Chapter 3: The Bone Forge The small coastal vessel pitched awkwardly against the rising chop of the Bering Sea. Dmitri stood on the deck, the cold gnawing at his bones through his heavy uniform coat, focusing on the dark coastline to the north. Grigory’s assessment was correct. He was here because he had no other options, not because of trust or shared purpose. He tried to frame the expedition as a scientific endeavor, holding onto the remnants of his Geographical Society mandate. *Documentation of the coastal architecture. Ethnographic notes on local transport methods.* These thoughts were like brittle ice against the heat of the underlying reality. Grigory Volkov worked with the captain near the stern, securing equipment against the increasing movement of the water. He was a creature of this harsh environment, his body moving with an economy of effort Dmitri lacked. Dmitri decided to address the Cossack with the cold professionalism he would have used in St. Petersburg. “We should establish protocols for documentation,” Dmitri said, moving closer to where Grigory was checking the ropes on a lashed-down sled. “Specifically, latitude readings every four hours during the sea journey, and detailed mapping once we transition to land.” Grigory straightened up, not looking at him. “You can write down what you like, Petrov. The spirits don’t care about latitude. The paperwork is for the dead city.” Dmitri bristled at the dismissal. “The Society requires accuracy. If this voyage is to have any scientific merit—” “It won’t,” Grigory interrupted, finally meeting his gaze. “The scientific merit of this endeavor ended when you saw a vision of masked men replacing your heart. Everything now is myth, ritual, and survival. Try to keep up with the new reality the spirits have forced upon you.” The whispers immediately responded to Grigory’s words. They intensified, not just in volume, but in spatial orientation. They were no longer located remotely at the edge of hearing; they originated directly behind his left ear, sharp and metallic. Dmitri rotated his head slightly, unconsciously trying to evade the nonexistent speaker. He ignored Grigory. He walked back to his trunk, retrieved his logbook and a pencil, and began charting the coordinates he estimated they were currently sailing, marking the speed of the vessel based on the engine’s vibration. The act of recording facts was a resistance, forcing order onto a chaotic new existence. For the first two days, this pretense held. Dmitri performed his scientific duties with meticulous discipline. He documented the passing headlands, noted the weather conditions, and kept a clinical record of the ship’s progress. He refused to engage Grigory in conversation that strayed from logistics, and most importantly, he refused to acknowledge the voices. Whenever the whispers grew too loud, he would focus intensely on the rhythm of the ship’s engine or the specific pattern of rust on the deck plates. The spirits did not appreciate the refusal. On the second night, resting in the cramped, humid cabin below deck, the internal pressure began to build. Dmitri was dreaming—not the ecstatic visions of his initiation, but a mundane, bureaucratic dream about misfiled documents in a St. Petersburg archive. The dream shattered abruptly. He was no longer in the cabin. He stood naked on a flat expanse of black bone. Above him, the sky was a swirling vortex of incandescent blue energy that burned without heat. The air roared with the combined voices he’d been attempting to ignore. They weren't speaking words anymore; they were singing a cosmological blueprint, an explanation of the universe that bypassed language. Then the geometry shifted. The bone beneath his feet began to climb and rearrange itself. He recognized the shape immediately: the massive jawbones and ribs of Whales, arranged in monumental arches. He was standing within the Whale Bone Alley, but the Alley was alive, still in the process of construction. Dmitri’s subjective experience of his body returned with startling violence. The vision wasn't external; it was internal and anatomical. The voices screamed a single, unified sound, and the pain began. It started in his hands, sharp and deep, radiating through the nerves before bypassing them entirely. He *saw* his flesh dissolving, peeling away like wet paper. His muscles vaporized. He watched as the spirits—the masked figures from his fever—moved around his skeletal structure, detached but impossibly close. This was the vision of dismemberment. The old self dying, stripped down to component parts. They were working quickly, ignoring his silent agony. One figure, taller than the others, gripped his exposed femur. It