by K T Munson
Darha smiled although her back was to him. She bit her lip as she began to melt the barrels of snow, with Cas steadfast on her mind. Excuses to summon him from his post, or to go see him, ran through her head for hours as she worked. She hoped it wouldn’t be long before she saw him again—or thought up an excuse to ensure she did.
Frost: Chapter Thirty-Three
The cold beat against Aradel’s cheeks, and the wind pushed her dress against her legs and whipped her hair around. She looked up at the snowy peaks of the Lonely Mountains. As glorious as it was here, she feared that her people would soon be sleeping amongst these very peaks—lost in the drifts of snow and buried in its comfort, abed in this winter wonderland to escape the harshness of the heat in the north.
She was buried up to her knees in the snow as she walked on, ignoring the seductive pull of the snow’s frigid lullaby. She was half tempted to clear her path, but there was something exhilarating about being so close with naturally occurring snow. She was constantly torn between moving it and rolling around in it. Unfortunately, time would not allow her to enjoy it.
As she crested the hill she’d been climbing, she could see the bridge below that led to the ice cavern covered in snow. She didn’t know what to expect inside that cavern. She had come this far south only once before and she had not been allowed entry. Only Queen Vesna, the possessor of the moon pearls, had gone on.
Aradel reached the snow-covered bridge and frowned at the fact that it had no railings. She took a tentative step onto it, but her foot slipped slightly. Drawing back, she glanced over the side as the snow she had disturbed fell to the rocky gorge below. It may have been covered with snow, but not enough to grant her any comfort if she fell. Only her powers would save her, but it would waste valuable time. She’d have to clear the bridge.
She lifted her hand and swept it out in front of her. Snow cascaded over the sides of the stone bridge and into the rocks below. Crystals of ice sprung into the air, and swirled around her. Miniscule flakes joined the dance, almost like a mist, and she began to cross the bridge. Reaching the other side, she only glanced back for a moment. When she left, she would have to replace the snow so no one could follow her path to this place.
She walked into the cave and stopped abruptly. It was so dark. As soon as she wished for some light, the moon pearls began to glow, illuminating just far enough into the darkness so she could see where she was going. Across the cave, a soft, pale blue glow met her eyes, mingling with the light from the pearls.
Rounding the corner to where the new light shone, she found a great wall of ice before her, extending from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, blocking any further access into the mountain. Her mouth dropped open a little and she softly gasped as she looked up at it. It was solid, and seemly impenetrable. She took a tentative step forward.
Queen Vesna had told all the candidates once, that when they were Queen, they would know what to do if they ever had to retrieve the Ancient Ice Crystal. But Aradel wasn’t sure what to do. She studied the wall with a critical eye. Was she supposed to break it?
She reached out to touch it, testing its depth to see if she could, and Aradel’s hand went through it as if it were made of water. She pulled her hand back in surprise and inspected it. A triumphant smile spread across her face as she pushed her hand through again. Then she took a deep breath, and stepped in. The magical barrier passed over her body with a little bit of resistance, until the pressure eventually lifted.
When she opened her eyes again she was in another cavern. Ice decorated the walls which shimmered blue even in the limited light. There was a hole in the ceiling that allowed some light, and some snow to fall through. She wondered what the point of the magical wall was if there was a hole in the ceiling, but decided she wasn’t one to judge. This cavern hadn’t been accidentally discovered in all the years it had been hidden there. If it had, the queen would have known about it.
On a short stone pedestal in the center of the room, was a single floating, shining blue gem the size of her fist. It was smooth on the sides but oddly shaped. Like the wall she had passed through, the gem reminded her of water. Her boots gently tapped against the stone, sending the sound echoing around the cavern. She smoothed her dress, and tucked a cluster of hairs behind her ear, trying to soothe her nerves as she approached.
While watching, the seemingly solid gem suddenly liquefied. It dropped onto the stone pedestal as though it were splashing water. Before escaping over the sides, the water floated up again, joined together in the center of the platform, and returned to its original solid form.
Aradel pulled back at the movement. She had never seen anything like it. Gathering her courage, she stepped up onto the circular staircase surrounding the pedestal; testing the stone briefly to be sure it remained solid beneath her feet, and reached for the gem.
As soon as her fingers touched it, it turned to water again, and quickly slithered up her hand like it had a life of its own. She reflexively pulled back and gasped in surprise, holding her arm away from herself as the liquid circled her wrist, and suddenly became a bracelet of stone. When she lifted her wrist, it sat like an unhampered bangle, resembling nothing like the power responsible for The Wall.
“Clever,” she said aloud, her voice echoing around the room.
Turning from the pedestal, she walked back toward the wall of ice water with purpose. She needed to take it back to The Wall now before the heat got worse. They had tried everything else, but everything had failed. Every day another village close to the fracture was abandoned, and every day they made no advance on fixing it. She prayed to the goddess that this would be enough.
The ice shield pressed closely against her skin as the heat of the world beyond The Wall raged against it. Behind her, the candidates gathered at the crack so they could combine their strength into a single force.
