Mistakes were not lessons here.
Guards pushed them in front, and slaves began to walk. Their feet tripped on the snow. Mo Fei’s legs trembled from the cold air. His eyes dropped to the ground cautiously, his body flinching from the scolding of a guard. Who knew when it’d be his turn to get whipped? Behind him were Han and Wu, and in the other line was Feng.
Mo Fei was linked in a chain of misery. The iron collar bit into his neck, turning it red. Every gust of the blizzard stole warmth and will.
A slave tripped over something and fell on the ground. He looked back and saw a guard’s boot drive into a kidney. Someone was killed here...
Mo Fei kept his eyes on the trudging feet ahead, chanting a mantra: Don’t fall. Don’t get noticed. A heavy kick between his shoulders shattered the chanting. Mo Fei groaned and lurched forward. The chain yanked the man in front of him.
"Eyes on the ground, void-spawn!" That guard snarled, his voice hoarse, "Or I’ll feed your eyes to the beasts myself." Kindly go intercourse yourself. Bastard.
Mo Fei cursed under his breath, his heart beating unusually fast as he found his footing. He heard a low murmur of the guards walking alongside their cursed procession.
"...fool’s errand, cutting through the Glacial Vein," one muttered to the other, his voice tight. "This is Kholkis’ territory. The Master’s pact doesn’t mean spit to those feathery calamities."
"Pact?" That guard, the one who’d kicked him, grunted. "We don’t need pacts. We have bargaining." He jerked a thumb back at our line. "A dozen of these wasted breaths. The Kholkis always hunger for warm and fresh meat. We just give them a few of them. From each line. They’ll take their tithe and let us pass! Elementary.
’Kholkis.’ The term echoed in Mo Fei’s hollow mind. Not just monsters. A localized calamity. Another named terror in this atlas of pain.
A part of Mo Fei wanted to laugh at that. A break? There were no breaks. Only variations on a theme of suffering. There was no fear or panic on his face.
"I have seen worse; it couldn’t be that bad, right?"
Then a sound severed his thought. It belonged to no earthly creature. It started beneath them, a deep roar like a large predatory bird, and then, from deep within the white snowy ground, it came.
A screech.
It was a loud sound of a child crying, or perhaps glaciers falling apart, mixed into one piercing shriek. Mo Fei clapped his hands over his ears, but it was useless. The sound bypassed his ears.
"RUN." Those words echoed in his mind, but from whom? And what?
Then the entire convoy ceased moving. Slaves froze in silence, their bodies trembling like the wings of a bee. The guards. They were worse (scoff); their arrogance forgotten, their faces went pale, their hands flew toward their weapons, and heads turned toward the source.
Then a vast shape plunged out of the snowfield at unimaginable speed.
From beneath, a shape began to detach itself from the blizzard’s weave. It unfolded into a beast that was larger than three men. It formed a nightmare parody of joints in the shape of a bird. Its "feathers" were layers of smooth silk and adorned with snow. Those eyes–visible even at that distance, glowing with a hunger for flesh.
The Kholkis had come for their tithe.
The tall guard swallowed. His earlier bravado vanished, replaced by the grim efficiency of a man trying to counter the fear. "Cut the rear chain loose," he commanded hurriedly, his voice cutting through the terrified silence. "Now."
Beside Mo Fei in the second line, a big man was shaking in fear. He had already accepted his demise. That trembling of his body came from his very soul. And the man’s eyes... once perhaps full of the life of a farmer or a father, rolled back until only the whites showed. His lips moved in a silent, frantic prayer to a god whose name he had likely already forgotten.
The woman on Mo Fei’s other side was scratching at the iron collar around her neck. Her fingernails were torn against the cold metal, dripping blood.
Death couldn’t be their only fear; they were paralyzed. Maybe from the realization that they had been weighed on a scale and found less worthy than the safety of a few cruel men. That was the true nature of Mill, after all.
"Don’t throw us!"
"Please. Not me!"
"I’ll work all day and night; have mercy, don’t choose me!"
Desperate voices shot through the line. They were all chained in sequence. To be the ’offering’ was a death sentence.
People were pushing and shoving everywhere, with those at the back trying to step back as much as they could. The ones in the front got pushed forward. It all became a human tide of pure selfish terror.
The guards moved with brutal precision, their axes striking the iron links between the fifth and sixth slaves from the end... Ironic luck that Mo Fei was one of them. But with him they shattered Han, Feng, the big man, the fearful woman, and three other men’s chains as well, leaving their hands tied with long chains.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The sounds were obscenely clean against the howling wind. Eight of them were cut adrift. Their chains, wrapped around their waist, fell to the ice with a final, heavy thud.
Theh were the offerings.
"Move!" The lead guard bellowed at the main column and whipped the air. The remaining slaves, fueled by the vicious relief of the reprieved, stumbled into a desperate, shambling sprint.
