A thousand years ago.
The blizzard outside the Great Hall was so thick it pressed against the windows like a solid wall of white, the wind finding every gap in the stone and pushing cold air through in thin persistent streams. Inside, the torches along the walls barely held their flame. The air was stagnant and tasted of old stone and something underneath it that had no clean name.
Ningthem, the eldest, stood in the center of the drafty hall, feet bare on the freezing floor. Beside him stood his younger siblings, close enough that their shoulders touched.
"Do not cry," Ningthem whispered, his teeth chattering hard enough to feel it in his jaw. "I am not even crying and I am the one being sacrificed, the ritual will take longer if you do."
Along the sides of the hall the villagers sat in rows. To a stranger they would have looked like ordinary men and women.
Their eyes were wrong, fixed and glassy, the eyes of something that had stopped inhabiting its own face. They did not breathe visibly. They did not blink.
"Honored Mistress Elara."
Fredo's voice came out dry and stripped of everything. He stepped forward and bowed until his forehead struck the stone floor with a hard flat sound. He did not flinch. He could not feel the bruise forming.
"Please allow us the privilege of serving you your meal."
Then someone stepped forward and swinged his weapon.
Ningthem's body was opened. His guts spilled across the cold stone floor in the quiet of the hall, the blizzard outside continuing without acknowledgment.
The demonness statue shifted slightly, the stone moving in the way stone does not move, and a voice came from it.
"Well then. Proceed."
Six women stepped forward from the rows, all of them clad in the same style of robes, Screja among them, Kellen beside her. The whole village bowed as one.
The six women crouched down over Ningthem's body and began to eat.
There was no other sound in the hall except the tearing of flesh, the wet rhythm of chewing, and the occasional sound of drinking. The blizzard outside continued without acknowledgment.
It was a complete and total mess and nobody in the room looked away from it.
After the human sacrifice the villagers returned to what they had been before the curse took hold. They could die again, temporarily.
They could eat and taste it.
They could relieve themselves, could feel sensation, could drown themselves in sex and warmth and every physical experience the curse had stripped from them. The return was real and complete and it lasted exactly as long as it lasted.
It was not permanent though, and the cost had to be paid again and again.
The human lives required for it had never weighed heavily on them. Before the curse, before the queen's campaign had turned humans into enemies, they had kept humans the way others kept pets.
That particular history was a longer tale, one for another time. The point was that the moral weight of the sacrifice had never been the heaviest thing on the scales.
The heavier cost was something else entirely.
One night.
"The first time I cried. The second time too." A woman named Ellara stood at the altar, a newborn child in her arms, her voice was flatness of someone who had run out of the particular feeling that used to accompany these words. "Now it has been so many times I do not even flinch."
She placed the child on the altar and walked away carrying another one.
"How many men are left now," the woman beside her asked.
"Enough to keep breeding, enough to keep placing our male children on that altar ourselves."
Seven out of every eight male children born in Inumaki had been offered as sacrifice.
Not eaten, but sacrificed nonetheless, their lives fed into the egg sculpture to nourish it, their potential and talent absorbed into whatever Kallar had been building inside the stone across the centuries.
It was the real reason nobody in the village had reached Ascension 2 except for Fredo, who had already been there before the curse took hold. The talents that might have elevated them had been harvested before they could develop.
In truth the sex of the child had never mattered to the sculpture. But Kallar was who he was, and he had preferred the males.
It had gone on like that for years, decade after decade, generation after generation, the village sustaining itself on a cycle of sacrifice and temporary restoration that ground its population down by increments too slow to feel catastrophic until the numbers made the catastrophe undeniable.
And now everything had changed at once, in the worst possible way.
The barrier was down. They were mortal again.
The wish they had carried for a thousand years had been granted in the middle of a battlefield with no warning and no preparation, their immortality stripped away at the exact moment the yai beasts came pouring in from the mountain perimeter and the lava flames and silver swords from Kallar and Leishna's battle rained down across the rooftops and roads of the village from above.
