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nitewrighter · 2 years ago

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The Knight of Frost Part 3

Been a lot of gloomy weather in my state, got me thinking about... them...

CW for the Corpse Horse and also stabbing, and also an avalanche and claustrophobia, and also ice mummies, which are kind of like bog mummies, but for ice. Did you guys know several of the Franklin Expedition got mummified purely by the dry freezing conditions of the arctic? And did you know the mummy of one of those mummies, John Torrington, inspired Iron Maiden’s “Stranger in a Strange Land?” Because holy shit. Anyways, all research I do for my fics is relevant at all times.

Part 1, Part 2

----

She knew she sounded mad when she tried to explain it to Cole. A figure in skeletal armor on a horse patched by corpses. And as she had spoken the words, she could feel them cringing back in her throat. They had already said this place gave them to strange thoughts and dreams, why should this case be any different from the rest of the party’s? Cole had simply said, “We’ll discuss it when we break camp,” and went back to sleep. Mercy curled into her bedroll and pushed herself back into a shallow and fitful sleep, more for her body than her mind.

They woke, broke fast, and broke camp only two hours later. The entire party was silent. They hadn’t seen anything. She knew they hadn’t seen anything, but it nagged at her. She was that pine in a dry place again, needs not being met, able to carry on, just a little bit angry. But it was the lack of eye-contact from Cole and Bayless that irked her more and more.

"I know what I saw," she said, unprompted as they loaded their bedrolls and other camp supplies onto the cart

"I didn't say anything," said Cole.

"You don't believe me," said Mercy.

"I just think, strange armored figure on a corpse horse or no, the best thing we can do is keep moving."

"Out of its territory," Baptiste agreed.

"Weren't you the one saying 'believing in this shit is to invite it?'" Cole's head swung to Baptiste.

"I said knowing the thing is to invite it, and I'm not saying you invited it by having Miss Goatsrue tell the story, however the fact that it showed up only after the story was told--"

"Indicates the story may well have put it in our heads! Which, I'll admit: My bad. But the mules are spooked enough, we can't be spooked too!"

Bayless just shot the three of them a dark look as he tried to get the mules hitched to the cart again. Mercy huffed and shouldered her pack. She exchanged a glance with Baptiste as he fingered the knife at his belt a bit longer and more thoughtfully than usual, and the two of them both gave a glance to Cole, who was fussing with the hang of his cloak for maximum warmth while still maintaining the freedom of this arms. There was Cole's 'belief,' which essentially boiled down to 'I'm agreeing with you to keep the peace but I've run into more than my fair share of superstitious locals in my travels,' and then there was Baptiste's belief—something she could feel him keeping as close and quiet and secret to him as the knife on his belt, dearly hoping he wouldn't have to draw it, for to draw it was to draw trouble. And of course there was Bayless, who in all likelihood misliked the idea of her coming in the first place but was keeping his mouth shut about it. Their party went silent again, with considerable more tension now. It was hard for Mercy not to feel foolish. The only woman—the hysterical woman--the thought of her presence drawing this pall on the group sickened her. She was better than this. And yet...

She thought back to the the figure on the hill, their nearly skeletal armor, their dark and steady stare. The party’s trek was taking them, once again, up a long, steady incline, with thankfully fewer switchbacks, until they once again crested to a snowy steppe dotted with boulders. The physical demands of the journey itself kept the party in an uneasy agreement of silence. No one wanted to discuss what had been seen further, and there was a weary sense of dread hanging over all of them, a question of, ‘If Mercy had really seen something, what could be done to stop it?’

“How does one expect to do anything against the long-dead and consigned to legend?”

That voice Mercy had overheard at the public house what seemed like ages back sent a shudder down her spine as they finally continued on their journey. She tried not to think about the armored figure (sometimes her mind slipped and called it a ‘knight’) as they went on, and instead committed herself to memorizing the list of herbs and other medicines she would need once they reached the capital by heart. Yarrow, she thought, her stomach tense as she noted there were no birds in the sky, no grasses stubbornly poking through the stone, Betony, hyssop, mandragora, wormwood, leeches, if I can get them.. if they could survive the journey... poor things.

