Chapter 9: Roots in Frozen Ground, Frost in the Heart

The scream of the wind was Stone Creek's constant hymn. It scoured the sod roofs, rattled the timber shutters, and moaned through the cracks in the Weeping Glacier's wounded face. Inside the communal Ice Cellar, the scream was muffled to a deep-throated groan, but the cold remained, a living presence that seeped through furs and bit at exposed skin. The smell – fish, roots, ice, and the pervasive mineral tang – was as familiar now as Tae's own breath.

Tae Mu-Ryong, known only as 'North Wind' here, sat hunched on a rough-hewn stool, methodically gutting a catch of oily, grey-scaled fish pulled from the toxin-tainted meltwater lake. His movements were efficient, practiced after weeks of grueling labor. The knife, honed sharp by Borin the ice-cutter, flashed in the flickering lantern light. His left arm, still concealed beneath layers of fur, radiated its unnatural chill, a constant counterpoint to the cellar's deep freeze. He kept it tucked close, mindful of Headwoman Anya's warning, a reminder that leashing the cold within him was as vital as gutting fish for survival.

Across the cellar, Lian – 'Shadowed Brook' – worked beside Marta, the village's formidable smokehouse mistress. Marta, a woman built like a glacier boulder with forearms thick as tree roots, was demonstrating how to scrape the thin, valuable inner membrane from a bundle of frost-wolf pelts. It was messy, bloody work that required a delicate touch Lian hadn't yet mastered. Her hands moved slowly, deliberately, her eyes focused on the task with an intensity that bordered on vacant. The profound silence inside her, left by the Watcher's departure, was a chasm she navigated carefully. Focusing on the scrape of the blade against hide, the smell of blood and raw fur, the low rumble of Marta's instructions – these were anchors in the echoing void.

"Pressure, girl, not force," Marta grunted, guiding Lian's hand with her own calloused one. "You're rending it, not cleaning it. Like this." Her thick fingers moved with surprising dexterity, peeling the membrane away cleanly. "This here's worth half the pelt to traders down-valley, if they ever brave the passes again. Ruin this, and you're sleeping in the snowdrift."

Lian nodded mutely, mimicking the motion. Her hands, once trained for intricate illusions and delicate brushstrokes in the Glacial Palace, were now chapped, red, and nicked from labor. The contrast was jarring, a constant, low-level dissonance beneath her numbness. She didn't look at Tae. Their shared space in the cellar's dark corner was a necessity, not a comfort. The gulf between them, widened by Yun's sacrifice and their own traumas, felt as vast as the Blizzard Wastes.

Outside the cellar, Stone Creek was slowly, grudgingly, absorbing them. It wasn't warmth, but a pragmatic acceptance born of shared hardship.

Borin, the taciturn ice-cutter, had ceased glaring daggers at Tae. After a week of hauling sledges laden with dangerously harvested ice blocks from the glacier's "cleaner" fissures (a relative term), Borin had simply nodded one morning, a curt gesture that meant Tae hadn't gotten himself killed or frozen the village yet. He'd even gruffly shown Tae how to read the glacier's groans for signs of imminent collapse.

Elara, a young mother with eyes perpetually shadowed by worry, had shyly pressed a small, precious cake of hardened honey into Lian's hand after seeing her meticulously repair a torn fishing net. "For the hands," she'd murmured, vanishing before Lian could refuse.

The children, initially wide-eyed and fearful of the newcomers radiating unnatural cold and silence, now darted past Tae without flinching, too busy with their own grim games of survival.

Yet, wariness remained, particularly around Tae. Old Man Heng, who claimed he could hear the glacier whispering its death throes, would mutter and make warding signs whenever Tae passed too close. Kael, a trapper whose face bore deep scars from a mutated snow-lynx, watched Tae's concealed arm with the calculating eyes of a man assessing a dangerous predator. The unnatural cold Tae carried was a tangible threat in a place perpetually balanced on the knife-edge of freezing.

One evening, after a brutal day hauling firewood from the stunted, iron-hard trees higher up the valley, Tae found Lian sitting alone on a flat rock overlooking the murky lake. The setting sun, weak and watery, cast long, distorted shadows across the poisoned water. She was simply staring, her expression as still and unreadable as the frozen landscape.

He approached slowly, the crunch of his boots on the gritty snow loud in the relative quiet. He stopped beside her, not sitting. The silence stretched, filled only by the wind's moan and the distant groan of the glacier.

