Chapter 105: Toward the Ice Wall (2)
Weiss let out a dark, lazy laugh from her place firmly tucked into my side. She reached up and started playing with the fringe of my scarf, completely mesmerized by the woven texture of the wool.
"Magic is inherently free," Weiss said, her voice entirely out of nowhere, cutting through Keith’s existential crisis about his skeletal hands. "The natural state of the world is chaotic and free. But rulers hate things that are free."
She paused, staring at her own glowing fingertips.
"Valerius hates that he cannot control the sky," she continued, her tone dipping into a weird, profound melancholy. "They want to bottle the stars and sell them back to you. They force people into rigid boxes because if everyone realized they could just exist... the entire system of power would collapse. We are all just cosmic dust being taxed by an absolute idiot in a pointy crown."
"Wow," Nea breathed out. She was slumping against the carriage window, staring at Weiss in pure, unfiltered awe. "That makes so much sense. It is so messed up."
Nea looked down at her own reflection in the foggy glass of the carriage window.
"We are knights," Nea whispered, her voice taking on a heavy, tragic tone. "We are supposed to protect people. Like farmers. And bakers. And kids. But politics makes us guard borders and fight wars against people we do not even know."
She turned away from the window and looked at the ceiling, gesturing vaguely with her hands.
"Nature did not make us weapons," Nea continued passionately. "The Empire did. We are born as soft, fleshy people, but they forge us into swords so they can point us at each other. It is exhausting. I don’t want to be a sword anymore."
"What do you want to be, Vice Captain?" Keith asked, tears actually welling up in his eyes for her plight. He was fully invested in her emotional journey.
Nea turned to look at me. Her charming eyes were completely dilated, dark, and filled with a profound, earth-shattering realization.
"Axel," Nea said, her voice deadly serious, using my real name in the safety of our hotboxed carriage. "I want to be a piece of cheese."
I stared at her. "Cheese."
"I want to be a block of aged cheddar," Nea confirmed, nodding slowly. "Nobody sends cheddar to war. People just love cheddar. It sits in a cool, dark cellar, and everyone respects it. It just gets better with time. I want that level of peace."
"You would be a very respectable cheddar," I told her, nodding sagely. I was used to this. You always validate the high ideas. "The most honorable cheese in the larder."
"I think you would be a Gouda," Keith offered helpfully.
Nea glared at him. "I am absolutely not a Gouda, Keith. Do not insult me."
"I am so hungry," Livia announced to the carriage at large, completely ignoring the cheese debate. She was still staring at the wooden wall. "If I do not eat a pastry right now, I think my soul will leave my body."
"I could eat an entire horse," Nea agreed, completely devastated by the thought of her empty stomach.
"Please don’t eat a horse, Vice Captain," Keith whimpered, hugging his metal-encased arms to his chest. "Horses have families. They have dreams."
"Fear not," I sighed, shifting my weight and playing the role of the provider.
I reached into my spatial pocket. I had prepared for this exact moment. You do not smoke magical Ent-weed without a contingency plan. I pulled out a massive, heavy wooden charcuterie board that I had pre-assembled back at the Grim Palace kitchen. It was loaded with cured meats, fresh fruit, salted crackers, and, crucially, three different types of expensive cheese.
The moment the board appeared and rested on my lap, the entire carriage went dead silent.
Four pairs of eyes locked onto the food like a pack of starved, rabid wolves.
"You are a literal god," Nea whispered, her mouth falling open.
"I am just a guy with a bottomless pocket and basic foresight," I said, setting the board down on the small pull-out table between the seats. "Eat up, heroes. We have a lot of weirdness left to unpack before we reach the Ice Wall."
Total chaos ensued.
Livia grabbed a cluster of green grapes, but before she ate them, she held them up to her ear and whispered, "I am sorry for what I must do," before popping them into her mouth.
Keith picked up a slice of cured salami with trembling fingers. "It is so thin," he marveled, staring at the translucent meat against the dim carriage light. "How many times can you slice a pig before it disappears?"
"Just eat it, Keith," Weiss mumbled, shoving three crackers loaded with brie into her mouth at the exact same time.
Nea immediately went for the cheddar. She took a bite, closed her eyes, and let out a sound of pure, unadulterated bliss that sent a very sudden, very inappropriate shiver down my spine. She looked at me, chewing happily, her previous knightly depression entirely cured by dairy.
For the next twenty minutes, the only sounds in the carriage were the aggressive crunching of crackers and Keith occasionally apologizing to the meat. The crushing anxiety of facing down the Empire’s darkest secrets had completely faded into a warm, hazy camaraderie. We were just five people eating cheese, trying to stop a maniac from ruining the natural order of the world.
But all good things must come to an end.
The carriage suddenly hit a massive bump, jarring all of us in our seats.
The comfortable, magical warmth inside the cabin vanished almost instantly. The temperature plummeted so sharply that my breath plumed into a white cloud in front of my face. The dense, pine-scented haze of the weed smoke rapidly thinned out, replaced by the biting, freezing sting of true winter air leaking through the floorboards.
The endless forest of pine trees outside our windows abruptly ended.
I leaned forward, my high fading into sharp, cold adrenaline, and wiped the heavy condensation off the glass window.
"Guys," I said quietly. My voice had lost all of its previous amusement.
Everyone stopped chewing. They shifted in their seats and looked out the window.
Rising up from the barren, frozen earth was a wall of solid, ancient ice. It was not just a large barrier. It was a complete geographical anomaly. It stretched endlessly to the left and the right, disappearing entirely into the curvature of the horizon. It reached so impossibly high up into the sky that the dark, gray clouds physically broke against its jagged, frozen peaks.
It was deep blue, stark white, and completely terrifying. It pulsed with a heavy, ancient magic that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
"The Ice Wall," Nea breathed out. All the relaxed, sleepy tone was completely gone from her voice. Her hand instinctively drifted toward the hilt of her sword.
"Well," Weiss sighed heavily from my shoulder, her golden eyes narrowing at the massive structure separating our world from the demons. "Let us go find out what the Empire is hiding in the freezer."