Master of the Loop - Chapter 146: Hymns of Shadow

Chapter 146

Hymns of Shadow

Sylas hardly fancied a blizzard that nigh buried him alive, but a blizzard that nigh buried him alive was what he got. Halfway through the night on top of the tiny protrusion he was using to rest, he was woken to the sounds of hissing winds that ripped through the mountainways, carrying with them snow adrift. The winds belted in the high hundreds, and soon snow began to fall. Add on to it the snow of the mountain, it had quickly turned into a storm.

He had to dig a hole with magic into the side of the cliff to latch onto, for otherwise he would have flown off himself, carried onward by the wind. His fingers soon began to bleed and meld into the melting ice, the droplets of water turning pinkish, as he held on for his dear life. He felt it, every pelting–the winds were like the knives cutting into his skin, and though resilient it was, beyond that of armor even, it was still short of perfect defense.

Blood soon began to flow out of the many cuts and he had to grit his teeth to the frostbitten, burning sensation sprawling over his entire body like an army of flesh-eating ants invading it. Hours passed in torture, but he held on–all the way until the winds died down and the blizzard subsided into the ‘mere’ snowfall. Digging his arm out of the hole, he realized that two of his fingers were broken, and one seemed almost dead to the frost. Sighing, he guided blood into it, slowly beginning to heal. Such was the way of magic–unnatural.

More than once he felt ‘off’ healing thusly, but by now it had become his second nature. His body would act on instinct even before he thought of it–at best, he could either slow it down or speed it up, but never prevent it.

Sitting upright, he glanced over the edge and saw the view clean up–the fog began to ascend and the snow began to thin out as the canopy of the forest below sprawled out. It was greenless still, glazed in white snow, but was like a roof to the world below. As though by magic, colors began to bleed from the distant east and the sun began to rise from beyond the horizon. It was soft yet hard-colored, chilly yet warm.

He’d largely forgotten, he realized, moments like these. Alone, in silence, blessed by the studious calm. His breathing calmed ever so invisibly, his eyes glued to the far-off cutting edge of the world. There was something steeling about the sight–the effervescent light that chilled, the humming silence of the faintest wind, the nothingness of the world around him. He was alone atop a mountain, surrounded by the inanimate, far off from any sign of life, it seemed. And yet, it was not hell.

Remaining seated for nearly an hour, watching the sun slowly go up in the sky, it was as though parts of himself were cleansed. Suddenly, he could think more clearly, and his mind wasn’t as clouded. Nonetheless, though, the pretty sight was hardly a cure for his many demons. Though it deafened them for a moment, they would be back–he knew. All he had to do was look up and beyond the crevice between the mountains and at the statuesque spire in the distance where those demons lived… and suddenly, his anger once again swelled.

Deep down he understood, slowly getting up and stretching and preparing to resume the climb, he’d never be rid of them. Those demons, accompanied by the memories, would always be a part of him. But he could control them–keep them pinned like the eternal fire burning underneath.

Latching onto the ladderless cliffside and the tiny, rocky protrusions, he continued scaling the frosted giant. It was a grueling, even painful process, resulting in quite a few forced breaks where he’d have to hang off of one arm to heal the other before switching them as his hands would often be lacerated and frostbitten.

Bit by bit, however, the ground below grew distant–a hundred feet, then two, three, five, and soon it turned into a complete mile. By his estimates, he was about halfway up the climbable side atop of which the cleave occurred where some level of even ground seemed to exist.

He scaled in silence, thoughtless, using the moment as a reprieve from the reality that was waiting for him beyond it. Whatever the outcome, he knew, a great number of people will be dead by the end of it. And though he knew he’d have to repeat this loop many, many, many times still, there was only one first time.

Hours swiftly sped by and he finished the climb–at least the initial one–landing on the platformed rock that edged into a quasi mountain path heavily sloped. Iced spikes protruded everywhere like thorns, and though much of the view was hidden beneath layers of mist, enough was visible. With some struggle, Sylas cut through the ‘road’, edging alongside thin and lengthy falls, almost slipping and falling into a deadly abyss several times.

