From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 92: Dark Keshnel

We broke camp at first light. With eight outposts built, the only direction left was back to Argent.

The walk toward the first outpost took two days. Thankfully we didn’t need to do any climbing or to fight any silver snakes.

Coco’s canteens did their job the whole way back.

We passed multiple Corruptors the last couple of days. Not fought, not fled from, just passed. The dark water handled everything, and the Corruptors moved through the canyons without registering our existence at all.

Wip had been really scared when she watched the first one.

Her entire body went rigid, muscles locked, ears flat, tail pressed tight against her back. She went so still I could feel her not breathing.

The Corruptor passed nearby, indifferent to everything in the world, and kept moving.

Wip exhaled, one tiny sound escaping her. "Wip." she murmured softly.

After the third one she stopped tensing up completely. She still watched them and went quiet, but her tail stayed loose and her ears only dropped halfway. She was learning the pattern the same way we had. They couldn’t see us, the canteens made sure of that.

On the fifth day Finn stopped walking.

He stood still with his eyes closed and his head slightly tilted. "It’s close." he said quietly. "We’re finally near Argent."

I looked ahead.

And there it was.

Argent’s barrier had its usual faint green shimmer, barely visible but completely unmistakable. The hum reached us a moment later, low and constant, a sound we had spent twenty years learning to ignore and were only now noticing clearly after weeks without it.

No one spoke.

We walked the rest of the distance without stopping.

Passing through the barrier was strange every time, a pressure that wasn’t quite physical. I stepped through and felt it tickle across my skin the way it usually did.

Then I heard it.

"Wip. Wip wip wip." the small voice called behind me.

I turned.

Wip stood outside the barrier, perfectly still with one paw lifted slightly as if she had tried to follow and stopped. She looked at me through the shimmer, ears up, tail low. "Wip wip wip." she called again, more insistently.

Of course.

I hadn’t thought about it. She wasn’t from Argent. The barrier had no reason to let her through.

I stepped back out and crouched beside her. She immediately pressed her head against my hand, saying wip wip wip in a softer, relieved tone as if she’d been worried I had just walked out of her life.

"I’m not going anywhere." I told her gently. "Just give me a second to figure this out."

I stood and looked at the others waiting inside. "Go find Rolen." I said. "He worked on the farms. He’ll know how the Ones moved passive mobs through the barrier."

"I’ll look for him, I wouldn’t feel well leaving Wip outside." Kira said.

What... So would she be fine if I stayed here? What had I done wrong?

After that the group disappeared into Argent, leaving me outside with Wip. She was already looking for something to do. A pebble near the barrier caught her attention and she began investigating it with intense concentration.

I took out my yo-yo and started running it while I practiced using the sense spell, feeling the rocks around us. Wip watched the yo-yo for a moment, then the rocks, and decided the rocks were more interesting.

We trained for what felt like a couple of hours.

Then footsteps approached and Kira returned through the barrier with Rolen.

"Hi Allaran." Rolen called, slightly out of breath like he had been walking fast.

Then he saw Wip.

He stopped.

He looked at Wip and something in his expression shifted into unfamiliar territory.

He crouched carefully and focused, the slight sharpening in his eyes telling me he had started using his ability to communicate. He held it for several seconds.

Nothing happened.

He tried again, the focus deepening.

Still nothing.

He straightened slowly and adjusted his glasses. "I can’t reach her at all." he said quietly, more to himself than to me. He looked down at Wip with deep confusion. "I’ve never encountered a passive mob I couldn’t communicate with. I’ve also never seen anything like her before. What did you say she was called."

"Wip." I answered.

"I meant the species." he clarified patiently.

"If you don’t know her species, then what do you expect from me?" I said. "I only know one bird species, and she’s definitely not a bird. Though she flies... wait. Is she a bird?"

He seemed confused about many things, but he continued regardless. "The procedure for bringing passive mobs through the barrier is a Ones matter. Most of us in the farms didn’t do it ourselves, we just received them afterward."

He then continued. "But I’ve learnt the method. You need to form a pact, you mark both yourself and the creature with a specific symbol using your own blood, something that looks like this."

He proceeded to show me a piece of paper where there was a sphere drawn with stars and an H through the center.

"The barrier then reads the bond and accepts the creature as yours."

I looked at my hand, then back at Rolen. "And that’s it?" I asked.

"That’s what I’ve read." he replied.

Simple enough.

I then used switch on a pebble, making small mental boxes around the pebble and removing sections from it until it became sharp. Then I pressed the tip against the pad of my index finger. The cut was shallow, blood flowed immediately against my calloused skin.

I drew the symbol on my chest. The sphere first, a rough circle of small dots, then the H through the center. It took longer than expected to draw freehand and looked uneven when I finished, but the shape was there.

Then I crouched beside Wip.

She watched calmly, completely focused, not afraid, just curious about what I was doing.

I drew the same symbol on her left back leg, carefully tracing the lines through her pale fur. She held perfectly still the entire time.

I finished the last stroke.

The light appeared before I could stand.

It began at the symbol on my chest, warmth spreading outward beneath my skin, and answered from Wip’s leg with the same deep gold glow. Both pulsed once in perfect unison. The air around us tightened briefly, then released.

Text appeared in my vision.

[You and the creature — Dark Keshnel have formed a Soul Pact.]

[Name your familiar.]

I read the first line again.

Dark Keshnel.

Wip was busy examining the glowing symbol on her leg, tilting her head at it the way she studied unusual rocks.

"Dark what." I muttered flatly.