Elworth's Returnee

A month after the Remouahe Event

Herbert extends a hand toward the snow-swept mountains ahead.

The girl grins at that, baring two sharp fangs.

The girl licks her lips, and a beastly grin spreads across her vicious face.

Forty miles away.

Coarse snow falls and piles on the girl's head until her hair goes white.

You reach out and gently brush it away.

Lily hesitates, hides her red, chapped hands behind her back, and shakes her head obediently.

You sigh, ruffle the little head tilted up at you, then stand and look out at the endless white ahead.

The blizzard tears across the sky and settles over the faint ridges rising at the far edge of the polar ice, over the place you're headed.

One week earlier

Flames dance in the fireplace. The finely dressed middle-aged man sets down his newspaper and waves you over.

You look at the glass he holds out and sigh.

Helot stands alone at the dock, her long hair dancing in the wind.

Helot waves, signaling the ferry to leave without her. She hasn't decided on her next stop.

A newspaper, still smelling of fresh ink, slides across to you.

"On @2/@2/@2, a catastrophic avalanche struck Elworth, the polar snowfield. Measurements make it the largest on record. The cause remains unknown..."

I'll get to the bottom of what's happening in Elworth.

I'll find Helot.

He drains the drink in front of him, then holds up the empty glass and gives it a small shake toward the door.

While you're talking with Doll, you see Lily wander up to a hole in the ice.

Lily walks a few steps further off and crouches down, curious.

You step closer. Something is stirring the seawater below, and a dull, muffled sound rises through the translucent ice.

A blurred dark shape appears beneath the ice, swelling larger and larger at terrifying speed...

You yank the girl back from the edge of the abyss. The ice splits beneath her feet, and several polar creatures, grotesquely, impossibly huge, burst up through it, hauling their misshapen bodies out onto the surface.

Eerie black Pustules well up from beneath their fur. Something stirs inside them, and the air fills with the stench of rot.

A hoarse, piercing shriek tears through the air. The creatures watch you with eyes eaten away by Pustules, full of raw hostility.

The Silver Key in your hand gives off a gentle glow. A black sphere plants itself in front of Lily and grinds the creatures to pulp.

You dodge the last of their dying lunges and let out a long breath.

The other end of the line goes quiet for a moment.

A mountain range unfolds before you, its snow-worn peaks bathed in golden light, standing solemn above the ice fields.

Lily tugs at your sleeve again. You crouch down and smile at her.

A commotion breaks out somewhere in the distance, cutting your conversation short.

You and Lily trade a look. You take her hand and run toward the noise...

...

You make short work of the monsters closing in, then look back toward the camp.

There are a dozen or so people in the camp, nearly all of them frail non-combatants. They watch these horrifying creatures in panic, and the resistance they manage to put up is feeble at best.

His voice is calm and steady, and a school-crest communicator is pinned to his chest. This must be the professor Doll mentioned, the one out here on field research, Elvis.

The young medic holds Lily in her arms, and Elvis, his skin dark from the sun, pulls faces to make her laugh.

The expedition members crowd around her, blocking the wind and snow while filling her tiny hands with chocolate and nuts.

For people who live with death at their shoulder, a child's smile is the only comfort they have left.

Her cheeks packed with nuts, Lily gnaws at the frozen chocolate with her little teeth, eyes crinkling with delight.

She notices you watching, hops down from the medic's lap, and comes pattering over to you.

Lily looks up at you, dead serious.

You pat Lily on the head and take a look around.

Elvis leans in for a closer look.

You glance around, just you and Elvis. You step closer to him and lower your voice.

You nod. The guide's deep voice carries over from nearby.

Soon you break camp and climb on, following the guide. Along the way, the gnawed-out carcasses of horses lie scattered beside the trail, white bones half-buried in the snow.

The guide juts his chin, motioning you toward a body lying beside the trail.

Ice and snow bury most of it. What skin shows is a dark purple-blue. It is still frozen in the act of crawling out of its sleeping bag, an eerie grin on its face.

