Book Seven

Whiteout

 

“You said Frosthold was just a name,” Riyo Falsemoon says through chattering teeth.

“You said that you wanted to go somewhere cold,” Rolleck the Lost replies.

A harsh wind drives snow into their faces as they trudge through a knee-high blanket over uneven rocks and the gnarled roots of leafless trees. The sky is slate grey, suggesting no coming respite from the storm.

Riyo turns her attention to Emerald. “Help me.”

“No,” Emerald says. “I may be fine now, but if I lose too much heat I’ll die.”

“That’s true for all of us,” Ravi Matriya complains. His feathers keep him warm to a point, but he has wrapped himself in all of the clothes he owns, and he still feels the bite of the wind on his skin when it blows against them.

“It’s not the same,” Emerald says with a shake of her head. “If anything goes wrong – say my pilot goes out or something disrupts my natural warmth – my blood will freeze immediately, and I will die. Breathing flame affects both and lowers my overall temperature, too. It’s too risky.”

“Ravi, lend me your feathers,” Riyo tries.

“Obviously no,” Ravi says without turning around. He squints up into the blizzard. Even his eyes can’t pierce it far, but it looks to him as though there is a wispy trail of smoke across the sky at odds with the clouds. “I think we’re close,” he says.

“We’d better be,” Riyo says. “My soul is about to freeze solid.”

“What’s that?” Emerald says, stopping and pointing at the sky.

The trail they walk wends its way around a mountain, whose peak is a wicked spike that looms as a shadow amongst the clouds. Something is flickering within that cloud; an unstable light that reminds Riyo of the way the wind would blow her candle flames when she snuck into the Galsbreath apothacarium late at night.

It’s fire,” Ravi says, a note of disbelief in his voice.

“A sky fire?” Riyo says.

“A dragon, maybe?” Rolleck suggests.

“Dragons steer clear of places like this, if they can avoid it,” Emerald says. “To fly in weather like this? And breathe flame, too?” She shakes her head, dislodging a few tenacious snowflakes from her crimson scales. “It would be suicide.”

“It’s rising,” Riyo says.

“Yeah,” Ravi says. He blinks snowflakes from his eyelashes and squints. “There’s some kind of… pointy object. I think the flame is driving it into the sky.”

“Weird,” Riyo says.

We are not chasing it,” Rolleck says.

“But…”

“You were just complaining about the cold. We’re not climbing a mountain chasing a sky fire.”

Riyo sighs. “Okay. Fine.” She starts walking again. “This town better be real close.”

“It stopped rising,” Ravi says.

The flame has begun sputtering, and after a moment it disappears completely, leaving the black smudge of an object it was supporting to the whims of gravity.

“I wonder what it is,” Emerald says.

“Maybe it’s some kind of bird.”

“A bird that farts fire?” Riyo suggests.

“That’s gross,” Emerald says.

“What? It’s just like you, except, y’know, out the other end.” There is an uncomfortable pause. “Hey, Emerald, can you-”

“No I cannot!”

“Looks like it’s completely out of fart fire,” Ravi says. “It’s getting dangerously close to the mountain.”

They watch as the little speck joins the big blur that is the summit of the mountain. Then there is a flash that lights the entire sky.

“It exploded,” Ravi says.

“Yeah,” Rolleck says. “Our eyes aren’t that ba-”

The last consonant is flattened by rolling thunder that shakes snow from the branches around them and scares a pair of ligmists from the shadow of a nearby boulder. Like stick insects, but taller than most trees, the creatures scuttle over the path and find new shadows to vanish into. One chooses the shade beneath a rock no larger than Riyo’s head, the other slips behind a tree thinner than her arm.

“That can’t be good,” Rolleck says.

“I still hear rumbling,” Ravi agrees.

“Huh?” Emerald says.

The avalanche hits them before they can explain what an avalanche is, but the rush of snow finds it easier to move around them.

“Wow,” Emerald says, watching the wall of perfect white flow by as if it were a river.

Riyo’s brow is creased with concentration. She treats things like this as a challenge and won’t settle for simply stopping the snow from crushing them to death. She uses it to practice her control, guiding the snow around them by adjusting the way gravity pushes it. First out, then past, making extra streams that go higher than normal to allow for the displaced snow.

After a minute or so, the snow stops moving. The four of them stand in a crater well below the new snow-line. Riyo lets out a breath and closes her reality. She has managed to sculpt the snow so that only a little crumbles inwards once it is under the normal influence of gravity.

“I didn’t know snow could move that fast,” Emerald says.

“Nice job, captain,” Ravi says.

Riyo nods. “It’s getting a little easier to make smaller changes, I think. Still too hard, though.”

“You don’t find the sunlight stone under the first rock you overturn,” Rolleck says.

“Has it started to feel weird to anyone else, hearing phrases like that?” Ravi asks. “I still have to keep reminding myself that we’re going to try and find the actual sunlight stone.”

“That’s what makes it worth finding,” Riyo says, then glances at the mountain. “There’s no rush, though. I say we-”

“No,” Rolleck says. “We get to town, first. Maybe this has happened before, and they can just tell us what it was instead of us having to climb up a frozen mountain to find out.”

Riyo pouts. “You’re no fun.”

“He’s right, though,” Ravi says.

“Yeah…” she says, sparing one more glance for the mountain and the explosive new addition to its peak. Then she turns back to where the path used to be and glares. The new snow is squashed flat, creating a corridor for them to follow. “Let’s go.”

Ravi can still make out the thin stream of smoke twirling its way through the storm, and they follow it until Riyo trips over something. With her reality open she manages to turn it into a perfect front-flip, landing on her feet without even needing to bend her knees. Ravi applauds politely at her extravagant bow, while Rolleck just rolls his eyes.

“It’s a sign,” Emerald says.

“Proof that we should just give up this insane quest and join the circus instead?” Rolleck says.

“No, an actual sign.” She points at the cause of Riyo’s trip.

“Coldton,” Ravi reads. “I suppose that’s appropriate.”

“It’s not very imaginative,” Riyo says.

“Let’s just hope the town survived the avalanche,” Rolleck says, gesturing towards the small ridge ahead.

“They must deal with avalanches all the time,” Riyo says. “I bet they’re fine.”

The town is covered entirely in snow. Severely peaked roofs poke up out of the powder here and there, tall chimneys still drizzling smoke up into the clouds.

“Uh oh,” Ravi says.

“Maybe it’s supposed to look like this,” Riyo says.

Some of the snow is moving. A rough, churning sound emanates from somewhere below them where the path once descended into the town. The surface collapses in on itself near the closest house, and a stream of snow geysers up into the sky, rejoining the blizzard. They watch, teeth chattering, as the avalanche around the path is dislodged into the air in bursts, while the sound grows louder and closer.

Something black and pointy emerges. Like the fin of a shark, it weaves its way slowly towards them, growing taller and wider until, after it has reached nearly four feet, the circular brim of a hat breaks free of the drift. It is followed shortly by a pair of spectacles on a wrinkled face that, despite being buried alive mere moments ago, is wearing a brilliant smile.

“That was a big one!” she says, looking up at them. “Welcome to Coldton!”

“Um,” Ravi says.

The woman is drawing glacially closer, rising from the snow as she does. Her body is a mound of black cloth with no shape or feature, and it squats atop something that shudders and groans and gushes snow out of a big metal pipe behind her.

She stops at the edge of the path and grins at them, her contraption still shaking beneath her. It reminds Emerald uncomfortably of the Twilight Express.

“We don’t get a whole lot of visitors, these days,” she says.

“It seems like a difficult place to visit,” Ravi says.

“Aye, I suppose it does. Didn’t used to be, though.” She looks up and wrinkles her nose. “Drat. Got a devil of an itch.” She starts moving her head and flaring her nostrils.

“Here,” Riyo says, hopping up onto the machine and scratching her nose for her.

Ravi and Rolleck grimace in unison.

“Oh, you’re a peach,” she says. “That’s it, right there.”

Emerald clears her throat.

“Oh,” the woman says. “Sorry. I’m Tremble, mayor of Coldton.”

Riyo steadies herself as the machine shudders and begins turning in place. Though mostly hidden by snow, it has a number of things beneath it that look like wheels to Ravi. It’s a far cry from any kind of cart he has ever seen before, though.

“Please, come, come. Let’s get inside and get you all warmed up.”

Riyo stays sat on the edge of the machine, while the others start walking behind it. Rolleck lets out a yell as hefty lumps of snow begin thumping down on his head.

“Give her a bit of space back there, folks,” Tremble yells over her shoulder. “She throws it up like me after my seventh dram.” She has a cackle to match the rattling of her machine’s engine.

Riyo sits giggling at the snowflakes in Rolleck’s moustache while they make their slow descent. The machine is much less efficient than Riyo at making a corridor through the snow, but she is fascinated by it, and wants to watch it work. Just beneath her, there is a window that shows gears turning inside it, so fast that they are jagged bronze blurs to her eyes. Linked pieces of metal wrap around strange cogs at either side of the thing and crunch through the snow, driving them forward.

They draw level with what is presumably the mayor’s house and begin another perfectly stationary turn.

“Might get a little cold there, dear,” Tremble says.

The snow now before them is still piled to the edge of the roof and, as soon as the machine starts eating it, it’s going to collapse on top of them. Apparently, Tremble is fine with that. So Riyo is too.

“I can handle a little more cold,” Riyo says, then opens her reality under her breath. Snow begins to tumble down and not hit them.

Tremble glances around for a moment, her wrinkled features showing surprise, then fear. She turns to look at Riyo, and the fear fades a little.

“That you?” she asks.

“Yep.”

“Oh.” There is a moment of relief on her face before she turns to look forward again. “Good.”

“So how does your machine work, Mrs. Mayor?”

“This thing?” There is probably a dismissive gesture that goes with her tone, but it is lost to her layers. “It’s powered by ice crystals.”

“Cool,” Riyo says.

“Most people usually have follow-up questions,” Tremble says after a pause.

“Most people don’t know as much about Calis as I do,” Riyo says.

The machine breeches the far side of the snow drift and begins pulling into a shelter designed for it. After firing its final blast of snow, it turns again, brushing the walls and dumping more snow onto the floor. The engine is louder in the confines of the shelter, so when it cuts out it leaves its memory thrumming against Riyo’s eardrums.

“Here we are, then,” Tremble says, standing and hopping from the machine. Her layers go all the way to the ground, so she remains a featureless, cloth blob. Her hat, which almost doubles her unimpressive height, is no impediment to her as she passes her unusually high doorway into her house. The others trail a dusting of snow in behind them, despite a thorough shaking and brushing outside the door.

“I’m afraid I can’t keep you company long,” Tremble says, bustling into her kitchen. “I have to help dig the others out.” Her house is warm both in temperature and atmosphere. Various knitted things cover walls, floors and surfaces in colours that long for a summer that will never come. All of her furniture is old and wooden, showing its wear with the grace of quality craftsmanship.

“You have a lovely home,” Ravi says, looking over a selection of pictures on one of the tables.

“Oh,” Emerald says, joining him. “I’ve seen pictures like this before. A merchant once showed me some of his family.”

“The cameras that take them are pretty new,” Riyo agrees, picking one up and looking at it. It shows Tremble, still wrapped in all her layers and wearing her hat, standing with several workmen before another strange-looking machine. “It’s rare to see good pictures out in the sticks.”

“Everstall is the last Song to get everything,” Rolleck says. He has found a comfortable seat and sat down. In front of him, in the middle of a semi-circle of such seats, is a contraption inside a cage that glows orange and hums softly. It seems to be the source of the house’s pleasant warmth.

Tremble returns with a tray of steaming mugs. She must be clutching it through her layers, because her arms are still not visible. Riyo wonders if perhaps she’s not wearing anything at all. She might just be a cloth blob woman. She sets the tray down and her head moves as though she has gestured them towards it, though she hasn’t. If she really was a blob woman, Riyo decides, she would probably have some more instinctive blob gestures. She takes a mug.

The drink is so rich and sweet and hot she almost spits it straight back out again. Everyone’s eyes widen at their first sip, and Emerald stares down into her mug with open wonder.

“What is this?” Ravi asks.

“It’s like chocolate, but… enlightened,” Emerald says, still staring.

“Rock cherry juice,” Tremble says. “Nearly the end of my stock, too. But I like to get it out for visitors because there’s nothing quite like it anywhere else in the world.” She doesn’t have a mug of her own and is already gliding towards the door. Presumably her legs are moving, but the cloth around them is thick enough that it hides any sign of the fact. “You all make yourselves at home, dears. I’ll be back once we’ve made some headway on this avalanche.”

She disappears, and a moment later they hear the machine start up again.

“Rock cherries, huh?” Riyo says, taking another sip. The drink seems to warm her right to her toes the moment it passes her lips.

“It’s amazing,” Emerald says. She sucks the rest down, passing it beneath her forked tongue to keep it from extinguishing her pilot.

“A little sweet, for my tastes,” Rolleck says.

Ravi settles his face into a soft scowl and lowers the pitch of his voice. “Yes. I prefer cold, black tea and eating whole, raw lemons.”

Rolleck looks over at him. A moment passes. “I do not sound like that.”

“You do, though,” Riyo says with a smirk.

Rolleck scowls at her, and Ravi’s deepens to match it. They glare at each other until Ravi loses it and starts laughing.

“You’re all just unsophisticated idiots,” Rolleck says. He takes another sip of his drink and grimaces.

Riyo drains her mug and hops to her feet. “I’m going to help flatten snow.”

“Seems like the decent thing to do,” Ravi agrees, joining her.

“I’d rather not go out in this if I don’t have to,” Emerald says.

“I’m staying, too,” Rolleck says. “It’s difficult to use a shovel with this.” He waves his sword in the air.

“You just don’t like getting snow in your moustache,” Riyo says.

“Have fun,” Rolleck says without turning around.

Riyo and Ravi head out through the machine shelter by which they entered. It has left odd, uniform tracks in the snow on its way out. They are too square to have been made by wheels.

Riyo opens her reality and squishes flat what snow has been left in the machine’s wake, while Ravi spots a shovel in the corner and decides the mayor will not mind him borrowing it to help with the clean-up. They both then leap to the top of the mayor’s house to get a better view of where to start.

The mayor’s machine marks its presence beneath the snow on what looks to be Coldton’s main thoroughfare by pitching snow at the heavens periodically. To their left, roughly west of the town, the mountain rises towards its ominous black peak – a vicious spire of rock. There are a few houses in that direction before the land becomes too steep to build on, so Riyo and Ravi decide to start there.

Riyo starts crushing the snow in the street in broad strokes, allowing Ravi to get close to the houses and start digging it away from their doors. He loses himself in the work, blocking out the cold and focusing on the heat in his muscles. Shovelful after shovelful of snow passes over his shoulder, scattering across the compacted stuff Riyo has left, until his arms are sore and his lungs are burning with the effort. Unlike the endless walking of their journey, however, this tiredness feels good.  The exertion of being useful, of helping people, always comes with a feeling of satisfaction.

Some time passes, though Ravi isn’t quite sure how much. The sun starts making its way down towards the Everstall Song, but it does so slowly, as if it must trudge through knee deep snow as well. He finds he has circled back towards the centre of the town, following the flat ground Riyo has made. He has lost track of her, he realises.

He stretches his sore arms and throws the shovel over his shoulder, wandering towards the main street. The residents of Coldton have cleared it completely, revealing a series of shop fronts and a path down to a mysterious machine. Ravi recognises it as the one from the picture in the mayor’s house. A long cable stretches away from the machine towards a metal pole further along the mountainside. Another pole is visible much further away, and the cable continues from there, too.

Mayor Tremble is sat atop her snow-clearing machine just in front of it, talking to a small group of people. Ravi heads down towards it, peering into the darkened windows of a few of the shops on the way. They are noticeably lacking in produce.

There are a few gasps and mutters as the people clearing snow from side streets notice him, and the group around Tremble all take a worried step back as he approaches. One of the younger men steps forward again, struggling to pull a sword from a sheath on his belt.

“Hold there,” he says. His long hair falls over his eyes and he jumps in surprise, then quickly brushes it out of the way again.

Ravi stops and raises his arms.

Tremble hops down from her machine and just walks into the young man. The weight of her layers must make her surprisingly heavy, because the lad misbalances and falls over.

“Don’t just wave your sword at everyone you don’t recognise,” Tremble says. “Most travellers are just travellers.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Mayor,” he says, scrambling to his feet and taking a few attempts to put his sword away.

“I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed your shovel,” Ravi says, gesturing with the tool.

“Of course not, of course not. We appreciate the help, don’t we, chaps?”

The group aren’t sure how to respond, but Tremble goes on as if they have all nodded enthusiastically. “Don’t tire yourselves out on our account, though. You and your friends should be heading off as soon as you can. This isn’t a safe place to be, of late.”

“Oh,” Ravi says, frowning. “We were hoping to spend the night here.”

The mayor shakes her head. “Sorry, sorry. The inn’s closed I’m afraid. You really should be moving along.”

The big machine behind them suddenly blusters to life, cogs and gears spinning into action and spitting out a deeper, angrier roar than that of the snow clearing machine. It appears to do this for the sake of pulling the cable in and then reeling it back out the other way.

The residents of Coldton all turn to stare at it for a moment, their eyes full of fear.

“We can’t…” Tremble says, then shakes her head. “Everybody back to your homes.”

“But…” the young man with the sword says.

