The Failed Sacrifice

Ilya Finalwind was a failure. This was the only identity that remained to her as she agonizingly gulped down air that she knew would be her final breaths. She had mere moments before she would finally know the face of death. Ilya was forced to face eternity alone, abandoned in a cold and damp cave located in the heart of a ravine. It was said to have been rend by the Lord of Wolves himself in the First Days.

The only thing she could feel was the cold, stone altar beneath her body. Numbing chill was the most familiar sensation to her, and she sought comfort in the hard surface as it bore her broken, fading body. Her left leg was awkwardly splayed at the hip, dislocated, and the sharp bone of her snapped tibia protruded through muscle and skin. It was as if her own traitorous limb had tried to flee from her – rather it be mangled than attached to such a failure as she.

Though grievous, the injuries did not bother her. Ilya had lost so much blood from the hole in her abdomen that she no longer felt the sharp, aching pain of her compound fracture.

Ilya had worked tirelessly for this day, what should have been the happiest day of her entire life; her wedding day. Or, that is what her mother, matriarch of the Sisterhood of Everfrost, had called it since she was a little girl. The day she would meet and become one with her betrothed, the Lord of Winter. It was a privilege to be chosen as the body for the gods of the Shadowkeep, to provide them with a form to inhabit the mortal realm, Foundation. Her mother had trained her nearly from birth in the ways of cold and magic so she would be the perfect specimen, flawless for her Lord. Her sensations had been carefully numbed, her nerves steeled against all but the most extreme stimuli in order to withstand contact with the god.

Her fellow sisters had adorned her in the proper bridal attire earlier that morning and had called her beautiful, stunning, perfect. When she glimpsed herself in her mother’s small hand mirror, Ilya felt their assessments were honest and not mere flattery. Her skin, normally extremely pale, had been given a light touch of red over her cheeks, transforming her usually severe face into that of a blushing bride. The delicate white robes that fell about her thin frame were tied at the waist with a belt adorned with five metal discs styled after the phases of the moon, and upon her neck and arms were pendants and bands of shining silver. She had felt ready to meet him.

So, why did he so soundly reject me? She miserably asked herself again. Absently, Ilya touched the delicate cloth that laid about her, now ruined with stains of her blood. She had no one who would speak with her, so wallowing and replaying the events of the day was the flagellation she chose as she waited for her miserable body to finally die.

The Lord’s displeasure had been as clear in her mind as the touch of ice against an aching tooth. From the moment she allowed him inside her body, she knew she was not perfect, not chosen, not what he wanted. Her mother’s eyes when she realized that the Lord of Winter had not accepted Ilya as his Host... Before the ritual, as Ilya laid her frail and dangerously thin body down upon the altar, she had seen her mother smile. A true smile full of warmth and pride. It was the first time she had ever felt her mother’s love – or, what she assumed a mother’s love would feel like. That love was snuffed out just as quickly - like a candle in a storm, the warmth vanished. Her mother had commanded the Sisterhood of Everfrost to abandon the cave and continue their endless pilgrimage in search of the Lord of Winter’s bedchamber.

If such a thing exists at all, Ilya thought bitterly. The Bedchamber was supposed to be hers to share with him – a hall in the Shadowkeep full of splendors unfathomable to the restraints of mortality. After her body and soul were given to him, she would live there for all eternity as one of the Lord of Winter’s pampered, cherished brides. It was what she wanted, to be loved in return for her life of study and endless pursuit of the bitterest of cold.

But it was all for nothing. The price for the love of a god was her autonomy, her soul, and her remaining mortal days. She did not realize until it was too late that she had never truly been ready to pay so much for something she could not fully understand.

Ilya was left on the altar, her body ravaged and broken by her brief encounter with her Lord. Only a handful of the Sisterhood were ordered to tarry behind. Their task was to hide the Sisterhood’s tracks. They would be the only witnesses to Ilya’s final resting place. She wondered how they would discard her body. Perhaps laid out in a sunny spot, for the birds and pests to peck at her flesh and use her bones for their nests? Or would they deem her failure so severe that they would bury her? The thought of the earth’s weight upon her soul so she would be unable to join the Lords in their great manor brought a tear unbidden to her hazy eyes.