Elvis crosses the soft snow toward the stiffened body and tries to shift it aside to uncover the name tag on the sleeping bag.

Then, in the instant he is completely unguarded, a purple-blue body caked in ice bursts out of the sleeping bag.

The nameless corpse, smiling that ghastly smile, reaches both hands, slick with pitch-black slime, toward Elvis, who has fallen to the ground.

Black spheres appear at Lily's side and hurl themselves at the grotesquely twisted corpses. In moments, the black Pustules inside them are cleared away.

This is the Elworth Local the expedition hired. His face has been grim the whole way, but now there's a sickly fervor in it.

The whole party has gone silent. The corpse that lurched up a moment ago, and the Local's mad muttering, have drawn a cloud of dread over the expedition.

Apart from the handful of you out of Mythag, none of them has ever faced anything like this.

You can't answer.

Under the terms laid down by the Mystia Treaty Committee, you're bound to keep the secret, the existence of the Dissolution Phenomenon must never be revealed to ordinary people.

The Local's face is ashen, his lips writhing as they push out sickening whispers, like maggots clawing their way out of his mouth.

The guide has collected himself. He frowns, but shakes his head firmly.

The guide's voice is steady and strong, the voice of a man you can trust, but the fist he keeps behind his back is trembling.

He is trying to build a reason solid enough to believe, for the others, and for himself.

The frightened expedition members clearly aren't convinced by such a thin explanation, but their faces settle all the same. They bury the unease, gather their gear, and prepare to move on.

Thousands of meters up a snowbound mountain, cornered by something no one understands, people need a false comfort. They need something to believe in.

And so the expedition, silent now, resumes the climb.

...

You spend two days on the mountain, slowly growing used to the climate. The expedition collects plenty of samples, but there's little joy on anyone's face.

Those strange incidents still gnaw at everyone who doesn't know the truth.

He pauses, a note of apology in his voice.

You climb for a long time, and still there's no sign of Helot. Above you, the summit is lost in howling wind and snow.

Give up and go back down with the expedition, or press on to the summit, you have to decide...

Following Lily's lead, you round a bend in the winding trail and see a figure slowly coming toward you.

You break into a run.

The girl is dressed far too thinly for this cold. At the sound of your shouts she halts in the snow and looks your way, wary.

No question, that is Helot's face. And yet you can't quite be sure, everything about her feels different from the last time you saw her.

The noise has put her on edge. That wary look belongs to a cornered animal, one ready to strike to kill at any moment.

The beast goes taut, breath held, staring. Then she grins, and the brief blankness in her eyes hardens into pure hostility and murder.

Helot steps forward and strikes. A massive flail takes shape in her hand and comes screaming toward you.

A dull thud. The black flail catches the guide a glancing blow and hurls him aside; his blood, still steaming, melts snow that has never once thawed and stains the toe of a stiffened climbing boot a brilliant red.

In full view of everyone, Helot charges into the crowd like a maddened beast.

You pull the Silver Key from your chest and pour your Spiritual Energy into it. A soft silver glow ripples out around you.

The silver glow slips gently into Helot's mind. Inside, her Spirit Realm is a howling storm, fighting your Link with everything it has.

The roar closes in...

Helot lets out a throat-tearing roar and hurls her flail wildly, smashing everything on the mountain to pieces.

Ding...

At last the soft silver glow forces its way through the churning tide of her mind and reaches Helot's eyes, and the madness there drains away.

Helot drifts down a river of silver light, letting the current cradle her mind.

She fights to break loose, but the water only folds around her more gently, and she sinks deeper, and deeper...

The madness has gone out of Helot's eyes, but her stare still burns, it clamps onto yours the way a starving animal fixes on a slab of meat.

She spits out each word one at a time, turning a simple admission into a threat.

Helot says nothing.

Elworth is far too strange, far too unpredictable. Now that you've found Helot, getting out of here fast is your top priority, and for that, you need her under control.

