The Berlóga was not just a cave.
It was a colossal wound carved into the western side of the wall — a gaping hole around which all of Medved had grown, as though the very life of the North revolved around that darkness.
It wasn't the only chasm ever discovered, but it had been the first. And since that day, it had become sacred.
Old stories claimed that the first alliance between the men of the North and the beasts had been sealed there. Myth, memory, or madness — no one could tell where the truth ended and the lie began.
But one thing was certain: from that forgotten day onward, every generation of the North had submitted to this brutal ritual.
And no one dared to question it.
"When we arrive, you will be received by the Gatekeeper and the Druid," Marina warned, her voice hard as iron. "You will remain silent and listen to every word. If anyone dares to disrespect this moment…" — her eyes swept over the group like a blade — "I'll cut their throat myself."
No one spoke.
Neither the officer from the East nor the one from the West — both stood still, as though even breathing might draw her wrath.
Even Professor Anton, who should have been leading the ceremony, stayed silent. He didn't try to correct her. Didn't even raise his eyes. He simply bowed his head — a gesture heavy with acknowledgment.
Whether it was fear or respect, no one could say. Perhaps it was both.
The first phase of the ritual seemed simple but carried enormous weight: the students would be presented before the Gatekeeper, who would decide who was worthy.
No outsider had ever witnessed that rite — it was forbidden. What happened inside the Berlóga stayed inside.
Still, whispers always escaped.
They said that last winter had been fertile, that the new litters of bears brought hope for the coming campaigns. But hopes in Medved were fragile things — as fragile as ice beneath thin snow.
Marina walked ahead, muttering almost to herself:
"The only thing you need to do is stay still. Don't worry. That bastard's far too powerful for any of you to even move."
Then, a low, broken laugh — strange, bitter, almost insane.
It sounded like the laughter of someone who had seen too many horrors to remember what fear even meant.
And with that sound, the youths behind her understood what they had only dared to suspect:
The Vybor was not just a test.
It was a ritual.
A dark, sacred, merciless ritual.
Everyone knew — though none dared to speak it — that many entered, but few returned.
Sometimes more.
Sometimes less.
But always fewer.
The cruel mathematics of the Berlóga never failed.
And that certainty weighed heavier than the darkness of the cave itself.
A colossal gate marked the border between the lower city and the Berlóga.
It almost never opened.
When it did, the abyss beyond would exhale a wind so cold and dense it seemed to swallow light.
Nikolai had risked peeking through its cracks in previous years — but all he had ever seen was blackness. A void that seemed to breathe. Each time, a gust had escaped: a frozen sigh rising skyward, like the breath of an army waiting beneath the earth.
This time, however, was different.
This time, he would not just look.
He would stay.
The gate towered before him — twenty meters tall, and just as wide. Even so close, the darkness within remained solid, impenetrable.
The cold air pressed against his face, heavy and foul, thick with a rot that clung to the throat.
The mass of youths advanced in uneasy silence, and through the fog of their breath, he saw her.
The Druid.
A direct descendant of the Triad — the chosen flame of this generation.
"They say she's held that post for nearly ninety years…" whispered a boy behind Nikolai.
When Nikolai's eyes met her, doubt dissolved.
Despite the ritual mask covering her face, her skin was flawless — smooth, unmarked, untouched by time. Her body, naked beneath painted runes, did not tremble beneath the cold that froze the bones of everyone else.
None dared to linger on her form. Fear overpowered curiosity.
Then, the sound began.
Thump.
Thump...
Thump…
Thump….
At first, it sounded like distant drums.
But Nikolai knew better.
That wasn't percussion.
It was rhythm — alive, enormous, ancient.
Footsteps.
Must weigh about five tons, he thought, swallowing hard.
And finally—
it appeared.
A creature of terrible beauty, a paradox between the sublime and the monstrous. Every contour of its body seemed sculpted by divine hands, yet tainted by something that should never have existed in this world.
Silence fell.
Every breath stopped.
The Gatekeeper had revealed itself.
A bear white as carved marble, titanic in stature — nearly twelve feet at the shoulder — raised its head with an air of godlike majesty. Its eyes were thin, icy slits, filled with a cruelty too calm to be rage. It saw no warriors, no people — only lesser creatures, unworthy even of its hunger.
Even Marina Sobolev, who moments earlier had thundered commands without flinching, now sank to one knee, her head bowed beneath the crushing weight of that presence.
The others almost followed, but the Druid's voice sliced through the stillness — sweet as a siren's song, yet threaded with madness that prickled the skin.
"Those of age, step forward. Shoulder to shoulder."
The command rang through the air. No one disobeyed.
One by one, the youths stepped ahead until they stood in a single trembling line, only a few meters from the sacred beast.
The Gatekeeper watched them in silence, unmoving, its gaze fixed somewhere beyond — as though their lives were motes of dust adrift before it. Then, at last, it lowered its head. Its eyes swept across the line, devouring each soul in turn.
The Druid stepped back, her voice now sharp as judgment:
"This year we have twenty-six chosen… for a litter of twenty."
A chill rippled through the group.
At least six would die.
At least six would feed the bears.
The rejection — the primal terror of being unchosen — struck deeper than the cold itself.
Even a full litter was no promise of safety.
Twenty bears did not mean twenty spared fates.
It meant twenty judges.
For Nikolai, that was still more than he had ever seen. In all the winters since he'd begun counting who went in and who came out, this was the largest number yet — and somehow, that tiny statistic felt like mercy.
