Chapter 29 #4
The ridgeline gave way to a series of rock faces cut with deep fissures.
Water had frozen in them over centuries, creating columns and sheets of ice that turned the upper mountain into something architecturally impossible.
Ice formations jutted from the rock at angles that defied gravity, held in place by their own frozen mass, glinting in the flat light like teeth in an enormous mouth.
Luna stopped at a fissure wider than the rest. Dark air breathed from it, colder than the outside, carrying a smell that Alsen couldn’t immediately place. Wet stone and something organic. Something old.
Luna peered into the cave entrance, her body still, her head tilting as she listened to things the rest of them couldn’t hear.
Alsen stopped himself from firing a scan. Broad spectrum scans weren’t exactly costless to cast either.
Luna walked in.
The rest of the group exchanged glances, and reluctantly followed. Some talking would have been great from Luna. Any communication, really.
The transition from daylight to cave happened in three steps. First, the gray light dimmed. Then it vanished. Then the dark pressed in from every direction, and Alsen summoned his floating orb of light.
The light revealed ice. Ice sheathed the cave walls, thick layers of pale blue frozen over dark rock, smoothed by time into organic curves. The floor was ice too, uneven but solid, ancient melt-freeze cycles having welded it into a surface that crunched under their boots.
He had the light float directly beneath the ceiling, hoping it wouldn’t be hit by the frost harpies’ screams. He realized something.
While he and Arleria were being disabled by the screams, Derell, Malick, Kern, and most likely Luna weren’t.
That strongly suggested the scream interfered directly with magic and therefore struck harder the more mana a person had flowing through them.
The air inside was colder. Not by a few degrees. The temperature dropped sharply. This wasn’t natural cold. The air carried something in it, a bite that went deeper than temperature, an energy that pushed against warmth as if the cave itself rejected it.
“The cold is magically influenced,” Arleria said. She’d felt it too. Her hands moved in the diagnostic patterns of detection magic, pink light threading between her fingers. “The cold here has a mana component. Something is generating it.”
“That doesn’t sound like the harpies,” Malick remarked.
“It’s likely tied to their source.”
Luna moved through the cave without dropping pace, forcing everyone else to keep moving. She tested the ice floor ahead of the group, her steps light and precise, finding the spots where the ice wasn’t too slippery.
They followed the passage as it wound deeper into the mountain. The ice thickened. The ceiling lowered, then rose, then lowered again. In places, the frozen walls had been scraped.
The passage opened into a larger cavern.
Alsen’s light pushed back the dark to reveal a space roughly sixty feet across, the ceiling high enough that the light couldn’t reach it.
Stalagmites of ice rose from the floor, fat and ancient, their surfaces ridged with bands of frozen mineral deposits. The walls glittered.
At the far end of the cavern, something stood.
About twelve feet tall and roughly humanoid, though hunched, its shoulders wider than Derell was long.
White fur covered it in matted, frozen clumps, each strand thick as a finger, crusted with ice crystals that had grown into the fur like a second skin.
Its arms hung past its knees, ending in hands with four fingers, each tipped with a curved claw the color of old bone.
Its head was broad and flat, dominated by a jaw that jutted forward, underbite exposing teeth that looked more ice than bone.
Its eyes were closed.
“Don’t move,” Luna breathed. She’d frozen mid-step, one foot still raised, her body locked in the perfect stillness of someone who understood predators on an instinctive level.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
The creature didn’t move, as if asleep.
Luna motioned to the wall, retreating to it before heading out by the room’s rim. Careful, and without much space between each other, they followed. They clung to the wall.
The creature’s breathing shifted. A deeper exhale, frost billowing from its nostrils in a cloud that drifted across the cavern floor like low fog. The ice crystals on its fur clinked faintly as its massive ribcage expanded and contracted.
Alsen pondered annihilating it with a lance.
That would end the creature in an instant.
But it would also tear into the mountain, possibly destabilizing the caverns.
To collapse the ceiling on them was the last thing he needed.
And it wasn’t like it would be the first time he had indirectly damaged himself with his own spell.
Not even the fifth time, actually.
They made it halfway around the room. The creature shifted, its eyes opening, impossibly blue.
Shit.
The creature hit the floor with its fist. A pulse of power thundered from the hit. The floor collapsed, taking the part of the wall they stood by with it. They started falling.