Chapter Text
If one were to be asked to imagine the most hostile place in the world, there are several images that might be conjured in one's mind. One might imagine the caldera of a volcano, so hot as to sear the flesh from a human's bones at a hundred paces; or one might imagine the deepest parts of the oceans, with crushing pressure so immense that flesh and bone would cease to exist as separate entities and instead would become simply a tiny ball of organic matter.
These are hostile places, so inimical to human life that none have set eyes upon them and lived in all the long thousands of years of human society.
Yet they are not the most hostile places in the world.
No. The most hostile place in the world is this;
To the north- far to the north, so far that there is no north left to travel to and south stretches away from you in every direction, the wind howls so cold that all heat would be stripped from a human body before its brain could register the pain. Great sheets of ice thicker than the tallest buildings of humanity are cradled in the gentle embrace of the ocean; and atop that ice stands yet more sleet and water and powdered snow, deep enough that a man who stepped incautiously could fall through and be buried below snow as tall as him again.
But this is not the reason that it is the most hostile place in the world.
Black spires here jut out from the frozen wastes, jagged walls of dark granite and sharp obsidian and stranger crystals besides. Geometric shapes spiral out from the ice, forming patterns the human eye cannot- or perhaps will not- follow; they twist in on themselves, stretching up and down and forward and back and in and out and in yet further directions the human tongue does not have words for. A castle, or perhaps a fortress, carved from materials that can never have belonged here in these lands of ice. It is profoundly unnatural in all senses of the word. To behold it is to know that it should not exist, and in such knowing understand the immense power of the beings within.
Thus is the most hostile place in the world. The lair of the King of Demons, he who commands the Endless Hosts, the Horned Tyrant.
At the front of the castle, there stands a wicked gate of stone and spikes. It is bound closed by chains of pig-iron as thick as a man, held down by a thicker peg within. Stories speak of two giants within, so tall their hair brushes against the clouds above, who must work together to lift the immense weight of these chains to open the gates for the demon's impending invasion.
There is a hole in this gate the size of a girl barely out of her adolescence, and from it spills a stream of blood, so hot and so fresh that it steams in the air and melts the snow around it.
The stream of blood flows from within the heart of the castle. Innumerable bodies of demons line the halls, their throats and stomachs and arteries opened such that their life-bloods flow forth and give rise to the stream that marks the passage of she who had killed them.
Here, in the deepest place in the most hostile place in the world, there is a throne sitting atop a dais. It is a massive, awful thing of jutting blades of obsidian and crystals burning inside with cold fire, and between it all a gaping nothing; small voids in reality where a tyrant's hatred has eroded the very existence of this world.
In all the castle, the only sounds that can be heard are the beating of a heart, and the soft gurgling of the stream of blood as it indelibly marks the northern ice for the rest of eternity.
Standing before the massive throne is a creature in the shape of a man. He cuts an intimidating figure, thrice as tall as the girl standing afore him, clad in armour so heavy the stone of the earth creaks beneath him.
At his side rests a sword whose blade is longer and heavier than the girl's body, from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet. It is a horrifically ornate thing, spiked and embedded with blood-red diamonds. Not a creature has ever survived a strike from the blade.
The girl's sword, in contrast, is a simple thing. Leather handle; steel blade. No frippery. It was made in a day by a blacksmith who was good, but not great.
The Horned Tyrant lifts his sword, but he does not aim it at the girl. He looks instead, first at the girl, then at his sword, before finally casting his gaze at nothing in particular; just the air. Then, he speaks words that cannot be heard as words. His voice is dry as the bone-dust inside a coffin, cold as the heart that sits unbeating in his chest.
The wolf has come at last. How many years has it stalked these lands, sinking its fang into the throats of all his loyal subjects? How many years has the river of blood behind it grown thick?
The girl has no answer for him, and so she stands silent, her ungloved hands curled loosely around the hilt of her blade.
And so he laughs, an awful grating sound that jitters and cheers and mocks, though there is no humour to be found behind it. You have given up all of yourself to be here, girl. A thousand thousand of my kind you have slaughtered. Has it brought you happiness?
This time, the girl has an answer for him; but they both know it already, and so still she does not speak it to spare herself the sound of it. Her hands instead tighten around the hilt, the grinding of leather on flesh cutting over the echoing remnants of the tyrant's voice.
Then, he speaks, and there is a note of true happiness in his voice; your journey has brought you as much misery as it has brought me. I can find contentment with that, even as I bring upon you one more cruelty.
There is no warning as he makes his final strike; there is no scent of blood, no bubbling of violence, no certainty of bloodshed to make the girl's muscles twitch. By the time the girl realizes he has made his move, his sword has already lifted from the ground and severed his own head from his shoulders.
She stares at it even as the body sags down to the floor, the head rolling across the floor to land at her feet. The rest of the meat that had comprised him falls to the ground, a cage of twisted metal all that gives it the shape of a body now.
He could not have stood against her regardless. They both knew this. Should their blades clash, it would not be hers that was severed; should they put strength and speed against each other, there would always be an undeniable victor, and it would not be the tyrant.
But even so.
To deny her the satisfaction of the kill? To deny her the feeling of life leaving his body, the relief of knowing that by her hands this threat to the land is gone? The certainty that she has put him to rest, and there is no wicked plan by which death by his own hand could release his spirit unto the world once more?
One more cruelty indeed. A wicked end for a wicked man.
How long she stands there, looking down at the pile of gore that had once been the greatest threat to this world, none could say. Long enough that ice crawls up her legs and snow piles upon her hair; long enough that the river of blood cools, then freezes, an eternal monument to the violence she has inflicted here.
But eventually, she moves again. There is no point to staying here.
She bends, and retrieves in her hands the wicked horned crown the King of Demons had worn to mark his status. She rolls it in her hands a moment, considering it; then she hangs it loosely on her belt, the horns digging uncomfortably into her side, and she turns and walks away.
In her wake is left a castle once the most hostile place in the world. In her wake is a castle now wicked and empty and desolate, filled with malice it cannot express; and with that inability to inflict itself upon the world comes-
comes-
- the girl comes to a stop nowhere, surrounded for a hundred miles in every direction by the empty ice.
What is supposed to come now?
Howling winds are the only sounds to greet her.
Minutes pass, the girl standing frozen amidst the wastelands she has wandered for so long, but there is no answer to be found here.
And so she trudges on, leaving behind her naught but footsteps and snow dyed crimson from the blood that has forever stained her cloak.