The Final Life

by Andrew Mowere

CHAPTER 17

  Glint trudged through the muddy road miserably as rain poured down on his grey cloak without pause for the fifth day in a row. He had decided early on that he didn’t like horses, but since Azrael decided that he had gotten reasonably good at using small amounts of his power for a substantial amount of time, they had gotten him a mount so he could walk alongside the others on the road. That had been more than eight months back and he still didn’t like the beast. It snorted at him whenever he spoke to it, cantered when he wanted to trot, and tried to fling him off at every opportunity. Still, he had to be kind to it, for it did have to bear the weight of a man with a full suit of armour on his hands.

  Azrael had used the border between Shien and Shönö to test Glint’s abilities. His objective? To sneak through it alone. At first the warrior was sceptical but as he found out later, both Stingray and the Sparrow’s Tail were still in a lazy and weakened mood after having their treasuries robbed. These were the two guilds Mark had told him of, almost a year prior. Security was lax enough for him to get through their high wooden walls, made entirely of tree trunks, without being noticed by anybody. Still, the guards were Ability users, and so it was required of the warrior to be fast and stealthy at once. This he completed and had just met up with his friends on the other side. They’d handed him his mount’s reins with a joke or two about how slow he was. They were still laughing about it now, and Glint snapped at them, to his companions’ amusement.

  “Shut it,” he growled, “You used a secret way, of course you were faster.” The words were directed at Vladimir, with a pointed finger to boot .The man laughed and said, “Normals need their own ways, mister Glint. We can’t all fly through the sky and breathe out fire.” This Glint had to begrudgingly accept, despite the gross exaggeration of his abilities.

  Three days later, the terrain began to change. Mud and rain replaced by frigid snow, and soon all three had to pull out their thicker coats and protective clothing against the bone freezing cold of this new part of the world. Shönö was just starting into winter, but some parts of the world were in almost perpetual ice anyway, and Krava was one of those places.

  It being Glint’s first time out of Shien, he’d been aware that things were going to be different, but he didn’t count on even the climate to change so drastically so fast. He said so to Vladimir and the man explained, “Continental lines are manmade. Our region is actually a part of both continents. We have been in Krava for more than two weeks, you know.”

  Glint did, but he still felt like it was no new land, but rather an entirely new realm, where the wind was laden with teeth of pure white ice. At times they had to climb through rocky terrain, balancing along ledges and taking care not to fall from a precarious spot. For the first time, trees became scarce, and forests far in between. Even more amazing was seeing entire mountains made of pure ice, shining in the sunlight and looking as if they had been there since the beginning of time and determined to stay for millennia to come. They stood like the frozen fingers of a long buried giant reaching towards the sun. The road took the three along some of these majestic creations, and Glint could see very few cracks in the mountains, although the ice wasn’t transparent. They made their way along a narrow path at one point, almost touching the mountain walls. To their right was a sheer drop into a river that may or may not have been frozen solid. In the distance, Glint could see both forests deadened by winter and long spans of what may as well have been snowy wasteland. Glint was glad he wasn’t afraid of heights, seeing that view beneath him. Even more amazing was finding caves along the mountain’s span, making it seem more like a honeycomb than anything.

  “What made these, then? Don’t tell me it’s natural for ice to form a mountain with caves inside of it?” he wondered aloud, and Vladimir actually twisted in his mount to look at Azrael for support, shrugging his shoulders from inside his heavy fur coat. “Nobody really knows,” the man answered. “Agreed, dripping water wouldn’t cause these shapes. It would simply melt the mountain as a whole. In fact I know of a scholar back in Brittania who researches these for a living. And he isn’t alone,” he added.

  “It’s amazing,” Glint whispered to in wonder, touching the icy wall in front of him, clear as a diamond with shapes running through its insides, although the miniscule impurities kept adding up and he could see only a foot into the thing, even so close as to touch it. Vladimir nodded.

  “Boy, they’re wonderful, I grant you that, but nothing compared to the glory of the Crystalline Caves. Just wait and I’ll show you. They span for leagues in all direction, and are deeper than you can imagine. The ice there is of the purest quality and you can see through the formations for many feet in all directions.”

  Glint happily agreed, nodding his head at the possibility of seeing a place even more beautiful than what he had in front of him right now.