“No buts, Wicker.” She doesn’t make a shooing motion at him, but there is a pause to suggest she tried to. “Off you go, back to your mother. She’ll be worried if you don’t. I can deal with this.”

The lad remains for a moment, a hand on the hilt of his sword, before turning and walking away with the rest.

Tremble looks to Ravi. “Please wait in my house for a little while longer, if you don’t mind.”

“What’s happening?”

“Oh, just a little, uh, local politics. I’m afraid I really must insist that you go inside and wait it out.” Her face is etched with worry, and she swallows as she turns away to face the cable machine.

Ravi frowns, but makes for the mayor’s house. He turns off at the first junction, however, and springs to the roof of the shop on the corner. The gloomy state of this town is a recent thing, and it reminds him of Fefille before the Deis came. There is something looming over them – something they are unable to fight or escape.

Tremble doesn’t notice that he hasn’t done as instructed. She is focused on the machine – a lone lump of fabric staring down a rolling avalanche. After a while, Ravi spots something by the distant pole. A black box, swaying with the wind of the blizzard, is being drawn in by the cable. It passes the next post, and then slows down on the approach to Coldton itself. It has windows in it, but they are covered in frost and clinging snow that hides those inside from sight.

Ravi strings his bow and knocks an arrow, frowning down at the doors in the side of the metal box. They are wrenched open with a squeal of metal on metal, and a man steps out. He is tall and lithe, with cruel, angular features and long limbs. His lanky black hair hangs half way down his back and his eyes are pinpricks of black malice. He is wearing a black leather jacket, open to expose his muscular chest. The cold seems not to affect him. On his back is a long-handled axe with a chewed-up blade.

A group of less striking men and women follow him out of the box, all wearing clothing much more appropriate to the weather. They, too, are armed, and they look mean.

The scary man steps up to Tremble and smiles down at her, his teeth crooked and yellow.

“Quite the avalanche, hey, Mrs. Mayor?”

“Yes,” Tremble says. “We’re still clearing it up.” Her voice shakes like her name.

“Well that’s no good. We were expecting a tithe today.”

“You don’t usually bring so many of your friends to collect a tithe,” Tremble says, looking past the monstrous man to his entourage.

He laughs. “A smart woman as always, Mrs. Mayor. We can never slip one by you. I’ll tell you what, though.” He places a hand on Tremble’s shoulder in mock reassurance. “Find us a tithe, and we can just head on home.”

“We have nothing left,” Tremble says. “You trap us here, take away our means of making money, of making anything, and expect us to keep paying you at your whim. We can’t. There is nothing more to take.” She sags in her layers, her head almost disappearing like a turtle into its shell.

“That’s not true,” the man says, standing and taking the axe from his back. “We can take lives. A couple of young boys or girls will do nicely. They sell well if you know who to offer them to.”

“No,” Tremble says, her voice a whisper.

“Sorry?” the man says, leaning in.

“You can’t. The last time was bad enough. Please.”

The man rests his axe on Tremble’s shoulder, the blade pointed towards her neck.

“Who rules this town, Mrs. Mayor?”

“Yrith does.” There are tears on the mayor’s cheeks.

“And who is Yrith’s voice?”

“You are, Mortimer.”

“That’s right,” Mortimer says, lifting the axe away. “And Coldton owes us a tithe. Four youngsters, ripe for sale, and one little old woman to sate the beast of the mountain.”

Tremble looks up in shock. “No,” she says.

“I’m afraid so.” He gestures around at the snow. “This little snow-slide is proof he’s hungry. He’ll do worse next time if he doesn’t eat.” His smile comes back, more dreadful than before. “So. What will it be? Will you choose your sacrifices? Or shall we start knocking on doors?”

“I… No,” Tremble says, looking up. Her expression is defiant. “I won’t do it. You’ll have to destroy this town and take what you want from us.”

Mortimer shakes his head. “That’s a real shame, Mrs. Mayor. Maybe your successor will have a little more sense.” He raises his axe.

There is a yell from the house in front of Ravi, and Wicker charges out towards the platform. He has his sword raised above his head in both hands, rust flaking from the blade in the wind.

Mortimer turns and frowns at the young man. He has started his battle-cry far too early and is still a dozen metres away when he runs out of breath. He inhales and starts up again from where he left off.

“Wicker!” Tremble yells.

He doesn’t respond. Mortimer raises his axe to lop off Wicker’s head.

Then there is an arrow through his arm.

He cries out and stumbles back in surprise, letting his axe fall into the snow. Wicker’s sword comes crashing down on his shoulder. He is small, and his blade is all but blunt, but he has enough force to bite through Mortimer’s jacket and send blood arcing through the air to smudge the snow behind him.

They stand in tableau for a moment, as though the icy winds have frozen them in place. Wicker’s face is a fierce snarl of hatred.

“That’s for my father,” he says.

“Your father would be disappointed,” Mortimer says. He grabs the sword by the blade and pulls it free of his shoulder, then rips it from Wicker’s grip.

The young man stumbles back, eyes going wide.

“It seems we have one already.”

One of Mortimer’s underlings steps forward and clubs Wicker over the head, sending him to the ground with a thud.

Mortimer turns back to Tremble, sparing a glance for the street and the buildings around it. Ravi has already ducked down out of sight.

“Of course, this attack adds a few extra bodies to the tally.” He casually snaps the arrow in his arm and draws the rest out with another spurt of blood. “Six slaves and one old woman, Mrs. Mayor. And your archer friend should know that if he fires again, I will kill you where you stand.” He says this loud enough that Ravi would be able to hear him even without his extra-human hearing.

They drag Wicker into the metal box.

“You have until sundown.”

As the doors screech closed again, Ravi curses himself for not using his curse-breaker. He could have shot Mortimer’s arm clean off or aimed for his body and killed him outright. He’d hesitated, though. He hadn’t even been able to make himself kill a dragon, let alone another human being.

The cable machine blusters into motion again, and once the box reaches the first pole Ravi drops from his roof and runs to the mayor’s side.

She looks at him with surprise.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save Wicker,” Ravi says, still watching the cable slither its way through the bowels of the machine and then out into the snow. He makes a decision. “I’m going to try and get him back.”

“No. Don’t. You can’t.” She makes to clutch at his arm, but she has too many layers.

“Why not? Surely you don’t intend to give them what they want?”

“There’s nothing we can do. Mortimer is just a goon. His boss, Yrith… he’s a monster.”

Ravi frowns. The box is just reaching the second pole. He shakes his head.

“Go back to your house. Tell my friends what happened. I don’t know where Riyo went, but Rolleck and Emerald should still be there. Tell them to follow the cable.”

“If your friend wandered out of town then she’s dead. In a blizzard like this, with that… creature out looking to feed… Nobody could survive.”

“I doubt she’d be stupid enough to leave town in this weather.” Ravi stops to consider what he’s just said. “Okay, well maybe she would. But she’s Riyo. She’ll be fine.” He leaps up onto the cable, finding his balance easily as it drags him out into the storm. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Mayor,” he shouts. “I’ll save him.”

Mayor Tremble watches the bird man disappear into the drifting snow. The streets of her town are icy and still, and she has never felt so alone. So helpless. Coldton has nothing left to give and no one left to defend it. Her people are frightened and hungry, worn down by the snow and the bandits keeping them like rats in a cage. Once, her smile was enough to make this bleak place bearable. Now that her husband is dead, nothing can.

She climbs onto her snow plough and turns it for her home. She will speak to the bird man’s friends, and they will go and die. Or, more likely, they will flee this doomed place once they realise the inevitability of their fate. Either way, Tremble will have to choose five more of her people to sacrifice into a life of slavery. At least one choice left to her is quite simple. She only knows of one little old lady deserving of being fed to a monster.

 

 

Rolleck is asleep, and Emerald has grown bored. It makes her feel a little guilty, but she is rooting around the mayor’s house. It is full of pictures, and Emerald feels like she now knows the old woman quite well. She has been mayor for a long time. Either what Riyo said about the picture-taking device was untrue, or someone here in Coldton had invented it independent of the rest of the world’s technology. There were pictures of a younger mayor Tremble standing on snow-free slopes with a man who must have been her husband.

Emerald has determined that this man, whose name she has not been able to find, was a scientist. There are pictures of him working on various machines in the town, including one with a cable that stretches what seems like dozens of miles over brutal terrain that otherwise would be impassable. He had also built the snow-clearing machine, and a whole bunch of others that Emerald can’t begin to guess the purpose of from the pictures alone.

In every picture they are together, the two of them are smiling. Then there are more recent pictures of Tremble looking more like she does now. She is still smiling, but it is a very different smile. It is this that makes Emerald think that her husband has passed away, rather than divorced her or moved to the Tower’s End Song to sell his inventions to people who would appreciate them more.

It is quite a sad story, much of which Emerald has made up entirely herself. She could be miles off.

The rumble of the machine suggests their host has returned, and Emerald quickly makes her way back to the living room to await her as though she hasn’t been nosing through her things. Maybe she should just be honest about it. She has an awful lot of questions based on her nosing, and the woman had told them to make themselves at home, after all. Maybe she would tell Emerald her story over another mug of that wonderful rock cherry juice.

This decision is taken from her by the look on Tremble’s face when she shuffle’s in. She looks like the snow has settled beneath her skin.

“Is something wrong?” Emerald asks.

“I…” Tremble says, then lets out a cold sigh. “I wanted to spare you this place. Travellers are so rare, so it’s easy to just pass them through with a smile. To hide it all from them.” She sighs again. “We’re beholden, you see, to a group of bandits who call themselves the Kings of the Mountain.” She shuffles over to the table of pictures. Picks up the one of her in front of the machine, her hands deftly manipulating the cloth that covers them. She shows it to Emerald, who is floundering a little for something to say.

“This is the gondola. My husband built it, more than a decade ago, to help keep our little town relevant.” She sits down before the heater, and Emerald takes the chair next to her.

“It used to be that the path down out of these mountains was only passable briefly during the summer. Travellers from the Everstall Song would flood through during that season. You could walk from here to Tower’s End on a bridge of log carts bringing lumber out of the endless forest. Then the trains came, and it changed everything. They still struggle to run in the depths of winter, and they’re quite expensive to ride, but they’re so much quicker and safer than travelling the paths up here. My husband said we needed something special to compete with them. Something that would make travellers safe even in the very heart of winter. So, he built the gondola.” She looks wistfully towards the window, still covered completely with snow. “Tourists would come to ride it, see the beautiful vistas, watch the snow flurry all around them as they dangled in the sky.”

“What happened to your husband?” Emerald asks, trying desperately to be delicate.

“There was… an accident with one of his machines when the bandits came,” Tremble says. “He wanted to fight them, but instead he left me alone to try and keep this place joyful. And I did. For years, I did. Even when it hurt me so much to smile that I thought my teeth would crack. But there’s only so much misery a good smile can fight. I’ve reached that limit, now.” Tears run down her cheek and soak into her topmost layer.

“What can I do?” Emerald says.

Tremble looks up, then. “What?”

“Something’s wrong. I can’t fix everything, but there must be something I can do.”

“You can’t,” Tremble says. “It’s impossible. Their grip on us is too tight to break.”

“Right. You said something about bandits. Who are they?”

“The Kings of the Mountain,” Tremble says. “And as I said, there’s nothing we can do to stop them. They have a creature who roams the mountainside, eating anyone who strays outside the village and bringing avalanches to compound our misery. They keep it cold, so that even in summer the snows cover everything. We can’t feed ourselves, and no more tourists come. Even if they did, the bandits control the gondola. And now they have asked me for something I can’t give them. Could never give them. So, at sundown, they will come and finish us all.”

Emerald growls. “You hear that, Rolleck?”

“Something about bandits,” he says sleepily. “You have a plan?”

“Not really, but when did that ever stop us?”

“Maybe we should let it, every once in a while.”

“Not this time,” Emerald says with a shake of her head. “The mayor has already suffered so much, but she kept smiling for her town. She smiled for us, too. A bunch of complete strangers. If you aren’t willing to swat a few bandits for that, you have no heart.”

Rolleck sits up and sighs. “I wouldn’t want to be accused of that,” he says. “It would only make your impressions of me even worse.”

Emerald lowers her voice and scowls. “My heart is in my blade, and it cuts with the power of love.”

Rolleck groans. “That’s even worse than Ravi’s.” He glances around. “Where is he, by the way? Riyo, too.”

“The bandits came,” Tremble says. “They took one of my people. A boy named Wicker. The fool tried to protect me. Your friend jumped onto the gondola cable before I could stop him. He’s going to get killed, and that will be my fault, too.” She looks to Emerald, her eyes pleading. “Please, just stop him and go. Leave this place to its fate. I already have too much guilt to take with me to the next life.”

“Sorry,” Rolleck says, standing up. “We’re very bad at walking away from things. Emerald, you’ll probably freeze if you go chasing the gondola, so I’ll do that. You stay here and deal with anyone they send to bother the town. That sound fair?”

“It means I have to sit around waiting even more,” Emerald says.

“Okay. Go fly into the blizzard, then.”

“Yeah, fine, okay. I’ll protect the town.” She turns to Tremble. “Our avian friend is Ravi. Do you know about the other woman?”

“He, uh, Ravi, said she might have left town.”

Rolleck covers his face with his free hand. “She’s gone up the mountain, I’d wager.”

“Ohhh,” Emerald says. “Yeah. We never should have let her leave the house.”

“Well, I’m sure she’s having a grand old adventure of her own, then,” Rolleck says. “If she shows up here, punch her for me.”

“Now that’s a plan.”

“So how do I find these bandits?”

“Just follow the gondola cable,” Emerald says. “If they’re controlling it then their base must be somewhere along its path.”

“Right.” Rolleck makes to leave.

“Wait,” Tremble says. They have essentially been ignoring her ever since they decided to help her. “Wait. If… if you must insist on this madness. Let me help you in whatever way I can.” She scurries off into the kitchen, and Emerald and Rolleck share a look as various clatters and clangs filter through the doorway.

She returns a moment later with a metal cylinder, which she offers to Rolleck. “All the rock cherry juice I have left.” She twists one end of the cylinder and it comes lose, revealing the fluid inside. “The flask is another of Albert’s inventions. It will keep the juice warm no matter what. You’ll need it to stay alive out there.”

Emerald expects Rolleck to make a comment about sweetness, but he just nods.

“Thank you.”

They watch him leave.

“Right,” Emerald says, cracking her neck left and right. “We should make sure everyone else in town is okay. You never finished clearing the avalanche, right?”

“Nobody will want to help now. They’ll be hiding in their homes.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Emerald says. “As long as I know I have somewhere warm and safe to come back to, this snow doesn’t stand a chance against me.” There is still a risk to her, of course. She hadn’t been joking when she said her death from cold could come instantly. Even so, she is done waiting. She needs to move.

 

 

 

Riyo Falsemoon is not an exceptional navigator, even with clear skies above her. Even so, the mountain she is heading towards is very big. She figured she probably wouldn’t lose it.

It has taken her about six minutes to lose it.

She slogs through the snow, her coat pulled tight around her. Her reality can ward off the worst of the wind’s bite, but the cold is in the very air, and if she uses her reality to get rid of that then she won’t be able to breathe.

The clouds are so thick around her that she feels like she is in a burning building, breathing smoke and fighting a growing panic. She has never been much for panic. Even when she knows she is no longer in control of a situation, she has always had the feeling that everything will work out okay. She still has that feeling now, but it fades a little with every snowdrift she pushes through.

She eventually reaches a cliff and takes it to be a good sign. Most of the cliffs, she reasons, probably face outwards from the mountain. She switches gravity for herself and walks up its face, watching as the wind-driven snow now seems to fall upwards instead of sideways.

The cliff is tall, and she is starting to wonder if she hasn’t become turned around and started walking across rather than up, when she hears somebody whistling. At first, she thinks she has imagined it. But she doesn’t recognise the tune, and it seems unlikely she would imagine something so hauntingly beautiful all by herself. It’s a strange sound – not clean and crisp enough for somebody to be playing the flute, but too metallic to be someone whistling with their lips. Curious, Riyo abandons her questionable path in favour of chasing the tune.

It proves difficult. The wind and the mountain’s echoes drag the sound up and down, left and right. She reaches the lip of the cliff at an angle, and rights herself on its edge before chasing the whistler along it. Her foot clunks against something that isn’t rock, setting the mountainside ringing. The whistling stops suddenly. Its producer has heard her.

“Who’s there?” a voice says. It, too, is metallic. Like someone is talking through a flute.

“Riyo Falsemoon,” Riyo says, because it is rude not to introduce yourself when you’ve interrupted someone’s whistling.

There is a pause.

“Who?”

Riyo follows the sound of the voice into a field of metal scraps stuck in the snow. Much of it is charred and warped, and it occurs to Riyo that she might have found what she came looking for after all.

“Stay away from me,” the voice says. “Haven’t you heard the stories?”

“No,” Riyo says.

“Oh. Well, there’s a monster in the hills. He brings the blizzard and eats the people who wander into it.”

“Is it you?”

“Uh. Yes? You should turn back. Or I’ll eat you.”

“I’m not convinced.” She is right on top of the voice, now, but there is no sign of anyone. There are a few big bits of metal someone could be hiding behind, so she picks the most robust-looking and peers around it. “Boo.”

“Wah!” the voice says, but there is nobody there. Instead, the chunk of metal itself scampers away from her.

This causes Riyo to say, “Wah!” too.

They are both still for a moment.