The sun hung low and cool and white in the great bowl of the sky as they continued on across the uplands. She tried to remember last time news from the capital reached their valley--most of the time the capital didn’t bother sending criers out unless the king was dead or there was a war. The former had happened when she was just a little girl living in her old mountain village, and the latter had happened when she was just a little baby. “They took your grandfather, father, and elder brother” her grandmother had told her, “None returned. The grief was too much for your mother, poor thing. I told my son she had too delicate a constitution, but he loved her, the fool. You don’t want news from the capital, girl. It’s never good.” Mercy couldn’t even remember if they had won that war--maybe that child-grief was too all-consuming at the time, or perhaps their village was so remote, it had never mattered. And yet, it had been so long...there ought to have been something... a census, or a tax, or a declaration of a marriage or something. Mercy wondered, briefly, if there still was a capital at the end of their journey, when the party came to an abrupt stop.

The narrow neck of the main mountain pass, flanked on both sides by craggy peaks practically groaning with snow in the low moan of the wind, lay ahead. The mules hesitated, nickering and nipping at each other and their tack.

"Avalanche territory," Cole murmured, his eyes on the snow-laden cliffs flanking them. He gave a wary look back at the rest of the party and Bayless did his best to calm the mules. Mercy and Baptiste exchanged glances at each other and a look back to Cole. She straightened up with her pack and drew a long steadying breath. After a few seconds of murmured agreements to keep sound to a minimum, they carefully readjusted of the wagon and calmed and adjusted the tack of the mules to ensure they would be as quiet as possible as well. Perhaps it was the unified tension and focus upon silence that buffed away much of Mercy’s previous resentment. The armored figure on the corpse horse seemed a distant dream compared to the very real threat provided by their journey in and of itself. She and the men focused on guiding the wagon as quietly as possible, heads swinging from the wheels to the snowy peaks on either side of them. She pulled her muffler up over her nose and mouth, perhaps unconsciously in the hopes that it might be true to its name.

They went forward, the cliffs rising up on both sides of them like the maw of a great beast snapping up from the earth. Forward they went, eyes forward, save for slow, careful glances upward at drifts of snow gently sloughing down by wind and gravity. She winced at the rumble of the cart, there was a fresh layer of powder to mute the sound but the weight of it broke through to the dense, crunching layers below.

“What’s that up ahead?” a hushed question fell out of Baptiste.

“Shh!” Cole shushed on reflex, but he saw it as well. His eyes narrowed.

Mercy squinted forward through the mountain pass, hoping dearly for a point where the two walls of rock and snow on either side of them would finally open back up to the wide snowy moonscape of the uplands. But there was something... fluttering up ahead, with something twisted at its base. She squinted, trying to make the shape out better. Cole was moving forward, with Baptiste not far behind, and Bayless still urging the mules and cart on. Maybe it was a trail marker, or perhaps, a darker part of her thought, the remains of another expedition, maybe from another valley, or from some other village in these mountains that couldn’t outrun the cold in time. It didn’t seem completely natural, standing right in the middle of their path, that was for sure. She glanced to Baptiste and Cole, trying to gauge their thoughts on it, but they seemed just as unsure about it as her. She would have kept her eyes fixed on that fluttering thing with the twisted base but then she got a deep shudder down her spine, and a feeling she wished wasn’t familiar. Slowly, slowly, she turned her gaze upward once more.

She saw the armored figure again, at the top of the cliffs. They looked different in the daylight, still astride their part-corpse horse. The blue of their armor taking on an unsettling realness out of the glow of the moonlight. She could make out the chunks of human flesh out of the horse's flank more clearly, now, the lines of their chest plate seeming more rib-like and skeletal than ever.

The cold keeps the flesh.

She hated the sensation of feeling watched by them when she could not see their eyes. What do you want? she wanted to yell, What do you want from me? What will it take to end this winter? To not see my people starve and sicken? But just as horrifying was the deep, dreadfully certain feeling that they were not the one behind this cold, that there was nothing they could do to stop it. Just as horrifying was the strange feeling that they looked upon her now with their own helplessness, like when a child brings you something dead and asks you to fix it. The sun had disappeared behind steel-coloured clouds, almost as if by the figure’s will, like he could not bear to be seen in its direct light. The figure kept staring at her, then their sight seemingly broke away, glancing down the mountain pass, down towards where they were headed, towards the--

The cold keeps the--

Mercy’s head suddenly swung away from the sight of the armored figure and back down to Cole and Baptiste, still approaching the crumpled, fluttering thing ahead. She nearly shouted at them to stop and then barely caught herself, instead hoisting up her skirts and sprinting as fast as the deep snow would allow. The snow squeaked and crunched with her boots as she ran, but the sound didn’t travel far, even with the stone walls around them. As she ran, she made out that fluttering, crumpled thing more clearly. It was a banner, stuck in some kind of cairn? Some crooked pile of stones?