wasn't carving; it was boiling. His bones pulsed with heat, turning soft and pliable like wax within the spirit’s grasp. He heard the roar of a forge, though the figures carried no physical tools. The ancestral spirits were present as well, shadowy figures clothed in skins and furs that absorbed the light from the sky vortex. They observed the process without intervening. Then came the reconstruction. The masked figures began to replace sections. His right tibia was removed entirely and swapped with something crystalline and glowing, a splinter of concentrated starlight shaped like a leg bone. When it locked into place, the sensation was electric, a current of cosmic energy rushing through the leg where his marrow should have been. They worked their way through his torso. His ribs were reinforced with bands of iron that clanged as they connected. He saw the new heart, the modified organ Grigory had heard, pulsing an irregular green light in the void where his lungs hung like shreds of memory. The final piece was his skull. A figure pressed a small, dark stone into the frontal lobe of his brain. The stone, obsidian black and impossibly cold, brought instantaneous clarity. He understood the ritual: they were fixing the spiritual tools into his physical body, making the transformation irreversible. The vision snapped off like a broken wire. Dmitri was instantly back in the oppressive darkness of the narrow cabin. He gasped, a dry, rattling sound. He was drenched in sweat, but the sweat felt freezing cold and metallic, as if his internal temperature regulation had been permanently broken. He didn’t move. He lay rigid, listening to the regular pitch and roll of the vessel, focusing determinedly on the smell of diesel and stale bread. The metallic whispers were now deeply embedded inside his skull, no longer localized, but radiating from the crystal bone in his leg and the obsidian stone in his brain. *You will accept the new organs.* He swallowed the dryness in his throat and reached his hand to the wall. He needed anchor points. He needed objective reality. He was Dmitri Petrov, explorer, scientist, survivor. Not a shaman. He spent the third day staggering around the deck, pretending the incident had not occurred. He documented cloud formations—altostratus rapidly transitioning to nimbostratus, indicating a coastal storm approaching. This professional facade was exhausting to maintain. Grigory watched him from a distance but offered no commentary. The Cossack spent his time sharpening knives and checking the harness leather for the dogs they would acquire further north. He was patient and waiting. The fourth day brought the storm. The coastal vessel was small, and the rough seas forced the captain to reduce speed drastically. The wind howled through the rigging, tearing at Dmitri’s resolve. Dmitri stood near the bow, trying to keep his footing, when the second vision hit him, catalyzed by the violence of the natural world. It was immediate and overlapping. The wooden deck beneath his boots dissolved, replaced by the cross-section of a massive tree trunk. The tree was impossibly large, its bark spiraling upward through an infinite number of sky layers. The World Tree. The Axis Mundi. The coastal vessel wasn't moving across the sea; it was moving *on* the World Tree, suspended precariously between the root systems of the Lower World and the branching canopy of the Upper. The reality of the tree was so immense that it crushed his attempt at rational thought. Then the spirits showed him the danger. The Cossack's actions weren't just selfish; they risked the entire cosmic structure. Grigory stood at the rudder, but in the vision, he was a dark shape holding a massive, blunt axe aimed directly at the central trunk of the World Tree. *The balance is necessary. The sealing must hold.* As Grigory swung the axe—not in reality, but in the terrifying, immediate parallel vision—the tree split along a central vertical fault line, releasing a blinding, frozen light from the rift. The tear propagated instantly. Dmitri watched, paralyzed, as the fissure raced through the deck, splitting the coastal vessel longitudinally. The captain and the two deck hands were severed without a sound. The masked figures stood along the edge of the rent, chanting. They waved bone rattles, calling up enormous animal spirits from the sea. A bear, enormous and skeletal, rose from the freezing water, its eyes glowing with predatory awareness. A spectral eagle circled overhead, its wingspan eclipsing the storm clouds. These were animal guides, the protectors who taught the initiate to traverse the worlds. The animal spirits fixed their attention not on Dmitri, but on Grigory. They seemed to be debating the Cossack’s intent, treating him as a dangerous variable within the cosmic mechanism. Then the masked figures turned their attention to Dmitri himself. He watched the crew members transform, their skin stretching tight across their faces, eyes dissolving into empty sockets, their normal clothing replaced by ritual hides. They were now the instruments of the spirit guides, observing his reaction. *You must choose the path. The axe will sever the root of the middle world.