Anything but that…!

Ilya tried once more to call out to the sisters she knew were nearby, cleaning out the cave and erasing any trace of their ritual. She could hear their shuffling footsteps as they went about their work, so she knew that though her voice was weak they were near enough to hear her. But her sisters dutifully ignored the failure’s pleas for water, for companionship, for comfort.

Her crying slowly ebbed, despite her endless sorrow. She must have run out of tears. Though it was true that Ilya was afraid of dying, she had wanted nothing more than to be a good daughter, and a good bride. She thought that her doubts would be washed away by the tender, cold hand of her god. Ilya closed her tired eyes as she clung to the words of her Lord that only she had heard – the conversation that every one of her sisters would have killed to have.

They offer me a trembling lamb? He had said. The Everfrost cannot descend upon Foundation with so frail a body.

The words stung like a slap to the face. After her entire life of servitude and devotion… he thought she was too weak?

“But I’ve worked tirelessly, Lord. No one in all of Foundation can coax the chill as I can.” Her voice had not wavered, as she knew to expect a Lord’s bargaining before the contract was signed. Her mother had taught her all she needed to navigate these negotiations such that they would end with her perfect union with the otherworldly entity.

You would be cracked in two if I placed even one fang upon your soul. The bone-chilling voice in her mind swayed with a tint of pity, and it was that pity that sealed her fate. Still, she persisted, as she had been trained.

“I am your bride – eternally cold, rigid and powerful.” Ilya smiled sweetly, but only the onlooking sisters could appreciate it. Her blue lips trembled as the Lord of Winter peered through her mind.

My brides are made of sterner stuff. Do you truly believe you are enough for the Everfrost, my foolish lamb?

A bead of sweat traced a slow path down Ilya’s temple. “P-please, Lord, do with me what you will. The Foundation’s Spring must be ended- ah!” Her stomach dropped as she felt her Lord reluctantly trying on her body. An unbidden image of a weary husband putting on an ill-fitting coat to soothe an anxious wife flashed through her vision. A laugh dark as the ocean's depths echoed in her mind, the Lord of Winter seeing her thoughts as she thought them.

So, you do understand you will not fit. Poor lamb.

Without warning, she felt her left leg twist in its socket. The rest of her body remained where it was on the altar, and the resulting tension was a sickening POP as her femur seemingly jumped out of place on its own. Simultaneously, her knee and shin twisted from the momentum with a CRACK. Despite a life of lessons from her mother on withstanding pain, to become numb to everything as the winter is numb to the world on which it settles, Ilya shouted in agony. No pain had ever felt like this. There was no way to prepare for such sudden and unexpected violence, and she gasped down at the splinter of her bone that was now protruding through her shin.

It felt wonderful. The blissful scream of life – her body speaking in the only way it could to warn her of the immediate danger she was in. She wanted to stay alive, still, despite it all. The searing pain was her proof, and her failure. The shameful pleasure she found in feeling was the death knell to her union with the Lord of Winter. She had failed the final test.

An icy ache had then gathered in her abdomen, and she felt her body temperature dropping rapidly. A nip of frost began to coat the most vital parts of her stomach, until finally, it burst – and with it the Lord of Winter’s audience ended. The intruding presence faded from her, leaving her behind in a body that had been stretched and squeezed into a shape that no longer fit her. Ilya grasped at the quickly blackening skin of her stomach, and it was a small mercy that she could not feel the extent of the damage. She knew with one look at this wound that the Lord of Winter had killed her for her shortcomings.

An ear-splitting roar interrupted Ilya from her final moments of recollection. The sound was otherworldly – so loud and filled with white-hot rage that she felt the cave tremble around her. If she still had a life worth living, she would have been terrified, but she did not have energy left to be anything but distantly curious. Her will to live had left her standing at the altar, after all. How ironic that she had given up the fight to live now, when this resignation would have made her a bride earlier that day.

Would something else finish her off before the Lord of Winter’s rejection did? She weakly opened one blue eye to peer at the entrance to the chamber just in time to see one of her sisters run into the room. It was Nika, one of the few members of the Sisterhood who was younger than Ilya. Chances were she would be the next candidate for their god’s bride.

