Ambience music for reading the chapter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhvyGiJs120

“Tough times never last, but tough people do.”

Robert H Schuller

An unknown number of days later, or at least it would have been without the system, Time Sense had kept track even if I had not, but that was not my first thought as I regained consciousness. Where was I? How was I alive?

I could feel the bitter cold and hear the wind whistling as I was carried somewhere.

My eyes opened and stared as I found myself being carried across a white frozen hell. No snow fell, and the sky was clear for the first time that I could remember in so long, but the endless ice stretched on for as far as I could see. The only break in the white monotony was the shapes the ice had been carved into by the wind and a cliff edge leading to the sea where icebergs floated cold and silent on the watery horizon. Otherwise, it was flat and desolate.

The storm had carried us to the utter north, until it must have finally dashed our small vessel into the walls of endless ice. All that was known of the North beyond the Compass Kingdom of Tramontana was that it went on forever and that no one had ever returned from attempting to cross it to find out what was on the other side. I doubted it went on forever, but who knew?

My bruised and battered body bounced ever onward as my memories of our final flight came back to me in flashes. For days and days, the runes on our boat had held, keeping us afloat and in one piece as I spent my mana holding our ship together. The hurricane we had found ourselves trapped within never let up and never stopped attempting to take us to the bottom of the sea. The last thing I remembered was watching the walls grow ever closer while strapped to Namir before the walls of white rushed toward us and they were all I could see.

We had survived, even if the boat had not.

I was freezing despite how tightly I was wrapped. My front and face felt warm pressed up against Namir’s back, his body a warm furnace as it ran across the ice, not in a sprint that would burn out but a long-distance lope that he must have been carrying on for as long as I had been unconscious. My back, though, felt as frozen as the wastelands with no warmth to keep it warm.

I could do something about that. I tried to activate my medallion only to find myself shocked by the fact that it was drained. Never had I managed to do that in all of my years of it eating my excess mana. Namir slowed as he felt my movement bleeding off his speed before coming to a complete stop.

“Welcome back.” He said as he unwrapped me to place me in front of him.

Despite his stats and mine, he was wrapped as warmly as I had been. Though he at least had stopped in the lee of an outcropping of ice that sheltered us a little from the unforgiving icy winds.

“What happened?” I asked as I fed my own mana into the medallion to create a bubble of warmth around us. It slowly heated me, but the warmth was soon whipped away if I let up on the mana.

“The storm smashed us against the endless ice of the north.” He smiled sardonically, “So much for a short sailing trip.” His hatred for the open ocean and sailing in particular fully justified by our recent adventure.

“But how did we survive?” I asked, confused. My memories of the final moments were fragmented and incomplete. I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened or even why I couldn’t remember it had all ended so abruptly.

“The storm and currents drove us here to the northern edge of the Compass Kingdoms. Unable to avoid the collision, we at least luckily managed to hit the wall at the crest of a wave rather than at the bottom. The boat imploded on impact, but we had long ago tied ourselves together to prevent ourselves from being separated by the waves.”

I remembered how, as my strength waned, he had become your arms and legs for sailing. He even gained a skill for it, not that he would ever likely use that one again. I also remembered how we had tied ourselves together and to the boat to prevent either of us from disappearing into the depths.

“But if the boat broke itself on the walls, how . . . ?” I questioned. The Endless Ice Wall of the North had been hundreds of feet high where we met it.

“Because as we hit, I finally had some solid . . . well, semi-solid land beneath my feet to work with.” He answered. “It wasn’t easy, but I was able to scale the ice wall as the storm dashed itself on it.” He showed his left hand to demonstrate the difficulty, and I noticed his left paw was missing two of its claws. I widened my eyes in acknowledgement of the nightmare that climbing the endless ice wall of the north must have been with the wind attempting to whip us off it.

“And me?” I asked, confused. I would expect myself to remember such a harrowing escape.

“I didn’t notice until well after we cleared the top.” He said, touching the back of his head.

My hand reached up. I felt the back of my head wincing as I touched a lump the size of an egg under my matted, frozen hair.

“You’re lucky you’re part dwarf.” He said, referring to the racial dwarven trait I had achieved. “Most heads would have cracked with the impact. Mine would have if I had similar stats to yours.”

“Lucky I have such a thick skull,” I replied, still wincing as I traced the size of the lump. “What happened next?” I asked.

“When we reached the top, I had to concentrate on putting some distance between us and the cliff edge the storm was attempting to tear down.” He pointed to the jagged nature of the cliff edge, and I could imagine how the storm would have rent and torn at the cliff as it passed over it.

“The winds were trying to rip us off, and it was not until the storm had passed on that I realised that you had been injured, though I feared as much with your silence. All I could do was fight on.” He described his battle with the elements at the end of the world.

“Then what?”

“We toughed it out, I buried us in the snow while the storm passed. Since then, I have been heading east with you. Who knows how far west we were taken, but eventually, we will have to hit the Compass Kingdom of Tramontana. We just need to keep the coastline to our right and run to the rising sun.”

“How long has it been?” I asked.

“Since we landed . . .” He paused after optimistically describing our arrival as if counting, “It’s been five days.”

“How am I still alive?” I queried why I had not frozen to death despite being carried.

“The amulet.” He answered. “When you didn’t wake up when the storm passed, I activated the heating option. It has been keeping you warm ever since whenever we moved further east. It ran out of mana this morning.” He explained as it suddenly made sense why I found it drained on waking. The bitter cold was probably what had finally woken me from my stupor.

“What next?” I asked.

“If you are awake and up for using some mana, it might be nice to get out of this wind,” He gestured to the outcropping we were sheltering in the lee from the ever-present whistling of the wind.

“Of course,” I said as I began to cut into the ice with my mana, forming a small shelter from the elements. We sealed ourselves inside while I continued to expand our temporary accommodation, building two berths to lie down.

“Food and sleep for me.” Namir seemingly had used up all his words to explain our situation, and now that he had shelter, his weariness appeared to catch up with him.

Still wrapped around my neck was the adventurer’s locket Lady Acacia had given us those years ago. The Alchemical miracle was still hidden within. I opened it up and spilt a little yellow powder out into an ice bowl I had formed. All it required was water and mana, both of which I was able to apply in abundance. The food grew as it formed to fill the bowl.

“I hate this stuff, but beggars can’t be choosers.” Namir groused as he started to eat the food provided ravenously, and as he did, I recognised my own hunger and made a bowl for myself.

With a belly full of food and my body finally arming up in the safety of the shelter, I began to feel a little more human, though it took some time to banish the chill from my bones.

“Can you keep watch?” Were Namir’s last words before he swiftly succumbed to sleep.

Standing guard over his comatose body, I stretched my senses out across the desolate wastes as I sat and contemplated our situation.

Only to discover that they were not so empty after all.