“Who are you?” they both say at the same time.

“I’m Riyo Falsemoon,” Riyo says again.

“Oh. Yeah. Um.” The chunk of metal starts glowing, and Riyo realises it is not all metal. The front and top of a rough oblong are glass, and there is now faint blue light emanating from within. It rises on a pair of thin, metal legs, gears whirring behind the lower half of the glass. In the upper section, there is a reflection of the blizzard. Snow swirls and falls in the pale blue enclosure, making it look like a giant snow-globe.

“I’m Glitter.”

“Wow,” Riyo says. “Um, what, exactly, are you?”

“I’m ice,” Glitter says. “My father built me a robot body.”

“That,” Riyo says, “is really cool.”

“Ha ha!” the ice robot says. “My father made that joke, too.”

They are silent for a moment, and it begins to become awkward. Then Riyo remembers why she came up here in the first place.

“What exploded up here, by the way?”

“Oh. That was me. I’m sorry. I built a rocket to take me back home. To my real home. But it didn’t work. I’m not as smart as my father was.”

“So where is your real home, Glitter?” Riyo asks.

“My father said I came from Calis. So now I want to go back. Because I don’t fit in here.”

“Huh,” Riyo says. “I’m going to Calis, too.”

“Wow. Do you have a rocket?”

“No. I’m just going to walk.”

“You can do that?”

“Yeah. You just have to cross the Reach. Hey!” Riyo snaps her fingers. “You should just come with me.”

“Okay!” Glitter says. The blizzard inside his body grows stronger, until the glass is coated with snow. As if a big finger is drawing in it, a simple face appears. It is smiling.

Riyo laughs. “That’s a neat trick. Come on, I’ll take you to meet my friends. They’re waiting in Coldton.”

“Oh,” Glitter says, metallic register falling. “I can’t go there.”

“Huh? Why not?”

“That’s where the bad man is. I have to stay away from the bad man.”

“Pfft,” Riyo says. “What if I squash the bad man? Will you come to Calis with me then?”

“I don’t know… The bad man is very bad. I think we should all stay away from the bad man.”

“Well I’m not going to,” Riyo says, turning away. “I’m going to go squish him. So, you can help, or you can stay here and blow up some more rockets.”

“Um,” Glitter says, his comically small legs scuttling through the snow to keep up with Riyo as she walks away. “Um.” He follows her for several minutes, until Riyo turns back to him again.

“Last chance. Are you coming or not?”

“I guess,” he says. His frosted glass makes a face with a wiggly mouth.

“Great,” Riyo says. “Because I have an idea. How tough is your body?”

“Father said it was his greatest work,” Glitter says. “I have now crashed seventeen rockets without breaking it.” The pride is evident in his voice.

Riyo grins. “Perfect.”

She trips him with her reality, knocking him onto his glass face and making him yelp again. Then she jumps on his back.

“What are you doing?!”

“Getting down this mountain,” Riyo says, doubling her weight to help brace herself, then flipping Glitter’s gravity so it pulls him towards where Coldton probably is. He begins to slide. “This is gonna be awesome.”

“Waaaiiiiiit,” Glitter says, but it gets lost in the sound of rushing wind as they pick up speed.

 

 

Ravi Matriya is cold. The cable box has stopped on a ridge where the wind howls between two peaks, driving the snow into a near-perfect wall of white. Through it, Ravi can just make out the entrance to a cave. Light flickers within it like a siren’s call that promises warmth and shelter. The bandits have answered that call, but Ravi is fairly certain that doing so himself will only end in disaster. Mortimer’s boss is probably in there, along with Mortimer himself and however many goons he has in his employ. He talked a big game to the mayor, but now he doesn’t know how to make good on it.

So far as he can tell, nobody watches the entrance. This seems like an oversight to Ravi, but then they control the only reasonable approach to the base. They probably haven’t received unexpected guests for years. That might mean none of them are alert, and he can sneak in and get Wicker out without them even noticing.

If he waits too much longer, his arms will freeze off and he’ll have no chance at all, so he quickly strings his bow and slinks closer. No alarm is raised as he crosses the stretch of clean snow before the mouth of the cave. His footprints are eaten by the blizzard the moment he lifts his foot, and no sign of his passage remains by the time he presses up against the rock of the cliff.

A quick glance inside reveals a short corridor that curves right at the end. The flickering firelight turns rocks into transient shadows all the way up the left wall, and he catches the smell of something cooking. It reminds him he hasn’t eaten since lunch. He ignores his belly and joins the shadows on the right-hand wall, slithering along the face of the rock until he is up against the turn.

“I heard,” somebody says, “that the World Force is going to come and quash the rebellion.”

“No way. They aren’t allowed to interfere in Song politics.”

“They’re allowed to if the Archcrafters decide it’s for the good of world peace,” the first voice says. “And some of them can see the future.”

“They say that, but I bet they’re just lying. If they could, then they would have stopped the revolution from happening in the first place. They could have saved years of unrest.”

“Maybe. We should be careful, though. If they do restore the king’s power, he’ll probably beef up the police force and put a stop to our sweet little operation.”

“Mmm. Just gotta keep an ear to the ground.”

Ravi hadn’t known the Frosthold Song had a king, nor that there had been a rebellion against him. It doesn’t matter much. What does matter, is that there are two people in the cavern around the corner, and he needs to get past them.

He hefts a rock back towards the entrance of the cave and then hunkers down in the shadows. His coat is a dark colour, so hopefully it will keep him hidden.

“What was that?” the first voice says.

“Go check it out,” the second says.

“What? No. What if it’s that monster?”

“The monster’s on our side, dumbass. The boss can control it.”

“I mean the other monster.”

“What other monster?”

“You know. The other one. The one that killed Bridget.”

“You really are stupid, aren’t you? You think Bridget got eaten by a second monster the day after she disrespects the boss?”

“I mean, that’s what Mortimer said happened.” The voice slows down towards the end.

“Yeah. No. Bridget got fed to the monster, and you will too if you don’t go check out that noise. What if someone’s trying to sabotage the gondola?”

“Fine,” the first voice says. “But you gotta come help if I yell. Otherwise the boss’ll have you eaten, too.”

Ravi counts footsteps, then holds his breath as they get close. The owner of the first voice appears, holding a spear out in front of him. He is wearing a studded leather jacket over a warm coat, but he is still shivering and moves carefully. Once he is out of sight of the fire, Ravi slips up behind him, quiet as the night. He hooks his bowstring over the man’s head and pulls hard, strangling any sound he might have tried to make. He struggles, lashing over his shoulder with his spear, but Ravi stays low until the man’s panic subsides and he flounders into unconsciousness. His spear tumbles from his grip, and Ravi winces as it clatters against the rock.

“Oh, come on,” the second voice says. “I’m not falling for something that basic, Will.”

Ravi quickly shoves the unconscious man into the blind spot in the corner and retrieves the spear.

“Will?”

The second man may come and investigate, but he may also take the threat seriously and call for help. Ravi looks down at the fallen guard and thinks back to his conversation. His voice isn’t that distinctive, and the echo of the cave will help. He moves a little further back down the corridor.

“Hey!” he shouts. “I think there’s someone out here!”

He hears the scuffle of feet and runs back towards the corner. He arrives at the same time as the second man, and before he can yelp in surprise the butt of his colleague’s spear slams between his eyes. He drops like a clumsy roofer.

Ravi takes a deep breath, then smiles to himself. His infiltration is going well.

“Intruder!” somebody yells from behind him, making his heart dive free of his chest.

He turns to find a dragon in the mouth of the cave. His eyes are icy blue, his face elongated into a snout like Emerald’s, but with stark white scales and crystalline teeth. He has no wings, but a long tail whips out behind him studded with spines like icicles. His claws glint as he raises them to point at Ravi.

“Big mistake, birdy boy,” he says.

Ravi grabs for an arrow, but then the sound of boots on stone echoes through the chamber behind him. It sounds like an entire army is marching towards him.

“Crap,” he says, dropping the spear and then his bow before raising his hands.

The lizard man stalks towards him, his smile a field of jagged points. “More chattel for the cage,” he says.

More armed men and women clatter around the corner, and the lizard man jabs a finger at them.

“Take him,” he says, and Ravi can only let them grab his arms and drag him deeper into the cave.

 

 

Rolleck the Lost is cold. Following the gondola cable, it turns out, is easier said than done. So far, he has had to leap a crevasse and scale a small, icy cliff. The latter he only managed by jabbing his sword into the stone to make handholds for himself. Now he struggles his way through waist-deep snow and a tangle of thorny vines that snake their way around a forest of skeletal trees. Water has soaked through his coat so, once again, his waistcoat is damp, and it has put him in a sour mood.

The sun has fallen through the sky and sundown threatens, the last light that can penetrate the thick cloud around the mountain barely enough to keep the ligmists from their hunt. He has already had to kill one that decided to leap from behind a tree when he passed through its shadow.

Something throws a deep hum over the forest, and a moment later the gondola passes overhead. Rolleck curses quietly, but there is nothing he can do about that now. Emerald will have to keep the residents of Coldton safe. On the bright side, very little time passed between the gondola activating and reaching him, which means he is close.

Even so, it is nigh full dark by the time he clears the forest and stumbles into a clearing where light from the mouth of a cave beckons him close. There is a man outside the cave, holding a spear and peering into the gloom.

“Who goes there?” he shouts.

“This is the hideout of the Kings of the Mountain, correct?” Rolleck says, walking into the shy light.

“Intruder!” the man yells, then Rolleck is on him, his sword whispering sweet nothings into his mind. Blood splatters snow, and for a moment the evening is silent once more.

Rolleck steps into the cave to the sound of approaching enemies. It is a sound he is happy to hear. Nothing warms the blood like battle. He turns the corner into a firelit cavern where nearly a dozen bandits wait. A crossbow string snaps as soon as he appears, and he tilts his head slightly to avoid its bolt.

“Put your weapon down!” one of them yells.

“Sorry,” Rolleck says, raising his sword to show the wires and barbs wrapped around and through his arm. “That’s not really an option.”

“Um,” the leader says, glancing at some of her colleagues. It’s clear she’s not sure what to do.

“Don’t worry,” Rolleck says. “I wasn’t going to comply anyway.”

Run, the voice says.

Rolleck dives forward. More crossbows snap at him, but he is not where they think he is. He is much closer. His sword cuts weapons and shields, armour and flesh. He is as unstoppable as the blizzard itself, and the bandit small-fry are strewn across the cave floor like the last leaves of autumn. Where Ravi Matriya has a good heart, and no doubt attempted to rescue the hostage without killing anyone, Rolleck has been a police officer for a long time and seen what these criminals are capable of. He has no reservations about giving them no quarter.

When he is done, the cave is silent. He moves deeper, following torches and little orbs that give light with no fire. Each is attached to a little metal box that whirrs as though there is a spinning top inside. The next cavern is much larger. The heat hits him like a wall, and Rolleck starts to think he has walked into another volcano. There are no streams of magma pouring down the walls as there had been in Yl Torat, however. There is just a metal cage with a glowing orange device inside.

“Rolleck,” Ravi shouts. “Below you!”

Rolleck jumps aside just in time to avoid being skewered by a great spike of ice. He rolls to his feet, watching the ground, and sees the twinkle of forming frost. He moves again as another spike materialises.

A man’s deep laughter echoes around the cavern, and Rolleck looks up to find its owner standing before a raised throne of wood and gold.

Off to one side, Ravi and Wicker are tied up in a big iron cage.

“Careful,” Ravi says. “He’s a crafter.”

That does not bode well. Once, early in their journey together, Rolleck challenged Riyo to a friendly contest. He had mostly been curious about whether he was capable of resisting her reality.

He is not. She had been able to bounce him around like a rubber doll. She had laughed about it for a long time.

“You would be the leader of these bandits, then?” he says. He stays on his toes, aware that, if the man’s reality is one of ice, then he could expect an attack from anywhere around him.

The man is short and burly, his brown hair thin enough that he has combed it over to hide a bald patch that is still extremely noticeable. He is wearing spectacles and a dark shirt. There is a black wolf pelt around his waist. Rolleck scowls. Another police officer gone foul.

“That I am,” he says. “Have you come to arrest me?” He wears a sardonic smile.

“Unfortunately not,” Rolleck says. “This is outside my jurisdiction. I’m just going to have to kill you.”

The man laughs again. “I’m afraid this is my home turf, officer. You may not be like those other country bums who don’t even know crafting when they see it, but that doesn’t mean you can do anything about it. In this place, I reign supreme.”

Shards of ice spring into existence all around Rolleck, but he is ready for it. He slaps several out of the way as they are still forming and darts through the gap. The heat from the glowing device has disappeared, the temperature in the cave plummeting to match that outside and then falling further. Rolleck feels his movements slowing, and as more icicles stab at him from nowhere he finds he is not quick enough to dodge them. They rip into his clothes and skin, steam as his blood coats them.

The crafter stands by his throne, unmoving. He still wears his smile, and Rolleck realises that, just as with Riyo, he cannot approach him. Cannot fight inside his reality.

You could, the voice says. Let me closer.

“No,” Rolleck says through gritted teeth. He makes a final forward feint, focusing the man’s defences before himself, then darts left and shears through the cage. Barbs fly forward from his arm and rip through Ravi’s bonds.

Then the man’s laugh rings out again, and Rolleck cannot move. His limbs are encased in ice. He can feel it, freezing against his exposed skin. It almost feels as though he is being burned. The sound of the man’s footsteps fill the cave.

“And what was that supposed to achieve?” he says, coming to stand by Rolleck. “No, wait, let me guess. You must protect the innocent no matter what?” He laughs some more. It is not a pleasant sound. Like he was once told about laughter and thought he might try it out without hearing the real thing first. “I’d like to say I was once like you,” he says, kneeling down to bring himself level with Rolleck’s eyes, “but I wasn’t. The power this pelt brings, the power my crafting brings. They’re tools. Tools to control people. Before the revolution I used that power to get what I wanted out of the capital. Now I use them to get what I want out of the people here. You see, no matter what happens, people with power will-”

“Never shut up about it,” Ravi says.

The man looks annoyed that his speech has been interrupted.

“And I suppose you are the one to shut me up?” he says with a scowl.

“Maybe,” Ravi says. He has been disarmed, but Rolleck has made a convenient pile of metal bars in front of him. He picks one up. Stares at it for a moment. Blue light flickers along its length, cascades through his feathers.

“You’ll freeze to death like your friend,” the man says.

A new cage of ice surrounds Ravi, dreadful spikes pointing in at him. It begins to contract, closing in to crush him. And as each spike touches him, it shatters into nothing. The bars do the same, his curse-breaker obliterating them the moment they come into contact with his feathers.

“What?”

Ravi shrugs, then swings at the man’s head with his improvised club.

A sheet of ice springs into existence before the man, and the bar renders it to dust without slowing. It catches him on the hairline, snapping his head to one side and drawing out a yell. He stumbles back, clutching his head where blood flows between his fingers. His spectacles lie on the floor by his feet, one lens cracked.

“How…?” he says, eyes wide. He takes a few more steps back as Ravi emerges from the cage. The bottoms of his feet tingle, and he glances down to find an ice spike trying to materialise. What manages to form quickly crumbles away when Ravi swipes his foot through it.

The bandit leader licks his lips nervously.

Then he turns and runs.

Ravi considers chasing him, but he can’t leave Rolleck the way he is, or he might die. The man is inhumanly resilient, but even he would succumb to frostbite eventually if left encased in ice.

Ravi kneels and inspects his fallen friend. The ice coats him in a thin layer that shines in the light of the heating device. Now that the crafter’s reality no longer holds sway over the area, the heat has already made a sheen of glittering water on its surface. It is melting too slowly for Rolleck, however.

Ravi’s curse-breaker flickers over his outstretched palm for a moment, then jumps onto Rolleck’s back. It almost seems to burn the ice, as though it is covered in a thin layer of oil. It washes over Rolleck’s body, making dying nerves tickle and twinge, loosening his joints until they allow him to sag to the ground, panting for breath.

“Thank you,” he says.

“No problem,” Ravi says. “Thanks for getting me out of the cage. Guess we’re even.”

“No problem,” Rolleck struggles to say.

Ravi helps him crawl closer to the heating device, then returns to the cage to free Wicker from his bonds.

“How did you do that?” Wicker asks, rubbing at his wrists. “He’s been terrorising us for months with that power, and you just… ignored it.”

“It’s a gift,” Ravi says with a shrug. He is perhaps a year older than Wicker. He doesn’t really feel comfortable with the way the younger man is staring at him. He flickers his curse-breaker through his feathers as a demonstration.

“That’s amazing,” Wicker says. “Maybe he’s gone for good.”

“I doubt it,” Ravi says. “Most of his gang went to destroy your town, remember?”

Wicker’s face grows pale. “We have to get back.”

Ravi shakes his head with a glance for Rolleck. “We left at least one dependable friend in town, and I don’t want to strain Rolleck too much. He just almost died.”

“I’m fine,” Rolleck says. He has managed to sit up, but he is still shivering so much that his voice wobbles. He reaches for his belt and, after some fumbling, pulls out the flask Tremble gave him. “Got this.”

“That’s Uncle Albert’s flask!” Wicker says. He scurries over to Rolleck. “Here, let me help.”

He unscrews the top and then pours some of the steaming contents into the lid, using it like a cup. He helps Rolleck take a sip.

