CHAPTER 13 — THE TEMPLE OF FROST
The north had nothing human about it. It had nothing alive about it either. It existed in such perfect stillness that it almost seemed intentional, almost sacred, as though the world had chosen this place to bury whatever it no longer wished to show the rest of creation. Snow fell there without sound, the hills breathed beneath layers of ancient ice, and the sky, immense and grey, hung over everything like a lid of ash placed upon a tomb too old to still carry a name. The wind did not sing there as it did in the plains of the south; here, it whispered. It murmured like a tired voice, a voice that had seen too much, waited too long, kept too many secrets. Every gust slipped between the cliffs like air moving through the ribs of some gigantic corpse, and the atmosphere itself seemed to have forgotten warmth. Yet in the middle of that white immensity where even beasts appeared hesitant to leave tracks, a single figure advanced with an arrogance that was almost divine. Suspended in the sky as though gravity were nothing more than an old rule made for other people, Râ crossed the snow-covered hills with sovereign ease, carried by his Miracle like a king borne upon an invisible throne. His ash-grey hair moved behind him, his cloak snapped lightly in the wind, and his golden eyes, calm and attentive without ever seeming worried, observed the horizon with that terrible assurance possessed only by beings who had already survived everything that should have killed them. He did not look like a man on a mission. He looked like a god who was bored.
He let out a small sigh, one of those light, almost mocking sighs one releases when the world takes too long to provide a spectacle worthy of one's attention, then tilted his head ever so slightly as he gazed toward the distant mountains. "Honestly…" he murmured, his voice carried by the wind, warm despite the cold reigning around him, "if Arthur sent me all the way out here just to chase some oversized snow beast, I'm seriously going to renegotiate my rates." He gave a soft laugh to himself, that calm, easy, almost charming laugh that immediately became unsettling the moment one remembered what he was capable of. "Paladin SS, Sun King, calamity slayer, destroyer of divine threats… and they've got me doing the work of a scout. Disgraceful." His own voice seemed to entertain him more than the landscape. He spoke to the wind the way some people speak to old friends; not out of loneliness, but because he knew that nothing around him was yet important enough to deserve his silence. Yet as he continued gliding above the hills, something in the air changed. It was not a brutal sensation. More like an irregularity. A small tear in the great frozen monotony of the place. A human echo, clumsy, alive. Râ slowed until he nearly came to a stop above a snow-covered ridge, then turned his head slightly, his eyes narrowing with fresh curiosity. He could hear voices. Several of them. Not far away.
"Oh?" he said, amusement immediately lighting his features. "Now this is finally becoming slightly less miserable."
He descended slowly, unhurried, as though allowing himself the luxury of savoring his own returning interest, and the hill soon revealed what had been hidden behind it: a crude camp set up against frozen rock, several heavy tents with fabric worn thin by the cold, crates stacked together, hides stretched out to block the wind, weapons leaning against stakes buried in the snow, and above all, men. At least a dozen of them. Maybe more. Some sat around a low fire, others kept watch, while a few checked the harnesses fastened onto enormous polar bears trained as beasts of burden and war. The contrast between Râ's almost supernatural nobility and the camp's rough brutality was so violent it bordered on absurd. The men wore thick armor of dull metal and fur, carried spears, axes, broad swords, mountain crossbows; their faces were weathered by frost, their hands heavy, their eyes those of survivors who had long since become predators. Nothing about them resembled Fumetsu. No aura. No halo. No sacred pulse in the air. They were not Celestials. They were not even high-level fighters. Just armed men, stranded in a place that should never have belonged to them.
Râ landed a few meters from the camp, his boots barely sinking into the snow, as though even the frozen earth hesitated to truly touch him. He kept his hands in his coat pockets and observed the scene with an almost polite smile. "Good evening, gentlemen." His voice cut through the wind with absurd ease. Immediately, several men turned, some nearly leaping in surprise, others rising in violent reflex. The bears growled. Hands flew to weapons. A second later, the entire camp had eyes only for him. A large man with a thick beard, wearing a reinforced breastplate plated with hardened ice, stepped forward and pointed his axe at him. "Who the hell are you?!" he barked. "You're not from here." Râ tilted his head ever so slightly, as though genuinely considering the best way to answer a question so insignificant. "No," he replied. "I'm not." His smile widened just a little. "And you, apparently, are not particularly hospitable." Another brigand spat into the snow and raised his sword. "We kill anything that gets close." Râ looked at him with almost tender softness. "Ah." He paused. "That is exactly what I was hoping you'd say."