Those eight were left on the frozen field. Chains bound their hands and legs in long shackles.
Their commander–that tall masculine bastard–moved his horse, leading others to follow him. Their figures slowly vanished in the howling snow.
Then the Kholkis descended.
Their bodies became colder. It was a predatory frost that felt like thousands of frostbites together, eager to turn their warm blood into jagged ice.
As the Kholkis drew closer, its shape grew rapidly. The very sound of the blizzard began to change. The howling wind was swallowed by a heavy, pressurized silence. Mo Fei could hear the terrifyingly rhythmic tink-tink-tink of his sweat freezing into beads against his forehead.
His fingers began moving together as if counting down the warmth. He coughed after he exhaled the air.
And Kholkis... It didn’t just fly; it cascaded like a vast snow falling from the sky. One moment it was a silhouette against the blurry sky, and the next it was among them, moving with a silent, air-defying speed. The air grew colder and colder.
As he forced his mind to lock onto the flickering flaw in the Kholkis, he heard a sickening pop in the back of his skull... The sound of a door being ripped off.
Suddenly, the memory of his third-grade teacher’s face, a woman who had once given him a gold star for a drawing, dissolved into a void. It faded slowly, a payback of something he had achieved, leaving a raw, aching void in his mind; then cold filled that unwanted place.
"Ahh!" Mo Fei screamed. His eyes rolled back, and a faint shadow of a ribbon moved through the eyeballs. He closed them tightly, wincing as the ribbon moved through his body.
The skin of his forearm turned black. The ribbon inside him heated up, burning his forearm. Mo Fei fell on the ground. The seven of them looked at him, their expressions terrified. They must have thought he had gone mad, seeing his death against him.
But it showed Mo Fei the "flaw" of the calamity, and he had to trade pieces of the man he used to be. The trade was involuntary and merciless, without his will.
That moment his hand was swallowed up. The ribbon began to lose its heat.
Then he saw the spirit threads of the Kholkis, connecting shrieks to a deep, icy well of power beneath the feathers.
And he saw a symbol embedded in the chest of the Kholkis: a jagged, fractal rune that seemed to drink the light and pulse with a slow, ancient order. The outline of a snowflake, crossing with two blades. He could say it couldn’t be the Creator’s mark. That was different. Older. A law of the world made into flesh of frost.
The Kholkis landed before them. It cocked its head in a grotesquely curious gesture. Then it opened its beak.
It reached toward Mo Fei.
"Guh." He jumped sideways, rolling into the snowy ground. The dirt under snow stuck to his clothes.
Then he noticed his mistake.
A man who was directly behind Mo Fei screamed loudly... a short, wet sound as the sharp beak struck him. The man couldn’t avoid it.
The Kholkis’s head darted forward through him. Its beak was lined with razor-sharp fangs, and with a horrific crunch of splitting bone and tissue, it tore into the flesh. The beak pierced through his body.
All of them stared with wide eyes, their mouths gaping open. Mo Fei had seen dead bodies in previous worlds, but that sight happened in front of his eyes. The white snow turned crimson.
Mo Fei stared frozen as the creature lifted the man into the air. Then, with a savage twist of its neck, it ripped him in two. It tossed one half skyward and tossed it into its mouth before swallowing it. It discarded the other half, which was a ruined heap of meat. The man’s chains scattered near his arm.
Chaos.
The remaining seven of them scattered. The long chain holding their legs became a snarling, tripping death. Kholkis swooped toward another man, but he tripped and fell. His legs tangled in the chain.
The beast let out a shriek in frustration and climbed back into the sky to locate its target.
Swoosh.
It caught the man in its talon and flew into the air with a massive burst of speed. He screamed with all his might. "HELP ME! PLEASE! I DON’T–I—I..." He couldn’t finish his words. Kholkis threw his body into the sky with such force that his body ripped apart. His liver and intestines fell one by one.
The Kholkis caught the meat in midair and chewed it. It let out a snarl, dropping blood from its beak as if enjoying its meal.
A man ran away in the snowfield, running as fast as he could. His shackles let out a noise.
Mo Fei’s eyes followed his figure. He gritted his teeth and whispered, "Fuck it! I’m not staying here longer!"
When Mo Fei prepared to sprint. He looked behind only to see the scared faces. "Tch, even if it suits me, I’m not leaving my life behind for anybody."
The Kholkis turned its glacial gaze to him. Mo Fei could see them clearly now: those spirit threads, forming in the air between them. The smooth silver threads moved between its spirit cores.
Instinct... Neither thoughts nor courage. But the same instinct that made him kill himself. The instinct to break free from the curse of the chosen ones took over him.
Mo Fei didn’t try to outrun them now; it was useless immediately. There was a flicker of instability. He didn’t have any weapons to fight back. Pointless; everything was pointless.
"Tch," Mo Fei’s eyes darted between his shackles and Kholkis. He knew what to do next.