Or, she would have been, if not for the powerful, black claws that shot out of the tunnel and pulled Nika’s head clean from her neck. The dead girl’s body slumped to the ground with a dull THUD, and her head soon followed.

Ilya watched Nika’s blood as it slowly pooled out of her neck and across the floor. The blood of the Sisters who worshiped the Everfrost flowed slower and thicker than the average mortal’s did. And of course – the Sisterhood practiced exclusively ice magic, which slowed everything about their bodies as its toll - their nerves, their blood, their breathing, and even their lives. The cold preserved them, and they nurtured it with their spark of life in return.

She was aware of a looming presence as it entered the ritual room. Ilya tried to open her other eye, but could not, and so she peered up weakly, trying to make sense of what she was looking at as a hulking form filled the space. Bright amber eyes peered down at her, but she could make out no other features. Everything surrounding those piercing eyes was… darkness. The deepest shadow upon which no light could find purchase. The furred beast which killed her sister moved what she assumed was its large head closer to her. It sniffed at her stomach, the numb and dead wound that still oozed with blood.

The beast’s gesture was one of curiosity, or perhaps caution. Ilya scoffed – the thought of anything being cautious of her was too ridiculous, especially now.

“I could not hurt you if I wished to, beast.”

Those amber eyes shot up to look at Ilya’s face, its pupils contracted to pinpricks. The thing’s head was so large that all her vision was taken up by its darkness. It gave the dying witch the sensation of floating, as if she was in a void with nothing but those eyes to witness her final moments.

She slowly raised a hand, and wondered if this was the face she had been waiting for – the Lord of Death come to collect her before she left her body.

No, the Lord of Death was as incorporeal as all gods were, and her numb hands brushed against dense, wiry fur. So, was this truly just an animal? But those eyes, they seemed so intent, like they understood what was happening. Tears began to pool in Ilya’s eyes as she touched something so soft and warm. The beast was full of life, and she felt herself chastised and burned by the rage in its expression.

Ilya was jealous of this beast and its ferocious will to live.

“Please…” She closed her eye, letting the tears fall down her cheeks. “Please, claim my life, before the wounds inflicted by my Lord put me in his service for eternity.”

The beast’s breathing hitched. Could it understand her words? Would it grant her final request?

Ilya couldn’t stop her tears as she thought of her mother, ages away by now, in search of a new doll to dress and torture. The family she thought had loved and admired her abandoned her here, left to seek comfort by a monster which would surely kill and devour her.

She felt the sharp tip of one of the beast’s heavy claws prick at her chest, just above her damn heart that still slowly beat. Ilya forced her eye to open again, though the effort was more enormous than before. The beast was watching her face, and seemed as if it was… waiting for her.

Waiting for what? For Ilya to finish her crying?

“Do you… understand me?” The beast did not move, its expression did not change. It also did not kill her, which said much. “Then be witness to my dying wish, beast,” Ilya gritted her teeth and placed one of her own hands upon the monster’s claw. She gripped it as hard as she could – a baby grasping for its mother’s warmth.

“May my mother lose everything she has stolen from me,” she spat. It was a curse, she knew. To speak such as one's dying wish was the height of arrogance. But, if her final mortal feelings would be ones of envy, anger and bitterness, there was already no stopping her transformation into a ghost. She might as well go all the way with it and lay a curse in her wake – even if this monster did not have the capacity to fulfill her wish.

Ilya’s cold hand dropped to the altar as the tension went out from her body, and she was engulfed in blissful, numb darkness.

—

Ilya, much to her surprise, woke.

Not as a ghost, unsatisfied and cursed to haunt the cave where she died until the Final Days. Not to find her soul trapped beneath the earth where her sisters buried her in punishment. Not even as a servant in the Shadowkeep – which would have been the best case scenario.

No, Ilya was still, miraculously, alive. She tried to move, but a pain shot up from her spine to her brain which seared so hot behind her eyes that she saw white and nearly passed out again.