The cold keeps--

A corpse. It was a kneeling corpse, long mummified by the wind and the ice. Its gnarled hands, the flesh long-dried to strings on bone, were gripped around a pole bearing a standard, though it was a wonder the cloth was still there with how exposed it was. Much of the bulk of the figure was just armor, but how had the weight of it not collapsed the bones? Unless enough of the interior was frozen solid rather than rotted away. Cole’s own pace toward it had slowed, only slightly as he realized what it was. Out of caution, or reverence? Mercy thought, but it made her steps all the more feverish. She rushed past Bayless.

“What--” Bayless spoke at a normal volume before catching himself and the mules nervously nickered and he moved to calm them. She made it to Baptiste before Cole, he glanced over his shoulder from the crouching figure in the snow to see her and opened his mouth before looking back at Cole and realizing she was sprinting forward to stop him. Something like fear, but more of a grimace of reflex flashed across his face and he caught her arm. She grunted at his grip and then furiously flung her arm up with a pointing finger. Baptiste glanced up and he clapped a hand over his mouth to muffle a bellow of shock.

The cold--

The figure was looking down at them both, watching them patiently. By the crest of their helmet Mercy thought she could make out a slow shake of the head, before that head slowly turned away from her and she followed its gaze, back towards Cole. She knew he would stop if she called out to him, just enough for her to reach him, and yet she couldn’t. All that snow hanging over their heads, all that white crushing weight. She tore out of Baptiste’s grip but he hurried after her--not trying to stop her this time, she realized.

“Cole--” The name left her, harsh and thick and breathy, as soon as she felt she was in a safe distance of audibility. And he stopped, and he looked back at her, and she realized something was shifting in his eyes. A horrified realization was settling over all of them, weight by weight, like the gentle shuff of a slough of snow slipping over from above:

This was the main pass to the capital from their valley. Were it not for the winter that had caged them in, there was no way this corpse would be here---not because the cold couldn’t kill a man here, because it certainly could, but because of the fact that they could immediately tell, from the armor, from the fluttering standard it gripped, from the sheer age that had turned all its flesh to desiccated sinew and left its lips blackened and drawn back from yellowed teeth, that something this old didn’t simply lie in the middle of mountain pass roads. Certainly not roads that were traversed by all manner of merchant and traveler in years previous. This was a thing that should not be here.

The horror of that, and the cacophony of questions that bubbled up and fell into a choral blur, made any words she might have had for Cole die in her throat. He looked at her, and then he looked up at the cliffs around them.

The armored figure, she thought, jerking her head back up to the cliffs, He has to see the horse, he has to see--

But the armored figure wasn’t there. There was only the wind blowing a soft spiral of frost up off of the snow hanging overhead. She would have screamed out of sheer fury and frustration if that didn’t mean bringing tonnes of crushing snow down around them all. Cole seemed to be trying to gauge her face.

Please, please, you have to believe me, please---

But shuff. Another weight of snow fell once more with that same soft sound. And the helplessness settled on her. Even if he did believe her, even if he did see the horse and rider, could they go home? Go home to increasingly bare cupboards and stomachs that were just a little hungrier each night? Home to people who needed bones set and fevers broken who would only look upon empty jars? All the hope they had was in the capital. All the hope they had was going forward, and here was this damnable corpse in their path, on a mountain pass so laden with snow there was no other way around. Cole suddenly struck out an arm in front of her—stupid, chivalrous-- as his other hand crossed his torso to his own weapon, a flintlock.

Mercy wondered briefly if that fluttering standard was disguising slow and hidden movements from this crumpled corpse from the very moment it had first come into view, if it had been carefully watching them, regarding them as the armored figure had been.

But now the movements were not slow and hidden—as if an invisible string attached to the top of its helm had suddenly been drawn taut, the corpse's head jutted up and swiveled toward them. "Hhrrr" she could hear the sound through its teeth, and something that looked like the breath of fog seeped through that black-framed cracked and yellow snarl, but she knew it could not be the fog of warm breath, but cold—colder than the cold already around them, from its dark and frozen core.

She could hear Cole’s teeth grit, hear the breath draw sharp through them.

