It took another three months before Simon felt like he understood what he was doing and completed the enchantment on his sword. Unlike the armor and the scabbard, which did nothing to confirm that he’d actually succeeded in his efforts, the flames of his weapon sprang immediately to life.
Simon instantly shoved it into the scabbard, and only once that seemed to extinguish it did, he finally breathe a sigh of relief. “Finally,” he said to himself, “I’m ready.”
He still had to test the gloves, of course, since he was sure the weapon would heat up to the point where he could no longer hold it within a few minutes, but he was confident that it would work fine. After all, he’d spent most of this time trying to understand exactly how he could enchant an item to do two different things at once, and it was only when he’d made that breakthrough that he finally felt like he could activate the runes on his blade.
Now though, he needed to sleep. In the morning, he could get ready, and then he could finally get out of Hybissian’s hair. In the morning, he began to pack, and once he verified that his gloves were almost entirely fireproof, he made a little time to show off his new weapon to Majoria. He did it in private, though, of course. He didn’t want to upset the villagers and provoke a witch hunt just when he was finally ready to move to the next level.
“You really made this?” she asked, wide-eyed, as he unsheathed his flaming blade and showed it to her. “I never imagined such a thing would be possible!”
Simon explained some of the basics of what he’d done and how it wasn’t so hard, but as she nodded eagerly and seemed to hang on his every word, even those he was fairly certain she didn’t understand, he noticed something. Simon realized from the way she was looking at him over the flaming weapon with a mixture of awe and admiration that he could have her if he wanted her. It was a strange moment in his life because he’d never been certain of that before now. Not even with Freya during their second time together. The moment had just snuck up on him.
Here though, there was some magic - some connection, and he could seize it. It was a tempting moment. Instead of plunging deeper into the arctic level just ahead, he could stay here with a beautiful woman to keep him warm. He could try to forget Freya and move on with a comfortable life.
Instead, he sheathed his sword and said goodbye to the sweet young woman before he turned his back on her and began climbing up the hill toward his date with destiny. Majoria’s cute smile might be enough to make him forget the way Freya once looked at him with her beautiful eyes, but nothing she could do would help him clear this dungeon, and at the end of the day, that was all that mattered.
Even though it was a warm morning that would be sweltering by midday, he put on his gloves and covered his face from the nose down with a cloth wrap before he lifted his hood. Only then did he open the door. Majoria and a few other townspeople watched him from a distance. They’d seen him at this door before, but he’d never gone through it. Today would be the last time they’d ever see him.
Simon kind of felt like he should say goodbye. He just took one final look and then opened the door and took a sudden gust of arctic air across the face. The shock that it sent through him was almost physical, and he cinched up his backpack a little higher and stepped through, closing the door behind him. The frozen level, as he thought of it, was every bit as strange as it had been the first time he’d been here, and the only thing that had changed was his lack of urgency.
The last time he’d been here, he was freezing to death almost from the first moment. This time it was still quite chilly, but it was the sort of cold that was manageable. Simon spent a few moments checking his winter gear and finding that almost all the cold spots were expected. The gaps where his furs met around his waist, his face, and his boots were the worst offenders.
Simon didn’t relish the idea of spending weeks putting together such an outfit for every run going forward, but realistically he didn’t think he would have to. He just wanted to do one good search of the area to try to understand what this place was supposed to be, and then next time, he could go back to breezing through it again. Next time. After all, it was just a sprint down this main street and then a force blast or something through the wall of ice that barred his way, and then it was on to the lizard men or whatever.
He didn’t sprint, though. He walked slowly through the drifting snow as he took a peek through various windows and opened up a couple doors with his shoulder. What he found was a town that wasn’t so different from any of the others he’d spent time in recently. It was larger than Rivenwood and smaller than Schwarzenbruck or Crowvar, but culturally he felt like it was similar based on the dishware and the style of houses. This wasn’t the sort of place that should have experienced a deep freeze like this, even in the middle of winter.