Twenty percent of them were left.
The rest were running, directionless, pouring through the narrow roads between the wooden cabins and the collapsed farm enclosures, screaming, with nowhere to go that was not already on fire or already occupied by something hungry.
The dinosaur shaped yai beasts were not large but they were thorough, moving through the village streets with the focused efficiency of something that had been waiting outside a barrier for a very long time and was now making up for it. Their teeth were red and warm and they worked without particular hurry.
"There must be an anima here, why else would the yai beasts have assembled in these numbers!"
The voice came from somewhere in the chaos and went unanswered.
Fredo moved through it, cutting down the beasts he reached with his yaicraft, his body still carrying the poison from Kallar's arrows but moving anyway. Around him his race was being reduced to a fraction of what it had already been reduced to and the number was still falling.
*This is insanity. At this rate every last one of us will be gone.*
*I have to save them.*
He was still in that thought when he saw Atiya.
Everything else stopped mattering.
*This is because of you. All of it. Every single thing that has happened here is because of you.*
He launched his attacks without announcing them, yai balls and cutting arcs firing toward Atiya across the road between them, the full weight of everything the last hour had done to him channeled into a single focused point.
Atiya received the first wave and kept standing.
"Come and kill me if you can."
He summoned his three portals, Sajibu coming to his hand, and turned to face Fredo properly.
Atiya closed the distance fast, using everything his Ascension 2 body could produce and everything his mother and Zelaine had drilled into him across years of training, weaving between the lava flames dropping from the fight above and the yai beast attacks cutting through the roads around him, moving toward Fredo through the chaos of the burning village.
Fredo did not wait for him to arrive. Yai orbs launched across the road between them, fast and direct. Atiya deflected two with his staff and stepped around the third, not slowing.
When he got close enough Fredo had already prepared the next sequence. He raised one hand and four concentric circles manifested in the air in front of him, layered and rotating, the geometry of something that had been coded with considerable care over a very long time.
Homing Piercers launched from the circles, darts of compressed light that curved through the air as they traveled, adjusting their trajectory, coming for him from angles that changed as he moved.
Atiya did not try to outrun them. He was already too close for that to work. He planted the butt of Sajibu into the snow covered road and used the weight of the scythe blade to anchor his stance as his portals flickered.
Fredo noticed them deactivate. Then watched them come back.
A magenta rift opened six inches from Atiya's chest, the first portal snapping into existence with the faint shimmer he had come to recognize. A second opened behind Fredo's left shoulder.
A third materialized high above the road, giving Atiya a top down view of the space between them.
The first Piercer entered the portal at his chest and came out of the second behind Fredo's shoulder at the same velocity it had entered, redirected and lethal. Fredo did not turn his head.
A hexagonal barrier shimmered into existence behind him and absorbed his own reflected attack with a dull flat thud, the light dissipating against the surface.
"Space yaicraft," Fredo said.
He snapped his fingers. The snow beneath Atiya's feet shifted, white serpentine bindings erupting upward from the road surface and coiling toward his legs. Atiya drove the butt of Sajibu down and vaulted himself off it, clearing the bindings as a secondary beam tore through the spot where he had been standing a half second before, the road surface below vaporizing and leaving a clean scorched circle in the snow.
Atiya landed hard on the snow packed road, coughing as the heat from the falling embers reached his lungs.
A shallow cut on his cheek bled freely and his left shoulder was dark with a fresh burn where one of the Piercers had grazed him on the way past.
Fredo, twenty meters away across the road, looked untouched.
The small graze Atiya had managed to land minutes earlier was already closing, the flesh knitting together with a faint green glow that did its work quietly and completely.
'Recovery skill!!!'
He could not outlast that. Atiya ran the numbers quickly and arrived at the same answer from every angle.
A prolonged exchange favored Fredo absolutely, his body repairing itself faster than Atiya could accumulate damage on it while Atiya's own wounds stayed open and his yai kept dropping.
The variables of the fight as it currently stood needed to change.