“The rock cherry juice was the first thing the bandits took,” Wicker says. “We used to mine the cherries out of the mountain ourselves, but then Uncle Albert made machines that break the rocks and filter out the cherries. They carry them up to the surface through a big pipe, but now the bandits control it. I didn’t know the mayor still had some.”

“This is the last of it,” Rolleck says. The few sips he has taken are already warming their way through his frozen body. It feels as though a great weigh of ice has been cleared out of him. “It’s enough, though. Let’s go.” He tries to stand, but he’s still shivering so badly his legs can barely hold him up.

Ravi shakes his head. “Emerald can buy us a few minutes,” he says. “And who knows. Maybe Riyo’s already back.”

 

 

 

It is quite easy for a fire-breathing dragon to clear snow. By the time the grinding sound of the gondola spins out over the town, Emerald has uncovered most of the houses that make up Coldton. A lesser dragon than herself might have had some trouble keeping said houses from catching fire when she breathed on them. She has greater control than the majority of Yl Torat, however, refined by years of careful study and practice out in the endless forest.

She only set fire to two houses, and she extinguished them quite quickly.

The citizens of Coldton were scared, then amazed, as she rolled through the town, melting everything. Now they are scared again and have retreated to their homes to await the coming bandits. Only mayor Tremble stands with her before the gondola platform.

“You should return to your home, mayor,” Emerald says again.

Her giant hat wobbles as she shakes her head. “This is my town. I should be its last line of defence.”

Emerald sighs. “Okay. But as long as I’m still standing, you have at least one line before yours. So please try to stay back.”

Tremble is quiet for a moment, then begins talking in barely more than a whisper.

“This has happened before,” she says. “They came before we could gather together a tithe. Their leader, Yrith, he…” She stops for a moment, the effort of remembering overwhelming her. “He took slaves, instead. He made me choose. Two young men from town, and one old woman to… to feed his creature.”

Emerald grits her teeth and glances at Tremble. The woman smiling in all those pictures. The woman strong enough to survive the death of her husband and hold her town together with her smile.

“You chose.”

“I did.”

“Does Coldton know?”

She shakes her head. “They… They would have taken what they wanted anyway. I doubt you have any idea how it feels to be this powerless. To be in a place where your only option is something truly terrible. We’re none of us strong, or brave. Not anymore.”

Emerald remembers standing before her father’s broken body, hating herself for things she could have done. Perhaps, without Riyo and the others, Folvin would have burned and her brother would not have been stopped. Certainly, she could not have stopped him herself. She had felt helpless, then. But Tremble is right. Even then, she had options. Tremble had none. Until now.

“You’re right,” Emerald says. “It must have been unbearable. But no more. What guilt you feel cannot be expunged by death. You will have to atone once you are able to.” The gondola is now visible, swaying past the closest post. “Hopefully, that will start tomorrow morning.”

“The gondola is hanging heavy,” Tremble says. “It’s probably over capacity.” She looks up at Emerald again. “Are you sure-”

“Yes.”

Tremble swallows and turns back to the gondola.

“If I fail, though,” Emerald says into the churning silence. “Don’t give up. Riyo will come back here, and even if she fails, someone else will come after. It may feel like all is lost, but there is always someone willing to help you carry your burden.”

The gondola makes an awful screeching noise as it drags across the stone of the platform. The doors wrench open with another tortured sound, and Mortimer steps out. He is followed by more than twenty men and women, all armed with crossbows and spears. The last one out looks like a dragon.

Emerald blinks at him. His scales and spines match the icy world around him, and he has no wings. Aside from that, he could have been born in Yl Torat.

“Who’s that?” Emerald whispers at Tremble.

“I don’t know,” she says, eyes wide. “I’ve never seen him before.”

Some of the bandits are wearing similar expressions of shock and begin glancing back at their scaled companions as if asking the same questions about her.

For his part, the wingless dragon narrows his eyes at her.

Mortimer ignores all this, stepping down from the platform into the street.

“Mayor,” he says, voice viciously jovial. “I don’t see a tithe.”

“The cost was too high, this time,” Emerald says. “You’ve pushed too hard.”

“We can push a whole lot harder than this,” he growls.

“Care, Mortimer,” the wingless dragon says.

“Huh? You think she can out-fight you? And the rest of us?” There is a sneer in his voice.

“I don’t know,” the wingless dragon says. “I’ve never faced a dragon before. I don’t know what she is capable of.”

“She’s a dragon?”

“The fact that you didn’t know what she is should be enough reason for caution, Mortimer. You know there are dangers greater than us out there.”

“Not many.”

“Enough.”

They are quiet for a moment, Mortimer glaring, the wingless dragon’s gaze steady and insistent. Then Mortimer sighs.

“Fine. What do we do?”

“Just be careful.”

“Insightful.” He turns to the gathered bandits. “Fire.”

Emerald steps in front of Tremble as a hail of crossbow bolts flicker towards them. They cannot pierce Emerald’s scales, so to her it feels like being pelted with snowballs.

“I think you’ve made your defiance known, mayor,” Emerald says. “Please go back to your home. I can hold them here, but it will be more difficult if I have to protect you.”

Tremble gives a trembling nod.

As she starts walking, Emerald turns back to the bandits.

“I’m going to fight you,” she says. “And if you win, then the town is yours again. Until that happens, though, anyone who decides to take a free shot at the mayor will be the first to die.” That said, she inhales her pilot.

Just as her blood catches, a crossbow snaps.

“Shit,” Emerald says. She isn’t close enough to intercept it. She just has to hope that it misses its mark. Instead, she explodes forward, indigo fire leaking from beneath her scales.

Though she cannot outrun a crossbow bolt, she can come close. By the time it reaches its destination, her hand is emerging from the other side of the marksman’s head. She tosses him aside and breathes on his compatriots, melting armour and scorching flesh. Screams echo out over the mountain as they scatter before her, diving into snowdrifts to try and soothe their burns.

She catches an axe in her left hand, stopping it dead on its path to her neck. She then stands from her slouch and faces down the man named Mortimer.

“Oh,” he says as his axe starts to melt.

Emerald uses what’s left of the weapon to yank him off balance and goes to punch his head off his shoulders.

“I told you to be careful,” the wingless dragon growls, catching her fist before it can connect. “Take any who can still follow and retreat to the edge of town.”

The fire around Emerald’s fist emerges in fits and flickers, and where his scales touch hers, she feels the fizz of heat meeting cold. She lets Mortimer retreat and takes a step back from her new opponent, watching out of the corner of her eye as the bandits regroup in the snow. He flexes his claws around his palm, but the scales there look undamaged.

Emerald breathes flame, engulfing him in a cloak of his own that twists into a short-lived pillar of light.

When it fades, he is still standing, this time wearing a grin.

“It was worth a try,” Emerald says.

“I knew the dragons were proud,” he says. “But it seems you don’t even know what I am, let alone who.”

“My dragonly education is lacking,” Emerald agrees. “But I’m not embarrassed about not knowing the name of a small-time mountain bandit.”

His expression sours at that. “I may be a bandit for now, but at home I am a prince – L’Sweren Riss, heir to the crystal empire of the drakes.”

“If you’re the one who used to be a prince then I’m not the one who needs to feel embarrassed, am I?” Emerald says. She can’t afford to have this conversation. Her cowl has a time limit, and when it expires, she will die the same death as Bronze, her brother’s consort. Either that, or she will successfully extinguish her blood only to have it freeze and kill her that way.

She coats him in flame again, then lunges after it.

“That won’t-” he manages before her fist crashes into his jaw, sending him careening off the gondola platform and into a snow drift. She leaps into the air after him, a billow of fire erasing any sign of the drift as she begins her descent. He’s sprawled across the rocks, but this time he’s able to dodge just before her flame wreathed talons make a molten wreck of the stones.

He springs to his feet and wipes a trickle of blue blood from the corner of his mouth. There is anger in his icy eyes, now.

“Since I can’t melt you like I do most of my opponents,” Emerald says, “and you can’t freeze me at a touch like you presumably do yours, we’ll settle this with old-fashioned tooth and claw.” She pulls her wings in tight against her back and then falls into a fighting stance. As one of the few dragons around with roughly human proportions, Emerald is perhaps the first of her race to learn martial arts beyond the brutal, flailing brawls she’d grown up with.

The drake prince snarls and comes at her, the knee-deep snow no impediment to his movements. He drops to all-fours before leaping at her, and it occurs to Emerald a little too late that the martial forms she has so painstakingly practiced as she travelled the endless forest were all designed for fighting human shaped opponents. The drake is suddenly more like a panther than a man, and she is barely able to nudge aside his claws as he collapses onto her. She can do little about his legs, and apparently a drake’s claws are just as sharp as a dragon’s, because she feels them dig past the scales of her thigh.

She grits her teeth and grabs his wrists to keep him from her throat. Now that he is on her, the fight resembles wrestling — something she is more familiar with. She brings her legs in close, wincing as his claws tear free of her and take some of her scales with them. She then kicks out, shoving him off her but keeping hold of his arms so that he flips over her head and onto his back.

They both come back to their feet, and there is a brief stand-off before they come together again. Emerald finds herself reverting to the style of fighting of her youth, when all her conflicts had been simple brawls between dragons trying to prove themselves before the rest of Yl Torat. Before she’d learned of a world so much bigger than all that. Blue blood chills her scales where it splatters from her claws, while her own blood burns like spilled lantern oil everywhere it falls.

For a while, the drake holds his advantage. He has been nurturing his animal instincts for violence his entire life, while Emerald has attempted to leave hers behind. She hasn’t succeeded, however. As the fight drags on, though her body begins to ache from her burning blood, she finds that the animal is still inside her. She finds herself smiling, and wonders if this is how Rolleck the Lost feels when he fights.

She also finds that all her training was not for nothing after all. Between primal growls and feral strikes, she sees wasted movements and openings she can exploit.

The drake leaves her the perfect chance, and instead of just raking his scales with her claws and leaving minimal damage, she grabs his arm and pivots it round. He reacts with surprise, trying to move away and only worsening his balance. She uses his misstep to force him to the ground on his belly, his arm twisted up behind him. Then she puts everything she has into the twist, and a monstrous crack rings out around the town.

The drake screams, but Emerald keeps hold of the arm and plants her foot on the back of his neck to keep him from writhing free. She’s almost at the limit of her cowl, but even so she is reluctant to end it so easily. The drake has given her a good fight.

Something responds to his scream. Something deep and loud and terrible, lost amidst snow and darkness. The ground starts to shake with the reverberations of enormous footsteps.

“Shit,” the drake says between pained breaths. “I hate that thing.”

“What is it?” Emerald says.

“I don’t know. It’s dangerous, though. Even to me. The boss never should have kept it around.”

A shadow looms up between two houses at the edge of the town, and another bass roar knocks snow from rooftops and tree branches. It is coming towards Emerald, perhaps attracted by the sound of fighting or perhaps ordered to by the now-missing Mortimer.

Emerald steps off the drake and turns to face the monster. It seems to drag the gloom of night with it as it walks, leaving only the impression of rimed fur and glowing red eyes.

For the space of a heartbeat, Emerald is frightened. Wrapped in her cowl and with the heat of battle running through her, she nevertheless feels a chill. Like her blood has already frozen.

Then someone yells “Yahooooo!” and something large, black and vaguely rectangular ramps off the roof of the house to her left in a shower of snow. It hits the monster in the side of the head with a clang like a church bell, losing its momentum and breaking into two parts. One of them is notably human in shape. Both thunk down into the snow, while the monster keels over backwards with a crash that once again sets the ground shaking.

Emerald and the drake both stare gormlessly at the mess.

Then Riyo Falemoon’s head bursts from a pile of snow.

“What a rush!” she says, looking over at the chunk of metal she has ridden into a mountain monster. “Let’s do it again!”

Emerald blinks as the metal sits up by itself. Snow cascades from one side of it, then moulds itself into a massive arm. It rubs the top of the box.

“Ouch,” a soft, metallic voice says. “No. That hurt.”

“Really?” Riyo says.

The box stops rubbing its head and sighs. “No. Not really. I don’t want to do that again, though.” Its snow arm recedes, moving back inside the box like a snake. A metal flap falls back into place over the spot where it had emerged.

“I guess climbing back up the mountain would be a pain,” Riyo says, pulling herself out of her self-made igloo and brushing snow from her coat. “What stopped us, anyway?” She finally begins to take in her surroundings. “Oh, hey Emerald.”

“Where have you been?” Emerald says. Then shakes her head. “Actually, I don’t care.” Her veins hurt. “I need to get back to the… mayor’s… house… Shit. I forgot about the mayor!”

Riyo’s eyes go wide and she runs after Emerald.

“There’s a monster here,” Glitter says behind them. “Oh! Maybe this is the one that eats people!”

Emerald darts around the corner onto the main street and makes a bee-line for the lump of black cloth near the gondola. The crossbow bolt had not missed her.

Both of them skid in the snow as they come to a stop.

“Shit,” Emerald says. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have got distracted fighting that drake.”

“Who did this?” Riyo asks. She looks angry.

“Bandits. They’ve been holding the town hostage for a long time. You’ve missed a lot.”

“Clearly,” Riyo says. “Point me at these bandits.”

“I’m fine,” a muffled voice says.

They both blink at the mayor. The blob begins reorienting itself, until the hat is pointing at the sky once more. Then it rises slightly to reveal the ruddy face of mayor Tremble.

“The bolt didn’t get through my layers,” she says.

Riyo takes hold of quarrel and pulls. It comes free with the soft sound of wool tearing. She then peers into the hole.

“Do you actually have a body, Mrs. Mayor?”

She chuckles softly.

“I need to recover,” Emerald says. The situation is getting a little urgent for her. She needs to be inside when her flame goes out, and it needs to go out soon. “Riyo, can you deal with that monster if it gets back up?”

There is a massive crash, then a high-pitched wail starts up. It gets progressively louder until Glitter rounds the corner, his little legs causing his over-wide body to waddle as he runs. He is screaming, and has made a comical, wide-eyed face on his glass. Behind him comes the crunch and clatter of the monster in pursuit.

“By the sunlight stone,” Tremble breathes. “It’s here…”

“I got it,” Riyo says. “Get the mayor home.”

Emerald nods. “Thanks. See you later.”

Tremble glides through the snow after the burning dragon, swinging around a set of buildings to avoid the path of the monster. Her hat swivels back and forth as she glances over her shoulder at Riyo, concern etched into her weathered face.

Riyo, meanwhile, steps in front of Glitter and changes gravity around her so that, for all intents and purposes, there is a solid wall in front of her. Glitter hits it and bounces off.

“Hey!” he says. “There’s a monster coming!”

Said monster bounds around the corner at that moment, using its giant fists like forelegs. It stops to glare red hatred at its surroundings, then its eyes light on Riyo and Glitter.

“I don’t think we need to worry,” Riyo says.

“But it’s huge,” Glitter says, turning to face it and backing up slowly. “Look at its arms!”

It roars and plunges towards them.

“Your father,” Riyo says, still watching the oncoming monster. She imagines being punched by those fists would be a lot like being hit by a magical space train. “He’s not around anymore, right?”

“No.”

“Where did he live?”

“Here. In Coldton,” Glitter says, glancing around. “He loved this place.”

“That monster’s making a mess of the place your father loved,” Riyo says.

“Then… then somebody should stop it, shouldn’t they?”

“Mhmm,” Riyo says. She flares her reality out to encompass the monster, then pushes against it. As she suspects, it resists, barely slowing as gravity around it begins pulling it back down the street. She glances at Glitter. The monster is now seconds away.

“Okay,” Glitter says.

Snow bursts from his two shoulder flaps, churning far faster than the earlier avalanche. In the blink of an eye there is enough swirling around him to cover one of the houses and, in the moment before the monster’s impact, it compacts inwards with a soft crunch. What is left is a bulky, humanoid snowman with a glowing blue heart.

Riyo takes a step back as the two giants come together. They grapple for a moment, pitching their strength against each other but coming to a stalemate. Then Glitter drops away suddenly, making the monster stumble forward. Glitter grabs the monster’s head, his hands losing their shape and becoming a ball of ice that holds the creature fast. His body then comes apart, flowing over the monster like the wind-driven blizzard and reforming behind him. He flings the creature down the street with a metallic yell that is muffled by the snow.

Riyo cheers as the monster comes crashing down beyond the mayor’s house.

“So, it wasn’t just the bird and the swordsman,” someone says behind her.

She swivels to find a man in a black wolf-pelt and spectacles standing behind her. He is grinning maliciously despite the dried blood on his forehead and down the side of his face. Behind him, on the gondola platform, a group of singed bandits are gathered around a pile of mostly-broken weapons. Their apparent leader, a man with some of an axe, is scowling at the wingless dragon from earlier.

Riyo frowns. “Who’re you?”

To her left, Glitter gasps. “Oh no! It’s the bad man.”

“Oh,” Riyo says, glancing at the ice robot. He has retracted into his case, and the face on the glass has its eyes closed in despair.

“This town-” The man is interrupted by the gondola whirring into motion again. He turns and glares at the axeman. “Turn that off.”

“We can’t, boss,” he says. “We broke the stop button at this end, remember?”

The boss’s face darkens. “Then anything that comes out of the gondola dies immediately.” He turns back to Riyo and Glitter. “This town is mine,” he growls, far less grand than whatever his speech was going to be before the interruption. “I’ve been made a fool of today, and I don’t like it. These people need to learn their place. Learn that no matter who they ask to help them, only I can decide what happens here. Only me.”

