We found ourselves in the path of an avalanche. Pebbles and ice pellets rattled past like an overturned bag of marbles. White rocks tumbled and obliterated tree trunks. Entire segments of what I had taken to be firm ground slid past us like leaves in a stream.

“We should take cover!” shouted Commander Zideo, realizing that we would not outrun the growing, growling foam of rocky slush plunging down the mountainside. In seconds it doubled in size, and now more resembled a ceiling of cloud closing down over our heads.

“No time, chap!” said Helmgarth, gripping his shoulder straps tightly in hand. “Summon the book! Give us time to think!”

“Good call!” said Zideo, planting his heels into the slope and skidding to a stop. Unfortunately his head kept going after his feet halted, and he fell face-first into the snow. I jumped to try to get to him, but a series of rocks skipping downhill at a deadly velocity cut me off, forcing me back. I was helpless to pull him out, flailing his Jordan-shoes in the air while the tide of crystal and powder plummeted toward us.

“Chum!” shouted Helmgarth. “M’lord!” I barked, although I am not sure how helpful that was.

Then, he found his footing. My heart leaped. Zideo got one leg under him and leaned back upward, a man in defiance of the elements as a blowing gust of ice rained down. I will never forget how cool and heroic he looked in that moment, framed in white, his pink and blue hair and his tie-dye shirt flapping in the compressed air blowing in front of the stormhead. Extremely literary. He held out one palm, like the human tale of the man who parted the sea. He cleared his throat so that he could be heard over the quaking mountain.

“Hey! Uh,” he glanced at Helmgarth for guidance.

“Ask it a direct question!”

He was no more than a gray silhouette now. I heard his increasingly muffled voice say “What’s the deal with… no, hang on. Okay, for real though. What is this pl—”

A wave of violent cold both crushed and lifted us, propelling us down the mountain.

This was quite different from being embedded in the snow drift, though it shared one feature: encompassing cold. I tumbled and lost my sense of up and down. My fur was soaked, my limbs were pushed and battered. My spine was ice.

Cold rocks and hard crystals slashed at my coat and ears. I was hurled and jumbled like one of Lisa’s socks I had so often watched I the machine that dried clothes, after its cycle in the machine that made clothes wet. (Another incomprehensible human practice.) The air was swirling sediment, and I coughed on powder. I twirled and rolled and suddenly found hard, cold ground beneath my feet.

The world still moved around me, but the night sky was above me once more. I pressed my pads down against solid ice. They slipped at first, but held.

The world moved past me, white treetops sailing past to either side. I rode a sheet of ice no bigger than Commander Zideo’s Honda Micro-Commuter EV, more or less surfing it down the mountain.

Like a river unleashed from a dam, the avalanche streamed downward in a relatively narrow channel—I say narrow compared to the mountain’s face, but it was easily wide enough to sweep up Lisa’s entire house, and then some. Hearing a cry of amazement, I turned and saw Helmgarth riding on his own separate iceberg. Indeed, so too was Zideo stranded on a raft of ice, a little behind us but keeping speed atop the flowing river and rolling, roiling, reeling snow. I marveled at the coincidence and, frankly, the convenience of this. But that wonder lasted only a moment, as the churning channel zigged and zagged toward a vast gulf ahead of us, a drop of incalculable depth.

“You didn’t ask the question!” shouted Helmgarth over the din.

Zideo coughed snow out of his mouth, and shook it out of his two-tone hair in a very canine manner. “No need!” he said, after a moment of looking around. “I know what this is!”

Something whooshed past me in the air, ringing coolly as it flew with the tones of a wet finger on a wineglass. Or, more precisely, I whooshed past it. It reflected light like solid gold, and from my perspective, streaked backward toward Zideo. He reached out his hand and snagged it out of the air, whereupon it disappeared with a sound that I can only describe as pa-tink!

“Coins!” hollered to us. “It’s a challenge—look out!” He pointed ahead of us suddenly. I saw Helmgarth flatten himself on the ice, and turned my head to see a wide, dark line growing way too fast. I ducked as a sturdy tree trunk swiped over my head, as though wielded by a giant. I saw a flash of golden coins below.

Helmgarth’s backpack exploded, and he tumbled backward from the force. The tree trunk shrank behind us, in a cloud of jerky, fabric, iron ingots, herbs, precious stones, books, broken swords, rusty helmets, tattered cloaks, cheese wheels, garnet-red potion bottles, hats made from sabre-toothed tiger pelts, amulets and rings, lockpicks, chicken legs and goat haunches, torches, strips of leather, quivers full of arrows, phials of poisons and their antidotes, maps, a musicbox, and scroll that glowed faintly, weird masks, and a wooden shield flipping end over end. Helmgarth clawed at the ice and found traction only inches from the its edge, his boots kicking up a spray of powder.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

The coin pa-tinked into Zideo’s hand while he was prone on the ice.

He glanced backward. “Man, what?” he said. “You had all that stuff? You had clothes and stuff and didn’t give them to me?”

Helmgarth shouted back, “They were out of durability, old sport! They wouldn’t have warmed you!”

