After a good rest, the world had changed quite a bit. Looking from above, we could see that the surging levels of Wild Magic had stabilised, effectively turning the valley below into a quite lethal area that would tear apart pretty much anything entering it. On the outskirts, we might be able to survive and work with the power but we could only guess how intense the power deeper in the valley would be. There was simply too much going on for us to see.

“We can work from the outside in,” I mused, changing a few of my previous ideas and trying to come up with something that would work. The greatest understanding I had when it came to channelling outside Astral Power came from Blood Magic, allowing me to channel and control Astral Power drained from others without making it mine first. That might be the best way to approach the problem, as trying to channel the sheer volume of power we could feel in the valley below through my body would undoubtedly be lethal. It was just too much and unless one was some sort of purely elemental spirit, some sort of Ice-Elemental, I doubted anything had the required affinity to survive. And that was only considering the power of Ice, there were other elements mixed in and even those could easily kill you.

With Lenore on my shoulder, I began to carefully make my way down the slope. Ylva was with us, reporting about the events of the night and telling us how the Nexus had surged until it formed the current, relatively calm, conditions. Sadly, her mystical senses were less about detecting precisely what was going on and more about detecting if anything was going on and trying to avoid it, so her observations were less enlightening than one might hope.

But it was good to hear that pretty much every surviving Yeti had decided to look for whiter glaciers and fled after the original fight had left them utterly destroyed. We wouldn’t have to bother with them for now, maybe forever.

Studying the valley, I realised that I would be able to approach the centre, where the power coming out of the Nexus was strongest, only up to a certain distance, any closer and I would suffer. That meant I had a radius of operations I could work with, a circle that I could approach and use the power of the Nexus to tame it.

Previously, I had used ritual circles to channel power, maybe I would be able to accomplish something similar here, forming a ritual circle with the Nexus in the centre and using that circle to control the power.

Lenore and I kept working on my idea as we travelled around the valley, studying the area and making sure there were no other critters that wanted to know what was going on.

Finally, after almost four hours of discussion, we began to work on the first corner after coming up with an incredibly complex formation that would hopefully allow us to tame the power around us. Reaching out with my own Power, I didn’t even try to touch the unstable energy of the Nexus, not initially at least. Instead, I focused on the glacier itself, controlling and shifting the Ice to form a large pillar, some ten metres thick and thirty metres high, into which I could engrave runes from afar.

That pillar itself was slowly turning into the equivalent of a staff, wielded by the planet itself, a focus to turn the surging power of the nexus into a controlled flow, a flow that was currently simply channelled into the air, creating a glittering shower of diamond dust around it. It was the simplest way to expend the power harmlessly, allowing me to use it at a later point.

With the power in this area getting channelled away, the Wild Magic abated somewhat, but given the symmetry we wanted to achieve, the other pillars couldn’t be closer to the Nexus, not if we wanted to use the formation Lenore and I had planned out.

At night, I began a concentrated effort to try communing with the Nidhögg inside its prison. My initial attempts were fraught with trouble, at first there was no reaction but soon, I got one. Only, the reaction was not one I could fully comprehend and it wasn’t even a problem of language, the ability shared by Lenore took care of that. It was more a problem that my puny mind was simply too weak to handle the amount of information it could pack into a single growling hum, for that was what its speech sounded like to me. It was filled with images and concepts on a level I simply couldn’t keep up with. But with each headache, I got a feeling I was getting a little closer.

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For the next two days, we kept moving around the Nexus, slowly raising four more pillars of Ice that controlled the power of the Nexus, turning the frozen glacier into a beautiful winter wonderland filled with glittering diamond dust. It made for a spectacular view and I felt almost sad that I would have to disrupt it, but I would need the power.

Curiously, we noticed that there was something strange going on in the valley, all three of us occasionally feeling watched. None of us had been able to detect what caused those eerie feelings but we began to get suspicious. While all of us were vigilant, it was normally not to the point of paranoia. However, if we were unable to find what caused the sensations, we could do very little about the situation, other than remaining cautious and keeping a lookout while we were working.

The upside of the work was that I had gained one of the incredibly coveted points in Ice-Rune Mastery, bringing the skill to eighty and allowing me to comprehend another rune. The glacier we were on, and the glaciers all around us made that almost trivial. Delving into the Astral River, I could feel the timeless, eternal nature, their core never changing. Eternity was an incredible concept but I had begun making inroads to it, the Eternal Stillness of Ice giving me the first glimpse of it. The sheer magnitude was breathtaking, and I had a feeling that fully immersing myself in it might be a bad idea.

Once the construction of my pillars was complete, it was time for the next step. The power in the centre had been controlled to the point that I could move into it without freezing to death within seconds and that was exactly what I did. Lenore was along for the ride, hiding in her Hallow and complaining about the cold. How she felt the cold neither of us knew but she was here, not only supporting me morally but also with additional Astral Power and mental processing.

In the centre of the Nexus, we began to work in earnest, the central pillar not just a pillar but hollow, a tower that would allow us to engrave even more runes and turn it into a massive staff that we could use to control and channel the power of the Nexus.

Just raising it, working in shifts as the cold took a toll on me despite my affinity, took four days, the base almost a hundred metres wide, the entire glacier acting as a foundation. The tower tapered inwards, from the initial hundred metres to a mere forty metres at the top, almost two hundred metres above the glacier. It was utterly over-designed, compared to the amount of power that remained untamed, but the idea was to build something that could control the entire Nexus at the same time, even without the five outer pillars.

But even after those four days of raising the tower, we were far from done. The week had been incredible, both incredibly exhausting but also incredibly enlightening. My attempts to converse with the Nidhögg were slowly bearing fruit, to the point that I could glimpse some of the concepts it tried to impart to me. Or maybe it simply realised that it was talking with a stupid elf, not another dragon, and deliberately dumbed things down to a level I could understand. Either way, it was fascinating and I even managed to work a bit of my new-found understanding into my Spellcraft. It was similar to the connecting patterns the Dwarves had introduced to me, only so much more complex and complicated. It made me want to start completely new, to work on my understanding of magic from the ground up, as I felt my previous work had been a clumsy insult to all things magic. But given the time left to me, I simply couldn’t even try.

And so, slowly but surely, my tower was taking form.

Finally, ten days after I had slain the large Yeti, I placed the last rune at the top of my tower, a surge of Astral Power flowing through the valley and into the Throne I was sitting on. For a moment, my hands clenched, the sheer volume of power in my hands almost too scary to consider. But only for a moment, before I pushed those fears away. Now, I could begin to truly work on my vengeance.

I was just about to start drawing on the Nexus when a blue box appeared before me, asking me to name my creation. After a second of consideration, I decided to call it the Frozen Citadel.

The moment I confirmed my choice, a pair of blue boxes appeared.

Heroes, the world needs you. The Ice Queen of the Frozen Citadel plans to unleash Calamity upon the world of Mundus. Head into the Mountains of Ice and break her rule, to stop the End of the World.

Ooops…

Title gained You gained a title: Ice Queen

While you have to be born a Princess, you can rise to become a Queen.

You now rule your own frozen domain, its inhabitants yours to command. But will your rule be benevolent or tyrannical? Only time will tell.

Double Ooops?