The Twin Suns

Grolm did not dodge.

He raised his left hand, the one still holding a piece of raw Ogre, and took Gesbiek out of the air by the throat.

Everything stopped at once. All the momentum of a Level 82 body crossing thirty feet went into that grip and did not come out anywhere, and Gesbiek hung there with his feet off the ground and his claws working uselessly at a forearm that felt like reinforced leather.

He got the tips in. They went nowhere. The skin closed back over the scratches while he watched.

Grolm's fingers tightened, and Gesbiek's air supply ended.

The Chief turned his head, unhurried, and finished chewing what was in his mouth before he said anything, which Gesbiek recognised as deliberate.

"I smelled you, Runt."

The voice was deeper than it had been two years ago. It came up through the hand and into Gesbiek's jaw.

"You smell of the woods. Pine, and wet earth."

A pause.

"And fear."

He did not throw him. He carried him over to the brazier and held him up in the light instead, turning him slightly, the way you inspect a cut of meat you have not seen before.

"You found food," Grolm rumbled, and there was something almost like approval in it. "You grew. You hardened. You stopped looking like a worm."

His grip closed further.

"And you decided that being bigger meant you could walk into my mountain."

He laughed, and Gesbiek felt it through his neck.

"You are still meat, nephew. Better meat than you were. Worth eating instead of throwing away."

The word went through Gesbiek sideways, because it was the answer to the question he had carried east for two years.

Worth eating. Not cursed. Not the Old Rot, not a sickness in the blood, not any of the things Grolm had said out loud in a hall full of Lieutenants with his claw wiped twice down his loincloth.

He had not spared a runt out of superstition. He had declined a scrap he did not fancy the taste of, in front of an audience, and had dressed the declining in prophecy because a chief who says not hungry is a chief and a chief who says cursed is a prophet.

Two years of walking around the strangest thing that had ever happened to him, and it had been a man refusing a small meal and inventing a reason afterward.

Gesbiek would have laughed if there had been any air in him.

Another squeeze.

"Meat all the same."

Nephew.

The word went in through the fog at the edges of Gesbiek's vision and lodged there. Nobody had ever told him. The clan had not tracked Grey lineage, because there had been no reason to track something that was not going to amount to anything.

Grolm brought him closer, and looked at his eyes properly for the first time, and something in his face changed.

"You have his eyes," he said, and it came out of him like something spat. "Your father's eyes. Always looking at me as though he were the better animal. The noble one. The one who would save us all with peace and long thinking."

The grip tightened again and the room began to narrow.

"Clan unity. Sustainable growth. Feed the weak now and they will work for you later." Grolm's voice went up into a mockery of somebody else's, and dropped again. "Soft. And dead."

He leaned in, and his breath was blood and rot.

"Do you think the humans killed him?"

Gesbiek could not have answered if he had wanted to.

"Hah. The humans were running. We had them. We were taking their grain." Grolm's voice dropped to something almost conversational, a secret finally getting an audience after seven years of not having one. "It was my knife that found his ribs. Between the fourth and the fifth. From behind, in the middle of it, while everything was noise."

His eyes went distant with the pleasure of the memory.

"He turned around. He looked at me with those eyes. He said, brother. He said, why."

Grolm grinned.

"I told him. Because you are weak, and the weak are culled. And then he lay in the mud and drowned in himself, still believing every word he had ever said."

He shook Gesbiek slightly, the way you shake something to settle it.

"And now I cull the son."

* * * *

The information went into Gesbiek somewhere below the place where thinking happened.

He had almost nothing of his father. A shape in a doorway. A hand on the back of his head, once, briefly. A gap where a person should have been, which the clan had filled in for him with a story about a raid.

Murdered by his own brother, in the middle of a battle they were winning, for the crime of wanting the clan fed.

Something came up in Gesbiek's chest that had grief in it and a great deal else besides, and his Silver Core flared, and data crackled in the air around him.

Grolm flicked his wrist.

It was not a throw. It was the motion a goblin makes to get something off his hand.

Gesbiek crossed thirty feet of Throne Room, went through a heavy oak weapon rack that came apart like kindling, and hit the wall behind it.

CRACK.

[HP: 92%]
[RIB STRESS: MODERATE]

Eighty-two levels of Vitality kept his spine in one piece. It did not keep any air in him.

He got up on one elbow and shook his head clear, and something about the arithmetic refused to sit down.

One Red was two full tiers above him. That was a gap, and he had expected a gap. It was not enough to throw a Level 82 body across a room without effort, like a goblin discarding a bone.

The numbers were wrong somewhere.

Grolm pulled the fur cloak off his shoulders and let it drop.

And Gesbiek saw where.

* * * *

There was a Red Shard in the centre of Grolm's chest, burning the way it always had.

There was a second one beside it.

They sat side by side, evenly spaced, and they pulsed together in a rhythm that was not one beat but two.

Thump-THUMP.

Thump-THUMP.

The brazier flames leaned in time with it. Behind the Warlord, the twin lights threw two shadows up the wall, overlapping and separating with each beat, so that the shape on the stone was larger than the goblin making it.

Grolm had not levelled.

When a body takes in more than a single core can hold, and keeps taking it in, and does not die, it does the only thing available to it. It builds another one.

He was carrying two engines.

[HIGH-CHIEF GROLM]
[RANK: 2-RED]
[THREAT: ????????]
[STR: S | DUR: S | AGI: A | VIT: S | INT: D]
[TRAIT: TWIN CORE (GROWN)]
[EFFECT: ALL PHYSICAL STATS +100%]

Two tiers of gap, and then everything physical about him doubled on top of it.