Cole kept his hand on the handle of the flintlock. He cleared his throat. “Wraith of these lands,” he said, “We know not of the suffering that binds you to this form, we come here merely as travelers. We seek to disrupt no power--only to make our own way, and protect the livelihoods of those dear to us. Will you permit us through?” Mercy blinked, mildly impressed at this phrasing. This was a man who did respect local customs, because that was necessary to his travels. Even if he thought her fanatical and superstitious, placed here, now, in this situation, he understood the decree of decorum which was expected of him, even if the situation was itself fantastical and horrific.

Another “Hhhrrr,” escaped the corpse, seemingly more drawn out this time, and then a choking noise escaped it, a sound from the back of the utterly kippered throat that unmistakably rasped, “Liiiaar.”

There was a moment when all the reflexes of fear failed to catch up to the comprehension of the mind, a moment when Mercy's limbs seemed as dumb and slow as if she were moving in a dream, despite the fact that every sense was telling her to run, to fight. This was the moment when the corpse struck out with an ancient, curved knife and caught Cole in the side of the stomach. A dense grunt fell out of him and on reflex he drew the gun.

“No--!” every fiber of her body told her to scream, but survival instinct dulled it to speaking volume at the last second. And in that last second Cole had flicked out the flintlock and fired.The corpse’s head exploded into ribbons of dust and shards of bone.

And even then, with the knife dug into his side, Cole knew his mistake, she watched, as even through the grip of pain and adrenaline, that surprise and regret washed over his features as well. The cracking roar of the flintlock echoed throughout their canyon, and there was a deep rumbling.

“Cole!” Baptiste suddenly rushed past her, not caring for volume because what was coming now was inevitable. Cole crumpled and Baptiste caught him with his own shoulder, “Move,” he said, “MOVE!”

She did not look back. She knew there was already no time to look back. Everything was a roar behind her and great puffs of diamond dust flushed up from behind them that just made the cliffs on either side of them seem that much closer, that much more claustrophobic, made their opening up back into the uplands seem that much further. Bayless cut the mules loose from the cart and rushed them forward. Baptiste was already struggling to pull Cole ahead when Bayless came up alongside him and both hauled Cole up over the mule's flank. Cole scrambled, fingers clawing for purchase on the shaggy winter hide of the mule before managing to swing his legs aside and slumping against the mule's back, one arm around the mule's neck and the other gripping his wound.

Get out of the pass and move to the side, she thought, out of the pass and move to the side--

The snow was already surging around her legs, she was practically bringing them to her chest to stay on top of it, and yank them out of it, the exhaustion she should feel from this movement only a mere suggestion amidst all her adrenaline, and she realized she still had her pack. Stupid— she thought, throwing it off behind her, Stay upright, stay upright, you're almost there--

Something caught on her skirts—the snow, doubtless, and she seized them and yanked them forward, meaning to bunch them up in front with one arm to free her legs more. The skirt tore, and she heard a terrible "Hrrhh" behind her. This, this was what finally forced her to turn around and she saw, among the pressing surge of white and blue-white and gray, yellowed bones and the taut yellow-brown of skin that would have rotted away long ago had it not been for the ice and wind—an arm was reaching forward from the snow, still clutching a tattered scrap of her skirt, and just behind it, staring at her with eyeless sockets, a face with blackened lips drawn back from yawning brittle teeth, pressing forward in the crushing, roaring, cascade of white.

And it was not the only one.

Maybe it was the avalanche itself that had awoken them, or maybe they were the avalanche, waiting and watching that whole time for them to make that fatal noise, that cry or that crack of gunfire, but they were there—none of them fully visible in body, just limbs and faces and scraps of armor and spearpoints sticking out amidst great spills of powder and crags of packed ice.

"They're in the snow!" she shouted ahead to the others, but the roar of the avalanche was drowning her voice out, "They're in the--"

And all at once she was swallowed up. She wasn't quite sure when the snow had gotten past her waist, but the desperate pumping of her legs no longer moved her forward any more than all the snow around her was already moving forward. And then it was up and past her waist, her skirt-gripping arm now pressed to herself with the weight of all the white around her. She was able to fling her free arm up, at first meaning to dig herself out, or at least keep it above the surface for the others to find her. She could feel a breeze on her fingers, and her scarlet cloak on the back of her arm--the cloth was jerked up vertically behind her like a hangman’s noose, but the weight of her muffler kept it at her shoulders.