As she blinked away the stars, shapes began to coalesce into a scene. She was in a room that could only be described as bare. The bed she was in was soft, built upon fur and feathers, but the blanket she laid under was made of thick and scratchy wool. It was warm and a welcome weight that pressed down upon her frail frame, giving to her a small sense of security. There was a stone hearth by her feet in which burned a modest fire that warmed the room as well as the parts of her body that could still feel. A small window in the wall across from her revealed the bright blue sky and fluffy clouds of Foundation’s eternal Spring. And finally, there was a basic wooden chair in the corner near the hearth. She could see no decorations, paintings nor adornments – nothing to tell Ilya about the person whose home she found herself in.

It must be past midday, Ilya thought as she watched the clouds slowly move across her field of vision, framed as it was by the portal to the outside world. A vivid smell of roses wafted through the drafty building - but that was not unexpected. Eternal Spring kept flowers in bloom. Perhaps there was a garden outside? The chirping of birds and insects, along with the crackling of the fire, made her eyes droop in spite of her apprehension about this mysterious circumstance. Perhaps she was in the Shadowkeep after all, and she was recovering from her Lord’s rejection? It seemed entirely possible that a god of his stature could injure not only the physical, but also spiritual forms of his mortal flock. As her eyes fluttered closed and she allowed her breathing to even out, she couldn’t help hoping. She had not been enough for his bride, but her devotion would still be rewarded in death. Ilya would wear her scars with pride and continue to serve her Lord dutifully in the afterlife. Of course her quarters would be bare and sparse - she was but a humble servant, not fit for the fine opulence of the Shadowkeep’s bedchambers.

The scuffing of heavy boots upon the wooden floorboards was the only warning Ilya was given before she heard a door behind her creak open. She had assumed it was back there, since from where she lay she couldn’t see any other way to enter the modest room but the small window, which would barely fit a child through. Still, the peace was broken and the sound had chased the drowsiness from her – she was wary about not seeing who had entered.

Then the smell of something warm and plain cut through her trepidation. The wood platter was the first thing she saw of the visitor. Upon it was set a wooden bowl and matching cup, each roughly carved and well-used. The meal was a simple one, surely prepared for someone not able to keep down any solid foods. Despite the rather plain broth and overcooked vegetables Ilya could see sloshing inside the bowl, her mouth watered. When was it she last ate? The ritual had required a day of fasting, so, depending on how long she had been unconscious, it could have been days since her last meal.

Ilya wrested her attention away from the tantalizing meal of mushy carrots and broth to peer up at the stranger who held the ambrosia just out of reach. Sharp, amber eyes peered down at her, void of emotion. From the square jaw, the rough, short hair and the myriad scars that lined the stranger’s face, Ilya first assumed that her savior must be a man, but the way the stranger’s vestments hugged in an effort to contain her chest and hips, the failed bride realized she was instead facing a very stern and rough woman. There was something else about her that was familiar to Ilya. Her eyes widened as she realized that this woman was a Host. The air about the stranger swirled with the same magic, the same aura, the same otherworldly tangle that Ilya had felt intimately during her encounter with Lord Winter. The tension eased from her shoulders as Ilya accepted that she had been saved by the grace of this Lord.

Her musing was cut short as the platter of food, to her great dismay, left her sight. The stranger placed it upon the chair by the hearth.

She was going to protest her urgent need for that bowl of overcooked soup, but the stranger gripped the heavy wool blanket and peeled it away from her in one quick motion. Ilya realized she had something much more pressing to complain about.

The failed sacrifice was wearing only her plain underclothes. Her heavy robes and other garments were nowhere to be seen.

Scandalized, Ilya flailed her arms in an effort to cover herself, but another stab of pain shot up her spine from the sudden movement. Her mind was no longer the master over her body – this agony her new dictator. She weakly flopped back down against the pillow as her vision swam.

“W-what are you doing!?” Her body wouldn’t obey, but she could still use her voice, thank the Cold.

In reply, the stranger began to unwrap the many tight bandages about Ilya’s abdomen. It was seeped through with a myriad of concerning colors – red (her blood), yellow (pus, no doubt), black, purple (probably signs of rot or death, which was not ideal), and blue and green (these stumped her). She winced at the roughness of the stranger’s calloused hands on her delicate skin and sensitive wound. Unfortunately, she was starting to feel the place where her god had made his exit from her body, but it was still subdued. The dead tissue was numb, as she expected. It would be more alarming to Ilya if she could feel her wound. The pain would stand as a testament to the weakness of her Lord’s power; or that she had met with an impostor.

