Wolfram sat at his desk, inspecting the reports that his servants and guards put together, which was something he had started getting them to do shortly after Heller began meeting with Wolfram’s murderous sister, Jesvae. It was all pretty standard fare, but he had made it a policy to reward anyone whose reports led to a discovery, and it happened more frequently than Wolfram would have thought.

There were plots within plots in The City, with every noble having their own angle and interest, or so it seemed, when it came to the power dynamics between the four Great Houses. Wolfram didn’t go through all this data personally, of course – he used his system. Every report was scanned and uploaded, then put in a database that he could use to search, compare, and compile. After all, wasn’t data management one of the original uses of computers in the first place?

He was just in the midst of making a note to ask some follow-up questions regarding one of the reports when his soul started to itch.

Wait… what? Wolfram thought to himself, my soul is not supposed to be able to ‘itch’…

The itch soon turned into something worse, almost a pain, and Wolfram decided that he had better log into his system and see if he could figure out what was going on.

After logging on, a whole host of warning messages started going off, one after another, and all of them were regarding Heller. Wolfram had been pretty busy recently, and hadn’t had a chance to go through the ‘soul-link log’ in the last half-day or so. He had been trying to work on a way to make communication between himself and Heller smoother, maybe even real-time, over the last few years, but whatever the Celestial had done to their souls, it was WAY too high level for Wolfram to be able to manipulate or figure out how it worked.

Communication over a distance was possible, especially with Wolfram’s programmed spells, but there wasn’t anything he could do to set it up permanently because of how different his cultivation method was from Heller’s. In fact, Wolfram could set up long-distance communication with almost anyone else much easier, since Heller’s cultivation seemed to passively resist his own (and vice versa) to some degree.

Wolfram first dived into the messages, and it started off with a bunch of warnings from Heller that there was something really bad going down, and that the Merrik had shown up with dire warnings.

Then the messages changed, and he quickly figured out that one of Heller’s copies had been chosen to sacrifice itself, or something, so that the other would have a chance to survive. From this point on, he was only receiving very periodic updates from the Heller that had gone into the mountains.

…

…

Attached was an image of a gigantic bird made of ice, which was carrying what was obviously the metal form of Wulfric. The scene was desolate, a wind-swept valley that was chocked with ice and snow, and gigantic mountain peaks, vanishing upwards into the hazy sky above, surrounding the two figures in every direction.

It looked like Heller, in ice form, had grown wings and was trying to carry Wulfric through the lowest part of the mountains, but even those were up high enough that everything was permanently frozen.

Then suddenly, without warning, a gigantic tentacle exploded out of the valley floor below them, followed by another… and then another… They were each longer than a dozen houses, thicker than an anvil, and they moved with a speed that would put even Tetra to shame.

The first tentacle whipped through the forms of Heller and Wulfric, shattering Heller’s icy body and sending Wulfric’s form careening into the side of a mountain.

Heller’s body of ice started to reassemble itself, but before it could finish it was scooped up by another tentacle, and for the first time they really came into focus. The tentacles were nearly translucent, and they were covered with what looked like hair from a distance, but when the tentacle started to wrap around Heller all of the ‘hairs’ started to twine around him as well, holding him firmly in place.

Heller struggled futilely, his strength nowhere near that of the appendage ensnaring him, and in the distance a different tentacle could be seen digging into the rubble of ice and stone where Wulfric had landed.

After getting his wits about him, Heller turned into his incorporeal form, and as a swirling cloud of ice and snow he finally managed to escape the grasp of the tentacle… but not without leaving plenty of himself behind, caught firmly by the prehensile hairs as he flew out of the creatures grasp.

Heller’s ice cloud started to fly towards the area were Wulfric had landed, but before he could get even halfway there another tentacle slammed through the cloud of snow that was his body, dispersing it and actually managing to entangle even more of his snow form as it passed through him.

The scene went fuzzy after Heller’s body was dispersed, and it took him a few moments to reorient himself… but by that time Wulfric was gone, and there were even more tentacles waving frantically around the valley, capturing more and more of his now very thinly spread out body as they passed through him again and again.

Left with no choice, and feeling weaker by the second, Heller flew further and further upwards into the sky, until he was far out of reach of even the longest tentacle.

Wolfram was shocked to the core watching this scene, but what happened next was by far the worst.

One by one, each of the tentacles withdrew back into the valley, but not before working together to hide the rubble, smooth the snow, and remove nearly every trace that such a brief but deadly encounter had taken place there.

Then they were gone, as was Wulfric, and the valley once again a pristine frozen wasteland of snow and ice.

…

And that was the end of the last message.

Wolfram checked the log and could see that the final message was only sent a few minutes ago, but he was getting more and more distracted by the growing itch, so he turned his attention to the warning messages.

[Soul-Link Self Destruct Activated – Warning, an unknown force is trying to break into your soul-link. Please press the red button to cancel Self Destruct and instead detonate the compromised soul-fragment.]

Things were just going from bad to worse, and Wolfram was only mildly surprised to see a red flashing button marked ‘self destruct’ appear right in the center of the console he used to interact with his programming-based ‘Celestial’ cultivation technique.

Detonate the compromised…

Wolfram quickly ran a query on his cultivation technique, and found that the compromised ‘soul fragment’ was estimated, with 98% accuracy, to be the Heller that had headed into the mountains.

So… was the tentacle thing trying to infiltrate the soul-link? Or was it something else… maybe the threat that the Merrik warned Heller about?

Wolfram started cursing in his mind, but the ‘CCEO’ who had gifted them with the soul-link (and the Celestial Cultivation Technique) had never led him wrong…

Plus… the lure of red buttons… was strong…

Awww F*** it, Wolfram thought to himself, reaching down to press the button.

***

Jesvae stood over the prone form of Heller, who had just gone limp and fainted mid-sentence while speaking with her, and she was just drawing her swords when she saw a bright flash that lit up the dark evening skyline over the mountains.

She looked in that direction quizzically, wondering if this had anything to do with Heller’s other self, who had gone that way (she assumed – the Merrik moved much too fast for her to follow) only a few hours ago. The light was bright, but not so painful to look at as the sun itself, and then after a few seconds it faded.

“What the spirits…” Jesvae mutter to herself, looking between the ‘Tetra Tree’ and Heller. She sheathed her swords after detecting immediate threats, and bent down to check if Heller was still alive.

Jesvae let out a slight sigh of relief when she detected his slow and steady breathing, and was about to pick him up when the world suddenly jumped under her feet, throwing her to the ground next to Heller, and then kept on shaking as she fought to try and regain her balance.

The shaking stopped almost as quickly as it began, and as Jesvae stood up she felt… something… shifting in the world around her, but she couldn’t quite identify what it was.

And then she saw the avalanches… from every mountain she could see, in every direction…