The Ice Lands

by William Dickey

  I took note of some Traveler machinery most of it related to the portal. It all seemed to be in working order, but that was to be expected, the Travelers were a lot better builders than the daemons and tended to over engineer everything. Furthermore, Distlemander had probably intentionally avoided damaging the Traveler equipment, it was important to Niflheim’s operation and while daemon equipment could be easily replaced, Traveler tech was a different story.

  I spotted one more machine it was small and although it was lying on the floor next to the frozen and shattered remains of a daemon-made table, it looked to be intact. Even more shocking the device was clearly not made by either the daemons or the Travelers.

  The device was a small hand-sized black box with the SONY logo printed on one side. Across its front face was a bar with two scales, one labeled AM the other FM, and in one corner of the box, there was a space concealing a retracted antenna. I extended the antenna to its maximum length and switched it on. Fortunately, the radio was battery powered. It was already tuned to a station so I didn’t need to adjust it.

  “But what I bet most people listening are wondering is: Why have things gotten so bad so fast? Not just here in Alaska, but around the world. Why Alaska in particular seems to be an epicenter of this crisis? And what can we expect going forward? Is it going to continue to get worse or is the worst behind us?” said a woman over the radio.

  “Well, that’s a lot of questions,” said a man.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to throw it all at you at once,” said the woman.

  “Don’t worry. I can handle it, just don’t expect everything to be perfectly organized,” the man began. “We’ve known and expected for decades that global warming would raise the planet’s overall temperature. As to why we’ve seen a dramatic upswing these past couple of years, the scientific community can’t quite agree. The general thought is that we have crossed some threshold and that either some factor that was holding warming at bay has disappeared or some new accelerating factor has gained strength. All the scientists basically agree on that point though they can’t agree on what.”

  “Some think it’s simply that melting ice and growing ocean has lowered the planet’s albedo, that the Earth is absorbing sunlight a lot better than before so the planet is getting warmer. Others think that we’ve crossed some botanical threshold. Most plants do slightly better in a warmer environment with less snow, so at least at first we’d expect an increase in plant activity to help remove carbon from the air, but at some point the heat starts killing off more plants from expanding deserts than are helped in colder climates,” explained the man.

  “And all this is connected to the other extreme weather events the US has been seeing,” the woman prompted.

  “Well of course, everyone knows that hurricanes thrive in warm water, which is why our hurricane season is in late summer / early fall. So with raising sea temperatures we can expect more hurricanes, during a larger portion of the year and even at higher latitudes. This is in line with what we saw last year with 12 hurricanes of category four or greater, one of which almost made it all the way up here in Anchorage before it petered out,” said the man.

  “Okay, that seems like enough backstory,” said the woman. “Now let’s talk about Alaska and Anchorage specifically. Today, at this moment it’s... 89 degrees outside. I know that it’s June but that is simply ridiculous. I looked it up, in the past two months, there were 37 days where it was the hottest day on record for that date. What’s up with that?” the woman asked.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  A spiral of thought rushed through me as I listened to the radio broadcast. It was like something clicked. It all made since. Before Mai mentioned that the AC units were too powerful. If this place was leaking much heat, it wouldn’t be so cold outside so I knew the daemons must have been using the heat for something. I saw the vents leading from the AC units to this chamber where from there the heat could be directed through the portal. The hole might not have been large enough to transfer physical objects, but heat was a different story.

  I recalled the profound effect the AC units had on Tautellus, how it had spawned war, starvation, and general devastation. And I figured that whatever heat this world lost, a comparable amount had to have been transferred to Earth.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  Before I’d imagined Earth as having been unchanged since I left it. I think we all do that, when we leave a place it remains perfectly intact in our memories and if we ever go back we are surprised to find it’s all changed.

  How much had Earth changed since I’d left? How much had happened? The disappearances of thousands the day I first came here. The heat generated by the daemon plot. The radio broadcast gave me a brief look at some of the changes. The things I’d directly heard were enough to make me worry. The things my imagination generated on top of that made me terrified.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  It was then that an especially dark thought occurred to me. What was the daemons’ primary goal in doing all this? Was this place set up to freeze Tautellus and the portal to Earth was simply the means to get rid of residual heat? Or was heating up Earth their true aim and freezing Tautellus simply a side effect?

  On one hand I had seen daemons crawling all over Tautellus, on the other I hadn’t been on Earth so I didn’t have anything to compare my experiences to. Furthermore, daemons clearly preferred warm environments to cold ones, so if they were prepping anywhere to....

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  Probably because a deep part of me wanted to get away from these thoughts, stick them in a six-foot hole and lay a tightly packed layer of dirt on top, but it was then that I heard the knocking.

  I set aside the questions of daemons and Earth, it wasn’t as if I could do anything about it and turned to the task literally knocking for me.

  “What is that banging?” I asked Mai. The large metal tubular room seemed perfectly designed to enhance echoes, which served to mask the pounding’s origin.

  ‘And now he realizes,’ Mai smirked.