Helot stays silent, and her mind keeps straining against your Link. Your face hardens.

Fire kindles in Helot's eyes. She grins at you, lips pulled back from sharp teeth. It is the look a beast gives its prey.

You meet her eyes without flinching.

The silence is awful. Every look, resentful, frightened, scornful, settles on you and Helot, and you feel them like thorns in your back.

The guide she wounded is an easygoing man. He slaps a bandage on himself, says nothing about it, calms the expedition with a few words, and starts organizing the descent.

The expedition collected on the way up, samples, fossils, a decent haul, but there isn't a trace of pleasure on anyone's face.

You remember what Doll said.

She looks back, eyes fixed on the way they came.

She says nothing more, only keeps glancing back at some point out in the endless white, her eyes bright with excitement and hunger.

You follow her gaze and catch a glimpse of a fleeting dark figure. When you look again, there is nothing behind you but endless wind and snow.

...

The way down is harder going than the climb up, and the monsters come thicker with every step.

Once the area is cleared of monsters, you make camp somewhere sheltered and easy to defend, and agree on a watch rotation for the night.

A full day of exertion has drained you dry. You can't fight off the heavy drowsiness, and you sink into a deep sleep...

...

Faint, muffled arguing drags you out of your dreams. You push aside the tent flap and find every face outside grim, frighteningly grim.

The moment they see you, they grab hold of you like a lifeline.

You all feign composure, follow the guide's lead, and search the trail carefully.

Clinging to a hope you know is unrealistic, you would rather believe the geology assistant is still alive.

The whole expedition looks ahead at once. There in the snow, down the slope, spreads a wide pool of bright red, congealed blood.

The body is still wrapped in cloth, broken apart like a heap of pulp.

Scraps of cloth flutter in the wind and snow. On the cracked nameplate, you can just make out the words "Geology Assistant."

A dreadful silence settles over everyone again. The grim-faced expedition members feel like strangers to Lily, and she takes your hand without thinking.

He curses you in a frenzy, crawling and knocking his forehead against the ground in some grotesque posture, begging to have his own sins forgiven.

The state of the body has shaken every member of the expedition. The guide tries to calm everyone down, but the screaming and the fear keep spreading through the group.

While everyone's eyes stay fixed on the ruined corpse, you notice something odd: the snow-covered ground still bears bloodstains and black marks from a violent fight.

She glances around at the others, every one of them on the edge of panic, then nods and steps forward.

The young medic presses her lips together, her back trembling faintly. You can tell she's forcing herself to stay calm.

The words set off an uproar. All eyes turn to Helot, nobody has forgotten the massive flail she threw without a second thought, and the sight of her cutting a man down is still fresh in every mind.

He spreads his hands, helpless.

By the professor's reasoning, Helot really does seem to be the only one who fits the profile of the killer.

He looks around at the faces of the expedition members and lowers his voice.

...

Outside the tents nothing is left but the campfire, and now and then a hushed exchange or the clatter of tools.

Some of the soft-handed researchers lash together whatever the mountain offers into crude stone axes and knives, then tuck them under their pillows for what little comfort that brings.

Others have abandoned reason entirely, absorbed in copying the posture the Local once used to please the Mountain God, flat on their bellies, crawling in slow, contorted movements...

Hostile eyes keep turning toward your tent.

The tent flap lifts and two figures step inside.

Helot's face stays cold and she says nothing, but the madness you forced down is still raging behind her eyes.

The guide walks over and claps you on the shoulder.

He lets out a few dry laughs, shoulders shaking hard, from laughter, from the cold, or from fear.

"Sinner." "Murderer." "Demon."... In the few seconds the tent stands open, the words bore into your ears, and there's no shutting them out.

Helot pauses, then suddenly leans in close, meeting your eyes.

She hums softly, turns away, and watches the wind and snow outside the tent.

You stop listening to her ravings.

You sit up with Helot the whole night and hear nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe the expedition member's grisly death yesterday really was just an accident...