“No wonder Emerald wanted to kick your ass,” Riyo says. “Let’s squish him, Glitter.” She turns to her new friend, but his metal body is shaking on its spindly legs.

“I can’t fight the bad man,” he moans.

“That’s right,” the boss says. Then he says, “Whiteout.”

Riyo feels his reality enfold her and narrows her eyes. “Oh. Gravity Mould.”

The man’s smile wavers for a moment, but then he rallies.

“So, you’re a crafter, too. Well, it doesn’t matter. Here, my reality can’t be beaten.” He looks to Glitter.

Something cold and hard hits Riyo in the side, sending her smashing through the window of a shop and into the counter. She manages to slow herself so that the impact is small, but the initial hit and the shattering glass came too quickly. She pulls herself to her feet and ignores the throbbing of her left arm and the sting of a pair of cuts on her face.

Glitter has become a snowman again, but this time his heart glows red.

“All of this snow,” the boss says. “All of this ice. All of it, mine.”

Glitter takes a step towards Riyo.

“Uh oh,” she says.

 

 

 

 

 

“What’s special about this one, then?” Tremble asked, sipping from a mug of rock cherry juice and peering over his shoulder at the crystal.

“I don’t know,” Albert said. “That’s what’s exciting about it. Look at the way it glows.”

It pulsed blue again, as if showing off.

“Do you think it’s more powerful?”

Albert shook his head. “All the readings are the same as other crystals of this size.” He tapped the output gauge to demonstrate, but Tremble didn’t bother looking at it. She was his greatest gift – the woman he had given up prestige and acclaim for – but she wasn’t a scientist like him. Even so, she trusted in everything he said and did.

“Well, I’ll leave you to your probing, then,” she said, leaning down and kissing him on the cheek. “Just remember there’s a town meeting this afternoon. We need to decide what to do about the poor dears coming in from the capital.”

“I know, I know,” Albert said with a smile. “I’m sure I can find a way to make a bit more space if any of them want to stay. I think I might be able to attach something to the snow plough to make digging out new plots a whole lot easier.”

“One thing at a time, dear,” Tremble said, offering him one of her winning smiles.

“Right, right,” he turned back to the crystal while Tremble went downstairs. “What do you have to teach me, then?”

The crystal flashed again, then returned to the same soft glow as before. Now that he thought about it, Albert realised it had been much more active while he was talking to his wife.

“Is it responding to my voice?” he wondered aloud.

The crystal flashed again.

“Huh.”

Flash.

“It seems that it is.”

Flash.

Albert took a hammer from his toolbox and tapped it against the wood of his desk. The crystal’s light remained low. He tapped louder, and then louder still, but each time the crystal ignored him. He tried making a few different sounds by hitting metal and clapping, but the crystal didn’t respond.

“Only my voice?” he said.

Flash.

Albert’s eyes went wide at the implication of this.

“Can you… can you understand me?”

Flash.

“Flash once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no’,” he tried.

Flash. Just the one.

Albert grimaced, then glanced around, struggling for a way to test the crystal. Since he had no idea what the crystal knew or didn’t know, it was hard coming up with questions for which he knew the answer was no. So far, the crystal had only done singular flashes. If he could make it do a double flash, then it was one step towards proving it wasn’t a coincidence.

Maybe asking complex questions wasn’t the way forward. The odds of a sentient ice crystal from Calis even understanding his words was shockingly low. He needed something easier to understand even without a shared language.

He picked up his hammer again and moved close to the crystal.

“One,” he said, and tapped the desk once.

Flash.

“Two,” he said. A single word, but he accompanied it with two taps.

The crystal flashed once.

“Two,” he said again, tapped twice.

The crystal flashed. Then, after a moment, flashed again without Albert saying anything to trigger it.

Heart racing, Albert said, “Three,” and tapped three times.

The crystal flashed three times.

By this point, Albert was shaking so much he was having difficulty holding onto the hammer, but he managed to take the crystal up to ten. Each time it grew more confident, having figured out what he wanted it to do.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

The crystal flashed once, then again with a little delay, almost seeming uncertain.

Albert glanced around, then put the hammer down carefully, trying to show the crystal that the game was over.

It flashed once more, then settled to its normal glow.

It seemed what mattered wasn’t what the crystal could teach him, but what he could teach the crystal.

 

Over the next few weeks, Albert grew convinced that the crystal wasn’t a simple life-form, but a new one. A blank canvas capable of thoughts matching, or maybe even exceeding his own, if only it had someone to teach it. He kept his discovery secret, unsure how the people of Coldton would respond to an alien lifeform among them. He kept talking around it, in the hopes that it would begin to pick up language in the same way a human infant would; passively absorbing until it was ready to begin experimenting with the sounds on its own.

But then, how would it do that?

As soon as the thought came to him, Albert began searching for ways to let the crystal speak to him. Ice crystals were used as power sources because they constantly drew in the heat around them and sequestered it. Even small amounts of heat were used so efficiently that they could provide more than enough power to operate anything he thought to create if he syphoned it out correctly. Perhaps a sentient crystal could control how it used that energy. Perhaps well enough to power things as and when it wanted to.

He could build it a body.

That became his task, and he quickly realised he couldn’t do it at home, so he made up an excuse about his next project being a little too dangerous to keep in the house and found himself a cave a short way from town.

It took him nearly six months, but after a number of failed attempts and plenty of one-way conversations with the crystal, he finished the base.

 

“This may hurt a little,” Albert said, easing the crystal out of its cradle. Even with his thick protective gloves, the chill of it pressed against his palms and threatened to numb them before he could put it on the base. With the crystal in the new cradle, he began turning the crank that would insert the syphon. He was almost sure it would work. His calculations had never been wrong before. But there was a nagging doubt in the bottom of his stomach that said the operation would kill the crystal.

He reached the point of no return and hesitated, then closed his eyes and turned the crank once more. A high pitched, metallic sound began resonating around the cavern, barely audible. Albert turned the crank once more and it became almost deafening.

“It’s over,” he yelled. His voice joined the squeal and was consumed by it.

It continued for a while then, just as Albert was ready to roll the crank back and remove the syphon, its pitch fell. It came down in steps, almost like someone playing the keys of a piano in order. Then it stopped.

Albert’s heart provided a beat for the scale, drumming against his rib cage. In the silence that followed the wail’s end, it sounded like a galloping horse.

“Glitter?” he said. He’d taken to calling the crystal that for the way its facets caught the sun on clear days.

The crystal pulsed a response, and another metallic sound emerged. Glitter seemed intrigued by that. It started making more noises, flickering through different pitches and modulations, exulting in its new communicative powers. It was all over the place for a while, then it started making bursts of sounds that almost felt like words.

“Fa…th…er.”

“What?” Albert said, his heart somehow managing to find an even faster rhythm.

“Fa…ther. Fa…ther. Father.”

 

 

Glitter learned quickly – far faster than a human child. He decided for himself that he was a ‘he’ after Albert explained what gender was. He also decided that he wanted to be a scientist after Albert explained what a scientist was. Together, they built his body from its simple base into an impenetrable fortress to protect his vulnerable crystal. Then, they turned to new projects. All the while, Glitter learned. Albert’s theories and ideals, his passions and his woes. Everything he knew and felt, he taught to Glitter.

“I have finished the modifications to the plough, father,” Glitter said. He knew it was powered by a crystal not dissimilar to him, but they had tested other crystals and found no sign of sentience in them. He was special.

“Thanks, Glitter,” Albert said. He seemed a little pensive.

“What is troubling you?”

He smiled at that. “Sometimes you can read me even better than my wife can.”

“You are deflecting, father.”

“You see?” Albert gave a short, sharp laugh. “Oh, but you’re right. I am.” He wandered over to the plough, and Glitter tottered after him.

“I think it’s time, Glitter,” he said. “Time for you to meet her.”

Glitter ‘breathed’ on his glass and made a shocked face. It was something he had discovered that always made Albert smile. He did so now.

“Past time, in fact. I don’t think I should have kept you sequestered up here by yourself for so long. I’ve realised that I don’t have the right to. Heck, you should be allowed to come and go as you please. Travel the world, even, instead of being stuck on this snowy mountain.”

“But I like this mountain,” Glitter said. “And I like you. Why would I want to leave?”

“Because this place is all you’ve known, Glitter. I’m the only person you’ve met. You might like other places and people even more. And even if you don’t,” he went on before Glitter could tell him that couldn’t possibly be true, “you deserve the chance to find that out for yourself.”

Glitter went to speak, then realised he didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t worry, though,” Albert said. “We’ll start slow.” He hopped up onto the plough and started its engine, filling their little cave with its hum. “Let’s go and meet Tremble. I’m sure she’ll love you.”

Glitter made a smiley face, then scurried over towards the door. Before he reached it, however, someone banged on it. The clang of metal stopped Glitter dead.

Albert frowned. “That’s odd.”

The person beyond the door smashed their fist into it again, insistent and frantic.

Albert jumped down from the plough and hurried over. “Play at sleep for a moment, Glitter.”

Glitter gave soft noise of assent and went to stand by the wall. He withdrew his legs, lowering his main chassis to the ground and then going still and dark. Like that, he just looked like another piece of machinery.

Albert nodded to him and then yanked open the door, the seal that kept their heat in hissing as it broke. A woman in a lot of layers and a tall hat stumbled in through the gap and fell against Albert.

“Tremble,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Bandits,” Tremble panted. “They came up out of the pass. I don’t know what to do, Al.”

Albert glanced around at his workshop, then grabbed the arc cannon they had been working on for the last few weeks. It was still highly unstable, and Glitter almost said as much before remembering he was pretending to be a cupboard.

Tremble’s features were a little different from Alberts, but Glitter was still able to recognise the look of apprehension on her face.

“There are so many of them, Al,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Albert said, strapping the harness that came with the cannon to his back. “As soon as we show them we aren’t easy prey, they’ll back off.” He shook his head. “With the rebellion gaining traction, we should have seen this coming.”

“I know,” Tremble said. “I feel like this is my fault.”

“Nobody said anything at any of our meetings, Trem. It’s a failure of the entire council. But we can get our act together after we deal with the present crisis. Come on.”

They both ran outside, Albert sparing a quick glance for Glitter before the door closed with a metal crash.

Glitter waited exactly three minutes, then popped his legs out and started pacing. He hadn’t heard the word ‘bandits’ before, but the way they talked about them, and the fact his father had taken the arc cannon, suggested they were bad. Could Glitter help? Tremble had said there were lots of them. If he didn’t help, what might happen to his father? Glitter imagined waiting here. And waiting. And waiting. Until he knew in his core that his father was not going to return. A sense of dread settled on him like a layer of fresh snow, growing heavier and heavier, until even his amazing body of tempered glass and refined steel was crushed by it.

Glitter turned to the door and let his snow slither out and hook the handle. The air outside was crisp, the sky a perfect blue that let the sun bore down through the cold between the trees. Glitter stepped outside by himself for the first time and turned to follow the tracks that blemished the white sheet that coated the mountain.

 

 

Albert stumbled into town with no breath left and had to lean against the wall of their house for a while to recover. Tremble had kept pace with him and was considerably less exhausted. Down the main street, he could see the bandits gathered by the gondola. Their clothing was mismatched and rough, their weapons and armour damaged. As he had guessed, they were refugees of the violence in the capital. Which side they had fought for, however, wasn’t immediately apparent.

“Go inside,” he told Tremble.

“No way,” she said. “You are not facing them alone.”

He thought to argue, but then decided Coldton didn’t have the time.

“Fine. Stay close, then.”

“Always,” Tremble said, smiling in spite of everything. She looked so beautiful when she smiled. Albert fell in love with her all over again every time she did.

The bandits seemed to be waiting for something, so, together, they made their way down the main street. Once they were noticed, one of the bandits stepped forward to meet them. He was fairly short and stocky, and his wolf pelt declared him to be a former police officer. From what Albert had heard, the capital police force had dissolved entirely almost as soon as the rebellion started rather than declare itself for one side or the other.

“Good afternoon,” the man said. His smile was the very opposite of Tremble’s. It promised only unhappiness to anyone who saw it. “This is a nice little town.”

“Thank you,” Tremble said. Her voice was rock steady. “I am its mayor, Tremble. May I ask why you’ve come?”

“My name is Yrith,” the man said, “And these are my friends. We’re looking for a place to call home.”

“Coldton is a little small for a group of your size,” Tremble said, “but I’m sure hard-working, law-abiding fellows such as yourself would be able to help us expand so you can pick out a plot.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Yrith said. “We’re not all that hard-working. Or law-abiding, come to that.”

“That’s enough,” Albert said. “You’re here to take whatever you want from us.”

Yrith’s smile curled a little higher on one side.

“I suppose, if you want to do away with the trappings of polite conversation, then yes, that about sums it up.”

“Well we won’t let you.”

“And how, pray tell, will you stop us? I did my research on your little town, Mrs. Mayor. You don’t have a Song garrison. You don’t even have a police force. You can only send for help when trouble arises, and with things the way they are in Saviour’s Call… Well. You don’t have a lot of choices that I can see.”

“We’ve always been able to do for ourselves,” Albert said, then hefted the arc cannon. “So, you get one chance to leave before I show you what we’re made of.”

Yrith raised an eyebrow. “I see. Then show me.”

The arc cannon had a pair of metal rods sticking up from the backpack that housed the ice crystal, and when Albert activated it, lines of raw, blue energy arced between them. Sparks and spurts of power made their way down a rubber tube that linked the backpack to the main weapon. Albert raised it, and Yrith’s smile disappeared.

Lightning burst from the maw of the weapon in twisted strands, burning the air and melting the snow. A pillar of ice burst up from the ground between the two men, and the projectile crashed into it, smashing it to shards and filling the air with chill mist.

“What?” Tremble said.

Albert took a step back as Yrith’s smile returned. “He’s a crafter, Trem.”

“That’s a nice weapon you’ve got there,” Yrith said, taking a step forward. “I wonder what other nice things you’ve got for me.” He looked back. “Looks like we’ve found our new kingdom, boys.” He then looked up, past Albert and Tremble. “Kings of the Mountain.”

The bandits cheered. Albert charged the arc cannon for another shot, but his heart told him it was useless. He had been confident his inventions alone would be enough to deter bandits if they ever needed to, but a crafter? Lightning roared and broke only ice.

“It looks like you have a choice,” Yrith said. “You can do exactly as I say, or you and every last man, woman and child in the town can die.”

Albert readied the cannon t fire again, but Tremble laid a hand on his arm.

“Don’t,” she said.

Albert gritted his teeth.

“A wise choice, Mrs. Mayor,” Yrith said. “To start with, let’s all go to your house and have a nice little chat about how this is going to work between us.”

 

 

 

Glitter stumbled into Coldton as night was falling. He had wrapped his stubby legs in his own snow to help them push through the snow on the ground, but this was the furthest he had ever walked. He was tired. He hadn’t known he could become tired.

It didn’t matter. His father was in danger, and he would ignore any and all new feelings that might stop him from protecting the man who had given him this life. He found a long street near the middle of the town, and at one end there was a big fire surrounded by people. Were they townsfolk? Or bandits? What did bandits even look like?

“Oh,” someone said behind him. He stumbled back from the road and pressed himself against the side of a house. “One more thing.”

“What?” Albert said. Glitter would recognise his voice anywhere. “You’ve asked us to give you everything already. What more could you take?”

“We need to make an example. To prove to the town that we’re serious.”

“No…” Tremble said.

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Mayor. And since only one person in the town attempted to fight back, it seems fairly clear to me who that example should be.”

“You’re a monster,” Tremble said.

“Call the town,” the man said, ignoring her. “They have an execution to witness.”

“You really think I’ll just walk to the chopping block with you?” Albert said.

“Yes. Because if you don’t, I’ll kill you right here and make an example of your wife instead.”

There was a painful pause.

“Make me your example,” Tremble said. Her voice was fierce.

“Trem, no,” Albert said. “It’s okay.”

“The town needs you more,” Tremble said. “You’ve made such a difference.”

“The things I’ve made haven’t kept people together, Trem. That was you. And you can keep them together through this, too.”

“How can I do anything if I don’t have you?”

“You’re strong, Trem. Stronger than anyone I’ve ever met. Everything passes, in time, and you’re the one with the strength to endure that time.”

“This has been truly touching,” Yrith said. “But you’re talking as if there was ever a choice.” He grabbed Albert by the arm. “There wasn’t. If Mrs. Mayor leads the town, the people endure, as you say. If you lead, you’ll foment a rebellion and I’ll have to kill everyone and find a new town all the sooner.” He dragged Albert past where Glitter was sat, dark and unmoving, and down towards the fire.

For a moment, there was only silent snowfall. Then Glitter heard Tremble weeping.

He didn’t know what to do. He had promised he wouldn’t let new feelings overwhelm him, but it turned out the ones he already recognised were more than enough by themselves. Above all, he was scared. Scared to do something wrong and make things even worse. Even if he could save his father, what if that meant the bandits destroyed the town? Albert wouldn’t be happy with that. He might even hate Glitter for it. But he was also scared to do nothing, because that would surely mean his father’s death. What had Albert said? ‘Sometimes you can read me better than my wife.’ But only sometimes. If there was anybody who could tell him what his father would want, it was Mayor Tremble.

He pushed his feet free of his chassis and tottered carefully around the house. Tremble’s woollen form squatted by the side of the road, shaking as she cried. Glitter approached her slowly, clearing the frost from his glass so his crystal showed clearly. His light drew Tremble’s attention, and she staggered back from him.

