Chapter 35: Tea with a Goddess
The four girls had settled onto the bed, huddled close together, three glowing screens hovering in the air before them.
The first showed the dungeon’s entrance, still and silent. The other two offered differing angles of the same scene, those of the butterflies trailing Aria, who had just finished crossing the cave to sink at last into the world below.
Down there, everything was excess.
Aria had paused a moment on the threshold of that world, taking in the landscape that stretched on without end. An immense forest spread out before her, its trees far too tall to be natural, bathed in a diffuse light that seemed to come from no sun. The air hung heavy, so saturated with mana one could have nearly drunk it.
"So this is the place that so deeply, so sadly traumatized my sweet and lovely mistress?"
On her shoulder, the bird stirred all at once, and a familiar voice sprang from it. Freya’s.
"I can hear you, Aria! We can all hear you, so don’t go saying embarrassing things like that!"
A faint smile came to the demon’s lips.
That’s how she is, my mistress. Soft and fragile, deep down. But on the surface, she hates being shown as weak, or treated as such.
That was precisely what made all her charm, in her servant’s eyes. Aria cherished her tyrannical façade every bit as much as the clumsy tenderness she hid beneath it.
"Do forgive me, madam. I’ll take greater care from now on."
With that, she pressed into the forest, slicing through the vines and brush that barred her path with a mere backhand sweep, without so much as slowing.
"It’s nothing... Just focus on what might happen to you." the bird relayed.
"Very well, mistress."
The bird fell silent then, leaving her wholly to her focus, to her expedition and her surroundings.
The hours that followed were of a profound tedium.
Anything that might have laid claim to blocking her way, a few Rank S beasts here, some small fry there, scattered well before she reached it. The creatures of these parts sensed by instinct what she was, and none was mad enough to approach.
She ended up crossing the forest clean through, and emerged onto a landscape that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the one she’d just left.
A snow-covered plain stretched as far as the eye could see, swept by a raging blizzard. Here and there, hidden beneath the powder, blocks of ice jutted from the ground, and within each of them lay the body of a beast. Faceless Devourers, among others, frozen there for eternity, caught mid-motion in a rest that would never end.
Magic barrier.
At that single thought, three small barriers unfurled around the butterflies and the bird, shielding them from the biting cold that reigned all around.
She set off again without delay, heading straight ahead in one very precise direction. For she already knew: all this cold was nothing natural. It emanated from a source, a magical source, and it was toward it that she was making her way.
A few minutes’ walk into that white waste, and a shape finally detached itself from the veil of snow. A structure, blending stone and ice, rising toward the sky.
A tower.
Aria crossed its threshold and raised her eyes. Above her, a staircase of ice spiraled upward, climbing so high it was lost from sight.
"So this is where you’re hiding."
She began the ascent, step after step. Long minutes passed, then longer ones still, and the staircase seemed to lengthen the higher she climbed, as though it refused to let her reach its summit.
She got there in the end all the same.
A great door of ice stood there, barring the way to whatever awaited beyond. Aria cut through it with a backhand sweep, diagonally, without even stopping.
The two halves slid slowly against each other, then tipped and crashed to the floor with a resounding din, flinging shards of frost all around. And the room, at last, offered itself to her gaze, and to the butterflies’.
Everything within was made of ice.
At its center, upon what looked like a table of ice topped with a parasol of the same, a woman sat. Skin pale, of an almost unreal perfection. White hair, white brows, and a blindfold masking her eyes. Before her, on the table, two cups steamed gently.
She did not turn her head toward the intruder, but she spoke, and her voice filled the room without her needing to raise it, low and even.
"Come, and sit. I am rarely visited, and more rarely still by anyone’s own free will."
Aria did not let go of her composure. She crossed the room at a measured pace and took her place facing her, back straight, gaze fixed on this woman who awaited her without even seeing her.
A long silence stretched out. With the tips of her pale fingers, the woman slowly turned her cup upon the icy surface, without ever bringing it to her lips, and when she spoke again, it was in the same level tone.
"Tell me. Would you be a close friend of that young woman who ventured here, not long ago? It seemed to me I found in you a little of her light."
"That’s correct. She is my mistress, and I am but her humble servant."
"So then..." She let the answer float, savoring each word. "You are the one who took the life of that poor child I had sent after her."