For some reason despite the near complete immobility, the claustrophobia here wasn't as bad as walking beneath all that overhanging snow had been. There was almost a relief in being trapped, like the worst had already happened. And the dead—even if she were sharing this frozen prison with the dead, at least they were just as trapped as her. They could not harm her. The others were ahead of her. If they had gotten out of the pass, they could have let the avalanche blow right past them and they could return to come get her. A long shot, but they would need their supplies as well. They had little hope of surviving the night without them, and they would need her all the more for Cole's injury... she hoped.

Air pocket, she thought, jamming her arm up from her torso and clawing at the snow pressing in around her face, Grandmother said always keep an air pocket. Don't panic. Don't waste your air. Wait until you hear the others calling for you.

Her bare fingers were pink and raw and bleeding in their nail beds as she clawed out an air pocket around her face, but at least the movement was able to loosen the snow packing her arm against her chest. Her reaching arm was completely immobilized and now asleep, whether it had been from the cold or from being stuck at an upward angle, she could not tell. All the same, she managed to wiggled and claw just enough room for her chest to expand with breath. and she closed her eyes and drew in a slow shallow breath as her hand kept clawing out space. Not so much to bring more snow down on top of her, but enough to cup itself out with the ice of her own exhalations. But then her fingers brushed against something that wasn't snow, and she opened her eyes.

"Hhrr..."

This was not the same dead as the one that had clawed at her skirt. Its eyes had stitched themselves forever shut into wrinkled slits drawn tight across the sockets, and its lips were a sad crinkle of skin, barely parted so that colder than cold breath could thread against her own. Her breath shuddered and she closed her eyes, feeling tears bud out from her eyes and run only a half inch down the side of her nose and temples before they froze and cracked against her skin.

They can't move either. They can't move either. Keep your breath slow and wait until you can hear the others calling.

And then she felt a skeletal hand clamp around her ankle, and another tickling at her back, and still more at her legs and skirts and clawing at her sides.This was when everything broke through for her once more. This was when she screamed. And screamed. And sobbed. And screamed. Until the black at the corners of her vision swallowed her up like the snow.

----

The wraith's horse treaded lightly over the craggy surface of the now-packing-itself-down-by-gravity former avalanche. It did not bear the same weight on the snow that a normal horse would, and neither did he. The dead would keep the others busy. He knew this. He paced the horse over the surface before pausing at a pale hand and wrist, and a scrap of scarlet—not blood, cloth—sticking out from the snow. The wraith leaned down in his saddle and pulled Mercy up out of the snow by her arm easily, the snow yielding away from her like it was powder once more. Several arms of the dead were still clinging to her as he pulled her up, and they broke off from their bearers under the weight of snow and the force of his lift. He held her at arm's length, staring at her for a few seconds, before he jostled her and shook the skeletal limbs from her skirt like one might shake dirt off of a carrot they just pulled out of their garden. She dangled limply, her eyes closed, her lips blue from cold and hypoxia. Her nostrils flared as a cold breeze blew through and all of a sudden she drew in a deep, guttural gasp, her eyelids fluttering asymmetrically before she coughed from the drowning intake of oxygen and then moaned, Her eyes flicked around her surroundings dizzily, first taking in her feet dangling off the ground, then her arm, still numb but now with a gentle ache at the shoulder, then the gauntleted hand gripping her wrist, and then finally, at the faceless face of the wraith's helmet. Her eyelids fluttered again, and she drew in a breath that was too slow to be a gasp, the instinct to panic meeting an unyielding wall of exhaustion.

"nnh...no..." her voice was thick and she turned her face away from him, or perhaps she simply no longer had the strength to hold her head up, "Please..."

He said nothing, but pulled her in gently, settling her in front of him on his saddle so that he could keep her propped up in one arm and hold the reins in the other. She could barely keep her eyes open, but she felt him wrapping her scarlet cloak around her like he was swaddling a child.

In the distance she thought she could hear Baptiste calling, “Miss Goatsrue--! Miss Goatsrue!” and a pained and grunting “Merce!?” from Cole, but her eyes closed and those voices fell away, along with the sensation of the horse galloping beneath her, and the careful pressure of the icy armored arm securing her in place.

#gency #ice wraith genji AU #thinking about the 'oh fuck we aren't going home' factor of season 1 of the Terror again lads #Fun fact! Mercy has a scarlet cape in this AU because I mostly have her Royal Knight skin in mind and also Roderika from Elden Ring

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