The first to attack was a nervous young man who shouted before he even thought, throwing himself at Râ with a short spear. The motion was fast, violent, graceless but not entirely clumsy; the movement of a man used to killing travelers, not facing a monster disguised as a human being. Râ watched him come with almost insulting indifference, then simply stepped aside. The spear sliced through empty air. In the same movement, he placed two fingers on the attacker's wrist and, with absurd gentleness, twisted. A sharp crack split the air. The arm broke like a frozen branch. The man screamed. Then Râ gave him a light palm strike to the chest, so light it almost seemed friendly, and yet the impact was so monstrous that the brigand was hurled across the camp, smashing through a table, overturning the firepit, and crashing against a rock in a spray of snow and blood. A stunned silence fell for half a second. Then the entire camp erupted. "KILL HIM!" someone roared. The brigands rushed him all at once, like a pack convinced that numbers alone could compensate for the difference in nature between themselves and their target. A crossbow snapped; the bolt shot straight toward his face. Râ simply turned his head, allowing the projectile to graze past his cheek before disappearing into the blizzard behind him. "Mm," he said as he looked toward the archer. "A little higher and you might've hit something important."
He lazily extended a hand. A tiny light appeared at the tip of his fingers. Not a grand spell, not a majestic summoning, not a spectacle. Just a point of light. Small. Almost pretty. Then he flicked it forward. The incandescent point tore through the air like a compressed star, struck the crossbow, and the weapon exploded in its wielder's hands with a burst of shattered metal and burned flesh. The man was thrown to the ground screaming, his gloves on fire, his fingers blackened. Two others were already coming in from the sides; one raised an axe, the other a curved blade. Râ sighed. "You people are painfully predictable…" He barely raised his forearm. A brutal wave of heat erupted around him in a perfect circle. The snow at his feet melted instantly. The ground hissed. An invisible thermal shockwave burst outward, and the two brigands were thrown back as though they had collided with a wall of sunlight. The first lost his axe and rolled several meters away; the second was hit so violently in the chest that the sound of his ribs breaking came before his body even touched the ground.
Then a bestial roar shook the camp. One of the massive war polar bears, driven mad by the smell of blood and the screams, was sent charging at him by a rider clad in leather and steel. The beast thundered forward, monstrous, claws ripping through the snow, frothing jaws wide open. Râ watched it approach with a faintly interested expression. "Oh? At least you've got presence." The bear leapt. At that exact instant, Râ raised his arm, opened his hand, and a burning disc of light formed before his palm. The beast struck it. For a single second, the air seemed to freeze. Then the thermal explosion tore through the front of the camp. The bear's massive body was hurled aside in a shriek of agony, its fur smoking, its trajectory smashing through two stakes and a crate before it collapsed, still alive but unable to rise. The rider, however, did not even have time to scream; Râ had already moved. He appeared before him like a cut in space, placed a hand over his face, and slammed him into the ground with such clean violence that the snow burst around them like shattered glass. "Sorry," he murmured without emotion. "You were in the wrong place." He had barely finished speaking when another brigand attempted to strike him from behind with a great two-handed blade. Râ leaned slightly forward without turning, allowing the blade to pass just above his neck, then drove his elbow backward. The man's face caved in under the blow. Blood sprayed into the snow. The body collapsed like an empty sack.
By that point, the camp had already stopped believing this was a fight. It had become a massacre. But fear sometimes makes men even stupider than courage. Two brigands, perhaps brothers judging by how much their faces resembled one another, launched themselves together in a desperate assault, one wielding a pike, the other a war hammer. Râ allowed them to come almost all the way to him. Then he extended both hands, one toward each. Two spheres of light appeared. Still small. Dense. "You know…" he said with that same effortless amusement, "I actually rather like the north. You people have a real sense of staging." The two spheres detonated simultaneously. Not like ordinary flames. Like two miniature suns that had decided to exist for one second too long. The two men were swallowed by the blast and thrown backward into a chaos of light, heat, and vaporized snow. The entire camp was swept by the shockwave. The tents ripped apart. The crates were hurled away. The central fire was blown out. Even the nearest rocks cracked under the thermal pressure. And at the center of it all, standing within the smoking clearing he had just created in the middle of the endless white, Râ remained perfectly calm, as though all of this had cost him nothing more than the slightest effort of attention.
