Winter came earlier the higher we climbed. The foothills hadn't been a problem, but the frigid highlands had caused issues with forage for the animals. A shuttle system was established, similar to the one we'd used to supply the army when it marched from the river to Urkash, to ferry feed for the nomads' horses and herds from the fertile hills where Rapid Growth was still effective up to the forward elements as they advanced ever higher.

Mountains were familiar to me from Earth. I'd never been to the Himalayas in the old world, never seen stone soaring into the sky above me, but the icy beauty of the perpetually snowcapped mountains around me dwarfed anything I could have imagined. Whatever else the gods had done when they shaped this world, they hadn't skimped on the majesty.

There was one main pass that ran low enough, slotting between two spires, to stay open long enough for the army to cross before winter. That had been a bitter argument. Even if we did cross successfully, dodging blizzards and avalanches, and avoiding losing half our herds, we would then be trapped on the far side, a wall of ice and rock to our backs, facing down Jeremy's overwhelming numbers. If it weren't for the ever-climbing level of assimilation for the combined Source in my chest, I'd have erred on the side of caution.

Sometimes you just didn't have the luxury of waiting.

Assimilation of the Source of The Cycle: 21% complete

I grimaced at the system update and mentally flicked it from my vision. Despite being in storage for weeks and practicing with Tezca to control the rate it increased, I only had a few months left. In that narrow window of time, I needed to take Jeremy prisoner, sealing him in a storage space for all time, and figure out what to do about Patricia. Catch or kill. I couldn't decide until I met her face-to-face.

But to get to my first target, I had to cross a vast land populated by millions of people. I didn't know for sure how Jeremy gained Souls, but I had a decent guess. I was a killer, killing gave me strength, according to the fucked up system.

He was a narcissist; he needed to be loved, so that would be his mechanism for harvesting. The vast sea of people who had fallen under his banner must have made him powerful in a way that Mortimer and Amir could only have dreamed of. If I hadn't stumbled onto this path of the divine through a lucky choice after killing my first Shikrakyn, it would have been an insurmountable challenge.

I was sitting perched on the high point of the pass, frigid winds had turned the ground around me slick and dangerous. My gaze was locked on the east, watching the sun rise over the lesser mountains and hills that still blocked my mortal eyes from witnessing what I'd seen from my domain.

I cast Shape Earth again and walked along the clifftop above the narrow pass, peeling the stone away. I built it up where I stood, drawing it up from the base and widening the pass. Fortifying the walls as I went, I expanded the choke points. Half a dozen Huskar could now march side by side through this section. That was the problem. When you've got thousands of giants needing to cross the mountains, being limited to so few at one time caused a massive backlog.

I whistled at the sky and waited as Wilson returned from whatever he was doing. I could feel him through the bond, somewhere a little north of my position, and at a much higher altitude. Whether he was on the ground or flying was hard to tell with the crags rising up around me.

I waited patiently. Patience was something I'd already had in spades, but my time with Tezca had only heightened the trait. Existing as a dissolved being, swirling in the mists of my rapidly expanding domain, and focusing on the real world, learning to narrow my attention to a specific individual had brought back those long years of refining my trade back on the old world.

Endless repetition. No breaks for food or the more mundane biological necessities: they didn't exist for me in that state. Honing in until I could hear what they heard and see what they saw, then shifting to a new target, and doing it again and again. It wasn't omniscience as you might expect from a god, but it wasn't far off.

But it had its limitations as well. I'd come to think of my domain as a sphere of influence, both in the divine realm and the mortal one. In the abstract, it was my kingdom, and I was truly a god there. Forging items and equipment out of mist and letting them swirl back to nothing when I was done with them. As I became more attuned to my little world, I could feel Aresk's domain surrounding mine. At first, it had been almost comforting, like a barricade between my still nascent power and that of the old gods, but recently it had begun to feel like prison walls. Soon, I'd have to break out and stand on my own.

But in what passed for the real world, this construct the gods had cobbled together for their games, my realm was in the hearts of men and women. And children, sadly. The desire for violence was the seed of it. But where it blossomed was when thoughts became plans, and it flowered when the deed was committed. New temples had sprung up in places, adorned with the vertical, black dagger emblem.

Other temples, other beliefs, clouded my vision. Pacificism was a problem. It's not exactly a belief that can thrive in a world barely past the survival stage, where every day is a struggle to avoid Hadesti's embrace. Violence, whether intra- or intergroup, had been the norm for so much of human history.

But somehow, even among humans from cultures that to me were thousands of years old, cults and gods thrived that opposed all violence. They cast a smoky shadow across my god-sight, blocking and blurring my perception. I couldn't be sure about Patricia; whatever Thoth's Source did, I was sure it blocked me completely. A huge chunk of northern India was just mist to me. But I was certain Jeremy was protected by Aphrodite.