  “What? It was natural that I was preoccupied,” I explained by holding up the radio.

  ‘The issue preceded that discovery,’ Mai hinted.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  I scanned the room again, starting with the floor since it was closest before working my way upwards.

  “Oh, shit. I completely forgot about Rose.”

  ‘About more than just Rose,’ Mai corrected, shaking her head.

  Although I had finished Distlemander alone, that wasn’t how I’d started the fight. I forgot my friends were grabbed and thrown into the chest cavities of the robots that were clinging to the ceiling. The knocking was them.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  “Hang on. I just finished dealing with the daemon,” I lied. “Give me a second and I’ll find a way to get you down.”

  I heard a muffled voice trying to yell something back from within one of the cans. The voice would have probably been impossible for any person with normal hearing to make out, but Mai’s raucous laughter as she rolled across the floor didn’t help.

  It wasn’t clear but the voice sounded faintly high-pitched. Of the five captured, three were women. Izusa and Titania, perhaps fittingly for their size, had relatively deep voices, at least by human woman standards, so I figured it was Rose.

  “Hang on, I’m moving as quickly as I can,” I tried to console Rose. I didn’t know what was going on, but thought it might have something to do with Rose’s state, which had been far from optimal when she’d been captured.

  “Which one is it?” I asked Mai. Mai pointed to a certain robot. She was still rolling with laughter.

  I set about finding a way to bring Rose down, which took a bit of thinking. I couldn’t just knock the robot down because the only result would be a hundred foot fall. I needed to either find a way to cushion the fall or bring it down more slowly. I very nearly tried to fill the bottom of the chamber with water, I had enough stored that I co
uld at least partially fill the chamber, but I realized that water deep enough to act as a cushion would also be able to submerge the capture drone. I doubted the bots would be airtight and I didn’t like the odds of me finding a way to break Rose out before she drowned.

  In the end, I had to rig up a complicated pulley system using the rope from our tents to lower the bot down. I used my gravity spear to fly up and set up all the rigging before knocking the capture drone free from its perch and lowering it.

  I could still hear banging and shouting emanating from the robot’s central compartment.

  “Don’t worry Rose, I’m right here,” I shouted as I took a metal bar and used it to pry open the capture drone’s bottom. I expected Rose to pop out and wrap her arms around me, for me to be able to pull her close. I got arms wrapped around me but not the ones I expected.

  “Thank you. Thank you. You can’t believe how bad it is in there. Trapped with nothing to see. Unable to move. I couldn’t even breathe,” said Bearballs between exhausted gasps of breath in an unusually high pitched voice as he continued wrapping his arms around me to help prop himself up.

  “Get off me.” I shoved Bearballs off and he stumbled to the ground.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked.

  “You saved me,” Bearballs answered hesitantly.

  ‘He’s clearly claustrophobic,’ said Mai. That actually made sense, given the way the beastmen lived, I doubted Bearballs was accustomed to enclosed spaces, but that wasn’t the information I sought. I glared at Mai.

  ‘What…’ Mai smiled innocently. ‘I did what you asked and pointed to the source of the noise. It’s not my fault that you thought the one making all the noise was Rose.’

  I kept glaring at her.

  ‘She’s in that one,’ Mai conceded and pointed to a bot right next to where Bearballs had been.

  I returned to what I’d been doing. Fortunately, with everything set up and with Bearballs’ help lowering Rose was quick. Unfortunately, with Bearballs there the mood of my dashing rescue was completely ruined and I had to settle for a kind exchange of words instead of a passionate embrace.

  I repeated the process and after half an hour, everyone was free. We soon left the central chamber to clear the rest of the seventh floor. Most of it consisted of frost damaged and cracked automated fabrication equipment, which I assumed created all of Distlemander’s drones. We also ran into a couple more daemons, though they were all dead. The heaters had been out for a while so the whole place was thoroughly chilled. After we finished, we returned to the large chamber with the portal to Earth.

  “What are we doing back here?” Rose asked. “Don’t you think we should get out of here? We don’t know if there might be more daemons coming.”

  “You have a point,” I agreed. I knew daemons had long-range communication devices. I’d seen Lilith using such a thing over a year before when we were travelling to Crystalpeak. Figuring how sophisticated this place was I would be surprised if it wasn’t in regular communication with wherever the rest of daemonkind lied. Even if the daemons didn’t already know, they’d soon figure it out and send someone to check on this place. We needed to be long gone by then.

  “You guys should go on ahead and leave. I just need to do one more thing before I go,” I said.

  My friends didn’t quite understand at first, but after I explained my plan, they went ahead, returned to the first floor, and exited through one of the AC unit holes.

  Meanwhile, I took the radio and stored it in my inventory. I didn’t really have a use for it, but it was a piece of home and it didn’t cost anything to take. Then I retrieved several blocks of uranium I’d acquired upstairs and set them together in a nice, big stack.