As the sullied bandages were removed, Ilya couldn’t help but gasp. Though she couldn’t completely feel the injury, it was quite disgusting to look at. Where she had felt the absolute cold of her Lord exit her mortal body, there was a hole the size of a good skipping stone. The skin about the hole was blackened, as if she had been burned, and she could only imagine what the damage to her organs looked like.

Her vision began to swim and her stomach roiled at the thought, but before she could lose consciousness completely, the stranger dug into one of the many pockets about her leather belt and placed two objects in Ilya’s hand. One was a small vial, and the other was a rough cylinder of wood as thick as two of Ilya’s fingers. She looked at the strange gifts in confusion, then understood as the stranger demonstrated their use by pointing to her own open mouth.

…A mouth with unnaturally pointed, jagged teeth, but for the moment Ilya chose to ignore the alarm bells going off in her mind.

Ilya placed the wood between her lips and flipped the lid of the vial. As she thought, a pungent odor wafted toward her. It made her eyes water, but she was well and truly awake, now. The stranger’s hands hovered over Ilya’s wound, silently asking if Ilya was ready to proceed with whatever agonizing treatment she was about to unleash on her patient.

Ilya shakily nodded her head once, and the stranger set to work.

She couldn’t watch, for fear of passing out again. Ilya grit down so hard on the wood that she feared it would splinter between her jaws, her teeth would crack, or she would pop a blood vessel – whichever came first. The stranger was deft but not gentle. She used two fingers to dig out some sort of poultice, perhaps a staunch for her bleeding. A cool substance was spread around the dead and unfeeling tissue. After a few moments of massaging it, Ilya’s skin felt a similar level of numbness around the wound as inside it.

“Prepare,” came a croaked warning from the stranger, her voice either harsh from lack of use or from the slashed scar across her throat, Ilya couldn’t know.

The stranger produced a small, sharp blade from a leather holster about her waist and began to cut out the dead tissue. As a woodcarver seeks the shape of their carvings in a block of wood, she carefully peeled through layers of skin and organs until the bright crimson of life was all that was left. Then the wound was refilled with a pulpy mixture of something green which smelled vaguely of roses. New bandages were wrapped around her body to keep everything in place, though Ilya knew they would need to be redressed many times for how much new blood was surely seeping out of her. And wouldn’t she need the wound and organs stitched closed?

When the stranger wiped her hands and blade clean of Ilya’s blood, the ordeal finished, Ilya relaxed. Though the pain in her stomach was no longer dull, it was evidence that she was alive.

She watched the stranger wrap her removed flesh in a cloth and set it aside. This woman must be a healer, perhaps even a fellow worshiper if she was able to keep the Lord of Winter’s judgment at bay. Though… she did not have the look of a healer at all. Her clothing was the dark stained leather of a hunter, but with so many pouches tied to her belt she was more likely an adventurer of some kind.

As if sensing Ilya’s thoughts and not liking to be mused about, the stranger put a callused hand upon Ilya’s bare thigh. “Now the leg,” she grumbled. “I must set it.”

Before Ilya could protest, the stranger pinned her hips to the bed with a heavy knee and gripped her mangled and broken left leg between two hands. The stranger’s thick arms strained as, with a pull, a twist and a rotation, the traitorous femur was maneuvered to lie in its original position at the socket of her hip. A gag fell from her lips as Ilya’s surprised scream shook the room. She weakly grabbed at the much larger woman to make her stop, pleas and sobs dribbling from her shaking lips.

But the stranger moved away from her hands, out of Ilya’s reach as her attention fell upon the splinted bone that protruded from Ilya’s shin.

“This will be worse. Grit your teeth.”

“P-please, don’t-!” Ilya wailed and cried in a way that she had not done since she was a very little girl. As no further pain flooded her body, she wiped an eye and realized the stranger was waiting for her to finish. Her amber eyes stared in a familiar, unblinking fashion until Ilya calmed herself and self-consciously returned the piece of wood to her mouth. The stranger’s hands hovered above the bone, again waiting for permission to begin the torture of healing.