“Hello,” he said softly.

“What…?” Tremble managed.

“My name is Glitter. Father wanted me to meet you.”

The evening pushed by in silence for several seconds with Tremble staring at him.

“The crystal,” Tremble said slowly. “The unusual crystal.”

Glitter ‘breathed’ and drew himself a soft smile. “That’s right.”

“How…”

“I don’t know,” Glitter said. “I just am. Father gave me this body, helped me speak. Taught me language and science. And now…”

He turned and looked down the sloping street to where the town was beginning to gather.

“What do I do?”

“I…” Tremble said, then shook her head. “What can you do?”

“I don’t know,” Glitter said. “I’ve never really… stretched myself. I might be able to save him but… but if I can’t, then…”

“Everything will be so much worse,” Tremble said, nodding. She seemed to be taking Glitter’s appearance rather well, and he felt a pang of regret that his father had waited so long before introducing them. Perhaps he had been right. Perhaps he could find people he liked as much as his father, and perhaps they would like him, too.

Tremble shook her head. “Possibilities are no reason to watch someone you love die before your eyes, Glitter. We have to try everything.”

“Okay,” Glitter said, flashing bright. His crystal span faster, turning his interior into a whirlwind of shimmering crystal and white powder. His light lanced through it like flickers of lightning hidden in the clouds. He turned and threw himself after his father, his stubby legs immediately falling behind and pitching him onto his face. He didn’t care. He grasped at the snow ahead of him with his thoughts and crushed it into sheets of ice that let him slide down the hill, picking up speed as he went.

Yrith turned at the sound of crunching ice, but by then, Glitter was moving faster than any avalanche. Yrith’s eyes barely had chance to widen before Glitter crashed into his legs, sending him spinning into the air with a scream. His spectacles slapped into the wall of a nearby shop and smashed.

Glitter pulled at the snow around himself and added his own to the mix, building drifts in seconds that he then smashed through. More screams erupted from the people around the fire, and they lurched aside to let Glitter crash through it. Fire arced through the evening, leaving orange smudges on the air and turning snow to steam before they were overcome by meltwater. With a final, thundering boom, Glitter impacted the gondola platform and came to a stop.

He rose amidst a flurry of snow, drawing more to him and forming the body of a giant. Blue light pulsed from him in waves, worming its way through the gaps between snowflakes like blood through veins. With a crunch, he pulled the snow in tight around him. Then he turned to the humans below. Many were running. Some held weapons, and some did not, so Glitter decided he would punch those who were armed.

A man with a large axe stepped forward and swung it into Glitter’s leg. The snow cracked and broke apart, then reformed at Glitter’s will.

The man looked up slowly.

Glitter slapped him away, and he sailed over the gondola platform and out of the town. After that, none of the bandits attacked Glitter. Instead, they tried to flee. Glitter chased them around, flinging those he caught out of Coldton, until the night fell silent around him.

“Glitter.”

Glitter turned to find Albert standing behind him in the street. He let his snow crumble away, gently depositing him on his spindly legs in front of his father. A silent moment passed, and a thousand fears flew through Glitter’s mind. Had he made the wrong choice after all?

Albert ran forward and hugged him. His arm span was barely enough to reach either edge of Glitter’s wide body, but the sentiment was exactly enough to make Glitter’s crystal stop pulsing for several seconds.

“Thank you. Thank you for saving my life.”

“I thought about you never coming back,” Glitter said, voice high and soft. “I couldn’t bear it.”

“I’m so glad,” Albert said, pulling away. “You’re a hero. Come on. Everyone’s gathered by the gondola to welcome you to Coldton.” He was smiling, and there were tears in the corners of his eyes. “Everyone’s going to love you.”

The townsfolk had rebuilt the fire, and it cast its warmth and light over a crowd of bundled-up people with flickering eyes and wary expressions. They were tall and short, fat and thin, old and young. Glitter was shocked by how different they were from one another. And yet, just as he had with Albert and Tremble, Glitter could see how they felt. Could almost feel those same feelings by looking at their faces. They were unsure, but they knew what he had done for them, and they could see that Albert was with him. Maybe they wouldn’t understand immediately, but his father was right. He was sure they would grow to like him, and that he would grow to like them.

“Everyone,” Albert said, stopping before the crowd. “I’d like you to meet Glitter. He’s-”

 

“An ice crystal,” someone said.

Everyone turned to the gondola machine. A shadow detached itself and stepped into the firelight.

“You,” Albert said, his voice cold.

“Yes,” the bandit leader said. He was smiling, the flickering of the flames casting it as a fearful rictus.

“You aren’t welcome here. Begone with the rest of your troupe of rogues,” Tremble said.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “You’ve brought me too great a gift to leave behind.”

“Glitter, run!” Albert said.

“Too late, too late!” Yrith screamed. “Whiteout!”

The snow bunched in around Glitter, and he rose amidst it as his giant puppet formed. He felt nothing. Not surprise, not anger, not fear. The cold around him took on a red hue. Like blood.

“This is my power,” Yrith shouted. “And this is my town.”

People ran and screamed. Glitter watched them, impassive.

Then, something tugged at his attention. Something important. Something vital. If only he could focus on it.

“Stop, Glitter. Please.”

A voice so familiar. That he had heard so much of. It really shouldn’t be this difficult to place it. To understand what was happening.

“This is the price of defiance,” Yrith said.

“Glitter! Wake up! Glitter!”

Glitter raised a massive fist. Clenched it. Clenched it so hard it became a ball of dense ice that glittered in the firelight.

“I love you, Glitter.”

Glitter slammed his fist into the ground.

Someone screamed, and Glitter could feel again. It rushed back to him in a moment, bringing with it a pain so immense it hid everything else.

He knew what he had done.

“Get out of here!”

He focused on the voice. Mayor Tremble stood over Yrith, a piece of burning wood in her hand.

“Go, Glitter. Never come back here!”

Yrith clutched at his head. Dazed, for now, but not for long. Tremble went to hit him again, but he managed to throw his arm in the way, stumbling back from her.

“GO!” she screamed. There were tears rolling down her cheeks and soaking into the wool of her collar.

Glitter lurched away, barely in control of his puppet. It began to fall apart as he fled, crumbling away behind him until he was left to his little legs. His little legs his father had built him. Glitter began to wail, let his anguish escape in the voice his father had given him. He ran and screamed and ran and screamed until the mountain swallowed him, and he realised he was back home. Back in the little cave his father had carved out for them to live in.

Everything was so neat. So well placed. Categorised. Labelled. Perfect. It hurt to look at.

Glitter slammed the metal door closed and retracted his legs. He didn’t have eyes, but he was able to close himself down so that nothing got in. So that he was no different from the other ice crystals from Calis. In that darkness, he let his blizzard rage, until he had nothing left.

Calis. That was where he was from, and perhaps where he belonged. He had taken everything from the very man who had given him everything. He certainly didn’t belong here, with those he had taken Albert from.

He let the world back in. He had made a wreck of the lab. Instruments and workbenches were strewn all over the place; work that had taken them weeks torn apart in a matter of minutes. It didn’t matter. The one thing Glitter knew was that none of this mattered. He could not stay in the only place he had ever known, so he must return where he came from. Perhaps there, he would find a new meaning, or at least a quiet place to die.

Glitter stood up and began work on his first rocket.

 

 

 

 

Yrith the bandit is not a weak crafter. He is not as strong as Riyo, she thinks, but it takes a massive disparity in strength for one crafter to simply shut down another’s reality. The difference between the two of them is not so great, and so, as with the colour wraith in Fefille, their realities overlap. It becomes a little more difficult for Riyo to craft inside Yrith’s reality, and vice versa for him. It is next to impossible for her to, for example, crush him into a ball of mulch – affecting another trained crafter directly is very difficult indeed, even if you can see them.

In theory, then, they are on a level playing field.

In practice, Riyo bounces up to another rooftop just in time to avoid being smashed into paste by a dense mallet of ice. Glitter is surprisingly spry, and any damage Riyo is able to inflict on him in spite of Yrith’s reality is immediately healed by more snow. Whatever his true body is made of, Riyo could seriously hurt herself trying to create enough pressure to crush it. She doesn’t want to do that, anyway, since Glitter is her friend. Yrith himself will not stay in her line of sight, dodging behind buildings and creating barriers of ice to hide from her. He hopes Glitter will be able to finish her as long as his reality keeps her from bringing her full strength to bear on him.

Annoyingly, he is probably right.

Extra annoyingly, the giant monster from earlier is now lumbering down the road towards their fight. Its shadowy figure is barely visible in the few lights that parade along Coldton’s main road, but its red eyes smoulder with hatred and its teeth glint like sharpened stars.

“Hey, Glitter!” she yells as he leaps at her once again. She redirects him, and he overshoots her rooftop and comes crashing down in the street behind. “It’d really help me if you’d wake up!”

The snow giant turns to look at her, though it has no eyes.

A gentle crinkling of the air draws her attention round, and she manages to dive from the roof just before a hail of sharpened icicles crack the slates that she had been standing on. Unfortunately, that drops her into Glitter’s waiting arms.

He tries to grab her in his snow fist, but she pushes outwards. He is left holding a ball of inverted gravity with her at the centre.

“Oi, Glitter! Come on! You’re breaking a load of stuff your dad really cared about, here.”

The snow golem looks up, as though it is thinking. For a moment, Riyo thinks she might be getting through. Then she follows its non-existent gaze down the road to where the other monster has just come around the corner.

“Oh shit,” she says, remembering the way that creature had basically ignored her reality earlier. She looks back. “Glitter. Please don’t.”

The golem throws back its arm and pitches her and her little sphere of safety like a fastball, right towards the waiting monster.

Riyo lets her sphere go, and as the monster raises a be-clawed hand to smash her into the ground she tilts herself to one side. The creature can’t react fast enough, and Riyo rips her sword from her back and pushes the back of its blade with her reality to keep it from jarring out of her hands as it tears through the monster’s side.

She hits the snow hard as the monster howls, barely keeping her balance even with her reality. She doesn’t turn to see what she’s achieved. Instead, she starts running. Even if she did get a good hit in, she is outnumbered. She needs to find a way to change the situation somehow.

The ground shakes as both monsters begin their pursuit. Riyo’s reality makes her light and quick, her boots barely scraping the snow, let alone leaving prints. She bounds halfway up a corner shop and uses its wall to change direction, streaking towards the gondola. She can still feel Yrith’s reality surrounding her own, but he isn’t crafting much. It costs him very little to just hold it open and make her crafting more difficult. Even so, there’s an edge somewhere. Covering the whole town for this long would wear him out quickly, which means, if she can move fast, she might be able to draw the monster outside and face it one-on-one – a much more winnable fight.

The road ahead is suddenly blocked by ice, and Riyo is moving too quickly to stop. All she can do is push away from her raised palms and hope.

The ice breaks, but not quickly enough to keep chunks of it from pummelling her body as she flies through the barrier and smashes into the ground, rolling to a stop at the bottom of the main street. She lies in the snow, the damp soaking into her coat and her hair. Her breath roars in and out of her as she stares at the black layer of cloud that is still spilling its contents down over the mountain.

“This sucks,” she says.

“It’s about to get a lot worse,” a voice says.

Mortimer, with his axe that’s little more than a few scraps of metal clinging to a bo staff at this point, looms over her, wearing an awful grin.

“No,” Riyo says as he raises it to stave her skull in. “Not yet.”

It is gratifying to briefly face an opponent against whom her reality actually works. Mortimer sails off into the sky with a yell, and Riyo sits up and looks around. The monster is barrelling towards her, and it ignores the remnant of the ice barrier that brought her to a halt. Ice and frost billow up into the night, accompanied by another roar. Its side now glows like its eyes, its luminescent blood coating its fur and leaving trailing dots in the snow.

Its rumbling footsteps, however, are a muted slightly by the sound of the gondola, still whirring away into the night. Riyo looks over her shoulder, following the wire away to a rectangular smudge against the night sky. There is a speck of blue light atop it.

She grins. “Finally.”

She takes a few steps back as the monster rushes on. The arrow slams into the side of the creature’s head just as it raises its fist again. Its attack becomes a graceless pirouette that takes it over Riyo’s head, where it crashes into a building. Snow and roof tiles rain down upon its still form.

Glitter, who had been coming on behind the monster, stops short. For a moment, the only sound is the oncoming gondola. The tide feels as though it has shifted.

Then the monster roars and bounces to its feet again, smashing away more building as it does so. It leaves a gap in the wall as it blunders towards Riyo, revealing a terrified family huddling against the far wall. Glitter seems momentarily transfixed by them, his golem’s empty face pinning them in place. The walls of their home are bright and summery, like Tremble’s, and their warmth throws his cold, monolithic visage into stark relief.

Riyo jumps over the gondola platform and up onto its wire, the monster crashing after her. It grabs the cable, and, with little effort, snaps it.

“No! You idiot!” Yrith yells from somewhere behind her, but the monster begins thrashing the wire, sending a cascade of lethal sine waves leaping after her.

Ravi sees the monster coming and bangs urgently on the roof of the gondola, then dives free of it. A moment later, Rolleck kicks the door open and throws another person out before jumping after. Riyo is pleased to see her friends again, and leaps after them, letting the whip-crack of the wire slam into the gondola and drop it to the ground with an almighty crash.

She comes to rest beside Rolleck, who is sitting on his arse in a snow drift.

“Hi,” she says.

“Where the hell have you been?” he says without even looking at her. “Ravi? Where’s Wicker?”

“I’m here,” the boy says from a short way away. “Something broke my fall.”

The something turns out to be Mortimer. They all frown down at him for a moment. He is completely unconscious.

“So, uh, what’s been happening?” Ravi says from the tree branch he has managed to land on.

“Oh, y’know,” Riyo says, waving a hand vaguely. “The important thing for now is that we save Glitter.”

They all look at her for a moment.

“Who’s Glitter?” Ravi ventures.

Riyo points. The monster is coming towards them again. Its rage seems to be making it even stronger, making its eyes glow even fiercer.

“The big scary monster?” Ravi says.

“No,” Riyo says, as though that should be obvious. “Behind that.”

“The other big scary monster,” Rolleck says.

“Exactly.”

“Um,” Ravi says. He glances at Riyo, then decides trying to understand her mind is about as futile as trying to eat a tree. “So, uh, how do we save him?”

“I need you to take out that bandit leader guy.”

“Oh,” he says, brightening. “Well, I think we were planning something like that anyway.”

“Great,” Riyo says. “He’s hiding somewhere in town, doing crafter things. I’ll keep Glitter busy while you track him down. Rolleck, you take care of the monster.”

Rolleck turns to look at the avalanche of muscle, fur and blood descending towards them. He sighs.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Um,” Wicker says.

“You should probably go check on the mayor,” Ravi says.

The kid seems to perk up at being given a role.

“Good idea,” Riyo says. “If you see Emerald, tell her we’re all fine.”

“Who’s Emerald?”

“You’ll probably know her when you see her.”

“Okay.”

There is a not-quite silence as they wait to see if anyone else has anything they need to say.

“Well then,” Riyo says, and the monster is on them.

Ravi jumps higher into the tree, Rolleck rolls aside, and Riyo grabs Wicker and backflips onto the creature’s head, using it as a springboard to send them both towards town. The creature’s fist comes down on nothing but Mortimer.

It doesn’t even notice, turning to follow the little insect that has bounced off its head. It makes to grab at them, but something slashes at its leg and it stumbles. It turns its fury on the insect that remains behind it, roaring into the moustachioed man’s face. He just smiles.

 

 

Ravi catches up to Riyo as she and Wicker reach the gondola platform. It is covered in cracks now, emerging from a single massive footprint that goes deep into the stone.

“How did you do that?” Wicker says, looking down at his legs. “It’s like… like we were flying.”

“Unfortunately, we weren’t,” Riyo says. She is still annoyed that she can’t do that.

Glitter is still staring at the house where the other monster landed. The family has fled to another room.

“Wicker, go straight to the mayor’s house,” Riyo says.

“But… the monster’s right there!”

“Yes, but we can see you all the way there and protect you if Yrith decides to go for you. Trust us and run.”

Wicker swallows, hesitates for a moment, then lets out a yell similar to his useless battle cry from earlier in the day.

Ravi sighs and covers his face.

“Keep him safe and find the bandit,” Riyo says.

“You got it, boss,” Ravi says, and skips up the wall of the souvenir shop to his left. He draws an arrow to his cheek. A slight twinkle is all he needs, and a streak of curse-breaker blue slams into the ground between Wicker’s legs. He stumbles in shock, looking back, then down. Another icicle tries to impale him, but a second arrow blasts it to powder before it can even form. A third threatens him from above, but all that reaches his head is a smattering of snow. It takes that long for him to start running again.

Ravi feels pressure to his right and spares a lightning glance to make sure he is not about to die. Riyo is on the roof, standing between him and a jagged ball of ice that is bigger than both of them together.

“Eyes on the prize, Ravi,” she says.

Ravi looses another arrow, smashing a wall of ice that has begun to form ahead of Wicker’s panicked charge. He does not know that much about crafting, but he has picked up a few things from travelling with Riyo. He knows that the easiest way for a crafter to open their reality is in a sphere with them at the centre. He knows that the edge of that sphere is absolute – they cannot craft even lightly outside it. Yrith is controlling Glitter, and he is not likely to let that control lapse just to kill Wicker.