  The most primitive of nuclear bombs, like the ones used during World War II, detonated simply by bringing enough uranium into one place. The only thing keeping the stack from going off immediately was the lead lining insolating the bricks. With a few vats of acid, it didn’t take much to rig it to explode.

  ‘Easy come, easy go,’ said Mai, remarking on how quickly I was putting it to use.

  We watched the explosion from half a dozen miles away. Since it had gone off underground, the bomb’s blast was relatively contained and we were safe even from that distance. I had sent my friends out ahead of me since I was immortal and I wasn’t sure how long I’d have to get away once I set things into motion. Still, that was only a precaution. I never planned on dying there if I could help it. If I did, I’d lose both Mai and my inventory, which would suck, probably. Fortunately, everything went as I’d intended. I got away and caught up to my friends before the bomb went off.

  The explosion was quite beautiful, a bright flash of red followed by a sudden massive cloud of white smoke that seemed to appear and surround all of Niflheim before the structure even had a chance to break apart. Dozens of small blips of red shot out in every direction possessing a strangely alluring symmetry as the burning pieces of debris flew in long arcs before falling back to the ground. The burning debris left behind white trails, leaving a mark even long after all the red faded away.

  During the explosion, pieces of debris flew everywhere. Most of it didn’t come anywhere near far enough to reach us, but one piece did. It landed with a thud practically at my feet. It was then that I was bombarded by several messages.

  Briinnng.

  You have completed the quest: †Total Annihilation†

  Quest rewards for completing †Investigating the Permerine Shrine† are unfrozen.

  Reward for †Investigating the Permerine Shrine†: †Portal Marble†

  Reward for †Total Annihilation†: New Title: †Bane of Daemonkind†

  †Bane of Daemonkind†

  You have caused a great deal of harm to the daemon race as a whole, either by killing a significant number of daemons or by otherwise bringing harm to all of daemonkind.

  Effects:

  . Your fame is widespread. Daemons will often recognize you and even when they don’t will subconsciously feel hostility towards you.

  . You will naturally be able to detect daemonic auras even while they are attempting to conceal themselves.

  . All damage dealt to daemons +10%

  . All damage received from daemons +5%

  I ignored the title bump for the moment. I was sure it’s effects would be beneficial in the future, but since this bout with the daemons seemed over, I was more interested in the smoking piece of debris that nearly hit me.

  It was a pitch black sphere the size of my thumb. I reached down, picked it up, and got a better look.

  †Portal Marble†

  Durability: Infinite

  Description: A key constituent of the device once at Niflheim. This marble is actually the bridge to another universe. Right now, the portal is only a few atoms wide but by injecting it with large amounts of mana, it can temporarily be made wider.

  I threw the marble into my inventory. I wasn’t too impressed with this reward either. After all, I’d spent months on this quest, first struggling to earn respect from the abuse obsessed Doragans. Then traveling a thousand miles across some of the world’s harshest terrain, before ultimately engaging in a one man take down of an entire daemon outpost. Of course, the others participated in that take down but for a large portion of it, I had to go it alone so I think I’m within my rights to refer to it that way. And after all that work, all I got a title that would be somewhat useful and a portal generator that couldn’t make a hole large enough to move anything of significance through. A tremendous sense of dissatisfaction and contempt with the world flowed through me, building up to the point where it felt like it was about to spill over.

  In that dark moment, something grabbed my hand, someone. I looked to my side. It was Rose. She just smiled at me. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. In her bright warm hopeful eyes, I realized how greedy and self-involved I was being. I might have only gotten a tile bump, a marble, and a couple levels, but what did everyone else who particip
ated in this thankless task get?

  Only one thing, the knowledge that they’d stopped a tragedy, that we’d stopped a war that would have killed countless people on both sides. That knowledge was reward enough, everything else was just a bonus.

  It already felt warmer in that artic abyss at the edge of the world. It would take years for the land to recover from what was done to it, both from the weather and the over harvesting that was necessary for the Othans to survive. But I had the bodies of all the daemons we killed and a handful of Othans who had seen it all. With them and the improving weather, it would be enough to convince everyone there was no longer a need to invade Xebrya.

  I gripped Rose’s hand tightly as we made our way south. For the first time in a long time, I was content.

  Those next days were some of my best in all my time on Tautellus. I had a great victory that earned much acclaim and I had the girl right by my side. I still had lingering questions of Earth and the daemons but with everything else, such things were quickly put off.

  In retrospect I should have known better, for sometimes hidden even within the greatest successes lies hidden failure and looming catastrophe.

  Epilogue

  “What brings you here, Mord? I didn’t expect your next report until the day after tomorrow. What is important enough that you’ve come early?” Apollyon asked the groveling man kneeling before him. Mord was tasked with keeping an eye on the goings on of Tautellus and regularly updating the Lord Satan while he was away from their home world. Apollyon had skilled and trusted daemons running things from Gehenna so he only needed to receive reports once a week and didn’t really need to handle too many things personally. While Mord’s position was definitely one of high honor, Apollyon also knew Mord didn’t like being in his presence. He was sure that whatever brought Mord here was important.