She finally brought the cup to her mouth and drank a sip, slowly, before turning her eyes, so to speak, back to her guest.
At those words, Aria’s aura broke loose within the room.
The ice cracked on all sides, running in fractures along the walls and ceiling, and the table itself split under the pressure before shattering to pieces. Soon nothing remained, amid the chaos, but the two chairs and the two women facing each other upon them.
The woman, for her part, hadn’t flinched. Not one white hair had trembled on her head.
"So there lay a wound. Forgive me for touching it." With a gesture of perfect nonchalance, she let her cup slip from her fingers, and the object went to shatter against the floor of ice without her deigning to follow it. "Understand that there was nothing personal in it. A simple rule, one I’ve obeyed far longer than your world could imagine."
Aria stared at her a long moment before answering. And when her voice came, it was low, slow, and sharp as a wire.
"I have no time to waste on your games. You’re going to answer my questions, every one of them." She let a silence weigh between each word. "What is this place. Who are you. And what rule are you talking about."
The air around her seemed to grow colder still, and yet it wasn’t from the woman’s ice that this cold came.
"Weigh your next words carefully. They could be your last."
A smile brushed the woman’s lips. Rather than answer at once, she rose, in a slow, fluid motion.
"So much fever, in you... I understand it, and hold none of it against you. So I’ll grant you what you ask."
She raised a hand, and with a single motion of her fingers, the entire wall of the tower began to melt, flowing away without a sound and revealing what lay beyond.
And even Aria, for the space of a heartbeat, held her breath.
An endless sea stretched to the horizon, of a blue so deep it seemed unnatural, beneath a sky that belonged to no known world. In the distance, colossal silhouettes moved through it slowly, tall as mountains, half-beast, half-divinity, their outlines defying comprehension. Islands drifted through the air, borne by nothing, and over all that vastness rested a golden, ancient light, unlike that of any sun. Before her screen, leagues away, Freya could not have called it anything other than divine.
"Look. This is Nymeria."
She let the landscape speak for her a moment, then went on, in that same ample, unhurried voice that contrasted so sharply with what she was revealing.
"The world born beneath your feet on the first day, when sky and blood mingled for the very first time. A world the surface has come to forget, and one I have since made it my task to keep forgotten."
She turned her sightless face toward Aria, and inclined it with an almost royal courtesy.
"I am the thirteenth and last child of our parents. The demigod Myrphès, and the dragon-queen Ōgami."
The revelation echoed through the room, heavy, and the woman gave it no time to settle.
"And my name is Artalia. Ordinarily, at this precise moment, I would ask you yours. It would be the least of courtesies, between us."
Then she lowered her hand toward the floor.
At her gesture, the ice all around lost its opacity, clearing little by little until it turned translucent, and what it held within was revealed at last. Bodies. Dozens, hundreds of human bodies, frozen, prisoners of the very matter, their features fixed forever in the instant of their death. The floor was paved with them. The walls were built of them. The entire tower, from threshold to summit, was made of flesh caught in the ice.
"But you see, here, such courtesy would no longer have any meaning."
She let her pale hand glide along the banister of the staircase.
"Each of the steps you climbed to reach me was once an intruder. Each one had a name too. Each one came to my door to uncover the secret of this world, exactly as you did tonight." A smile lit her features. "And the next step I set down will bear the face of your dear mistress."
She straightened, and her voice, without ever rising, turned final.
"For there is only one rule here, one that no one has ever escaped. Whoever learns of Nymeria’s existence must die. No exception. No appeal."
It was at that instant that the bird, silent until then, stirred abruptly.
"Aria—" Freya’s voice cracked, pitched higher, unrecognizable. "Aria, kill her! Right now! Don’t let her talk, stop listening to her, KILL HER! That’s an order, do you hear me?!"
There was nothing composed left in her voice. Nothing but fear. The raw, naked fear of a woman who had just understood that the thing down there knew of her existence, her face, and even where she was.
Artalia tilted her head gently toward the bird, and a smile came to light her features.
"Ah... Wouldn’t that be our shy little visitor from the other time I hear there?"
Her voice grew softer still, and only became the more chilling for it.
"Calm yourself, my child. There’s no rush. If I let your devoted servant come all the way to me without laying a hand on her, it’s because you too, up there, at home, I’ve had a present sent your way."