The bearded leader stepped back. Then another step. His axe trembled in his hand. His eyes no longer belonged to a brigand used to terrorizing the weak. They belonged to an animal that had just realized it had misjudged its place in the food chain. "W-what are you…?" he stammered. Râ slowly turned his head toward him. He no longer needed to smile; his simple calm was already more terrifying than any grimace. "Wrong question," he replied softly. "The right one is: how much time do you have left before I get bored?" The man let out a panicked roar and hurled himself at him, axe raised in both hands, in one final suicidal reflex of pride. Râ did not move until the very last instant. Then he raised a finger. Just one. The axe came down—and stopped. Dead. A few centimeters from his face. The air around Râ's finger shimmered faintly, as though some invisible pressure had frozen the weapon mid-strike. The brigand's eyes widened. "Impossible…" he breathed. Râ looked at him almost kindly. "No," he said. "Just humiliating." Then he gave the slightest push forward. The axe folded in on itself as though it were made of heated tin. The shockwave traveled back up through the brigand's arms, dislocating them with a sickening crack. The man screamed and collapsed to his knees in the blood-stained snow.
Silence slowly returned. Real silence. The kind that comes after screaming, heavier than before, deeper, almost colder because it now has something to cover. Around them there was nothing left but bodies, abandoned weapons, useless traces of struggle, and the steam of fresh wounds mingling with the frozen air. The few bears still alive had either fled or lay farther off, injured and too terrified to come back. Râ walked among the dead the way one crosses a room that has suddenly become boring, then stopped in front of the bearded leader, who was breathing in ragged bursts, his arms hanging uselessly at his sides, his beard stained with snow and blood. With a simple, almost absentminded gesture, Râ bent down and tore off the man's helmet and the upper section of his armor, revealing a weathered face, a scar across one cheek, and grey eyes filled with naked terror. The man tried to back away but his legs slipped in the reddened snow. "Please…" he whispered. "Please, I beg you…" Râ slowly crouched before him, rested an elbow on his knee, and looked at him the way one looks at an insect that has suddenly learned to speak. "There we go," he said in an almost satisfied tone. "Now we're finally having an interesting conversation."
The man swallowed hard, trembling from head to toe. "I-I'll tell you everything… everything you want…" Râ inclined his head slightly. "Perfect." His golden gaze hardened just enough to make it clear that the slightest mistake would be expensive. "Who are you? And more importantly… what are you doing this far north, in an area where even regular patrols hesitate to set foot?" The brigand coughed, spat blood into the snow, then answered in a broken voice: "W-we live here… in the hills… we attack travelers… merchants… anyone who passes…" He closed his eyes as though shame or pain had suddenly become too heavy to bear. "We take what they have… and if they resist… we kill them…" Râ listened without emotion, as though he were hearing nothing more than one of the world's ordinary banalities. "Scavengers, then," he murmured. "Charming." He straightened a little. "And now, the only question keeping you alive: where is the Temple of Frost?" The brigand's gaze faltered instantly. He had recognized something in that question, something he would rather never have heard. "T-the Temple?" His voice trembled even more. "Y-you really want to go there…?" Râ smiled slightly. "No. I mostly want to watch you panic while you guide me there with your mouth. Answer." The man swallowed, then weakly lifted his chin toward the horizon. "T-the breach… farther out… behind the white hills… there's a crack in the ice… an opening that descends beneath the mountain… the temple is there… in a cavern…" He swallowed again. "No one should go there… we hear things at night… voices… and sometimes… sometimes the statues move…"
Râ remained silent for a second, then let out a soft laugh that sounded almost genuine. "Now that is finally interesting." He stood fully, lazily brushed some snow off his coat, and cast one last glance at the destroyed camp. "You spoke well," he said without looking at the man. The brigand immediately lifted his head, miserable hope flashing across his features. "Then… then you'll let me live…?" Râ turned his face slightly toward him. His smile was not cruel. It was worse. It was calm. Almost beautiful. Almost radiant. "I already did," he replied. "The rest will depend on the cold." Then he turned his back on him and walked away, leaving him alive beneath the corpses of his companions, in a camp transformed into a smoking grave at the center of the endless white.
The wind reclaimed the world as he left the camp behind. Before him, the hills rose and fell like frozen waves arrested in the middle of motion. At first Râ walked slowly, his hands still in his pockets, his gaze lifted toward the ridges fading into the snow haze, but then his body rose slightly from the ground and he began leaping from summit to summit with near-unreal fluidity. At every push-off, the snow burst beneath his feet before he was already gone, his figure cutting through the blizzard like a restrained beam of light. The north became silent again around him, but it was no longer the same silence as before. This one felt denser. More inhabited. As though the landscape itself had understood he was approaching a place that did not like being disturbed. The farther he advanced, the more the air itself seemed to change. The cold did not simply grow sharper; it grew older. More intimate. It no longer attacked only the skin, but the very idea of warmth, as though this region had been severed from the living world for centuries. Râ lifted his eyes. There, between two massive rock formations buried beneath frost, a rupture split the white expanse: a great black breach carved into ice and stone, like a wound cut vertically into the mountain's flank.