* Dmitri needed to move, to speak, to stop Grigory—the actual Cossack standing ten feet away—but the vision had locked his physical body. The strain of maintaining his human form against the vision was too strong. The crystalline bone in his leg began to hum, vibrating violently, threatening to shatter. The obsidian stone in his head pulsed, broadcasting alien signals that scrambled his sense of balance and location. He collapsed. He didn't fall onto the real deck; he fell into the crack in the World Tree. The sound of his impact was muffled by the wind and the crashing waves. Grigory was immediately at his side, dropping the piece of rope he’d been coiling. “Petrov! What happened?” Dmitri couldn't answer. He was lost in the cold, frozen light emanating from the cosmic rift. The fall felt endless, a descent through layers of frozen time. When Grigory grabbed his shoulder, the contact dragged Dmitri partially back to the physical world, but the visions did not cease. They simply merged, overlaying the mundane reality. Grigory’s face was now a swirling tapestry of human flesh overlaid with the bone mask. The eyes were too large, too empty. Dmitri saw the spectral eagle perched on Grigory’s shoulder, observing him with cold intelligence. The intensity of the vision broke the last of Dmitri’s physical reserves. His mind screamed a rejection of the spirits’ forced indoctrination, a final, futile attempt at resistance. The effect was instantaneous and disastrous. The energy of the vision, rejected by his conscious mind, rebounded inward like a lightning strike. He slid into a deep, shaking spasm. His hands curled into tight claws, and his teeth clamped down, tearing the inside of his cheek. The cabin boy, standing near the wheel, shouted and pointed at Dmitri. “His skin! It’s going blue!” Grigory knelt beside him, his expression one of intense focus, without any accompanying panic. He checked Dmitri’s breathing and then reached a hand to his forehead. The masked figure in Dmitri’s vision smiled, showing no teeth. “It is complete disorientation,” Grigory murmured, addressing the spectral eagle, or perhaps himself. “The spiritual body is rejecting the physical container.” Grigory ripped a blanket from a nearby stack intended for the hounds and wrapped Dmitri’s convulsing body tightly. The Cossack worked with the dispassionate efficiency of someone who had seen severe physical trauma many times. “Captain! Hold steady! He’s gone into his crisis.” The captain’s voice was strained against the wind. “Is he dying, Volkov?” “He is being born,” Grigory corrected. “Pull closer to the coast; we need to reach the river mouth before the ice blocks us completely.” Dmitri was no longer perceiving reality linearly. The World Tree, the Bone Forge, the metallic whispers—they all existed simultaneously. He could hear Grigory speaking, but the words were filtered through the chaotic roar of the Upper World's voices. The sickness became purely physical. His already irregular heartbeat accelerated to a frantic, unsustainable pace, then plunged into a slow, almost nonexistent rhythm. The new organs were destabilizing his core functions. His body temperature plummeted. Even wrapped in the thick wool blanket, Dmitri was profoundly cold, a cold that radiated from the crystalline bones in his core. He had experienced the symbolic boiling of his bones, and now his physical body reacted to the replacement of its vital infrastructure. The spirit-given tools were incompatible with the biological engine. The fourth night passed in a blur of shivering and hallucinatory pain. Grigory forced warm tea down his throat occasionally, but it barely registered. *The call is permanent. Resistance is futile,* the voices insisted, their metallic resonance now tuned to the slow, dragging rhythm of his heart. Dmitri found himself in a liminal state, halfway between the cabin and the Lower World. He saw himself floating over an endless, frozen plain. The masks of the spirits had changed; they were now the faces of the ancient Thule people, solemn and grief-stricken. They pointed to the land, indicating that the source of the conflict was near. He struggled to regain control, to move his fingers, to