Chương 22: Threads

Warmth. That was the first thing Solstice felt. Warmth. Wetness. Pressure. And darkness. For half a second, it almost felt good. Almost. His whole life had been carved out of an ice age that never once let up, and warmth this total, this complete, hit something old and animal in him before his brain caught up to what was actually happening. Then it caught up.' I'm inside it.'

Flesh pressed in from every side at once, pushing him deeper with each pulse, like the creature's whole body was swallowing in slow, deliberate waves. He couldn't tell up from down anymore. Couldn't tell where his own limbs ended and where the thing around him began. Then light bloomed, everywhere at once. Strands of something lit up around him, threading through the dark like veins on fire, translucent, glowing faint gold and blue. Beautiful, in a way that made no sense given where he was.

He didn't get long to look at it. A rush of dark green fluid surged through the space around him, thick and hot, and Solstice clamped his mouth shut a half second before it hit. It splashed against his coat, and his coat hissed back at it, fabric already starting to smoke where the liquid touched.' Fuck. I don't think this shit is going to work.' The heat did one thing right, at least. His eyes filled with color again, threads snapping into view all around him, faint through the smoke and fluid, but there.

No time to think about that either. His clothes were dissolving. Not fast. Not fast enough to panic outright. But fast enough that he felt fabric thinning against his skin in patches, heat licking through where it went, gas curling up thick around him, stinging worse than smoke had any right to. He clamped a hand over his nose and mouth and started counting. One. The pressure crushed in tighter, and the knife in his other hand, still gripped tight from pure reflex, slid deeper into something soft.

The flesh around him convulsed, hard, a violent shudder that rattled through his whole body. Ten. His skin started to burn. Not the sharp, clean burn of touching something hot. Something slower. Deeper. Working its way in. Twenty. His hair singed at the ends, curling back against his scalp, heat crawling along it like it meant to reach the roots next.' Hate this. Hate every second of this.' Thirty.

He bit down on his own lip hard enough to draw blood, using the pain to anchor himself, to keep from opening his mouth on pure instinct. Every muscle in his body screamed to move, to fight, to do anything but hold still and count. Forty. Too hot. Don't breathe. Keep moving. Fifty. His lungs burned now too, starved and desperate, his whole chest one solid ache demanding air he refused to give it. Sixty. He forced his eyes open.

Fluid stung against them instantly, thick and slimy, blurring everything into smears of green and gold. He grimaced through it, forcing himself to keep looking, scanning through the murk for anything shaped like what Khufrol had described. Fragments floated past him. White. Curved.' Bones.'

'Someone came before me.' Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. He shoved the thought aside and kept moving, dragging himself forward through muscle that clenched tighter around him with every second he wasted, using anything he could grab, flesh, tendon, things he had no name for and didn't want one for. Then he saw it. A red sac, round and glowing faintly, tucked into the far corner of the space he was fighting through.

His whole body screamed against moving even one more inch. The heat had stopped feeling like heat somewhere around the sixtieth second, had started feeling like something closer to sleep, warm and heavy and pulling at the edges of his mind in a way that scared him more than the burning had. He pushed anyway. Muscle clamped down around his arm as he reached, slowing him, crushing tighter the closer he got.

He forced the knife-hand forward through sheer stubbornness, fingers screaming, until the blade finally met the sac. He stabbed. It gave. He pulled, ripping it wide, tearing through whatever held it in place. The creature screamed around him. Not a sound so much as a vibration, every wall of muscle around him convulsing at once, hard enough to knock the last of the air out of his lungs. Darkness crept in at the edges of his vision. Then pressure.

Sudden and violent, shoving him backward, faster than he could brace for. For one full second, everything went black. He came to on wet ground, covered head to toe in slime and something worse, gasping in one long, ragged breath that hurt more than anything before it had. He opened his eyes. The Oryth loomed over him, whole again, whatever damage he'd done from the inside already lost somewhere in that mass of shuddering muscle.

It reared back, and the ground beneath it cracked with the weight coming off its front end.' It's not done.' Solstice scrambled backward through the snow, dragging his bad leg with him, knife still fisted so tight in his hand his knuckles had gone white. The Oryth's mouth opened again, wide enough to swallow him twice over, a fresh wave of steam rolling off it into the cold." NOT AGAIN, YOU BASTARD!"

He rolled, barely, the jaw slamming shut where his head had been half a second earlier, close enough that heat licked across his cheek. He came up on his knees, breath tearing out of him in ragged bursts, and drove the knife into the closest patch of flesh he could reach. The Oryth shrieked, that same vibration he'd felt from inside it, and its body whipped sideways, flinging him clean off his feet. He hit the snow hard, rolled twice, and forced himself back up before the pain could catch him.

It came at him again, faster this time, a wall of muscle and steam bearing down with nothing behind its eyes but hunger. Solstice ducked low, driving off his good leg, and buried the blade up to the hilt in its underside as it passed over him. It didn't stop moving. It dragged him with it, his whole body wrenched off the ground, boots skidding through snow and ice as the creature thrashed and spun, trying to shake him loose like something caught on a hook. He held on.

Muscle tore under his grip where his free hand dug in for purchase, and blood, thick and dark, sprayed hot across his face and chest. He didn't let go. Couldn't. Letting go meant flying, and flying meant landing somewhere he wouldn't get back up from." GET OFF! GET OFF ME!" The Oryth flung itself sideways, slamming him into a snowbank hard enough to knock the air from his lungs a second time.

He tasted blood, his own this time, and forced his eyes back open through the haze already crowding in at the edges of his vision. It reared up for another strike. Something in Solstice's chest cracked loose. Not fear. Something past fear, hollowed out and furious, a small, half-starved animal with nothing left to lose deciding it would rather die swinging than die running." DIE, YOU HIDEOUS THING!"

He surged forward to meet it instead of away from it, driving the knife up through the underside of its jaw with everything his body had left to give. The Oryth screamed, and this time the scream cracked, ragged, wrong. He didn't stop. He tore the blade free and drove it in again, and again, ripping through muscle in wide, savage strokes, blood and fluid soaking him to the skin, until the ground beneath them both had gone dark with it. The colors were still there, threading through the wound he'd carved open.

Without thinking it through, his free hand shot toward them, dragging at the threads the way he had back at the forge. The Oryth's body inflated, sudden and grotesque, swelling far past anything natural.

'I did that.' The realization landed cold, somewhere underneath the adrenaline. He didn't know what he'd just done. Didn't understand it. Kept doing it anyway, because stopping now felt more dangerous than not knowing. The creature deflated all at once, fluid gushing out in one violent wave, a wet, popping burst of sound following right behind it.

Solstice staggered back, chest heaving, and watched the last of it collapse into the snow, muscle shredded, torn like something had ripped it apart from the inside rather than cut it. Threads still buried themselves beneath the ruined flesh, faint now, fading. He stared at them a long moment. Then he stood. He lowered the knife slowly, breath ragged, hands shaking hard enough that he almost dropped it. Something felt different. Lighter. He waited for the cough. Nothing came. He swallowed. Once. Twice.

Still nothing. Being swallowed had been unpleasant. Worse than unpleasant. Somewhere on the list of things he never wanted to repeat, right up near the top. But apparently, it had worked. Solstice looked down at the steaming corpse, at his own ruined clothes, at the burns already blistering across his arms." How enlightening."