Fryg, as before, seethed right back: “Yes, I do dare, you jumped-up cunt. Do you just want me to turn you to an ice pillar right here and now, is that it? Or will you scurry back to your tasteless pseudo-Ankhezian horror show of a longhouse with your tail between your legs?”

Fryg smirked when Kristina turned on a boot-heel, scoffing and flicking out her fan as she walked away. She waited for a second, then called out.

“...And take care that your branch family members don’t meet their untimely ends trying to break into our vaults.”

Kristina stopped dead.

“I have no reason to worry about such a thing happening. What object of value could the Hulsons conceivably hold beneath their longhouse?” she retorted, her veneer of sneering venom failing to conceal that she had gotten the true message.

She, alongside her entourage, departed.

The road was long and bitterly cold, yet superior Borean craftsmanship saw them through. Furred cloaks and blankets with eerily-good heat insulation, self-heating metal trinkets set with Ignis-charged gems, and special foods that magnified one’s natural heat regulation all combined to ward off the elements.

Many kilometers from Oasis City, they split; Zel left the Butcher’s casket to Zefaris’ care, neither wanting to risk its loss on the climb nor willing to just leave it at the Immortal Throne’s base.

Driving onward through the permafrost, Zelsys eventually beheld a great mesa rise over the horizon, at its top a distinct shape that she took to be the Revenant King’s seat of power. It was hundreds of kilometers more before she beheld the Immortal Throne’s base and the town which was to be found there.

Everything in that place was scaled to its inhabitants, conveying a feeling of smallness that she had otherwise only felt in ancient ruins and a scarce few other places. Indeed, they were great big bear-men; she noticed perhaps six or seven noticeably different types, each exhibiting different forms and degrees of physical humanization. All of them, however, wore clothing, walked on two feet, and acted with a monastic tranquility.

They welcomed her as if they had anticipated her arrival.

When she questioned this, they answered readily: “The King foresaw your approach; he sees all within sight of his throne. He passed the knowledge to us. Come. Rest. The climb is long and perilous.”

And so, rest she did, partaking of the bear-men’s seemingly boundless hospitality.

Her departure for the climb was marked by a reverent ceremonial procession, one tinged by the same colours of emotion as those held for warriors going off to a battle from which they are unlikely to return. A number of preparations were made; some of her own foresight, others of the bear-men’s kindness. Yet further talismans and elixirs, as well as tightly-fitting, thin body wrappings that trapped heat yet didn’t impede movement to an appreciable degree. They were a deep burgundy.

A harness of strong rope she tied around herself, connecting it to the four climbing picks Ingvald had given her. She swallowed eight metal pills, sequestering all but one in her second stomach for later use during the climb.

After all was said and done, her countenance was that of a bloodsoaked mummy.

“Though these preparations are minimal, we shall hold out hope for your return,” said a bear-man whom she had come to identify as the elder of this village.

Driving onward through the permafrost, Zefaris eventually beheld a titanic, vaguely humanoid shape rise over the horizon.

In the meanwhile, Victor distracted himself from the biting cold’s ability to somehow seep in through all that insulation; he did so by fiddling with a mass of devilbone, moulding it into myriad different shapes while dwelling on anything and everything that came to mind.

As they drew nearer, Teutobochus’ full scale revealed itself, as did the area in which it stood; the titan’s form was partially concealed by the lip of a sprawling crater, hundreds of meters across. Teutobochus itself was tens of meters tall, a thing of pulsating purple flesh clad in gigantic plates of bone, scrimshawed with equally gigantic glyphs of protection; at least, that was Victor’s interpretation of them, drawn from his heretofore minimal grasp of Koschei’s residual knowledge. It stirred into motion, great tracts of ice falling from its form and crashing to the ice sheet below, shaking the ground.

Teutobochus turned in place as if it weren’t a giant, but a human martial artist, its motion stirring gusts of buffeting wind in their direction. Nonetheless, the bears pulling their sled pushed on. The shock of seeing such a gigantic thing moving so quickly rattled Victor’s twin-tracked train of thought. Zefaris stopped the sled when they were within around two-hundred meters of the titan.

It stared down at them with the beacons of magenta light that blazed in its otherwise empty eye sockets. There was a sense of longing to be found there. Victor felt it in bones, and he knew exactly what it would take to command it.

“I need to get closer,” he said to her, getting off the sled. “I’ll communicate over aetherwave.”

Closer still he walked towards the living machine, using the Oculus to support himself so he wouldn’t be knocked off of his feet by the buffeting winds that kept sweeping through.

A mere speck by comparison to the great god-machine, this work of glorious artifice that had been denied its true purpose through cruel twists of circumstance. His inheritance and his lost great work all at once; Victor felt Koschei’s irreconcilable grief for having left Teutobochus to guard this place, bubbling up from the depths of immortal memory.

KOSCHEI’S FIRST OPUS

AZOTH-PNEUMATIC TITAN

DEUS MACHINA TEUTOBOCHUS

He shifted to as stable a stance as he could, legs wide, and raised the Oculus in both hands, permitting the scouring winds to whip at him and chill his flesh to the bone.

With every fiber of his being, every iota of his soul, Victor funneled arcane power and sheer concentrated will into the Oculus. Its smaller rings spun unevenly about the greater one’s perimeter, emitting a terrible clatter as a bead of black flame gathered in the center.