I woke up in darkness. This time, I was fully aware of the crushing cold and the pain that was wracking every part of my body. I could feel the frozen, crumpled metal of my suit as searing fire against my flesh, and I could barely take a breath. It felt like the air would claw open my lungs from within, ripping through me with talons of ice. But I wasn't dead. Ravanur hadn't been lying. I wasn't actually dead- and whatever she had done to me was keeping me that way for the moment. However, it wouldn't last forever. Though she was a god, albeit a dead one, she had said that her powers were limited at the scale that mortals like me operated within. She couldn't make me do anything, and she couldn't stop the planet's ferocious cold from killing me permanently. As she explained it, her powers were an order of magnitude greater than my petty needs. She could affect the movement of the local planets and moons, and could hide Chalice's true nature from outside observation. She could even bring forth an apocalyptic level of destruction to destroy any large fleet that dared threaten the security of her secret prison for deities. But against the actions of individual beings, people like me- or Barbas- she was limited to the use of empowered agents. And she intended me to be one such agent if I survived.

I scrambled free of my suit, gritting my teeth and closing my mind against the horrible pain of my wounds. I immediately began scouring the frozen bodies that lay all around me, trying to ignore their glassy vacant stares. Most of them were Erinye, like Volistad, though some showed the more feral features displayed by Ravanur. Perhaps those were older? Other bodies weren’t human at all, from something that looked like a shaggy, eight-legged horse to a colossal beast that looked like nothing so much as a monstrous hermit crab whose home was a hollowed out boulder. The whole menagerie, man and beast, were dead- and they showed no wounds. I couldn’t guess what killed them all. There was no bruising, no discoloration, just death- like they were used up soda bottles, casually tossed aside by an uncaring giant when he had finished with them. Except for the cold, and the place where Barbas’ nanite storm had eaten some of them to make his own body, they could all have been sleeping.

Remembering Ravanur's instructions, I searched frantically through the pile of frozen corpses, each one of them a minor Herculean task to move. Most of the humanoids had been dressed in the clothes they had died in, and I quickly identified one dressed as Volistad had been. The dead ranger wore assorted furs wrapped tight around his frozen corpse, and he bore a variety of weapons and tools all about his person. I heaved the dead ranger out of the pile, and quickly stripped him of his furs, looking for the one object Ravanur had told me I needed to seek. I found it fairly easily, in the form of a heavy black torque, an ornate band meant to be worn about the upper arm. It had clearly been fashioned from the scavenged remains of some other machine, and I could see some of the ancient circuitry cunningly woven into the new design, and what looked like thermal conduction coils disguised behind little medallions of silver. All in all, it was a beautiful piece of art- but it was completely inert. Whatever power it might once have had, that energy was gone - unless I did exactly as the "Great Mother" had told me.

I lifted the black band high over my head and turned my eyes away from it, preparing for what I knew would be exceedingly painful. I felt static building in the air, lifting the preserved hair of the thousands of dead piled around me into the air in a crackling halo. The air thickened around me, and even my frozen sinuses detected the acrid stink of ozone as the whole space around me became charged with hidden electrical potential. "I can only do this for you once," Ravanur had said. "The bodies all still have tiny sparks of bioelectricity contained in their brains. Not nearly enough for cognition, but enough, in the aggregate, to charge one of that old goat's devices." I didn't know who ‘that old goat' was, but I figured that being on a nickname basis with a god, was probably more a curse than it was a blessing. Ironically, that was the situation in which I was now trapped. "Hold that trinket high, my little lightning bug." I stretched as far as I could, and held the torque high above my head, squeezing my eyes shut in preparation for…

PAIN. All I could hear was a dial tone from an old wired phone. All I could see were random patterns and spots dancing in my vision. But I could feel… EVERYTHING. A hundred-thousand frozen moments in time, indistinct flashes of sensation and emotion from thousands of suddenly shortened lives- it all surged through me, through my veins, through my heart, through my mind, and my sense of self was wiped away before the flood. I screamed as a thousand vicious pains stabbed, burned, crushed and shot their way through my body. I fell to my knees as a thousand tiny fragments of pleasure lit up my nervous system and left me shaky and weak. A kaleidoscope of moments flashed through me, riding the burning current of lightning from the bodies below, coiling up through my body and spiraling up my arm toward my spasmodic grip on the black torque. I blacked out where I was kneeling, for just a few seconds. And then it was over. I looked down at the results of the ordeal, praying to whichever god that could hear me for Ravanur to have come through for me.

In my hand lay a black metal torque, woven with wire and engraved with a hundred subtle symbols, each of them precisely fashioned. The bauble seemed much the same as it had been, though now it hummed with quiet, threatening power. All of that energy had been channeled through me into the device like it was a battery. As I slipped the metal band onto my arm and pushed it up toward my shoulder, I noted how tight it was against the muscle. Good. The suit had done its job all these months, and it had kept my muscles free of atrophy. I looked down at the band against my skin, and I frowned. All runes scrawled around it, glowed a faint blue, and I noticed with a start that I couldn't feel the cold - not entirely, anyway. I knew it was cold, and my skin confirmed that knowledge. But I no longer hurt from the cold, and I could breathe easily. I was alive. I would live- for now. I didn't know how long this device would last, and if I didn't get to the next step of Ravanur's plan before it ran out again, there would not be another "convenient" mass grave for me to use as a static charger.

Hurriedly, I pulled on the dead ranger's fur, bending and placing a palm against his hard, frozen chest and saying a silent thank you. Then I rose and made my way over to the wreck of my suit to find the key to this whole thing. I didn't know why I needed it, but Ravanur had been very insistent. I would need the heart of a burug. Fortunately, the strange black heart I had lifted from the puddle of liquefied burug was still intact and undamaged. I wasn't sure what could damage it, since I had fallen onto the thing, and my armored weight hadn’t even scratched it. I didn’t have time to ponder its strange properties, however. I had a very long way to go. I stowed the heart in the pack I took from the ranger, hefted one of his spike-headed climbing axes, and set off into the darkness. I didn’t know where Barbas had gone, but that would have to wait. He had become something of a god himself- or at least he had been consumed by one. If I wanted to defeat what remained of him- I would need to earn my own divinity first.