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In every house he went inside, he found the same grisly discovery: a family huddled in front of their hearth or curled up beside each other in bed that had frozen to death, waiting for whatever this was that was happening to end. It tugged at his heart strings to see so many people not just dead but frozen solid as a result of something terrible. He didn’t really get his first clue as to what that was, though, until he spotted green trees from the windows of one of the houses.
At first, Simon thought it was a second gate. It had to be, didn’t it? The only color he’d seen until now beyond the white and blue of snow and the brown and gray of the frozen buildings had been the blood-red sunset from the next world at the end of the street. A green tree simply didn’t make sense in that setup unless it was sitting safely beyond a portal boundary or crystallized in particularly clear ice.
Neither of those turned out to be true, though. He left the home he’d been standing in and walked down a side street toward that distant goal. He found the strangest thing of all. A boundary line. It wasn’t quite as stark as a cartoon might be, with spring grasses on one side and a foot of snow on the other, but it quickly became apparent that this cold was coming from a single source, and it only reached so far before it petered out.
When he took off his glove and passed the line where ice and snow gave way to mud, Simon confirmed it was still cold, but apparently not cold enough to kill everything and leave it frozen. He began to walk along that border, noting that there were a few houses on the side of the line that he thought of as ‘safe,’ but they’d obviously been abandoned in a hurry.
Even though it was obviously a warm and sunny day sometime in late spring, Simon knew that he’d be freezing even this far out without the magic he’d sewn into his armor. Whatever was doing this robbed all the warmth from the air, and as Simon walked along that long border, he realized it was an almost perfect circle. On one side, wheat was slowly growing, and on the other side, it had been frozen dead before it had done much more than poke a few leaves above the ground.
He felt like he should be able to work out how long this place had been like this from those two facts, but he hadn’t paid enough attention to all the farming he’d been around recently to really say for sure, so he continued on. Along the way, he found half-dead orchards and even a half-frozen pond.
As the sun started to set, he realized he was going to have to make a decision. Either he was going to have to move further away from the cold and make camp for the night, or he was going to have to go to the center of this town and look for the source. He chose the latter.
Aiming for the center was easy at first. He just looked as far left and right as he could, and then he oriented himself and started walking. “A giant tower or something to aim at would be nice,” he mumbled beneath his scarf as he strode forward.
Near as he could tell, it was likely coming from one of two or three large houses toward the center of town, but none of them seemed much more likely than the other. He vowed to give all three a quick search but to leave before it got dark if he didn’t find anything obvious.
The first house was a complete waste of his time, and the only thing notable about it was just how cold it got when he reached the third-floor garret. The fact that, by the time he got that high up, his teeth were chattering even through his armor was enough to convince him. Whatever was causing this had to be in the house next door.
He didn’t know what he expected as he climbed those stairs, but the first and second floors seemed normal enough and noticeably lacking in corpses. It was only when he got to the narrow stairs up to the third floor he found the body of a frozen man that had obviously been rushing down the stairs before he’d been frozen in place with a look of panic on his face.
Simon could feel the ice assaulting him worse with every step as he walked up those dark stairs. He didn’t have to search to find the source, though. The blue glow made it fairly obvious. There, on a desk in the center of the frosty high-ceilinged space, he found a blue orb hovering just above the desk where someone had been working on it. Around it, there were engraving tools and alchemical compounds that he found more than a little familiar after his experimentation with making his flaming sword.
He would have loved to study whatever this was, but he couldn’t. He knew that if he did so, he’d be frozen just as solid as the poor bastard that had started all this in a minute or two. So, he didn’t hesitate. He pulled out his sword, watching the shadows jump as the yellow-orange flames suddenly out shone the soft blue glow of the orb. Then he struck it, cleaving the thing into two halves which both flickered briefly before fading out completely.
Simon shivered as he sheathed his sword before he went back downstairs. It was still brutally cold here, but not lethally cold. Whatever that thing had been had stopped, but everything around it had spent weeks or months absorbing that temperature, so he expected it would still be like a deep freeze in this room for days at least.
That made his decision to go find somewhere warm to let the whole place thaw out an easy one. He’d go back to one of those buildings on the edge of town, light a fire and see how many toes he was going to lose from frostbite.