Gesbiek, at 82, was roughly a high 1-Orange. He was looking at something two full evolutionary steps above that, and the steps were not additions. He had learned that watching a wolf pack from a tree, a very long time ago, when three lights had been the worst thing in the world.

He had walked into this under-levelled, under-prepared, and under-informed, which was three separate errors and he had made all of them in one evening.

Zog would have had a great deal to say about attacking relatives with two red stars burning in their chest. Most of it would have been about the counting.

* * * *

Gesbiek got up anyway, because grief was doing his thinking for him, and screamed something that had no words in it at all.

He came off the wall at full Agility, a green blur across the stone, and put his claws into Grolm's stomach where the twin shards sat.

CLANG.

Sparks came off the impact.

No blood. No cut. Not a mark.

The shock came back up his arm and rattled every joint in it, and his own claws came away split.

[ATTACK FAILED | DAMAGE: 0]
[REASON: INSUFFICIENT PENETRATION]

Grolm had no barrier and no armour. He had simply eaten enough, for long enough, that his skin had stopped being a thing that could be opened by anything smaller than himself.

Gesbiek fired every muscle he had and threw himself backwards out of range, faster than any goblin had ever moved in this room, leaving an afterimage of himself in the blue light.

Grolm did not chase him.

He arrived.

One moment the Warlord was standing where he had been. The next he was inside Gesbiek's guard with a sound like air being displaced by something that had not travelled through it politely.

The backhand came across before Gesbiek's eyes had finished tracking the start of it.

It felt like being struck by something designed for gates.

He went across the floor a second time, through debris, and came to rest against the base of a pillar, coughing copper.

[RIB FRACTURE DETECTED]
[HP: 78%]

* * * *

From down there, he could see past Grolm to the back of the room, and that was when he noticed the tether.

A line of red energy ran from the Ancestral Totem to the Warlord's back, and it pulsed on the Totem's rhythm.

It was not healing him. His health had not moved, because nothing had touched it.

Gesbiek watched Grolm's Strength readout climb in real time.

[BUFF: ANCESTRAL RAGE]
[PHYSICAL DAMAGE +300%]
[DURATION: UNLIMITED (PROXIMITY)]

Five Red Shards, sitting in a pillar of ironwood that his people had venerated for generations, pouring raw aggression into the goblin standing in front of it.

The clan had prayed to that thing. Gesbiek had watched them do it as a child, from the edge of the crowd, from behind other people's legs.

It was a battery, and Grolm had built his throne room around the socket.

Every time it pulsed, the veins came up thicker along the Warlord's arms.

If one full swing landed while that was running, there would not be a body to bury.

Grolm collected his axe from beside the throne, three feet of blade on a reinforced ironwood haft, and swung it once, lazily, one-handed, testing the balance of a weapon he had used a thousand times. Showing off, to an audience of one, because nothing in this room could make him hurry.

He saw where Gesbiek was looking.

"You wonder where the second heart came from."

He tapped his chest and both shards flared.

"I did not sit still while you hid in the trees. The Lieutenants came for me. Three of them, over two winters." He gestured at the half-eaten carcass on the table. "I ate what they were made of. All of it."

The pride in his voice was not performance. It was the deepest thing in him.

"Eat to grow. Fight to harden. Kill to evolve. That is what our blood says, and it has never once been wrong." He struck his own chest with a fist. "I filled my heart until it could not hold what I put in it. My body was tearing. So my body made another one. That is what strength does, nephew. It makes room for itself."

Gesbiek, spitting blood onto Grolm's floor, could see the shape of it and found it genuinely elegant. Eat until your body has to build somewhere to put the surplus. Not subtle. Not complicated. A river flooding until it cuts itself a second channel.

Rivers did not usually eat their own tributaries. That part was Grolm's own contribution.

Grolm kicked a lever at the base of the throne.

An iron grate came down over the tunnel mouth with a crash that went round the whole cavern, and the chains rattled through their housings and locked.

"No running to the woods," he said. "Not this time."

He hefted the axe, and the Rage buff pulsed, and his shoulders swelled.

"We eat here. You are what is being eaten."

* * * *

Gesbiek looked at his hands. His claws were split from a strike that had done nothing.

He looked at the grate. Sealed.

He looked at the Totem, and at the enormous red thing standing between him and it.

[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 0.00%]

The old feeling came up through him from underneath, the one from the Sludge Pits, the boot on his back and the trench and the arithmetic of a creature that cannot win and cannot leave.

Small. Weak. Prey.

Grolm raised the axe for an overhead swing, and both shards went blinding, and the Rage flared along his arms.

"I killed the father," he roared, with something in his face that was very close to joy. "Now I erase the son."

The axe started down.

Everything Gesbiek knew about the world said he was about to stop existing. The strength was greater, the durability was absolute, the exit was sealed, and the numbers had been checked twice by a System that did not flatter anybody.

All of that was true inside the rules.

Gesbiek had spent two years learning that the rules were a thing somebody had written, and that written things have gaps in them, and that he could see the gaps.

[MANA: 73%]

He could not cut Grolm. He could not outrun him. He could not out-eat him.

He might be able to stop him.

The fear went out of Gesbiek all at once and left behind something flat and cold and extremely clear, and he opened a menu that nothing else in this mountain could see.

The axe was three feet from his skull.

Two.

"I am not playing your game any more, uncle," Gesbiek said.

One.

[FREEZE: EXECUTE]