His followers were hardly peace-loving hippies. They plotted and schemed and killed each other, and the common people were much the same in his lands as they were anywhere else. But deeper into his lands, things got blurry and indistinct. And it only got worse as I tried to look further east. The far edge of China, Korea, and the Japanese islands was completely opaque to me.

Was it some form of balancing? Was this what Tezca had meant about the limits on their power and the rules they had to abide by? Either way, I had thousands of miles to travel and only a few months to do it in. It would be constant warfare all the way. I was torn between leaving my forces behind and going ahead on my own or not. I wasn't sure that I could fight through the sheer numbers Jeremy had at his command.

Weeks of unceasing, sleepless slaughter away from my followers wasn't something I felt I could stomach. Precision had always been my talent. A knife in the ribs at just the right time, in just the right place for me to slip away afterwards. This shit… this was Aresk's thing, not mine.

A shadow passed over me, and Wilson dropped to the ground with a thump, shaking out his wings and tossing a lump from his jaws at my feet.

"What have you been playing with this time?" I asked aloud, rolling the three-metre ball of white fur over to examine its underside with a grunt. The thing was matted with blood, and I had to wrestle its head back to see the long jaws almost hidden in the puffball of white hair. Serrated teeth, double-rowed like a shark's, lined a two-foot-long snout. Beady black eyes, now dull in death, stared listlessly at the mountains around us.

Wilson chuffed and nudged it with his snout. A limb fell free from where it had curled up, and long translucent claws stuck out from a wide paw as it flopped back against the stone next to me.

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"How the hell is something this big alive up here?" I wondered, noting the clumps of metallic bronze fur caught in the claws. "You ok, big guy?" I asked, looking up at the enhanced wolf.

A sense of warmth and derision flowed out to me. Warmth for the concern, derision that I might have thought he'd have been injured.

"You did get a bloody leg blown off not so long ago, bloke. Maybe ease up on the cockiness?" I chuckled as I stalked around his prize. Was it some kind of cat, or a weird mountain beaver? The tail was furry, unlike a beaver's, but it was clearly flat like a paddle.

A sense of reproach washed over me from the god-forged beast.

"Sure, but it doesn't look like you learned your lesson if you're tangling with this thing on its home turf. We're here to sneak through before it gets too cold up here, not piss off the wildlife."

Wilson snorted and snapped his jaws. Communicating with emotions wasn't easy, despite the wolf's unnatural intelligence. I experienced a sense of loneliness, followed by a feeling of coming together and being around others like him. No, around others like this thing. He was projecting what he thought this thing would have felt.

"More things like this?" It was getting colder, which meant predators would be hungry, and a long train of horses was winding its way up into these cliffs. "Can you show me the others?" I asked, earning a nod and a dipped shoulder to make mounting easier.

I scrambled up and dug my fingers into his wiry fur just in time. Almost as soon as I was seated on his shoulders, he charged and leapt over my recently improved cliff. Wings slammed down with a crack as they caught the air, and he fell into the weird undulating movement of flight his chimeric body preferred.

The view became even more breathtaking as he climbed. The steady thuds of his spine slamming into my butt and legs with each wing flap, coupled with the thin air, didn't make breathing easy at this altitude, but the vista around me stole what breath I had left.

The sun shone down on the white peaks, casting dark shadows in places where the earth dipped or the wind had sculpted the snow. I grasped why people could have believed that mountains supported the sky, the icy fingers from the earth stretching up into the patchy blue, or got lost among the clouds. This mountain range was eerie in its surreality. Nothing like this ought to exist.

Wilson banked to his left, giving me a look at the glossy tundra beneath me that caused me to tighten my grip on his fur. He circled down towards a flat expanse that sat between two cliffs. On one side, the ground fell away, and on the other, it rose ever higher, but an area the size of a football field was relatively flat and totally inaccessible from the ground.

Wilson disappeared up to his knees in the snow as he landed, and an ominous crunching and settling sound filled the air as everything shifted slightly. I sent him the concept of caution, heavily stressed. We did not need an avalanche. Although I wasn't too sure where we were in relation to the pass, I knew we were high above it and off to one side. Somewhere off the edge of this safe space, way down below us, was the passage my army needed. I didn't want to bury it in tons of snow, with my own body mixed in somewhere in the mess.

I slid off Wilson's flank and dropped down, only sinking up to my waist in the loosely packed snow. I waded slowly and carefully towards the cliff rising above us, following to one side of Wilson as he led the way. A shower of snow sprayed out behind the wolf as we reached the wall, and he dug down towards something hidden by the ice.

A snarl and a snap followed, and he bucked and backed away, tossing his head back over a shoulder. A smaller version of the thing from below sailed through the air and tumbled back into the snow. Streaks of red marred its body where Wilson's teeth had sunk in, but it quickly righted itself and burrowed under the drifts, a small wave showing where it was moving before the snow settled back into position.

Unfortunately, the slight mounding of displaced snow was moving directly towards me.