"Lian," he said, his voice rough. It felt strange to use her real name, even in this isolated spot.

She didn't turn, but her posture stiffened almost imperceptibly.

He hesitated, the words clotting in his throat. The request felt like sacrilege, like poking a sleeping beast with a stick. But the gnawing uncertainty about Yun was a constant ache, sharper even than the cold in his arm. "The Watcher…" He forced the name out. "When it… possessed you. Did you… feel it? Truly feel its presence? Its thoughts?"

Lian flinched. A full-body shudder that had nothing to do with the cold. Her knuckles, resting on her knees, turned white. She remained silent for a long moment, staring at the darkening water. When she finally spoke, her voice was a thin, brittle thread, barely audible over the wind.

"It wasn't… thoughts. Not like ours. It was… pressure. A vast, cold weight. Like being buried under the glacier itself. And… whispers. Not words. More like… the sound ice makes when it cracks deep, deep down. Meanings I couldn't understand, but felt…" She trailed off, wrapping her arms around herself. "Why?"

Tae took a deep breath, the cold air burning his lungs. "Yun. We don't know…" He couldn't finish the sentence. If he's alive. If he's suffering. If he's become something else. "You were its vessel. Its conduit. Is there… any way? Could you… try to reach it? Not let it in," he added hastily, seeing the panic flare in her eyes, "just… listen? See if you can… sense anything? About him?"

The look Lian turned on him then was one of pure, unadulterated horror mixed with disbelief. "Reach it? Tae, it was a violation! It scraped me empty! Trying to touch that… that nothingness it left behind…" She shook her head violently. "It's like trying to grab smoke. Worse. It's like… like trying to remember the exact feeling of being stabbed while the wound is still bleeding. I can't. I won't." Her voice cracked on the last word.

"But Yun—" Tae started, desperation edging into his tone.

"Yun chose!" Lian snapped, her vacant eyes suddenly blazing with a spark of the fierce sister he remembered. "He chose to go with it! To save us! Poking at that… that abyss won't bring him back! It won't tell us if he's alive or dead! It might just… open the door again!" She scrambled to her feet, backing away from him, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps that plumed white in the freezing air. "Leave it alone, Tae! Leave me alone!" She turned and fled back towards the huddled village, leaving Tae standing alone in the gathering dusk, the wind screaming its agreement with her.

The silence in the corrupted valley wasn't just an absence of sound; it was an active, crushing weight. It pressed against Yun Mu-Ryong's eardrums, filled his skull, and seeped into the hollow spaces the Watcher had left behind. Days bled into an indistinguishable blur of grey-crimson snow, glassy black peaks veined with sickly light, and the tar-like ooze flowing through the ravines. He moved like a ghost through the warped reflection of his homeland, a constant shiver wracking his frame from the deep, internal cold that had become his constant companion.

Sanity felt like a frayed rope. The sheer, overwhelming wrongness of everything – the familiar shapes rendered monstrous, the unnatural silence, the gnawing isolation – threatened to unravel him. He found himself talking aloud, his voice startlingly loud and alien in the stillness, just to break the oppressive quiet. He recited Frost Serpent stances he'd learned as a child, the names of constellations he couldn't see in the bruised sky, even snippets of poetry his mother had loved. Anything to anchor himself to a reality that felt increasingly distant.

Desperation drove him to try cultivation. Sitting cross-legged in the dubious shelter of a glassy rock overhang, he closed his eyes and sought the familiar flow of Mu-Ryong qi. The glacial chill, the power of the Frozen Mountain that had once been his birthright.

It was like grasping at smoke. The connection was faint, distorted, buried deep beneath the pervasive, unnatural cold that now resided within him. His own core felt… changed. Instead of the clear, focused cold he'd known, his internal energy was sluggish, tainted, carrying the same metallic, ozone tang as the air. When he tried to cycle it, to draw strength from it, it resisted, flowing thick and cold like the sludge in the ravines. It didn't invigorate; it deepened the chill, amplifying the bone-aching weariness and the creeping sense of despair. The familiar forms felt clumsy, ineffective in this corrupted environment. The qi pathways depicted in the Mu-Ryong scrolls seemed irrelevant here, in a land where the very energy felt poisoned.