Ilya nodded and gritted her teeth, but when the stranger’s hand grasped her split bone, Ilya’s mind proved unwilling to bear through it any longer. The pain was so intense that Ilya didn’t even have time to wince before her eyes rolled back into her skull and she was once again thrust into unconsciousness.

—

The sky beyond the little window was pink and orange when the failed sacrifice next returned to the land of the waking.

Ilya blinked exhaustion from her eyes and slowly lifted the wool blanket to check her injuries. The skin she could see around the bandages was splotched with deep bruising. Her broken leg was now bandaged and tied to a broken plank of wood to keep it still as the bones and muscles healed.

“You will not move your hips, nor attempt to rise,” the gruff, low voice of the stranger startled Ilya, as she hadn’t heard her heavy boots approaching. It was as if the large woman had simply materialized out of the walls of the gloomy room to scold her.

A now-familiar, rough hand firmly pushed Ilya’s shoulder back until she was again resting upon the pillow. The stranger turned away from her, and Ilya watched her back with interest as the other woman lumbered toward the hearth. She had terrible posture, with a craned neck and hunched shoulders in an effort to avoid hitting her head on the room’s low ceiling. Or, was the room regular size, and the stranger was simply a giant? It was hard for Ilya to judge, since she hadn’t yet been able to stand in the room herself to compare. The stranger collected the now-empty wooden bowl and reached for a worn iron pot that sat over the fire. It was like watching an ox trot through a palace – nothing about this woman fit in the world around her.

The stranger returned to her side with a fresh bowl of the simple soup from before, only now the vegetables were partially disintegrated from staying over the fire for so long. Ilya found this bizarre, but as the stranger offered a spoonful she hungrily accepted it into her mouth regardless. Ilya felt a bit ridiculous, being fed as if she were a babe, but the stranger did not seem to mind.

Neither spoke as Ilya ate as much as her small stomach would allow. It was bland, but the warmth of it radiated out from her stomach toward her limbs, and that was enough. The stranger stared at her throughout the meal, entirely unblinking. It felt like she wasn’t actually seeing Ilya so much as looking through her, motions automatic; as if she was listening to something far, far away. Eating under her intense gaze was eerie, but Ilya wasn’t going to point it out. So her savior was a bit strange? Ilya wasn’t in a position to be choosy.

The spoon scraped the last mouthful from the bottom of the bowl, and the sound surprised Ilya. She couldn’t remember the last time she had gotten to the bottom of a bowl of food. The other sisters had always chastised her for eating like a bird, but no matter how delicious a meal she could never force more than a few bites. She was too aware of her own body – once she felt food hit her stomach, she became repulsed by the idea of ingesting any more. The mortal frame was disgusting - an opinion she kept to herself, but it was a large reason why she had so looked forward to the day she would leave it behind to embrace an eternity in the Shadowkeep.

She must have been truly starving, then, to eat all of something so… mediocre.

Ilya caught the pompous thought and shook her head, embarrassed by something she hadn’t even said aloud. How could she be so full of herself, so haughty about the form her medicine took when she would surely have died if not for the selflessness of this woman?

I’ll just have to find a moment to cook her a truly splendid meal to thank her, Ilya thought to herself. The Sisterhood of Everfrost shared everything among the sisters - food, chores, pleasure, grief. She had learned to cook from a young age, and looked forward to showing this woman how to elevate her meals with only the addition of salt and a few easily harvested herbs.

The stranger stood and her heavy boots moved her toward the door from which she had first entered – out of view.

“W-wait!” Ilya didn’t want her to go – she had too many questions. The stranger’s amber eyes fell down to her own as she waited for Ilya to continue. Again with that intense staring. It unnerved her, now that she felt more energized by the meal.

“Why are you helping me, Lord?”

The stranger’s eyes sharpened at the title, and her brows knitted together in a scowl so intense it made Ilya’s mouth dry. It was like she was looking at a cornered animal ready to attack, even though Ilya was the one gravely injured and stuck in this bed.

“I am no Lord,” the stranger bit out, and then stomped out of the room. The door slammed shut, shaking in its frame, and Ilya was left alone to ponder the strangeness of the gods.