He stopped at the edge of the opening, observing the invisible depths where the snow seemed to disappear without ever touching bottom. A freezing breath rose from below, colder than anything he had crossed so far, and with it came a strange sensation. Not an aura. Not exactly. Something subtler. A presence. A waiting. "So this is it…" he murmured. "The famous Temple of Frost." He tilted his head slightly, as though listening. Then his eyes narrowed. Yes. He could hear something. Voices. Very faint. Not human. Not entirely. Sounds without any clear language, like forgotten words spoken from another age. Râ smiled again, but this smile was thinner, more attentive. "I sincerely hope this isn't just a damp cave with two peasant legends thrown into it." Without waiting any longer, he descended into the breach, gliding between the icy walls with supernatural lightness before finally touching down upon a floor of frost-covered stone.
The underground world was vast, silent, almost religious. Snow no longer fell there, yet the cold reigned in an even more absolute way. Natural columns of ice rose toward a ceiling lost in shadow, crystalline formations hung like translucent fangs, and the grey light filtering down from the breach above shattered across a thousand frozen surfaces, giving the place a spectral brilliance. Râ advanced slowly, his footsteps barely echoing, then stopped almost immediately. A massive shape stood a few meters ahead of him. Then another, farther away. Then another still. Motionless silhouettes. Tall. Broad. Humanoid, yet too rigid to be alive. Golem-like beings. Their bodies appeared composed of ancient metal fused with ice and polished stone, as though they had been forged from the materials of the sanctuary itself. Their shoulders were enormous, their limbs thick, their faces reduced to expressionless masks, and yet their mere presence made the air heavier. They did not move. They did not breathe. They were simply there, planted in the darkness like guardians forgotten by time. Râ observed them for a long moment, then casually raised a hand. "Hey there," he called. "Are you decorative, or do you also serve as the welcome committee?" Nothing. Not a twitch. Not a reaction. He tilted his head slightly. "Ah. The silent type. Of course. I should've guessed."
So he continued, passing between them with the same quiet insolence that defined him, though his eyes remained sharp. Every statue seemed too well positioned. Too oriented. Too aware in its stillness. The kind of presence that is never truly inactive, only patient. He moved deeper into the sanctuary, crossed a first corridor carved into frozen stone, and eventually emerged into an even greater chamber, a room so vast that the silence within it felt almost physical. And there, at the center of that immense space, was something even stranger than the metallic guardians. A small white silhouette. Tiny compared to the golems surrounding it. A squat little being with proportions slightly grotesque, like some imp sculpted from ancient snow, sitting—or frozen—in an odd posture, equally motionless, its face turned toward the void. Its surface was not quite organic. Not quite mineral. It looked like something that should never have existed in the same world as men. Râ stopped completely. For the first time since entering the north, his expression was almost stripped of mockery. Because in the hands of that white creature rested a blue light.
A stone.
Small. Pure. Luminous.
A gem so deeply blue that it seemed to contain within itself a piece of the night sky imprisoned beneath the ice.
And the very instant Râ laid eyes on it, he knew.
"…Finally," he breathed.
His eyes gleamed more intensely now, not with anger or battle-lust, but with recognition. With lucid desire. With certainty.
"The Arkomb."
The name left his lips like a truth too heavy to remain inside. The stone pulsed faintly between the motionless fingers of the white imp, and its mere presence was enough to twist something in the air. It did not merely emit energy. It seemed to deny the normal separation between things. As though it were not a simple object, but a stitching point between realities. Râ took a step forward. Then another. His voice, when he spoke again, was lower, almost admiring despite himself. "A stone capable of granting a soul to anything that has none…" He kept walking very slowly. "…and opening a path into the Void." His gaze remained fixed upon the Arkomb, upon that blue light trapped between the fingers of the unmoving creature. "No wonder even Neverland is stirring because of this…"
Silence answered him.
But this time, that silence was no longer empty.
Something in the chamber was listening.
Something knew he was there.
Râ stopped once more, this time at a cautious distance from the center, and at last his smile returned, thin, dangerous, almost joyful.
"Very well…" he murmured.
"Now… let's see what, in this temple, genuinely believes it can tell me no."
And in the ancient cold of the sanctuary, somewhere between the motionless golems, the small white creature…
seemed, for the briefest instant,
to have breathed.