Outside the tent, where the watch should be standing, there are only a few pools of blood, already starting to congeal.

Your blood runs cold. One "accident" after another, every dawn thick with the smell of blood, expedition members vanishing and dying one by one...

Something makes you turn, hard and fast.

A cloaked dark figure disappears into the wind and snow...

The guide grabs the expedition member by the shoulders and shakes hard. Under that heavy voice and that stare, the member finally settles down a little.

The faces of several expedition members twist out of shape, and their voices slur into nonsense.

Thick black slurry spreads across the snow's pale surface, gurgling, eerie fluid pouring out of the expedition members' bodies.

A black spike lashes out and drives straight at Helot.

You twist and shove her aside, and the spike punches clean through your shoulder.

You let out a muffled groan, your arm going limp as you slump against Helot's shoulder. Blood and meltwater splash into her eyes, breaking apart your dim reflection.

Piercing pain spreads from the wound, your mind reeling, and the Link stalls for a moment.

You watch her uneasily. If she wanted, she could turn on you right now, and your Spiritual Energy would collapse without question. But... she doesn't.

She turns toward the expedition members howling to tear her apart. Those eyes, calmed a moment ago by the silver light, flood with blood-red again.

Too late. The howl of the flail drowns out your shout as it slams into the crazed expedition members.

You stare blankly at the pool of thick black remains in front of you. The people who stood with you only moments ago lie here now, left forever on this glacier of endless snow.

Countless explorers have died in these mountains, but the guide has never seen so many die so horribly.

He can't hold himself together any longer. His shoulders heave and he retches until the sound echoes off the ice.

BOOM...

He never finishes. The light above him simply goes dark.

You look up. Like a stormcloud swallowing the sun, an enormous dark shape rises along the side of the cliff and hangs over you.

A vast sigil is carved into the colossal Monster's body, you have seen it before, in a dream.

BOOM!

The immense being hanging above you slams down. The roar splits the peak, and the rock beneath your feet shatters to dust.

Your footing gives way, and you plunge into the gorge with Helot.

And through your horrified shouts, Helot grins wide and, for the first time, laughs out loud.

Facing a colossal Monster like nothing he has ever seen, he spends every last bit of strength just to stay on his feet.

"BOOM..."

A thunderous crash, Lily blocks the Monster's attack. Her balance breaks and she staggers back a few steps, but her eyes stay fixed on the Monster across from her.

The Monster hovering in the air shudders and lets out a shrill howl.

Lily is gathering another dark sphere when a figure steps in front of her.

The guide's voice shakes. Facing a terror beyond anything in his life, this ordinary man gathers up all the courage he has and stands in front of Lily.

He tries to shield her from the bone-deep cold of death. He tries to stand against a Fate no one can resist.

The cold rushes up him and his tongue goes numb. He is frozen through, as if dropped into liquid nitrogen, not one cell in his brain can move.

A cold so absolute it freezes thought itself and grinds it to powder.

The guide and Elvis harden into ice statues, and the gale knocks them flat into the snow. That absolute cold climbs Lily's fingertips.

Lily's face hardens. Her eyes leave the guide and rise to the huge Monster floating overhead.

The glowing blue Monster snarls its venomous babble. The snow it throws up whips across Lily's cheeks, and her face doesn't change at all.

A smooth, enormous black sphere takes shape at her fingertips. Lily raises one finger and points it at the glowing blue Monster hanging in the air.

No one answers. You open your eyes to a blur, feeling the wet seep in behind you, your snow-soaked coat being torn and crushed.

You've fallen onto a frozen lake, and the impact has punched a deep crater into the ice. Spilling endlessly out of the cracks are smooth spheres that look like black Pustules.

You flinch back and scramble away from the crater.

With nothing left to plug the hole, the black Pustules churning beneath the ice pour out all at once and race toward the lake's edge.

Black Pustules cling all over Helot. As though something in her resonates with them, she shakes harder and harder the more wildly they surge.