Obstacles and coins rained upstream, as it were, toward us as we rode the river of tumbling ice and snow. Floating ice platforms and stone steps sailed overhead, the oversized coins floating in the air above them, affixed by incomprehensible forces yet spinning with an indescribable allure. I am a dog and am therefore unencumbered with the desire for money, and even I felt the desire to reach out and pocket them. A series of three in a row sailed right past me, and I snapped my jaws around them, but closed them on thin air. Had I misjudged the distance? Or were the coins fundamentally unavailable to me?

More obstacles came, causing Helmgarth and myself to have to duck. Zideo handled them with aplomb, running up floating stones and swiping up coins, which vanished at the moment he acquired them. The storming river of snow split and surged around a wall of ice like the dorsal fin of a great and frigid shark. My human, spying a row of coins placed high up on its surface, jumped up from his ice raft and briefly ran along the wall as though gravity obeyed him as its master. He pushed off after a few steps, keeping pace with his ice raft, and landed on it in what I am going to say was a pretty damn cool pose, on one foot and one knee with his fists out to either side. The dude just couldn’t be stopped, if you ask me.

Helmgarth and I held on for dear life, ducking beneath and occasionally having to jump and scramble over logs and clods of earth, platforms that left little space to dodge. Surely, I thought, we must be at the base of the mountain, soaring over the precipice any second now. But again I must have misunderstood the distance, or else the distance misunderstood itself. We rode an avalanche and the avalanche kept going, and going….

“We must disembark this ride, chum!” yelled Helmgarth.

“Why?” asked Zideo, back-flipping to collect an arc of five coins from the air.

“It’s going to chuck us in the pit!”

“But I’m getting a ton of coins like this!”

Helmgarth turned back to him. “Who cares? We’re going to die!”

“Yeah,” said Zideo, “but a hundred coins is probably a one up, right?”

“What in blazes are you talking about, mate?”

The ridge of the mountain was visible now, a blank white horizon disappearing into a blank dark expanse, incredibly wide and incomprehensibly deep. Gravity devoured our river of snow and stone, logs and icebergs. The line at which it terminated was headed for us, or rather us for it, at a speed that left little time to plan.

“Oh,” yelled Zideo. “You know what? I should try the book again. Give us time to th-”

“Yes, go! Say it!”

He stood erect on the ice raft. He pointed toward the edge. “Hey, book!” he announced.

“With all due respect, chum,” said Helmgarth. “Spit it out!”

“Right!” said Zideo. “Book, answer this question for me! Um…”

“Any gods-blasted question!” screamed Helmgarth. “Anything!”

“What’s, uh—what is the name of this mountai—”

The three of us flew over the edge. I was encased once more in the spitting, swirling miasma of rushing ice. I held my breath. I felt nothing for a terrifying moment, the bowel-voiding sensation of freefall. I heard my human’s voice vocalizing one continued vowel, flying past me. My shoulder exploded with pain as I collided with something hard, and caromed off of walls until I found terra firma once more beneath my feet.

I took stock: I stood on a slim outcrop of rock with barely any room to turn. Like goats that scale nearly vertical walls with nothing but their nimble hooves, I clung there until my leg muscles cramped. Above me, the hissing, foaming river of snow carried rocks and trees out into the gulf. Boulders and entire clumps of forest passed before me, taking a long time to disappear into the darkness below. Besides the endless roar above my head, I could hear nothing. There was no indication of anything striking the ground, and I began to wonder if there was any where this pit terminated… if it terminated.

I scanned the dark cliffside for any sign of Zideo or Helmgarth, but detected no trace of either. I watched as the avalanche burned itself out, dumping untold quantities of snow and stone into the pit. Eventually, it calmed, leaving behind an unsteady trickle of stones careening into the endless dark, a drizzle of pebbles. Fearing that another loud noise could cause the mountain to shake loose another sheet of snow, I nevertheless reasoned that any snow that that had been positioned above me must be in the pit by now. Knowing that I could not resign myself to a cold fate on the side of a mountain, I began to call for my friends with a full-throated bark.

“There you are, chap,” came a weakened voice, a few dozen feet away. Flattened against the side of the cliff, Helmgarth dangled precariously from a strap of leather, a strap shorn from his destroyed backpack. It had hooked onto a rock or root perhaps. There was a look of farewell in his eyes, a sorrow that I did not like one bit. “I’m afraid it’s just us.” He tried to turn his head, but it was fairly pinned between his shoulders as he hung there. “How’d you wind up there? I suppose it doesn’t matter… bit of a miracle either of us made it. Although I don’t know how we’ll get out of this one.”

I ignored his implications. It was not possible for my human—the only real human on Shard Platformia and the greatest of all humans, in all of history—to have fallen into the pit. He had to be here somewhere, hanging onto a rock like Helmgarth, probably upside down and dangling from the laces of his Jordan-shoes. Or maybe he was unconscious on a jutting rock somewhere.

“Suppose we’ve run out of miracles,” said Helmgarth, “here at the end.”

I barked myself hoarse, pausing only to listen for the voice of my human. The only sound that returned was the howling wind that patrolled this pit, gulping echoes whole. That, and Helmgarth’s heavy sigh.