Soon, he rounded the mountain and wound up on the descent–which, much to his anger, was a fairly normal, mountainous descent without steep cliffs and jagged rocks. Luckily, the winds didn’t blow ‘inland’, as though the mountains surrounding him shielded him from that horror.

Some few hours in, he stopped as he landed squarely on an extended platform connecting over a dozen iced bridges over a massive gap. What lay before him was quite the sight–platforms arose from the abyss like floating islands, with natural bridges in-between them as the solitary means of traversing. The ‘islands’ varied in shapes and sizes as well as elevation, and it wasn’t difficult to realize one very simple truth: this wasn’t manmade. Though it seemed so, the things were simply too… unmanned for it to have been built by one’s hand.

Quite a few islands had shimmering, blue crystals ‘growing out’ of the ground like flowers, but past that, there was only a thick layer of snow and a sheet of ice beneath it. He began to island-hop, so it were, while moving forward. The distance was quite deceptive; though the central ‘mountain’ appeared just ‘over the hill’, he quickly realized that the reason it was so was that it was simply… insanely massive. In fact, the closer he got, the more abhorrently shocked he got at the sight–the mountain, after all, easily shot past ten thousand feet… at around its halfway point.

The weird shape of the mountain got even more pronounced the closer he came since he began to see more detail rather than just the general outline. What stuck out the most perhaps were the many, many holes in the side of the solitary, erect spearhead, some of which would occasionally shimmer ever so faintly.

It all but confirmed his suspicion that whoever he was after likely resided there. It was virtually the perfect place, out of the way of everyone, sprawling, hidden to the point of insanity. Had he been not pointed directly in this direction, and had he not serendipitously chanced a glance through the mountains, there was no chance in hell he would have ever discovered this place. He’d entirely taken out going into the mountains from his future plans ever since climbing toward the hidden lake and the portal.

While the knowledge he gained was fairly bountiful, the climb itself had nearly exhausted even him. Nonetheless, he’d completed another climb–or, well, was somewhere quarter from there. Looking ahead, he steeled his anger still; it was too early to be losing himself, especially considering that he might genuinely not even make it. After all, he was out of food–completely so. While he could still melt snow and drink it, he had nothing to eat. And though his body could endure for a long while, it still had a limit–he suspected that he would be able to last at most a month, but that was entirely in vacuum.

Considering his daily energy consumption by walking through the glazed wilderness, if it didn’t lessen at all, he might not even last half of that. And the last bout of it would likely be spent wallowing and waiting to die, as he’d simply have no energy to move.

As such, he took breaks every couple of hours, though he wasn’t sure how much they helped. One ‘island’ after another got crossed, each dementedly similar to one another. Even he had started losing it after some time–the repetition of the same sights, the exhaustion from the cold, the increasingly frustrating realization that he was much, much, much further away from the mountain than he initially expected. Nonetheless, he persisted.

And, just shy of two weeks later, his persistence paid off–for he had begun to hear voices. At first, he thought that his mind was getting the better of him–that the winds had suddenly learned to speak. However, after coming closer, he realized those were genuine voices–of people. His first encounter was with a dozen or so black-robed men walking from one island toward the other–what stood out specifically, though, was that both islands had more to them than just crystals and snow. He saw houses.

He paused and hid behind a rock, swallowing his excitement. Less so, in fact, that he’d found people–but more that he’d likely found food. After all, they were human too–they had to eat. And so, he waited till the night crept on and slowly snuck onto one of the islands. Luckily, there were no guards or lookouts. Why would there be, anyway? They thought they were cut out from the world and that nobody would ever come. But Sylas did.

Sneaking into the first house, he immediately saw three people fast asleep on a shared bed of straws on the floor. Without hesitation, he walked over and quickly and silently killed all three. Just near them, there was a bowl of fruit seated on top of a round, wooden table. Though just a few measly pieces of fruit, he launched toward them as though they were high-end steaks. He felt refreshed as the juices encapsulated his throat and the first solid food entered his stomach in weeks. He was reborn, in a sense, and ready for far more than just three still-cooling corpses. The purge, after all, was just about to commence.