The Forbidden Feast

The wood was five hundred years old and harder than steel, and it went between Gesbiek's teeth like bark on a young tree.

What came off it was not taste.

Copper first, which was the blood of everything the clan had ever killed, and it arrived not as a flavour but as a quantity: ten thousand deaths, catalogued, still in there. Then ash, which was the pyres of every clan the Red-Tooth had put down, and he could smell them. Underneath both, sound. Actual sound, held somehow in the structure of the wood, dying words and battle cries and one long high note that had been somebody's child.

Five centuries of a people, compressed and stored, and he was swallowing it in pieces without chewing.

Grolm landed behind him hard enough to crack the floor.

A hand closed on Gesbiek's shoulder and pulled, and every bit of 2-Red strength went into it.

Gesbiek's skin tore. His shoulder came out of its socket with a wet sound. Muscle separated from the bone it was attached to.

He did not let go.

His claws were four inches into the ironwood and hooked around the grain. His jaw was locked. Grolm was going to have to take the Totem with him or take Gesbiek apart, and Gesbiek had no strong preference between the two provided he kept swallowing.

Grolm let go of the shoulder and went for his belt, and came up with eight inches of jagged obsidian.

"Let go, mad dog."

He drove it down two-handed at the spine.

Gesbiek twisted, and it went through his left shoulder instead, through muscle, off bone, and out the other side into the wood.

Pinned to the Totem, like something mounted for study.

He shrieked into a mouthful of five hundred years and kept going.

* * * *

He wrenched his neck sideways and a fist-sized chunk of ironwood came away, fibrous and dripping red light, and underneath it the first of the five Red Shards sat exposed.

The heat off it was like an open oven. Grolm stepped back and put a forearm across his face without deciding to.

And then he saw where Gesbiek was looking, and his expression changed.

Every goblin alive knew what happened if you ate a Tier-5 core raw. It was not a rule anybody had needed to write down. The energy went into you faster than anything could process it and it cooked you from the inside, organs first, and there was nothing left afterwards that anybody would want to bury.

"You want death," Grolm said, and the relief in it was total. He lowered his guard and took another step back. "Good. Burn, then."

He had spent an hour failing to kill this creature. Now the creature was going to do it for him, out of despair, which was the only explanation available.

Gesbiek lunged forward against the dagger, tearing the wound wider, and closed his mouth over the shard.

It seared his tongue and the inside of his cheeks and he felt the skin of his lips go, and his body reported the damage as figures rather than pain, and he bit down.

CRACK.

The shard came apart like struck crystal and the fragments went into his gums and his throat, and what came out of it went down him like something molten.

[TIER-5 COMPONENT DETACHED FROM MATRIX]
[BINDING: DEGRADED, 4 OF 5 INTACT]
[INTAKE: 850,000]
[EXCEEDS SAFE ABSORPTION RATE BY 500%]
[HARDWARE FAILURE IMMINENT]

Gesbiek convulsed against the wood.

Light came out of his eyes and his mouth and from between his teeth, and out through his skin wherever it was thin.

He was not burning. He was processing, and the numbers in the corner of his vision had stopped counting and started running.

Level 82. 83. 84. 85.

Three rungs for a Tier-5 core, which was three more than the Chimera had paid and a very long way from a hundred, and somewhere under the convulsions he registered the shortfall with something close to professional irritation.

Prising one stone out of a matrix got you one stone. The binding had been the valuable part and he had just broken a fifth of it.

Across the chamber, Grolm's face came apart.

Not because of the light. Because of what he felt in his own chest, which was a lurch, and then a hollow, and then the sudden arrival of an hour of exhaustion that had been held off by something that had just stopped holding it off.

The tether from the Totem to his back flickered and thinned.

Every muscle he had began, for the first time in two winters, to report that it was tired.

"You," Grolm said, and his voice had gone somewhere strange. "You are stealing it."

Then he charged, without technique, without the axe, without any thought in him at all.

* * * *

He hit Gesbiek shoulder-first with the entire weight of a 2-Red body, and the impact tore claws out of wood and teeth out of the Totem and left the obsidian dagger standing in it like a marker.

Both of them went twenty feet and landed in the bone pile.

Grolm came down on top, straddling his chest, and did not reach for a weapon. He simply began.

CRACK. The right cheekbone.

CRACK. The left orbit, and half of Gesbiek's vision went out.

CRACK. The jaw came off its hinge.

"Spit it out," Grolm was screaming, and each word had a blow under it. His own knuckles had split open. "SPIT IT OUT."

He was not fighting any more. He was trying to reverse something, with his hands, physically, the way you shake a sack to get an object back out of it.

But it had gone in. It had been going in since the first swallow, and there was no arrangement of violence that could reach it.

Gesbiek could not move his arms. He could not see out of one eye. His ribs were giving way one at a time under a weight that was simply too great, and his vision had gone from red to black and back twice.

Somewhere behind all of it, very calm, a part of him was reading numbers.

[HP: 31%]
[HP: 22%]

He was aware, distantly, that this was the part where he died, and he found that he was less frightened of it than he had expected to be. He had been going to die in the Sludge Pits at a rate of about a week per week for five years. This was faster and it was in a more interesting room.

The count went past the thing he was waiting for.

[LEVEL 83]
[LEVEL 84]
[LEVEL 85]

Three at once.

A level restored a body. Gesbiek had known this since the Leaf Chicken, when the bruises had gone yellow and vanished while he lay in the ferns.