She swings her massive flail like a madwoman, smashing the black sludge that spills from the cracks, then comes for you.

Black vapor bleeds from Helot's pupils, and the Silver Key at your chest flares brighter than ever.

You can feel the Link being battered without mercy. Just holding it together takes everything you have.

A grotesque smile spreads across her face, slick with black slime. The huge flail is a toy in her hands as she swings it and closes in on you, step by step.

The flail comes screaming down, an instant from splitting your skull...

Clang...

A tremendous crash bursts open above your head. You slowly lower the arm you threw up over your eyes.

The flail is knocked away and drops limply to one side.

In the biting wind, that familiar dark figure who will not stay gone stands between you and the blow, blade in hand.

Boom...

The other "Helot" swings her massive flail, shattering a cluster of black Pustules, and the leftover force rips through the ice sheathing the rock. The mountain groans as it breaks.

Spike and flail slam together. The two of them stand locked eye to eye, sparks flying, each pouring unspent fury into the other.

The dark figure plants herself in front of you and takes the full sweep of the other "Helot's" frenzied flail, sliding back several steps.

The wind tears at the cloak, already shredded by the iron spikes, and lifts it aside to reveal a familiar profile.

She hurls the slime spike condensed in her hand, and it punches clean through the sticky Pustules on the other "Helot." Black dots spatter across the snow.

Helot's eyes go ice-cold, her hostile stare sliding past your shoulder to the other "Helot" standing behind you.

A slime spike shoots out along that cold stare, only for the other "Helot" to knock it into the snow with her massive flail, where it melts into a pool of pitch-black slime.

You step between their glares, trying to defuse things.

It doesn't seem to help.

The other "Helot" licks the black slurry from the corner of her mouth. The flail whirls madly in her grip, its howl closing in.

You thought back to your encounter with Genesis Ramona.

The other "Helot" throws back her head and laughs, pouring every ounce of her malice into the sound.

The massive flail whirls in her grip, hauled around by sheer force, as she closes in on Helot step by step.

The shrieking iron ball swallows the rest of her words and comes straight at you.

Helot ducks under the chain's crushing blow and hurls the slime spike in her hand at the other "Helot's" vitals, barely catching her balance at the lip of the ice pit where the Pustules are welling up.

Both of them stop at once and look toward the great hole in the middle of the frozen lake, where a black, viscous mass is slowly seeping up.

Helot sweeps her eyes across the area.

Something endless and dark lies hidden beneath the fissures in the lake. Pitch-black Pustules pour out of the widening cracks in the ice and close in around you.

Both Helots flinch at the same instant, hearing the cries that rise from deep inside their souls.

The other "Helot" swings her flail down and smashes a deep crater into the ice. Pustules swarm up out of the pit and cling to the flail.

They writhe as they gather in from every direction, and then she stops.

A manic grin spreads across her face.

Helot stands beside you, her face cold.

You climb the glacial rock face, where there is barely a foothold to be found, and follow Helot's faint sense of Lily into this crack in the rock.

A crevice inside a glacier should be packed with ice, yet it isn't cold here at all. Unsettling moss even clings to the inner walls.

You trip on a jut of white bone in the floor, and Helot catches your arm and hauls you back.

What tripped you is an intact human leg bone embedded in the wall, like scraps left behind after the rock swallowed the rest.

...

She flicks the small black Pustule against the wall and runs it through with her sword.

...

A faint voice drifts up from deep inside the cave.

You're about to push deeper in when a hand catches your arm. Helot shakes her head at you, her face grim.

As if answering her, the walls begin to writhe, slow and heavy.

A rotting hand works its way out of the wall, then a thigh, then a skull...

Countless pieces of bodies spill from the walls, some picked clean to the bone, others still hung with rotting flesh.

Mismatched limbs from a dozen different climbers open before you like a cruel flower of decay.

You pull your hand free before she can finish and plunge into the reeking dark of the passage.

...