Yet his stomach twisted.
What was the criterion?
Was it brute strength — like Oleg, with fists of iron?
Agility — like Irina, who could dance across thin ice?
Endurance — like those who breathed frost without shivering?
Or intelligence — the logic and numbers drilled into their heads by masters who would never step inside this abyss?
He had never found a pattern.
Sometimes the strong fell.
Sometimes the weak survived.
Some whispered that the bears chose the brave — but even that felt wrong.
Agility? Stamina? Knowledge? Courage?
The mystery was an invisible blade, slicing through them long before the ritual began.
But in the end, it mattered little.
There was no retreat.
No other path.
You either became an example — or a meal.
Then something happened Nikolai had never seen — not in the archives, not in the rumors, not even in the whispers of the old veterans.
The Gatekeeper opened its mouth.
"Cazadummmm…"
The voice rolled out — deep, ancient — as though the mountain itself had spoken.
The sound froze every drop of blood.
Nikolai couldn't move. Neither could anyone else. Every muscle, every nerve, every breath turned to ice. Even the wind seemed to stop, afraid to disturb the air.
And then…
from the darkness of the cave,
another sound answered.
Thump.
Thump...
Thump…
Many footsteps.
One after another, they emerged from the shadows.
First two. Then five. Then ten—
until nineteen bears stepped from the suffocating mist, each one dragging a fragment of the abyss with it, as if the cave itself bled monstrous life.
The tallest among them, a dark brown, stood nearly four feet at the shoulder.
They were cubs, yes—
but bear cubs.
Each step shook the ground. Each exhalation steamed the air like smoke from a forge. Even the smallest among them could shatter a man's ribs with a casual blow.
Nikolai's breath hitched, but his eyes stayed sharp.
One white.
Three browns.
Ten blacks.
Five silver-blues.
The white one was the most revered among all the nobility.
In the history of bear tamers, there were more records of heroes riding white bears than any other. They represented the pinnacle of symbiosis: physical robustness joined with a magical — almost religious — intimacy with snow and cold.
No other bond compared.
No other beast inspired as much pride and fear.
An adult white could easily reach seven feet at the shoulders and carried within it the heritage of being the Crest of the northern people. Its magic was deep, forged in the silence of the glaciers — capable of shaping snow into forms as lethal as they were beautiful.
They said the greatest among them could even rival the blues in raw magic.
For the nobles, to walk beside a white was to receive the blessing of the God of eternal winter.
And yet…
Even perfection had its limits.
Not even a white — no matter how great — could ever match the presence of the Gatekeeper.
He was an exception.
A colossal anomaly.
An abyss in the shape of a beast.
The browns, in turn, were the embodiment of brutality.
They possessed no magic, no affinity with frost or silence — and still, they were revered. Sometimes even more than the whites, especially by those who believed honor was found in blood and sacrifice, not distant sorcery.
They grew.
And grew.
Until they became living walls — beasts capable of rivaling the Gatekeeper in size.
When fully grown, they were unbreakable monsters, muscles taut as steel, fury without end. Where they passed, no stone was left upon another.
They were the terror of enemies.
The nightmare of deserters.
Some said that fighting a brown was like trying to stop an avalanche with bare hands.
Useless.
Inevitable.
Despairing.
And the most terrifying truth was that a warrior bonded to a brown could channel that wild strength through magical metamorphosis, becoming a living calamity on the battlefield.
It was one of these that Marina was bonded to.
And because of that, no one doubted her raw power — even in her arrogance.
The silver-blues were a living paradox.
There was no creature more gifted in the art of magic. Not even the whites could match the purity and intensity of their spells. Cold, lightning, ethereal plasma — everything bent to their will, as if the secrets of the world were etched into their blood at birth.
But perfection came at a price.
And in their case, the price was flesh.
Weak bodies.
Fragile bones.
Mana reserves far too limited to sustain the power they carried.
A silver-blue could split a battlefield in two with a single spell — and fall just as quickly, crushed by its own magic, which demanded everything before even a second casting.
That was why they were called Glass Berdiche.
Devastating.
Brilliant.
Brittle.
Capable of changing the course of a war — and yet, rarely surviving it.
Even so, there were those who desired them. Because a warrior bonded to a silver-blue did not merely gain power — they gained the chance to transcend human limits, mastering complex spells that, when wielded correctly, could elevate them to revered mages and indispensable supports.
Those who carried such a bond lived under a forked fate:
They either blazed like meteors, lighting the world for a fleeting moment…
or vanished far too soon, remembered only as a flame extinguished too early.
And the last ones…
The blacks.
The burden.
No magic.
No glory.
Only borrowed muscle to serve as shields of flesh.
The fate of laborers.
Of nameless dead.
There wasn't much to say about them.
Though considered useful, they were — without a shadow of doubt — the weakest of all.
They granted their tamers brief surges of strength, turning them into something close to super-human for mere moments. But even then, they fell short.
Nothing like the magic of a blue.
Nothing like the flexibility of a white.
Not even the brute force of a brown — even the most mediocre of them.
Nikolai clenched his teeth.
He knew that inventory by heart.
He had counted and recounted it every winter.
But this time—
Something was wrong.
One's missing.
Twenty were expected.
Twenty should have been there.
And yet, no matter how many times he counted, there were only nineteen.
A suffocating silence settled behind his eyes.
Not a mistake.
Not here.
Not in this ritual.
Then—
Where was the twentieth?