speak the name of his dead wife, Anna, to cling to human sorrow instead of this cosmic terror. But the obsidian stone in his forehead pressed against memory, replacing personal grief with universal dread. On the morning of the fifth day, the fever broke, or rather, it inverted. His skin was pale blue, and his body was lethargic, weak. His temperature, when Grigory checked it, was dangerously low. Grigory looked down at him with concern that was purely technical, not emotional. “The process is almost finished,” Grigory muttered, pushing the damp hair back from Dmitri’s forehead. “But if you die of hypothermia before we reach the shore, all that effort will be wasted.” Dmitri managed a whisper, a sound that scratched against his throat. “Yttygran.” “Soon,” Grigory promised. “We land today. Then we take the dogs to the island.” Dmitri tried to formulate a warning, to tell Grigory that the animal spirits and the Thule ancestors were against this plan to break the seal, that the Cossack had been marked as a traitor to the cosmic order. But the words dissolved into fragmented images: an iron rib clanging against a crystallized vertebra. The sixth day dawned clear, the storm having passed. The coastal vessel moved slowly toward a narrow inlet protected by two towering headlands. Dmitri observed the approach from his blanket-wrapped prison on the deck, the cold light of the new day making the snow-dusted landscape harsh and defined. The metallic whispers had settled into a steady drone, no longer urgent, but patiently present. The internal conflict had incapacitated him physically, draining the energy required for conscious thought. The vessel finally reached a small, rudimentary dock carved into the ice flow. A few permanent dwellings sat clustered near the mouth of the river, a minimal trading post and staging area for hunters—a place where they could acquire the dogsleds and gear necessary to cross the frozen mainland toward the ocean ice leading to Yttygran Island. The captain cast anchor with a massive grinding sound. Grigory clapped his hands, exhaling a plume of white air. “Welcome to Lavrentiya, Petrov. Now we land.” He turned to the captain. “Get the sleds ready. And send a man down to the settlement. Inform the handlers that their load has become complicated.” Dmitri tried to sit up. The simple motion required immense effort. He was no longer shivering; the internal cold had reached equilibrium. He looked down at his hands, watching for any sign of blue or crystalline glow, but they looked exactly as they had yesterday, simply pale and starved of warmth. The transformation was internal, and irreversible, but it had left him barely functional. Grigory lifted Dmitri without exertion, carrying him easily across the deck toward the gangplank. Dmitri’s head swam with the sudden elevation, his consciousness spiraling down towards the abyss where the World Tree had been severed. *Witness the landing,* commanded the metallic voices, now perfectly synchronized. Dmitri focused on the crunch of the snow beneath Grigory’s heavy boots as the Cossack stepped onto the solid ground of the staging post. He was here, on the continent of Chukotka, one final stage away from the island and the Sealed Place. He was too damaged to continue under his own power. He was an object being transported, a spiritual artifact in the care of a mad zealot. Grigory carried him past the few astonished locals, who stared at Dmitri's deathly pallor and limp form. The Cossack didn’t slow his pace, moving directly toward a small collection of chained, barking dogs located near a sturdy wooden shack. “We need the larger sled, Mikhail,” Grigory called out to a handler who emerged from the shack. “Our academic requires bedding and heat maintenance immediately.” The handler stared at Dmitri’s inert form, then at Grigory. “He is sick, Grigory Volkov?” “He is initiated. Now hurry. We lose no more time.” Grigory lowered Dmitri slowly onto a pile of furs inside the wooden shack. The warmth of the stove nearby was intense, but Dmitri registered it only as a distant concept. The crystalline bones rejected the heat. Grigory stripped away the saturated wool blanket and replaced it with dry fur pelts. He started rubbing Dmitri's arms and legs aggressively, trying to raise his core temperature manually. During the friction, Dmitri registered a new sound, distinct from the cosmic voices. It was the frantic, irregular rhythm of his own modified heart, thrumming against his newly installed iron ribs. It sounded like a badly tuned drum. The new organs were fighting the death-cold of the spiritual crisis, forcing him to maintain a tenuous hold on life, but the cost was near-total incapacitation.