Chapter 1655 (2/2)

“The official stance of Military High Command is that Elhume won a decisive victory and the Nether King was wounded and forced to flee. For the moment, the Pinnacle Seekers have managed to keep from undercutting this propaganda. In addition, both the Engraving Guild and Military High Command groups that were present in that final crater were able to escape; so there is no public reason for these groups to fixate on the Pinnacle Seekers’ survival.” The Frost Matriarch gave Helen a long look. “But don’t let that fool you. My people are fickle. Soon they bring a needle to the orthodox factions’ balloon, if just for the pleasure of revealing their hypocrisy.

“And when that happens, they will want to have a PR distraction prepared. I would be very surprised if both groups weren’t taking this time to investigate Randidly Ghosthound more fully. They won’t realize how much culpability he had in our escape… at least at first. But perhaps they will soon receive word.”

“And the other thing? With Seeker Dusk Jackal?” Helen rubbed the back of her neck, wishing the numbing sensation wouldn’t keep spreading through her body. At this point, her neck had begun to tingle. The whole situation left her feeling rather powerless.

The Frost Matriarch chuckled after taking an offensively large swallow of the tingling tea. “The Dusk Jackal said that if the Ghosthound hasn’t recovered in eight days for their duel, he will just crack open his cocoon a little bit, to make sure nothing is wrong. In this case, I can do nothing for you, as it was a promise between the two of them that was made in front of witnesses. Pinnacle Seekers do not meddle in each other’s affairs casually.”

After a few more minutes of discussion regarding more of the mundane details of their stay in the base, the Frost Matriarch turned and walked away down the hall. Helen watched her go and waited for the noise of her footsteps to fade. Then she picked up the teacup and teapot that were sitting on the table and carried them to the edge of the haul. There, she dumped the mysterious ‘specialty tea’ onto the frozen tundra.

Feeling incredibly refreshed, Helen returned the tea set to the table and walked across to the hallway herself. She took several sharp turns to end up on the far wing of the compound, where she reached a rather plain-looking wooden door and opened it. Within, the cocooned Randidly continued to recuperate.

“You are so fucking ugly right now,” Helen muttered as she scanned the marred, maroon grey covering for any signs of change. There were none.

While he was sitting in the core of his Nether Ritual, it had been difficult to see Randidly’s movements. A shining halo of light covered his body, even as the radiance did nothing to cover the sickening cracks and tears of his flesh being repeatedly ruptured. When the light had faded, they found a nearly humanoid form on all fours that had been covered with a strange maroon substance. It looked like plaster and smelled like shit.

This heavy, mudlike goop was especially heavy around his back and waist so that his hunched formed seemed grotesquely large. Actually, all of Randidly seemed just a little bit too large with the strange material covering him; his arms seemed to bulge and his fingers seemed ungainly.

Helen had scratched off a bit of the substance liberally coating his body and realized to her disgust that it was just a dried mixture of blood, flesh, and bone that had spurted across all of his limbs as he received the wounds. In his current form, he seemed to lurk, sitting on his haunches.

Randidly was crouching, with his knuckles pressing into the ground while his hands curled into claws. His chest and back was covered in strange ridges of his dried blood, signaling that the material had dried, broken open, and then bled out to fill in those new spaces. The Ghosthound’s head hung forward, meaning that the details of his features melted into the maroon goop dried across his face.

Honestly, Helen decided that his features being obscured might be for the best. She could easily imagine his face both contorted into an agonized scowl or held ominously blank by the force of his Willpower. Both options would have made it difficult to do little else but focus on the pain that Randidly had endured to protect them, which would have triggered the sense of helplessness in her chest even further.

As it was, after checking to make sure that Randidly hadn’t moved and broken out of his bone/blood goop, Helen began to practice her Depths of Horror Domain. Her image had been powerfully shaken by the clash against Techetadore, but that experience had just strengthened her understanding of the Depths of Horror.

Over the past few days, she had been continually pushing herself deeper and deeper into her Domain to understand the secrets it held. For now, Helen continued to avoid the sonorous heartbeat that signified the core area, but she used that central signal to explore the far corners of the darkness. Sometimes she stumbled across twisted monsters in those hidden areas which forced her to engage in a battle with a mental demon. Other times, she would discover new currents of energy that would inspire a different method of utilizing her wicker lines.

Today, she thought she would-

Crack!

Helen paused in her introspection. Releasing a breath, she rapidly ascended from the depths. Once she had shaken off the lingering mental pressure she felt from her Domain, and noticed to her dismay that the tingling numbness from the tea had now spread to most of her torso, she shook herself and looked toward the crouching gargoyle Randidly.

Crack! Crack!

Thin lines had formed across the pointer finger of his right hand. When Helen looked closely at the appendage, it was clear that a slight tremor was running through it.

After two and a half days, Randidly Ghosthound was waking up.