You follow the sound to the far end of the cave, where a ring of jagged rock and spikes guards a pitch-black altar.

Several dark red bodies kneel hunched on the altar, and not one of them is breathing.

You lean your head out of the shadowed passage and look up at whatever it is the crowd is worshipping.

There is an unnatural rupture on the dome. Within the hollow rock floats that glowing blue monster, marked with the Church of the Lightbearers insignia you once encountered.

It is a vast, horrifying thing, and this is the first time you get a proper look at it.

Bare bones, almost arthropod-like, sheathed in frost. At the center of its limbs pulses a strange blue flame, breathing out a cold that steals your breath.

A black sphere appears in front of you and crushes the Pustules mid-lunge into puddles of filthy fluid.

Lily squeezes out through a narrow gap, a long climbing rope trailing from her small hands. Two adults are tied to the far end, bundled up tight and unable to move.

Lily tips her head back, staring up with perfect innocence at the Monster coiled overhead.

The dead on the altar are caked with blood. Look closer, and every face is one you know, the expedition members who went missing.

You slip out of the passage with Lily and weave through the heaps of broken stone. The Monster still hasn't stirred by the time you reach the altar.

You clench your jaw and try not to let the anger and the grief take hold. Lily feels it and presses closer, offering what comfort she can.

After a moment of silence, you pat Lily's head. A warm sensation spreads through your skin, such a vibrant life.

Lily hauls the corpse too hard, and the body, stiff as an ice statue, cracks against the rubble. Behind you, a glowing blue flame flares to life.

The wind cuts across your cheeks like a blade. The Monster breathes out a cloud of icy mist, then fixes on you there in the shadows, unfolding its bones as it closes in.

Lily swings the massive flail and drives the huge Monster into the wall. It howls in fury.

You haul up the two barely breathing expedition members and run for the passage.

You are running for your lives. Every step is heavier than the last, but the Monster will be moving again soon, and you cannot stop.

The mountain lets out a deep, muffled groan, like foul air forced from a throat, then shudders and contracts, hard enough to knock you all off your feet.

There is no time to think. Instinct drives you on, clawing forward on hands and knees through the slime the cave is secreting, toward the mouth that is slowly closing.

BOOM,

The whole mountain heaves over. The passage lurches to a new angle and plunges steeply downward.

The slime beneath you gives no grip. You claw your way toward the lit opening, but the passage writhes harder with every second.

The warm stone keeps contracting, crushing your chest, and the air thins with every breath. Even Lily is pinned in a crevice, unable to move.

Black stone swallows the only way out. The path, close enough to touch, is gone, and hopeless darkness closes over your eyes.

BOOM!

Dust and flecks of snow scatter in the air in front of you.

A gash is hacked clean through the black passage, and blinding white light spills across your shoulders.

She smashes the cave rock apart and drags you out of the rubble.

Before she can finish, she steps into empty air.

Where memory says a slope should be, there is nothing at all. In an instant, it has become a bottomless drop.

The instant she falls, you throw out a hand and catch her.

Your ice axe bites into the mountainside. You hang halfway down the cliff face, blood seeping from the gash in your arm, pain rolling through it in waves.

From her other hand dangle the two expedition members, still bound tight.

She tries to pull herself up, but the axe and your failing arm can't take any more weight.

Lily shouts down at you, frantic, trying to pull together a black orb to lift you.

But the fight drained her. The orb barely holds its shape, let alone the weight of a person.

Helot's eyes go wide. She fights to shake off your hand, only to feel in those fingers a stubbornness she has never touched before.

Your crampons claw at the ice and keep slipping under the drag of the weight below; only Lily's pull keeps you where you are.

Your face burns red as you fight down the pain, straining to hold tighter, harder, and still you can only watch her fingers slide inch by inch out of your palm.

Her face is four feet from yours. Right now, four feet might as well be a mile.

The wound on your shoulder tears open. Blood spatters across the skin beneath Helot's eyes and runs down her hard, cold profile.