He makes one last attempt, this time using multiple, smaller projectiles. Ravi curses under his breath and flicks two extra arrows onto his bowstring. They strike the ground around Wicker a fraction of a second after he lets go, making a rough triangle with the boy at the centre. Blue lightning crackles around and between them, making Wicker cry out. Arcs leap from the triangle at the slivers of razor-sharp ice before they can slice him to ribbons, and as the light fades, Wicker runs out of a fine mist and reaches for the door of the mayor’s house.

He bangs on it, and, though it takes almost half a minute for the door to open, there are no further attacks. When it does open, Wicker screams again and stumbles back, falling on his arse. Ravi’s fingers twitch, and he almost releases another arrow before he sees Emerald peer out of the door, then grab Wicker’s ankle and drag him inside. The door slams closed.

Ravi lets out a breath of relief, then looks to his right again. He dives forward and a massive fist of ice crashes through the tiles behind him. He slides face first down the precipitous slant of the roof and rolls off the edge, landing in a narrow alley.

“Riyo!”

“Sorry,” Riyo shouts. She manages to redirect another ball of ice and it smashes the chimney of the souvenir shop. On top of being unable to just squish Glitter, she also has to be careful how she deflects his attacks. Most of the buildings are still occupied by the terrified residents of Coldton, so she can’t afford to just sling ice meteors every which way.

“You’re still in there, right Glitter?” she says.

He swings at her and she nudges his arm higher. Even so, she feels the chill of it as it passes over her head.

“Come on! Fight him!”

The golem’s heart continues to pulse red and, if anything, her voice just makes him angry. She leaps forward, shoving hard with her reality and knocking him back. She’d hoped he’d fall, but he reels against her and brings an overarm hammer of ice down on her. She shoves it aside and leaps out of the cloud of snow that burst up from the impact. The other fist is coming right at her, and she has to spring up to avoid it. The whole street shakes with the impact of the golem’s two fists coming together.

Riyo spins herself in the air, raking her sword through both the golem’s wrists, then pushes herself hastily back to earth as its chest erupts with a cascade of snow that turns to a rain of jagged ice. Riyo stops a few that are coming right towards her dead in the air, then shoots them back. They rip through the golem’s empty face, but the wounds close straight up again. Snow streams like rivulets through the air, entwining together until the arms are reconnected.

“Are you even trying to beat him?” Riyo yells at the monster’s heart. “Do you even care that you’re destroying your father’s home?”

Glitter makes a noise. The golem raises its fists for a double handed smash, but Riyo focuses on the red glow. It’s pulsing faster, and beneath all that snow, Glitter is whistling.

“Yrith is responsible for all of this! For everything! Don’t let him get away with it!”

The air seems to freeze, the snow to stop falling. The golem’s body shivers as though it has just realised it is made of snow. The lighting of their tableau flickers from red to blue, then back to red again. The cold layers in, and Riyo exhales mist.

Glitter’s fists slam down.

 

 

A tree falls in the forest. Rolleck is there to hear it – extremely close, in fact – and it sounds like the applause of vast audience congratulating him on another excellent dodge. The blowing wind carries scent and snow past him, cold and evergreen. The darkness is a ligmist’s dream, but the slender creatures scatter from the clash of two far greater predators. The monster sees with eyes adapted to night in the snowy abyss of nowhere, while Rolleck sees by a fighter’s instinct, the glow of the creature’s blood, and a voice whispering in the back of his mind. His sword is a sabre of light, coated in red luminescence, and its voice is growing ever louder as it begs for still more.

I could let you see, the voice says.

The monster swings, the blood on its chest telegraphing a right-fisted punch. Rolleck pitches himself beneath it, feels the air rush across the damp material on his back. He twists and lashes out, but once again scores only a light cut on the creature’s upper arm. More paint glows up the snowy canvas, steadily turning the forest into an abstract work of disparate smudges of light in darkness.

I could let you feel the very air shift around it, so that its every move is yours to know before it even makes it.

Rolleck rolls away from another blow his experience tells him must come from the left, from the creature’s unextended, uninjured arm. It impacts only snow, scattering lumps of it against the trees and rocks that surround Rolleck. The sound helps him to shape the space in his mind, but even as his instincts mould a map for him, his body and sword urge him forward. He leaps and strikes out, slashing what must be the creature’s shoulder and drawing a furious cry from it.

His feet hit an uneven log, and his landing becomes a roll. The snow caresses him as he passes it, leaving its chill touch on his skin. He comes to his feet and throws all of his strength into a swipe that turns the creature’s next punch aside and opens another gash along its forearm, then thrusts for patch of light where Riyo’s attack has painted a target for him. His sword goes deep, muffling its song and drawing a scream from the creature. Its other hand grabs for him, swatting him away into another snowdrift.

I can make every thrust a killing blow. Make the edge of your blade a death sentence to all who see it.

The beast is cautious, now. Blood is gushing from its new wound, the heat of it melting the snow where it falls. It roars all the anger it has left at Rolleck, and Rolleck growls back.

“No,” he says. “I won’t sell my heart for such an empty price.”

You did it once, the voice says, and Rolleck can hear the smile in it. He hates it. You will again.

Rolleck yells and rushes forward into the creature’s rage. He thrusts his free hand out, and the monster’s punch stops dead. His sword is like the reapers sickle, splitting the world apart as it comes down. A geyser of light bursts from the monster’s shoulder as its arm comes free, and its shock seals its fate. In the moment it takes for it to understand, Rolleck is stepping forward, letting the momentum of his strike carry him around so that the blade comes down again. This time it splits the monster’s head in half, and all that is left is the slop of blood and the thunk of a falling body.

“I don’t need you,” Rolleck pants. “I’ll never let you in again.”

I’m already in, Rolleck. No matter how you run, I’m your shadow. No matter where you hide, I’m on your shoulder. No matter how lost you are, I will find you.

The voice fades as Rolleck’s blood begins to cool. His sword is quiet once more, and there is only his breath and the blizzard.

 

 

Ravi has decided that his quarry is sequestered somewhere along the main road, closer to the gondola than the path leading out of town. His attacks on Wither had been relentless until the boy out-ranged him, meaning the bandit leader must be somewhere he can see the whole street. Ravi has retreated down the alley by the souvenir shop and now finds himself on a side street parallel to the main one. Here and there, there are specks of something glowing red in the snow.

He jogs uphill, closer to the mayor’s house, then swings a right back to the main road. Now, hopefully, Yrith will not know where Ravi is. He hops up to a window ledge, then stops before bouncing up to the roof. Inside the house, a pair of young boys crouch by the other window. They are avidly watching Riyo and Glitter’s fight, eyes sparkling with wonder. Ravi taps on the window.

The boys, twins by their near-identical faces and reactions, scuttle back on their hands, wonder turning to fear. Ravi taps a finger on his lips, shows the boys his empty hands, then beckons them to the window. The braver of the two glances towards the door of the room, then shuffles over. His brother remains crouched by his bed. After hesitating several times to stare at Ravi with earnest eyes, the boy opens the window a crack.

“Um. Hi.”

“Hello,” Ravi says. “Quite an exciting fight, isn’t it?” He is aware that Riyo is relying on him to resolve this quickly, but the boy is shaking so much it would be visible even to people with regular eyes. He doesn’t want to frighten him.

The boy gives a shy smile. “Yeah. That lady is cool. I hope she wins.”

“Me too,” Ravi says, returning the smile. “She’s my friend, after all. Her name is Riyo, and I’m Ravi. What’s your name?”

“I’m Barrel,” the boy says.

“I’m Crate!” his brother says, scurrying over. He seems not to like being left out.

“Nice to meet you both,” Ravi says.

“Shouldn’t you be helping your friend, Mister Ravi?” Crate says.

“Yeah! You gotta stop the big snowman!”

“I am helping her,” Ravi says. “And you can help her, too.”

“We can?” the boys say in perfect unison, eyes going wide with delight.

“That’s right,” Ravi says. “You’ve been watching the whole fight, haven’t you?”

“Yeah!”

“Great. I need you to tell me what happened to the old guy. The bandit.”

“Yrith,” Barrel says, looking over his shoulder as though the name might summon him.

“He’s controlling the snowman, isn’t he?” Crate says, pressing his face right up against the window.

“Yes,” Ravi says. “Did you see where he went?”

“I saw,” Barrel says.

“No you didn’t,” Crate says, turning on his brother. “No way. I didn’t see.”

“I did too.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Lads,” Ravi says, glancing over them to the other window. He can’t see the fight from this angle, but Riyo’s probably still doing okay.

“Sorry,” they say together.

“What did you see, Barrel?”

“Well, I didn’t actually see see.”

“I said so.”

“Shut up, Crate.”

“Please?” Ravi says, trying to keep the urgency from his voice.

“But I didn’t see. See?”

“Didn’t see?”

“Right,” Barrel says, a smug smile on his face.

“That’s stupid,” Crate says.

“No it’s not! Because he was down by old Maureen’s fruit shop when it started, right?”

“Yeah. I saw that,” Crate says.

“And then the lady was fighting the snowman, and the other monster went past.”

“I saw that, too. But I didn’t see where he went after that.”

“Exactly!” Barrel says.

Crate frowns, then turns back to Ravi. “I’m sorry. My brother is stupid.”

“No,” Ravi says slowly. “He’s right. You would have seen him if he came closer, or if he crossed the street.”

“Exactly!” Barrel says again.

His brother glares at him.

“So he must be close to where he started,” Ravi says. He plucks two arrows from his quiver and passes them through the window. “A gift. One for each of you, for your help. Be careful with them – they’re sharp.”

“Thank you!” the boys shout together. Ravi smiles, then leaps to the roof. He keeps low and heads for the chimney, using it to cover his advance. His eyes skitter across the opposite side of the street, just in case, but there is nobody in any of the windows or on any of the roofs. A quick glance around the chimney shows nobody obvious on his side of the street either, which meant Yrith is probably indoors, somewhere near the fruit shop. Digging his talons in to grip against the snow, he jumps for the next roof.

 

 

Riyo’s throat hurts, and her head is beginning to ache. Aside from that first flicker, Glitter has shown no sign of responding to her. She hasn’t seen Ravi since the boy made it to the mayor’s house, either. Her time is running out.

“That’s it,” she screams at Glitter. He swings for her again, but she stops it dead. It sends a pulse of pain through her head. “If you don’t come to your senses right now then I’m going to really test that body your dad made you.”

Glitter starts whistling a faster tune. It’s urgent, even angry. His glow is strobing beneath his snowy skin, the light as fitful as a dying candle. There is another heartbeat’s pause, then he pulls his arm back and blitzes her with ice again.

“Fine!” Riyo contracts her reality to contain only her and Glitter. He tries to swing at her again, but his arm stops before it’s moved more than a few inches. She pushes inwards with everything her leash will give her, ignoring the feeling of her skull trying to rip itself open. The golem shakes. Weaker clumps of snow give suddenly, denting inwards as though struck by tiny meteorites. In seconds it is a pock-marked field of shallow shadows, and then larger sections begin to give. The crackle-crunch of compressing snow becomes a constant rush, and Glitter’s whistling becomes a frantic, high pitched keening.

In under a minute, the golem becomes a snowball. Riyo doesn’t let up, and compacted snow becomes ice. The red light of Glitter’s crystal is now hidden – there is no space between the snow crystals for it to seep out any longer. His whistle is muffled to almost nothing. Riyo keeps pushing. Pushes until it feels like her mind will break. Until she can barely see. Until, with an ominous groan, metal begins to bend.

 

 

Yrith’s chest is heaving. The anger that swelled there before has been tamped down by a fight that should have been over in a handful of seconds. His power over this town should have been complete. His own little kingdom to rule, to take from until there was nothing left to take. He grips the windowsill, sweat running down his brow and his temples throbbing. How could this… this girl – barely an adult, by the looks of her. How could she craft so well inside his reality? She should be dead.

Well, she is now. Expending that much strength to contain the ice crystal leaves her open from every other direction. All he has to do is concentrate. Just one more ice spike, and the town is his once more. He might even move on anyway, after selling every single man, woman and child into the slavery they deserve.

“I don’t know much about crafting,” Ravi says. “But the way Riyo talks about her master makes me think he must be something special.”

The bandit leader stiffens, his breathing coming in sharp bursts that do not mist the air in front of him despite the cold Ravi feels. The rooms above the fruit shop are somebody’s home, but they are empty. The window offers a good view all the way up to the edge of town, and all the way down to the gondola. The kitchen window on the other side of the shop looks down over the few smudges of monster blood he had seen earlier.

“She’s pretty special herself.”

The man spins around with a growl on his lips. “So am I! I was the sheriff of Saviour’s Call and now I am the king of this mountain. You… tourists can’t bring me down like this. You can’t!”

“We have,” Ravi says, narrowing his eyes. “Now close your reality.”

“Never!” The whole room twinkles with ice. A blizzard wind rushes through the little apartment, riming everything it touches. Everything except Ravi.

His curse-breaker rolls from his feathers and down the haft of his bow. He slams it into the side of Yrith’s head, and his frozen wonderland is just a quiet apartment once more. The bandit leader’s eyes roll back, and he falls like an avalanche.

Ravi steps over him and pushes the window open. “Riyo! Stop!”

Riyo glances over her shoulder, then blinks. She can’t feel Yrith’s reality anymore. Another metal crunch emanates from her snowball, accompanied by a lyrical shriek.

She stops pushing.

“Glitter?”

The snowball bursts like a firework, layering everything in another few inches. Including Riyo.

Glitter sits up and looks around. Looks at the damaged houses and broken gondola. The snow that was once his golem lies still, but to him it looks like a bloodied weapon. One that he has used to hurt people. Again.

He stands up. His casing is a little warped, but it does not hinder him as he flees. He knows he should never have come back here. Knows that all of this is his fault. He will return to his cave and begin work on his next rocket.

He runs directly into nothing and bounces off it. His legs slip out from under him and he lands on his back, staring up at an ugly black sky full of fluffy white death.

“Hey,” Riyo says, peering down at him. A man with feathers comes to stand next to her.

“So, this is Glitter?” he says.

“Yep.”

“Nice to meet you,” the bird man says.

“I’m a monster,” Glitter says. He breathes on his glass but draws nothing. He wants to hide, but he can still see them.

“For sure,” Riyo says.

The bird man nods.

Glitter is flushed with shame. He knows this emotion from times he has failed, times he has broken things by accident or tripped over his feet while doing something important. Never has he felt it so strongly, though. He wishes he could bury himself deep within the earth and simply stop feeling anything at all. He hears a door open, but he cannot bring himself to try and rise. To do anything but wait to be judged.

A big, red lady with scales and wings now peers down at him, too.

Footsteps announce the arrival of a fourth, and a man with a wolf pelt over one shoulder and a moustache completes a small circle. His judge, his jury, and, perhaps, his executioners.

“And now all the monsters are assembled,” Riyo says.

“That’s a little rude,” the moustachioed man says.

Riyo scowls and speaks with a lower voice. “I am no monster; I am an officer of the law.”

“That’s the worst of the three,” the man says. The bird man and the dragon lady laugh.

“Is… is it over?” a lighter voice says. A familiar voice.

Glitter sits bolt upright, startling all four of them.

“He moves fast for a mine cart,” the man says.

“He’s not a mine cart,” Riyo says. “He’s a snowboard.”

Now you’re definitely being rude,” the dragon lady says.

They continue talking, but the conversation fades from Glitter’s attention.

“Tremble,” he says quietly. “I… I came back. I’m so sorry.”

Tremble glides over to them, her layers parting the snow like the blade on the front of the plough. A young man with a battered sword scurries in her wake. She looks so much smaller than Glitter remembers. It has been almost ten years since that day, the day he last ran away from here. Even so, she looks as though several decades have passed.

She stops in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

“You have nothing to apologise for, Glitter.”

“But-”

“I told you, didn’t I? Possibilities are no reason not to try. What happened… It wasn’t your fault.”

“But I-”

“You were exploited. Controlled. It must have been so awful for you.”

“I should have fought it,” he says. “Stopped him.”

“Where is he now?”

Glitter turns to look at Riyo, who turns to look at Ravi.

“Oh. Uh, he’s up there.” He points at the fruit shop window.

They all look at each other. Riyo raises a fist. The rest follow suit.

“Jankenpon.”

They all throw scissors except for Emerald, who throws paper. She shrugs, her wings stretching out and curling in again, and wanders over to the shop. They hear the rhythmic thumping of Yrith’s head hitting every step on the way down, and Emerald drags him out into the middle of the road.

“You really beat him,” Tremble says, a note of relief in her voice that seems to travel to them from ten years in the past.

“Um,” Wicker says. He is staring down the road.

They all follow his gaze through the streetlights and find the remnants of the Kings of the Mountain shuffling into town. Two of them have Mortimer propped limp between them, while the drake prince’s broken arm hangs limp at his side. They stop before the gondola, staring up the hill at them.

“Let’s put an end to this,” Riyo says with a glance at the mayor.

She nods.

Glitter follows them as they go to meet the bandits. Emerald drags Yrith behind her by one leg.

“You all deserve to die,” Tremble says. “For what you did to my town. To my friends. To my husband. You all…” She has to stop to hold back a sob. Everything she has endured. Everything she has kept locked in her chest while she waited and smiled, fearing this day would never come. It rises to the surface now, threatening to overwhelm her with pain.