He pushed harder, frustration mounting. He focused on a simple exercise: gathering ambient cold to form a small ice shard in his palm. In the Glacial Palace, it would have been effortless. Here, the corrupted energy resisted his call. He strained, pouring his will into it. The unnatural cold within him surged in response, not forming a shard, but causing the grey snow around him to writhe. Tendrils of frost, shot through with faint crimson streaks, snaked across the ground like living things before collapsing into inert dust. Yun recoiled, gasping. It wasn't control; it was a spasm, a leak of the poison inside him.

The attempt left him trembling, colder than before, and more frightened. His own power was alien to him now, a wild thing tainted by the Watcher's realm and his own sacrifice. Cultivation offered no solace, no strength. It only reminded him of what he'd lost and what he'd become.

The physical need, however, was undeniable. Hunger, a sharp, insistent clawing in his gut, had become a constant companion more demanding than the silence. He hadn't eaten properly since arriving in this nightmare. The grey-crimson snow was inert, lifeless dust. The skeletal black plants were brittle and smelled of decay. He needed sustenance.

Hunting. The word felt absurd in this barren, silent wasteland. What could possibly live here? Yet, desperation forced him to observe, to look for signs he might have missed in his despair.

He noticed subtle disturbances in the snowdrifts – not footprints, but faint depressions, sinuous trails winding between the glassy rock formations. He saw places where the tar-like ooze near a ravine's edge had been disturbed, thick tracks leading away. He began spotting them near dusk: creatures that seemed woven from the landscape's corruption.

Glass-Scuttlers: Small, multi-legged things the size of his hand, their carapaces translucent and dark, reflecting the veined crimson light of the rocks. They moved with startling speed, vanishing into crevices when he approached. The thought of eating them turned his stomach.

Ooze-Slithers: Limbless, eel-like creatures that burrowed in the banks of the tarry sludge. They surfaced occasionally, blind heads questing the air, their bodies glistening with the thick, dark fluid. Their very appearance screamed toxicity.

Grey-Crawlers: Larger, slower creatures, about the size of a hare, covered in coarse, dirty-grey fur that blended perfectly with the snow. They had multiple, beady black eyes and fed on the brittle stalks of the skeletal plants, their movements sluggish and deliberate. They seemed the least overtly monstrous.

Hunger overcame disgust. The Grey-Crawlers became his target. He fashioned a crude spear from a shard of the dark, glassy rock, using strips torn from his robe to haft it to a straight piece of petrified wood. He moved with exaggerated slowness, mimicking the stillness of the environment, learning the Crawlers' grazing patterns near a sparse patch of the black plants.

His first attempt was a fumbling disaster. He startled the creature, his thrust clumsy and slow. The Crawler scuttled away with a surprisingly fast, jerky motion. Frustration warred with the gnawing emptiness in his belly. He tried again the next dusk, positioning himself downwind (though the air was mostly still), waiting for hours in the biting cold until a Crawler ventured close. This time, his strike was true. The sharp glass point pierced through the coarse fur. The creature emitted a high-pitched, chittering shriek that echoed unnervingly in the silence before going limp.

Triumph was brief, drowned by revulsion. The creature's blood wasn't red. It was a thick, viscous fluid the colour of tarnished brass, smelling strongly of the pervasive metallic ozone. He gutted it with trembling hands, its internal organs a confusing mess of dark, glistening tissues. There was little meat, mostly tough muscle clinging to a bizarrely light, porous bone structure. He built a small fire using the driest pieces of the petrified plants he could find. They burned with a low, blue-tinged flame and gave off a pungent, acrid smoke. He skewered the meager meat and held it over the flames, the brass-coloured blood sizzling and popping.

He ate. It was tough, stringy, and tasted overwhelmingly of metal and bitterness, with an underlying putrid sweetness that made him gag. He forced it down, bite by agonizing bite, his body screaming for sustenance even as his mind recoiled. The unnatural cold within him seemed to coil tighter as he ate, a disquieting sensation. Afterward, a profound lethargy washed over him, deeper than mere fatigue. His vision swam, and a low, persistent throb started behind his temples. He curled up by the dying blue fire, the silence pressing in once more, now laced with a new kind of sickness – one born of consuming the poisoned heart of this corrupted world. He had staved off starvation, but at what cost? The roots he was putting down in this desolate place were not of resilience, but of slow, inevitable contamination. The frozen ground offered no solace, only a mirror to the frost deepening within his own heart.