Her eyes fly open. For a moment she only stares, not even noticing the blood seeping into them.

BOOM!

The whole mountain starts shaking again, hard enough to feel like it's coming apart.

You hold on through the weakness and the pain, but your ice axe is torn free of the mountain.

At least you gave it everything... You close your eyes.

Thud, thud, thud...

The bone-shattering impact never comes. You slam into one rock after another, and the fall becomes a tumble down the slope, then a long slide.

A few seconds later, you come to a stop. The cliff that was about to kill you is now level ground.

A few hundred meters off, Lily stands right where you drove in your ice axe, waving at you.

The grand speeches, the last goodbyes, all of it turns out to be an absurd farce.

You follow her gaze and catch a glimpse of a fleeting dark figure. When you look again, there is nothing behind you but endless wind and snow.

...

Holding on to all those people at the broken cliff face has drained you dry. Your arms are strained so badly you can't lift them. You're at your limit.

Her small hands clutch her head, and she tugs at the hem of your coat, bewildered.

The glacier roars again and begins to shift, agonizingly slow.

This time the frozen lake, hidden for so long, lies bare, and you can make out the thin figure standing on the ice, covered in black Pustules.

The crack in the ice widens and widens, a long open wound running across the lake beneath the sprawling glacier.

Black Pustules pour out without end, spreading over the other "Helot."

The grotesque Pustules sense her call and hum with excitement, crowding over one another to spill into her mouth, offering themselves up to be devoured.

They seem to delight in being shredded, to worship being swallowed, to hunger for being torn apart and eaten.

You come to a stop before the other "Helot." Her body is steeped in the black Pustules, her shape grown so thin that it looks like mist, ready to scatter at a breath.

The obsession and madness drain out of the other "Helot"'s eyes.

She looks at Helot with a composure, a calm, she has never shown before.

That one quiet word, and Helot shudders.

She turns her face toward you, lips splitting into a grin that bares a pair of sly fangs.

The black Pustules pile up thicker and thicker, a swarm of starving primeval things flinging themselves at her body, crawling up her cheeks.

She laughs, a beast tearing into raw meat, a king about to take the throne.

The black Pustules keep spreading and heaping over her, burrowing into a body that can no longer bear them, closing over that calm, mad face...

Bang...

Like a Pustule bursting, black and red fluid sprays in every direction.

The beast's final shriek still echoes through the empty valley. Where she stood, nothing remains but a puddle.

Helot lifts her head, dazed, and looks up at the pale gray sky.

Coarse flakes of snow roll across her skin and melt into little beads of water.

Helot doesn't get the chance to answer. Something else does...

The mountain shudders beneath your feet. From deep within the range comes a low, filthy call...

Lily curls up, clutching her head in pain.

You push the pain in your head aside and go to Lily to check on her.

A heavy thud, and Helot collapses to the ground, her previously composed face now filled with pain.

You lean down to check on Helot, and her hand clamps around your arm.

Spikes erupt from the slime in her palm and tear into your forearm, leaving it slick with blood.

An eerie light flickers in her eyes, and a strange smile has crept across that cold, proud face.

You activate the Silver Key, sending ripples of silver light towards the frantic Helot.

You close your eyes and overdraw your Spiritual Energy again, emptying yourself into the Link until you seize control of her by force.

She goes still. Her scattered eyes focus again, and when they find your bloodied forearm, she opens her mouth, then presses her lips shut.

The backlash rises from deep in your mind like a tide. Exhaustion crashes over you, and your face drains to the same dead white as this ancient plain of ice.

Before she finishes, an enormous dark shape sweeps over your heads.

The gale rakes across you, and a sick cold climbs from your feet all the way to your heart.

Beneath the hideous bulk of the colossal Monster, you are all no bigger than snowflakes about to melt.

But its eyes don't linger on you for long. Strangely, it turns away and flies toward the snow-covered summit, dragging a tail of glowing blue flame behind it.