Three levels arriving together had more restoration in them than one body could hold, and the surplus went outward.

The pulse came off him as physical force.

Grolm was sitting on his chest with a fist raised when it hit, and it threw him twenty feet backward end over end through the bone debris and into a pillar hard enough to crack the stone.

Underneath, Gesbiek's skeleton reassembled itself.

It was not healing. Healing takes time and follows an order. This was a reset: the jaw finding its hinge with a wet click, the orbit reforming around an eye that had been crushed a second earlier, ribs expanding, the split in his forehead closing over.

[HP: 100% | MANA: 100%]
[LEVEL 85]

He sat up in the ash and the bone dust and the last five minutes had left no evidence on him at all.

* * * *

Grolm got to his feet across the chamber, breathing hard for the first time since Gesbiek had known him.

Gesbiek did not look at him.

He looked at the Totem, and at the four Red Shards still in it, and he ran.

Grolm dived for the axe and came up with it and threw.

It went past Gesbiek's head by inches as he leapt, and took his left leg off at the knee.

The lower leg fell away, hit the floor, and rolled.

Silver blood went up the ironwood in an arc.

Gesbiek did not stop, and he was aware while not stopping that he should have. Something had reordered the priorities in him and had put continuing above every other consideration, including the leg.

He climbed one-handed and one-legged, claws into wood, hauling himself up past the empty socket of the first shard and the burn where his mouth had been.

At the crown, four shards sat clustered together, and he understood what he was looking at.

Not four stones. The rest of the matrix. Four Tier-5 cores still bound to each other by whatever the old crafters had done, wound about with gold wire and seated in ironwood by hands nobody in this clan could have described, let alone copied.

He had broken one component off the bottom and been paid for one component.

The other four were still agreeing with each other.

So he put his face into the whole of it and bit blindly, and took the crystal and the wood and the wire and the ceremonial band together, and did not sort any of it, because sorting it was exactly the mistake.

[MATRIX CONSUMED WHOLE: BINDING INTACT]
[INTAKE: 24,150,000]
[HARDWARE LIMIT EXCEEDED BY 800%]
[CONTAINER BREACH IMMINENT]

And the five hundred years came in all at once.

The first shard had been a taste of it. This was the whole thing arriving in a body that had room for none of it: not memories, because they were not his and there was no one left to have owned them, but the raw stored fact of a people.

A raid in winter, and the smell of a granary burning. A chief before Grolm, and a chief before that, and eleven more behind them, each one standing at the foot of this pillar with a cut palm. Somebody's mother singing four notes over a fever that did not break. Ten thousand kills, and every one of them had taken a moment, and he was getting all the moments at once.

And under it, running the whole length of it, a hunger that was not his. Generations of goblins standing in front of this thing asking for rain and for meat and for their children to live, and every one of those requests going into the wood and staying there, because there had never been anything in it capable of answering.

The Totem went grey underneath him.

Five hundred years of accumulation left it in the space of a few seconds, the crimson bleeding out to ash colour from the crown downward, and the wood lost the thing that had been holding it together.

It cracked from base to top, and Gesbiek fell, and twenty feet of the most sacred object his people had ever possessed came down around him as grey powder.

He landed in a heap of it, coughing, glowing.

* * * *

Something in his chest was no longer spinning correctly.

[MANA DENSITY: 342% OF MAXIMUM]
[CONTAINER INTEGRITY: 23% AND FALLING]
[BIOLOGICAL STRUCTURE: FAILING]
[FORCED EVOLUTION: REQUIRED FOR SURVIVAL]

Gesbiek screamed, and the scream started as a goblin and finished as something else, sliding partway through into a flat electronic note that no throat had made.

His skin began to come off.

Not tearing. Burning, from underneath, incinerated by the heat of the thing in his chest, sheets of emerald flesh turning to ash and lifting away from him into the air.

From the far side of the chamber, holding his own ribs, Grolm watched it happen and started to laugh.

It was a wheezing, exhausted, deeply relieved sound.

"Greedy fool," he got out. "You ate the sun. Now you burn."

The fire went from red to orange, and from orange to white, and stopped being anything like fire.

The light around Gesbiek's dissolving body became geometric. It set into planes and angles, hard-edged, mathematical, and locked together around him panel by panel until he was inside a shell of it: twelve faces, twenty vertices, perfectly regular, made of nothing that had a name.

The floor started to vibrate at a frequency below hearing.

Gravity became a suggestion. Bone fragments and ash lifted off the ground an inch, settled, lifted again. The air over the chrysalis distorted like heat haze, except it was cold.

Grolm stopped laughing.

He backed away one step, and then another, because whatever instinct had kept him alive for fifty years had begun to make a noise he could not ignore.

Something in the chamber went ping.

It was a small, clean, entirely synthetic sound, and it did not belong in a cave.

Then text appeared in the air above the shell. Not in Gesbiek's vision. In the room, hanging in space, bright enough to read.

[LEVEL 97]
[LEVEL 98]
[LEVEL 99]

The chamber went completely silent.

[LEVEL 100]
[ASCENSION PROTOCOL: COMPLETE]
[PERMISSIONS: UNRESTRICTED]

A crack opened across one face of the chrysalis, and then across all of them, and light came out through the fractures.

A hand came out of the shell and took hold of the edge.

It was not green. It was not skin. It was polished silver, seamless at the joints, and it closed on the broken hard-light with the unhurried confidence of something that had all the time it required.