Aradel had feared they would not accept her. But she should have known better. They accepted the decision of the moon pearls. The pearls had never chosen wrong, and the candidates would support whomever the pearls deemed worthy, no matter who the wearer might be.
“It has gotten so bad,” one of the girls gasped as she looked up at The Wall.
The only thing that remained was the original ice of The Wall with no magic left in it—The Wall that had been brought forth by the ancients who had used the same Ancient Ice Crystal that now resided on Aradel’s wrist. She only prayed it would be enough to repair the damage that was done. She dared not think of the implications of the future damage that would occur if they could not keep the heat at bay.
“Have faith,” Aradel said to the women behind her. “The Moon Goddess is with us.”
“May the Goddess lead us on our path,” one woman said, and many agreed.
The once-frozen grass was wet, and mud stuck to their boots. Aradel was happy she hadn’t wasted a moment to change out of them. She had ridden the elk back to the camp closest to the fracture where the candidates were waiting for her. They had walked a short distance, knowing that the camp would have to be moved as the heat continued to spread like a festering wound.
She was Queen, the most powerful user of frost magic, and she had her moon pearls. Even with the crystal, she dared not risk the endeavor alone because she knew she would need all the help she could get. She knew that infusing the crystal with their magic would begin the process of full repair to The Wall. She knew it like she had never known anything before.
“Together,” she said as she raised her arms.
A spiral of snow and ice shot forth from her hands and touched the base of The Wall. After a moment, the candidates joined their power to hers. She could feel the force of that much power as it crackled through the air around her. Their magic reached the entire length of the structure, from the west coast all the way to the east. Never since The Wall had been first constructed had such powers been needed at once. She prayed that the Goddess would watch over them and that they’d never have to do this again.
It was a s
low process. Hours went by. Soon a full day. By the time the moon came up, a thick layer of ice was added to the already existing structure. The addition was the full length of the wall, and reached the top. The magical fabric that kept their nation cold and safe was repaired.
Under the full glow of the moon, Aradel dropped her arms, and the candidates followed suit. She gazed at it. “It’s done,” she whispered.
A hand touch hers as one of the candidates came to stand next to her. Aradel glanced over at Rena, who smiled. She was one of the younger candidates and had only recently joined before the disasters started. Her pale blue eyes met Aradel’s lively blue ones. Aradel smiled in return, thankful for the company.
One by one, the candidates joined her until they were all in a row, bound together by joined hands. They stood as the cold from her pearls washed over them all, unyielding against the constant assault of heat. They stood in silence as one united entity and prayed together.
“It isn’t melting,” Rena whispered.
Aradel felt the energy of the candidates rising joyfully with every passing moment.
It suddenly began to rain as though the Goddess herself was weeping from joy. Aradel turned her face up to it and let it hit her skin. The drops left trails of ice down her cheeks, but she didn’t care. She had succeeded. No matter the time it took, it was done. Her fingers tightened around the hands holding hers, and her lips curled into a smile. Relief finally flooded in and she tried not to cry.
One of the girls started laughing and began to dance playfully in the rain. Rena soon rushed out to join her. Soon, all the women were pulled into the fun. Aradel lifted her arms, and with a tiny gesture, the rain turned into hail. The women all gasped in wonder and started laughing hysterically as they danced in the falling ice.
Rena returned to Aradel breathlessly and took her hands. “Come on.”
With an excited laugh, Aradel let herself be drawn into the fray of dancing women. Their feet squished and splashed in the mud as the hail bounced off their skin. No one else noticed as they celebrated this massive victory. Aradel would make an announcement later. Right now, she watched the women in their bliss. She didn’t have the heart to stop them with all the tragedy they had seen recently.
She eventually found herself closer to The Wall, and placed her hands on the ice as the girls shouted and laughed behind her. She rested her forehead against it briefly before looking up at the impassive construct. “You’re back to your former glory,” and for a moment, she could swear it felt happy.
Fire: Chapter Thirty-Four
“Who are you?” Thea asked, trying to sound brave, but the tremble was clear in her voice. What the young woman was, or seemed to be, was absolutely impossible!
“Oh, how impolite of me not to introduce myself,” she said with a wicked smile. “My name is Freya, and I’m the one who is destroying your entire world.”
Thea’s eyes narrowed. “What? What do you mean?”
Freya indicated the interior of the volcano with a gentle gesture of her hands. “I’m sure the massive natural disasters you have been experiencing didn’t escape your notice. They weren’t meant to be subtle.”
Thea’s eyes went wide, and she glanced up at Kirill, who met her eyes at the same time. She looked back at the woman. “You’re doing this?”
“Of course I am,” she said casually.
Thea couldn’t even form a coherent thought. “How? W—why?” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing or seeing. The world had suddenly become very surreal.
“The how is easy,” the woman responded with a smile. “I take a massive, dormant volcano with enough power to destroy your planet, and I heat it up until it does.”
“You’re heating this volcano?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “This is going to be a very long conversation if you have to repeat everything I say.” Thea swallowed heavily, stunned. “The ‘why’ is a little more complex. Would you really like to know?”