Fire erupts from the summit, its light blazing straight up into the sky.

A few sharp cracks split the air as the ice imprisoning Elvis and the guide breaks apart. Slowly, the two of them come around from the deep cold.

The twisted Monster slams down onto the ice, gouging out a trench deep as a ravine. It drones, hauling itself up again and again only to crash back down.

It is barely alive, yet the flames behind it keep burning, swelling larger, until they nearly devour it.

Helot drives the spike into the fire again and again, but nothing she does will put out that blaze.

Helot looks at you, then up at the blue flame burning on the summit.

Helot closes her eyes. The fragments that scattered gather again in her mind.

Helot opens her eyes again.

Helot crouches down and, copying you, awkwardly pats the soft top of Lily's head.

Lily is already half swallowed by the mountainside. Pitch-black tears run down her face, and she stares at Helot with empty eyes, no longer in control of herself.

She drives her blade into the rock. Soaked strands of hair hang across her face, freezing into slivers of ice that sway with her trembling shoulders.

The freezing wind tears across the mountain without pause, and dull crashes roll out one after another.

Pain comes at her in waves, but right now the voice in her head is perfectly clear.

Her shaking hands can no longer hold the hilt, and the sword rings with a metallic hum as the shuddering rock strikes against it.

...

"BOOM..."

The mountain heaves again, and the thick ice over the frozen lake splits apart, crack by crack.

Beneath the broken slabs, black Pustules churn wildly, boiling like soup, spreading wider and wider.

Helot pulls out the black thorn.

The clouds banked over the mountain are thick, and no sunlight gets through.

Black slime coils around Helot and binds her fast. Her mindless madness hardens into iron chains, holding her down under shackle upon shackle.

...

She hauls the chains on her thin shoulders, dragging herself forward. The weight drags at her until she can't breathe, and she drops to her knees in the snow.

Forbidden whispers pour endlessly into her ears, and somewhere in that thick, murky noise Helot hears the mountain and her own heart beating in time.

Thoom, thoom, thoom...

Beneath the hard rock and frozen earth, the thing that has woken hums with impatient hunger, craving her.

She steps onto the summit.

The frenzied peak stirs. The ground shudders, and a bitter wind tears at Helot's thin clothes without moving her an inch.

Black slurry surges up out of the peak in a flood, rising like a towering wave to close in all around her...

@3 returns... destroy @2... forget @3 @2... come... return to @3...

...return to @3...

Helot briefly turns her head. You think you see a fleeting smile cross her face.

She turns to face that undying blue flame and raises the black spike in her hand...

A declaration, and a command. The black slurry crashes down without end, swallowing everything on the summit.

The Elworth Mountains shake. Milky ice fog billows up along the ranges, and the stiff, lumbering slopes twist and thrash as if fighting something off.

The burning clouds are swept into a vast vortex that closes over the whole peak. Terrible power breaks loose unchecked, as if it would grind the sky itself to pieces...

...

How long it lasts, you cannot say. At last the dust settles, and the ground beneath your feet goes still.

Lily, herself again, comes over and takes your hand.

The mountains breathe, slow and steady. You lift your head and look up at the sky.

Coarse snowflakes fall and gather on your head until your hair goes white.

Elworth is quiet, as if nothing ever happened here.

You nod and turn back to the window.

As for finding Helot's Silver Core, you hadn't held much hope to begin with.

That promise, swept to your ears on the wind, sounds like a farewell meant to comfort you.

The sky runs with crimson as rich as oil paint, and the last of the light pools in your hands. Outside the window, the Mythag University campus lies steeped in the dying sun.

He tosses down a newspaper.

Dexter gives you an elegant little bow and eases the door shut behind him.

She picks up the newspaper Dexter left behind.

You snap your head around and take the paper from her.

In the blurry, ink-smudged photograph, the wind and snow over the mountains have stopped.

A thin dandelion has pushed up through snow that never melts.

Greeting the first spring Elworth has ever known.