmth. I pocketed it. I stepped outside again. The air was still cold. But something was different. I stood on the main street and looked up. The suns were brighter.

Not higher — they'd been climbing for weeks and would keep climbing. But the light itself had changed. It had weight. Warmth. The kind of weight that promised the snow wouldn't last forever. I looked down. The snow around my boots was wet. Not melting in streams. Not running. But soft. The top layer had turned to slush where the light hit it. Water seeped into the footprint I'd left. The road was still clear. The stones still warm. But the ground beside it was starting to give.

I thought about the bodies scattered across the field. Seven of them. The cold had preserved them well, but they wouldn't stay preserved much longer. When the thaw came — really came — they would rot. And I couldn't move them without the car they were simply too heavy. The car was a hundred kilometers away and the battery was probably dead because of the time it had spent waiting outside. But the road was clear, the snow was melting, and I finally had a way to stay warm while I travelled.

The cold room was at the edge of the village. I'd only glanced at it before but there wasn't much to say about it. The room was built into the stone, deep enough that the walls sweated frost even in winter. Shelves lined the interior, every single one empty. The villagers probably used it to store enough food for the winter. I could do the same, if only I could move the beasts there. I still wasn't ready to butcher them out in the open, especially outside the barrier.

I made my choice, but I now had to prepare, because the route I was going to take was not going to be painless. I didn't own a tent, and that meant the tent was going to be improvised. That was yet another thing to add on the list of things I wished I had purchased when I still had the chance to do so. I found what I needed in one of the houses — a heavy blanket, larger than the ones I had at home, woven from something thicker than wool. A length of cord from the workshop.

Four wooden stakes from a stack behind the barn. It wouldn't be elegant. But it would keep the wind off me while I slept, and with the Heat Transfer core activated in my pocket, I at least wouldn't freeze. I laid everything out on the living room floor. The packed food. The tent materials. The lightning core. The knife. The warmth core. The pebble grenades I still needed to test.

Yato watched from the couch, tail curled around his paws, tracking my movements with the flat attention of a cat who had seen me prepare for many things and was reserving judgment on this one. I looked at the pile. The road was about a hundred kilometers long. The car had a dead battery and no way to start it. I'd have to push it all the way back. An electric vehicle weighing far more than I wanted to think about.

There was no way around it, I just had to hope the house wouldn't leave on another trip while I was out, this time without me. I packed the bag. The car wasn't going to retrieve itself. Tomorrow, I would start walking.