"Bloody hell, boy! What the hell is that?" I snapped, my breath clouding in front of me. As soon as I spoke, I regretted it. The sound bounced back to me from the crags around us, and something shifted under my feet. I hurled myself at the cliff and used Shape Earth to propel myself upwards from what I assumed was a tidal wave of snow preparing to go visit the warmer climes half a mile below us.

Wilson yipped and pumped his wings to leap clear of the ground, then quickly circled round to flash past the sign of the creature burrowing below, his jaws snapping down to bite through ice and snow, yanking the creature up for a moment. That thick tail the monster had flicked up and slammed into his guts, causing him to drop the creature and fight for height and breath.

My senses spread out through the stone around me, and I quickly shaped a lip to deter whatever it was from trying to leap up and take a chunk out of its non-flying assailant. As I felt the stone around me, I found the tunnel that Wilson had dug down to. Faint thumps reached me through the stone as I tracked half a dozen more of the creatures stomping towards the snow. Some were on the roof of the wide tunnel, others clumped along on the walls. Clearly, they didn't need to worry about easy access to this plateau; the damn things could just stroll up the cliffs if they wanted to.

I sent shards of rock shooting out, turning the tunnel into a series of deadly traps. The thick fur resisted at first, but magically propelled granite, honed to a fine point, could stab through most living things. After the fur parted, the tough hide came next, then the cool liquid that filled their veins stained the floor, and they were pinned in place like defiant butterflies.

Morana's Guardian slain x5!

Five Hundred Souls gathered!

"Jesus. One hundred a piece?" I muttered, glancing up at the ongoing duel between wolf and guardian. Wilson had managed to yank the thing out of its burrows again and was circling higher, raking his claws along its stomach as he held it in his jaws. After a few moments, the red liquid falling grew into a waterfall as Wilson caught something vital, and a second later, he dropped the now limp creature back to the snow. It threw up a cloud of snow as it made a crater that was partially stained pink from the thing's blood.

I grimaced as I paused, waiting for the snow to slip over the edge and take the thing with it. A short section vanished with a crunch and a rumble as it dislodged stones below it. But it didn't spread. I waited a good three minutes anyway, just to be sure. Wilson was circling overhead, scanning wildly as he felt my fear and his own emotions bled off the excess.

I lowered myself carefully down to the packed ice around the entrance to the tunnel. I winced as Wilson landed next to me and shoved me aside to start exploring the tunnel. He tucked his wings against his flanks, giving him a bronze cloak as he disappeared into the darkness.

I scrambled after, happier now that I was away from the wide lip of snow perched halfway up a mountain. I produced a trinket from storage and activated it. A bright glow spread out around me, making me blink harshly to try to adjust to the glare.

Wilson was forced to stop where I had shish-kebabed the other guardians. I slipped between the stone spines, careful not to disturb the dead things. One hundred Souls a piece. If there were more, it was worth my time to find the damn things, and in a tunnel, I was unstoppable. One spell and I could control everything around me.

I held the glowing bead up and made way deeper underground. I was a few miles above sea level, higher than I'd ever been on this world, but it still felt subterranean and claustrophobic. The tunnel split off several times, and I investigated the side tunnels, but they all came to dead ends.

After a while, I ignored the side passages and just followed the main tunnel as it wound deeper and further into the mountain. It was getting colder. I was surrounded by bare stone, no ice or snow this far in, but I felt the temperature falling, my cheeks and bare feet slowly getting numb. Having avoided footwear for months, I now wished I had a pair of wool-lined boots in a storage bead.

My breath misted in front of me every time I exhaled, and my lungs twinged at the frigid air I sucked in. The stone was smooth as I turned another corner, wondering if I should go back. There didn't seem to be any more of the guardians here. I could always ask Wilson to go find another nest, but something inside me nudged me to go round just one more corner, over and over again.

The light from my bead spilled out into a cavern, and at the centre of it was a bleak, blue pearl. Another bloody Source.

Did I need another Source? They weren't always a blessing. Hadesti's hadn't been much more use than as a bludgeon, and once it fused with the Mater's Source, it had become the dominant threat to my existence.

But I couldn't just leave it. Jeremy might not have found it, but if Patricia became a problem, or some random Soulbound of Mortimer's made their way up here… All long shots but conceivably possible. It was probably going to be helpful, based on the numbers.

I stepped forward and felt the cold double, then triple. My clothes began to freeze against my skin. I released my aura and summoned balls of fire around me. Each step got harder, the air heavier. It burned my lungs with cold with every breath. It was almost too cold for the condensation from my exhales to form anything other than snow.

My fists of fire sputtered, the incandescent heat being sucked away by the whatever god owned this Source. I cast Wildfire, sending the walls of flame out to either side of me, making a corridor to my goal. The fires barely kept the heat away, but it was enough.

My hand, blue-fingered and numb, slapped down clumsily on the orb.

Morana, Goddess of Winter, is a viable target. Invade her realm: Y/N?

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