Thea’s concern for Kirill weighed heavily on her heart. He needed to get out of here or he was dead, and Thea wouldn’t allow that. But if there was one thing Thea knew for sure—and Kirill, as a fellow soldier, would know it, too—it was that she needed to hear as much about this young woman as she was willing to reveal. ‘Always know your enemy’ was the first thing everyone learned as a recruit. This woman was an enemy, an anomaly, an unknown. And Thea knew that couldn’t remain so.
“Of course I do!” Thea cried. “I want to hear what pitiful, self-absorbed reason you have to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people!”
“Innocent!?” the woman shrieked. She cackled a moment before her expression and tone became severe. “No one on this planet is innocent.”
Thea took a fearful step back until she could hear Fitzu breathing in her ear. “Kirill’s got to get out of here,” he said softly.
“I know,” Thea replied quietly in return.
She glanced up at him on the iceberg again and saw him start to blink rapidly, likely suffering from the exhaustion of trying to keep his ice shield intact in here. Thea didn’t know how much water he had left, if any, to keep cold.
“Not doing so well, are you Sir Knight?” the woman asked, drawing Thea’s attention back down to her. She was gazing up at Kirill with a menacing smirk on her face. Thea’s heart jumped into her throat. If nothing else, Kirill had to stay on that iceberg for as long as the thing could possibly last in this heat. It would help him stay cool.
“You can wield both fire and frost?” Thea asked quickly, appealing to the narcissistic tendencies that this woman displayed. She had to get the woman’s attention off Kirill. It worked. Freya’s strange orange and blue glowing eyes rested on her again.
“My, you are quick witted,” she said sarcastically.
Thea licked her lips, being careful not to look up at Kirill again lest she draw Freya’s attention back to him. “How?”
Freya smiled and started walking to her right. Thea turned with her, not daring to take her eyes away from her face. Fitzu stayed right beside Thea, turning with her. “My mother was a Frost Nation whore who my Fire Nation father bought and bedded,” the woman began.
Thea tried to keep her eyes from going wide at that, and failed. She knew black market deals could go down between the two nations—she’d disrupted a few exchanges herself—but she didn’t know any involved purchasing people. The thought of people being traded like cattle made her stomach turn over.
“My mother wrote to my father when she was dying. Oddly enough, my father wanted me. So after she died in childbirth,” the woman continued, “he brought me home to the Fire Nation. Everything seemed normal until I was eight and started using my frost-wielding abilities. Soon after that, he cast me out with just the clothes on my back and without a coin to my name. I was now his enemy and not worth the effort.”
That hit a nerve deep in Thea’s heart, and she impulsively wanted to apologize. She knew what that felt like. Both her parents had abandoned her at that age. Thea felt a longing to deal with Freya’s father herself for doing that to his daughter, but she knew if she said such a thing, her words would be empty to this woman.
“I escaped to the Frost Nation after that, thinking I could find my mother’s family and they would take me in. What a fool I was! None of the Frost Nation soldiers would even let me through The Wall to see Queen Vesna. They could see what I was, and I fled before they could capture me or worse. So, I came back north and went to Queen Berselis, begging for shelter and guidance, but she saw only the frost half of me, and I was exiled from there as well. I finally realized that no one wanted me, that I belonged nowhere.”
Thea pressed her lips together. Her adopted mother, Berselis, was a kind, sweet, and gracious woman. She was a good Queen to the Fire Nation, but she had no love for the Frost Nation and wasn’t shy about that fact. Neither did Thea’s adopted father, Leehin, Coor and Darha’s dad, though he was more laid back about it. As much as it pained Thea to think about it now, she knew B
erselis could do that to this young woman. It felt even worse to admit this to herself since she had become so close with Kirill.
“So, I made my way back through the Fire Nation, far north, to this volcano where nobody else lived and nobody would dare to come. Here, I perfected both of my magic abilities and became incredibly powerful,” she said with a purring sound of self-satisfaction. She met Thea’s eyes severely and paused her walking. “Since I don’t belong anywhere in this world, I’m going to make a new one—one where even I will belong.” She wrinkled her nose. “Punishing you all is just letting me have my cake and eat it too.”
Thea swiped her hand over her mouth in nervousness. Freya’s words were just words to her; her concern at the moment was Kirill’s life. She had to get him out of there. Her family also needed to know about Freya and what she was doing. The Fire and Frost nations needed to be warned.
“I must admit,” the woman went on, “it’s rather odd seeing a Fire Nation soldier and a Frost Knight working together like this.” Her eyes traveled back to Kirill, and Thea’s heart started to pound from the gaze she was casting up at him. “I didn’t think even a planetary level extermination would be able to unite you two. It’s actually quite upsetting.” One of her brows went up. “Which is why neither of you will leave this place.” With a simple flick of her finger, a large section of the iceberg that was right under Kirill’s feet collapsed.
“Kirill!” Thea screamed as he plummeted to the rocks.
He tried to land on his feet, but his knees completely buckled under him. He ended up on his side not moving even as large chunks of ice showered around him. Thea ran to him, completely disregarding the woman and the falling ice, and threw her body over his as best she could to shield him from the hazards that thankfully missed them both.
“What am I witnessing?” Freya said softly in disbelief.