Glitter steps forward. The snowflakes around them stop falling, hanging in the air like they’re dangling from silken threads. Snow flows from Glitter’s shoulders and joins with the snow on the ground, lurching around and smashing together until a flight of crystalline arrows is pointed at the group of bandits from every direction.

One by one, the bandits fall to their knees. Hands are raised in fear and eyes are closed in resignation. Glitter turns to Tremble and waits.

“I can’t,” the mayor says. Tears trickle down her cheeks and drip from the tip of her nose, making dents in the snow where they fall. “You’re all monsters, but…”

“But you’re not,” Emerald finishes for her. “People like them, people like us, like to believe it takes strength to fight, to kill. That somehow the ability to do so makes us worthy. But it takes ten times what any of us could muster to face everything this world can throw at us, and then smile.”

Wicker puts a supporting arm around the mayor’s shoulders and turns her away from the finished bandits. As they begin walking up the hill towards her home, Rolleck steps up onto the gondola platform and scowls at the captives.

“It seems what’s left of you get to walk away,” he says. “But for the rest of your lives, remember how it feels to be given kindness you don’t deserve. Carry the guilt over what you’ve done in the name of your selfish, pathetic desires all the way to your graves. I hope, before you get there, you can pay back the kindness you now owe the world.”

“Also,” Riyo says, “if you come back here and try anything else, I will literally turn you inside out.”

“Very poetic,” Ravi says.

“Thanks.”

“I meant Rolleck, obviously.”

“Oh.”

Glitter relaxes, and his arrows crumble and rejoin the snow that birthed them.

L’Sweren Riss stands up. He wants desperately to scowl, to dismiss these righteous words and promise vengeance for his arm and his pride. Some of it must show through, because the dragon narrows her eyes at him. He lets the last of his ugly feelings go in a frozen breath. He has been bested and shown again the weakness that has taken him from his home and his birthright. He has been trying to hide from his shame, but it has only made him even weaker.

“You were right,” he says. “I am banished from my home, disowned by my father. I am ashamed, and it has made me seek petty power over others when I should have sought to regain my honour.” He stands as tall as he is able, though it is not nearly as tall as he once could. “I am sorry that I am your first impression of the drakes, but please let me do one thing to redeem my race in your eyes. We hold fast to our word, so I promise you this: The Kings of the Mountain will not return to this place. I will ensure it.”

Emerald holds his eyes for a long moment. Something in them makes her believe him, so she nods.

“We’ll return to Coldton on our way back,” she says. “If your word isn’t good, there will be no place in this universe you will be able to hide from me.”

L’Sweren Riss bows his head, then turns and drags Yrith from the gondola platform. The rest of the bandits dribble after him.

The five of them stand watch in the puddle of light created by Coldton’s final street lamp, until the bandits escape even Ravi’s sight.

“I’m tired,” Ravi says, turning to look back up the hill. “Do you think we can convince someone to open the inn now?”

“I hope so,” Emerald says. Her stomach growls so loud Riyo is convinced for a moment that the monster has returned. “I hope we can get something to eat, too.”

“Um,” Glitter says. He is still facing the way the bandits went, his window still coated in impenetrable frost. “Thank you. For stopping me. For saving this town.”

“Don’t mention it,” Riyo says.

“But-”

“We would have helped anyway,” Rolleck says.

“It is a police officer’s duty to protect and serve,” Emerald and Ravi say together.

“Oh, come on,” Rolleck says. “I hardly ever mention being a police officer.”

The three of them press on up the hill. Riyo turns to Glitter.

“I’ll tell you what,” she says. “If you want to pay us back, you can carry me up to the inn.”

“Huh? But you look fine.”

“Well, it turns out going to town on you while inside another reality was pretty hard going.” She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and closes her reality.

Rolleck hears Glitter start screaming and turns just in time to see Riyo collapse. Then something the size of a mountain stamps on his head. He and Emerald grit their teeth until it passes. Ravi, meanwhile, frowns around. He can hear other screams from the surrounding houses. The pain passes, and they all rush back to Riyo’s side.

“I forgot about that,” Emerald says.

“It wasn’t as bad as with the Twilight Express,” Rolleck says.

“It’s still pretty concerning,” Ravi says.

“What can we do, though?” Emerald goes to scoop Riyo up, then stops as the snow beneath her rises.

“I said I would carry her,” Glitter says quietly. He has drawn a concerned face in the frost on his glass.

“We’re not going to convince her to stop using her reality,” Rolleck says. “We should probably find a crafter to talk to about it.”

“Maybe there’ll be one in Saviour’s Call.”

“What’re you talking about?” Riyo says sleepily from her bed of floating snow.

“We’re just blaming you for a variety of things,” Ravi says.

“Oh. Well do it quietly. Some of us are trying to sleep.”

Rolleck rolls his eyes. “She seems fine to me.”

 

 

Yrith first feels cold. This is not something he has experienced in a long time, and a moment of shivering disorientation passes before he manages to stammer open his reality. The cold leaches away from him by his will, and he is left with only his body temperature and another warm spot on his back. He rolls over.

“You’re awake,” L’Sweren Riss says. He is sat on the rimed stump of a tree, watching the dishevelled Kings of the Mountain huddle around a pitiful fire.

“Where are we?” he mumbles. His head hurts, and he can barely see. He reaches for his spare glasses, but that pocket of his coat is empty.

“This is a clearing near the start of the perilous Yvalt Pass. For a long time, it claimed dozens of lives every year through dangerous footing and an abundance of hungry wildlife. Nowadays, almost nobody uses it.”

“What?” Yrith says, sitting up. His head yells at him in tones of agony, making him wince. He pushes past it. “Why are we this far outside of town?”

“We got beaten,” L’Sweren says, turning his icy gaze on Yrith.

“By some random idiots. So what?”

“So, they asked us to leave.”

“And you listened to them?” Yrith’s raised voice begins to garner some attention from the remainder of the bandits.

“The alternative was to force them to kill us. The mayor chose to be merciful.”

“Then she’s the biggest idiot of all.” He forces himself to stand, ignores the way it makes his legs wobble. “We could have just gone back to the hideout and waited for that damn archcrafter to move along, then take the gondola back.”

L’Sweren is frowning at him now, but he ignores the drake and stumbles over to the fire.

“I swear, you’re all fools of the highest order. Where’s Mortimer?”

One of the bandits points. Yrith follows her finger and finds Mortimer slumped against another stump. His right arm and leg are both splinted and bandaged, and all of his visible skin is beginning to bruise. Each of his breaths comes hard, as though there is a great weight on his chest. His axe is nowhere to be seen.

Yrith considers kicking him awake anyway. The man was usually good at giving orders and convincing the rest of the riff-raff to march in time. He probably won’t do such a good job in his current condition, though, so instead Yrith turns to the bandits himself.

“Listen up.” He moves into the firelit circle and scowls at the battered faces that regard him. “We had some bad luck today. Crafters and fighters of that calibre don’t stumble through Coldton every day, though, so as soon as they move along, we can take our kingdom back.”

There are some mutters, but then only silence.

“Are you listening to me?” Yrith shouts.

They all avert their eyes.

“They’ve had a rough day,” L’Sweren says. “Emotionally, as well as physically. They have spent almost ten years being cruel, and now the tables have been turned on them. Yet instead of experiencing that same cruelty, they’ve been given kindness. None of them feel like good people, right now. Some of them will take this lesson in mercy to heart, while some of them will return to cruelty, in time. It won’t be tomorrow, though.”

“They’ll do what I bloody well tell them to do,” Yrith says. He glares at the fire, and though it makes his head ache, he contains its heat and lowers the temperature around the bandits. Teeth begin to chatter. “Or they’ll freeze to death.”

“I won’t,” L’Sweren says. He comes to stand before Yrith. He is nearly eight feet tall, and glares down at him through eyes that hold a fire cold enough to extinguish the sun. “Our partnership is at an end.”

“Fine,” Yrith growls. “Get out of my way.”

“I also promised that I would not allow you to return to Coldton.”

Yrith grinds his teeth. “You don’t speak for me, lizard.”

“I’m afraid I do. You see, you’ve been living your life using your power to get you what you want. You think everybody is the same as you, but you’re wrong. I haven’t been using my power to get what I want. I haven’t been using my power at all, in fact.” He raises a hand and places a claw just beneath Yrith’s eye. “Now I’m going to. You have two choices. Leave this place quietly with the rest of us,” he presses harder with the claw, “or die.”

Yrith swallows. His head feels like it is cracking open, but even if it didn’t, the drake has a lot of advantages over him. He is capable of resisting even the lowest temperatures Yrith’s reality can create, and he has the strength to break anything he might sculpt from ice or snow. He bites his tongue and, slowly, painfully, he lowers his head.

“I thought so,” L’Sweren says. “Get some rest. We’ll need your help getting through the pass tomorrow.” The drake returns to his stump.

Yrith turns away from the fire, humiliated. He feels the eyes of the other bandits on his back as he lies down. Sleep is a long time in coming.

 

 

The next day, Coldton is quiet. Last night’s blizzard has ebbed away, leaving only a soft, fluttering snowfall and a dirty white sky. Riyo steps outside and stretches. Though they are finally free of bandits, the air still feels heavy with fear. She finds the source of that fear at the bottom of the hill.

Glitter is standing in front of the gondola. Snakes of snow slither from his shoulders, splitting several times to form half a dozen icy hands that play across the machinery. They probe and prod, bend and twist, making delicate mechanical noises. Riyo looks up and realises that the broken cable has been repaired.

“Good morning,” she says.

“Wah!” Glitter says, spinning around and raising his tinkering arms to shield his ‘face’. “Oh. Good morning.” He draws a smiling face with little blushing cheeks. “You startled me.”

“I guessed you could see all around you. Was that wrong?”

“No,” Glitter says. “I don’t see like you do, but I can feel the changes in energy all around me. It means I can’t see distant things, but I’m not limited to seeing the way I’m facing, so it kind-of evens out. I have to concentrate to do it, though, so if I’m focused on something else, then…”

“Then I can sneak up on you.”

Glitter’s face disappears and is replaced by an image of a hand giving a thumbs up.

“So, can you fix it?” Riyo gestures at the gondola.

“I already have,” Glitter says. “I was just making a few improvements to the mechanism. It was well made, but even the most powerful machines have to rely on others to survive. Left alone, they eventually wear down and die.”

“Your father taught you that?”

“That, and so much more.” Glitter’s window becomes solid ice once more. “I miss him so much.”

“I’m sorry,” Riyo says.

“No. Don’t be. He once said that time eases pain, but I have been living without him for longer than I lived with him, now. It hasn’t made it easier. I’m not sure anything will. It is something that will be inside me forever.”

“People are like machines too, you know?” Riyo says. “We rely on others to survive. If you sit alone with just your pain, eventually you’ll break.”

Glitter turns to the empty town. “Better me than them. They’re afraid of me, and they’re right to be. I’m not like them. I’m dangerous.”

“Did your dad think you should be alone?”

Glitter winces. He remembers everything Albert said to him just before the bandits came.

“No. But he didn’t know. He didn’t know what I was capable of.”

“I don’t think that would have mattered to him, and I know you don’t either.”

Glitter watches the town in silence. The inn door opens and Riyo’s friends emerge, looking for her. They leave odd-shaped prints in the snow down the hill.

“Why’s it so quiet?” Ravi asks.

“I guess the residents of Coldton aren’t morning people,” Riyo says, then turns to Glitter. “So, what will you do, Glitter?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Tell you what, then. It’s a long way from here to the Reach. Why not walk with us? By the time we get to Calis, you’ll know if you want to stay there or not.”

“But… What if something bad happens? What if someone takes control of me again?”

“Then I’ll stop you again,” Riyo says. “Maybe you’re dangerous, but so am I, and so are these idiots.”

“Rude,” Emerald says.

“Besides, how much do you know about crafting?”

“I know lots about crafting,” Glitter says. “My father taught me to build all kinds of things.”

“She means the magic,” Ravi says. “Like her and Yrith use.”

“Huh?”

“So nothing, then,” Rolleck says.

“That’s fine,” Riyo says. She opens her reality. “Mine’s called Gravity Mould. I can use it to manipulate gravity.” She makes Rolleck do a slow, grumpy backflip.

Glitter draws a smirk on his face while he chokes back a giggle.

“Ha ha,” Rolleck says.

“I think Yrith called his Whiteout,” Riyo goes on. “But the important part is that it controlled ice, which is why he could control you. With my reality I might be able to ping-pong you about the place, but I can’t steal your soul like he could.” She lets her reality close. “I won’t say it’s impossible we’ll meet another crafter like him, but considering the focus of a reality is limited only by the imagination of the crafter…”

“The odds are really long,” Glitter says. He changes his face to one of zen understanding.

“So,” Riyo says. “Do you fancy a trip to the end of the world?”

Glitter looks back at the town, extends his sense of it as far as he is able. He barely knows it, really. Its people are afraid of him. He has been reluctant to come here for so long and done so much damage to the place when he has, he feels uncomfortable being here.

“I want to come with you,” he says. “Before he died, my father told me to go out and learn about the world. After what happened to him, I thought the world would be scared of me. That he was wrong. I tried to get to Calis, where I came from, but maybe I can give this world another chance. I think… I think my father would want that.”

“Your father sounds like mine,” Emerald says wistfully. “He wanted me to see the world, too.”

“Let’s go see it, then,” Riyo says. “I hear there’s a great view from this here gondola.”

“Didn’t seem that special yesterday,” Rolleck says.

“It was the middle of the night,” Ravi said. “And there was a blizzard. Even I could hardly see.”

Glitter snakes out an arm and taps the newly-repaired call button. The gears start pulling the cable in, crunching snow between them as they spin.

The gondola swings lackadaisically into the station, where it comes to a neat halt above the shattered platform. Its door is fixed, but there are still some dents in the metal.

“How far does it go, anyway?” Ravi asks as they shuffle towards the door.

“Forty-three miles,” Glitter says. He pauses by the swaying box. “I know everything about its specifications, but this is the first time I’ve really seen it in use. It’s truly wonderful.”

“It was his greatest gift to this town,” Tremble says.

All of them jump.

“Goodness,” Emerald says. “You move quietly.”

“Wool’s soft stuff,” she says. “Anyway. It’s rude to run off without saying goodbye.”

“Sorry,” Riyo said. “But it felt like the right thing to do.”

“Well it wasn’t,” she looks stern for a moment, then she smiles. The whole mountainside seems to light up. “I don’t think I can thank you for saving my town, but I do have this.” She hands them another flask. “It’s from the emergency stash. It’s supposed to be for if there’s an accident, but with the Kings of the Mountain finally gone we can start mining cherries again.”

“It seems like Yrith was using his reality to encourage the blizzard every few days,” Riyo says, taking the juice from Tremble with a return smile. “Without him, your weather should calm down again.”

“We’ll make sure to tell everyone we meet that the way to Coldton is open again,” Emerald says. “There’ll be tourists coming through again in no time.”

“You’re all superstars,” she says, beaming. “And Glitter…”

“Mmm,” Glitter said. He has hidden his glow in the vain hope she would assume he was a vending machine.

“The people are scared of you, now, but I can feel Albert’s heart in you. I’m going to talk to the town, explain everything to them. It’ll take some time, but, well, even if they don’t come around, I’ll still be here. I just want you to know… you have a home here, if you ever decide to come back.”

Glitter is still for a long moment, and Riyo begins to think he might have fallen asleep when he lets out a long, tonal wail that hurts their ears.

“Thank you,” he blubs. “Thank you so much.”

Tremble places a cloth covered hand on Glitter’s window while he sobs.

“Have a safe trip,” she says once he quiets. She takes a step back. “All of you.”

“It probably won’t be that,” Rolleck says.

“But we’ll be fine anyway,” Ravi says.

“Thank you for everything, mayor,” Emerald says.

Riyo just grins, and they all pile on the gondola. Glitter lingers a moment longer, until Tremble gives him a nod that tilts her remarkable hat.

“See you later, then,” Glitter says.

“I’ll be here.”

Metal crunches against metal as the door closes. Glitter drags frost and snow from the window, revealing a vista of iced trees and jagged rocks. Somewhere further along the range, the sun has broken the clouds, and lances down onto snow-capped peaks. The gondola rumbles back into motion once more, and the landscape begins to roll away behind them.

“Coldton was nice,” Riyo says.

“Still a bit cold for my liking,” Emerald says. “Can we stop somewhere warm next?”

“At some point we’ll have to cross the Glittering Sands,” Ravi says. “They’re supposed to be very warm.”

“You know, it doesn’t feel like that long since we were in a volcano,” Riyo says. “Surely there has to be some reasonable temperatures around.”

“It sounds like you’ve had an interesting journey so far,” Glitter says.

“It will only get worse,” Rolleck says.

“A journey is like a person’s life,” Rolleck seems to say. “It only ever gets worse.”

They all turn to stare at Glitter. He has drawn a frowny face on his glass.

“That was amazing!” Riyo says.

“Oh, come on,” Rolleck says. “You’ve known me for about five minutes.”

“You can learn everything there is to know about a man by crossing swords with him just once,” Glitter-Rolleck says.

“It’s perfect,” Ravi says.

“Beautiful, even,” Emerald agrees.

“We didn’t even fight, though,” Rolleck says.

“Of course not,” Glitter-Rolleck says. “That would be against the law.”

The gondola trundles on, lilting over a vista of glittering snow and swaying with the sound of laughter.