The Chronicles of a Scalebound Sage: Wandmaker Vol.2

Interlude WM [103.5] A Soul Worth Taking Part 2

Ingrid's first sensation was cold. Not the cold of wind or snow, not the cold of Gladsheim. It was a chill that ran deep into her very core. It wrapped around her bones. It slipped beneath her skin. It was like the touch of a phantom.

The second sensation was pain. Her body burned as hot and as the moment the thunderbird struck her with its lightning. She didn't know where she was, if she was alive, if she was dead. She had no strength in her limbs and her eyes refused to open. She pulled for her magic but felt nothing, no mana within her core, no core at all.

The pain stopped but all that did was let her think unabated by distraction. She had hoped she lived a life worthy of the Forest Father and worthy of the Salstar name at least in death. It was a funny thing that in life all she wanted was to show that she could achieve what no other thought possible. She wanted to be a wendigo without reproach who would leave a legacy as grand as the Founding King of Yuhia.

As she ruminated on all that she had done she did not feel the glory. She felt tired, she felt alone in the darkness. Her mind longed for her family, Ulfar, Ragnar and Eira. They were the reason she tried so hard, and she knew one day she would leave this world to her children but it felt too soon. She left too many shadows behind, too many words unsaid.

Then she thought of Freja. The one she had alway assumed was a failure. The one that in life caused so much shame and so much bitterness. She had been wrong about her daughter, more wrong than she had been about anything else in her life. She was sure, without any doubt, that the demoness she had seen in the final days in Lavi was Freja.

Ingrid knew the moment she saw her anger filled eyes. The moment she felt her strange aura, that Freja had become a greater wendigo. Disowning her was the greatest sin she had committed to the Salstar name. Somewhere along the way Ingrid new she was destined to die because of that sin.

Another pain rocked her from the darkness. Her eyes flew open but she could not move. Her chest was open—actually open and she could see into herself. Flesh was peeled back in careful, surgical precision, ribs pried apart like the pages of a book. Tiny, metal-jointed arms extended from the ceiling above, working with eerie silent precision, their tips glowing faintly as they cut, sealed, and reconstructed.

She saw the mess that was her own organs shifting under their touch, some being knitted back together with threads of shimmering blue light, others like her still heart, were lifted free and taken away. She could not gasp her lungs were being reconstructed, she could not move her arms were also disabled. She could not speak as tubs were in her throat.

She saw the arms lower something into her chest where the heart had been. A thing of dark metal and pulsing veins, slick with some unknown essence, nestled into the vacant cavity. It beat, not just with rhythm, but with purpose, a cadence both alien and terrifyingly familiar. Magic? No. Not magic. This was something else, something beyond her understanding. The moment it settled within her it felt as if something was sinking its roots into her very being. It was not merely repairing her. It was remaking her.

Awe and horror fought within her as she tried to move, to cry out. Her lips parted, but no sound came. Her throat was raw, dry, incapable of speech. Her struggle seemed to catch someone's attention and they came into view. A man, no, not a man. A being. He stood among the machines, completely bare, as if clothing had never been a concept to him. His skin was dark, smooth, untouched by scars or age. His eyes glowed faintly, reflecting the light of the mechanical arms as they worked. He did not command them, yet they moved in perfect harmony with him, as if he and the machines were the same.

He looked human but Ingrid could tell he was not human. Something about him was otherworldly in a way a human could never be. Her breath hitched as he turned to her, his expression one of calm certainty. When he spoke, his voice was not sound alone—it was presence. It resonated through the sterile chamber, filling it with something far greater than mere words. The air itself seemed to hum with meaning.