“Why are you mad at me?” Thar asked quietly.

D’Argen rolled his eyes and huffed. “I'm not mad, I'm in pain.”

“You are clearly mad.”

“Well, maybe, it’s because you’ve been acting like an idiot this whole time!”

“What? I—”

“No. Shut up. We’re not talking about this. Look… I’m seriously in pain, my leg hasn’t healed yet, and I need to figure out a way to get us across that doesn’t use either of our mahee.”

“Still?” Thar’s quiet question caught D’Argen off guard until he realized that Thar was asking about the pain, not the rest of his words.

“Have you ever broken a bone before? Or dislocated a hip? No? You’re lucky. I have. It’s not fun. The last time, I was in the comfort of my rooms at Evadia and even then, I was stuck there for a full month. I know you must have heard of it because it was an absolutely hilarious joke going around the city that I had gone crazy with staying still.”

“I do not pay attention to gossip.”

D’Argen felt himself relax at those words. From what he remembered, Thar was actually one of the few people that had not laughed or made fun of him for being bedridden for so long. Even Abbot had been a horrible tease and shared some of his paintings from a trip D’Argen could not join him on.

“We have one pair of hooks and a rope. It’ll hurt, but I can scale the wall the same way as earlier with the rope around me to create a line, then you follow the line across.”

“It would be easier if I do it—”

“While you try and cough out your lungs? Yeah, sure. Why not?”

Thar glared at him but D’Argen was easily able to ignore it in favour of looking at the running water. It was too fast for it to spill out directly into the ocean and they were too far from it. And who knew how long the river ran underground before it came up for air.

Nocipel would know.

Thar would, if he used one of Nocipel’s spells.

Although his hands were stiff and sore, he guided the mahee into a spell using his fingers rather than his voice. He closed his eyes to listen to the rushing water and focused on where it sank under the rocks. It was too violent. It bubbled in multiple places, and then his hearing could not catch more as it started churning in different directions and squeezed between tiny cracks. It was not a way out.

“I will rest my leg for a bit,” D’Argen started speaking once he released the spell, “and then I will go across on the rock side.”

“Why not the ice?” Thar asked.

D’Argen wanted to glare at him and yell, but he focused instead on taking a deep breath that would not hurt to calm himself. Thar was still using his mahee to shine a white light over his head. It was bright enough to reach the other end of the cavern and there was no other source of light. If D’Argen was to cross along the ice, then Thar would do the same as earlier – use his mahee to help him along.

“I will not—”

“Shut up,” D’Argen interrupted whatever lie Thar was about to spit out. “I’m thinking.”

“I have enough mahee for—”

“Do you remember what happened to Upates back when… the-event-that-shall-not-be-spoken-of happened? He ended up using all of his mahee and he was in a coma for years. Same with Delcaus when he broke the mountain. Centuries. You fall unconscious on me and that’s it, we’ll both go dormant until someone finds us and I doubt they ever will in this place.”

“Haur would not leave without us,” Thar said though his voice was quiet. He looked like he was in pain and when he reached up to rub at his chest, D’Argen found himself mirroring the motion without thinking.

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“Neither would the others,” D’Argen agreed. “Lilian will try to blow this place down before that.” The chuckle that he let out with those words calmed him. Thar, on the other hand, looked even more pained. That expression was worrying. “What is it? Are you alright?”

“I will be fine,” Thar dismissed him and then closed his eyes.

D’Argen watched carefully as the light shining from Thar dimmed. The other end of the cavern disappeared in the darkness.

“You should rest too,” Thar said quietly. When D’Argen looked over, the man had already settled into his usual sitting position to meditate.

“Don’t fall asleep on me,” D’Argen said with a warning in his voice. When Thar opened his eyes to look at him in confusion, D’Argen let out a heavy sigh. “I do want you to rest but honestly, I am even afraid to let you sleep.”

“I understand.”

“If you could stop using your mahee so much and focus on replenishing it instead, we can… I don’t know… maybe we can try your way to cross. But for now, I’m going to see if I can scale the rocks.”

“You are going to rest,” Thar said instead with a firm command in his voice. He was still so used to giving orders.

“I’d prefer we get out of here as soon as possible. I can hear your lungs crackling, even without Yaling’s spells, and my fingers are starting to get too stiff.”

Thar reached out before D’Argen even finished speaking. He hesitated and his hand hovered. D’Argen wanted to roll his eyes and he would have if his head did not hurt so much. Instead of voicing his annoyance, he put his hand in Thar’s. Thar carefully removed his glove and then looked over his hand with a focus so intense it was bordering on obscene.

“They are starting to turn blue,” Thar said.

D’Argen felt a heat rise to his cheeks that was most likely embarrassment. His hands were so stiff that he did not notice the cold settling in and all he saw as he looked down at his hand were slightly different shades of grey.

“Breathe on them, you must keep them warm,” Thar directed and let his hand go but did not return his glove.

“I am trying.” D’Argen pulled his other glove off stiffly and did exactly as he was told before tucking both hands into his armpits. “My fingers are not that important now.”

“How will you pull a bow without fingers?”

“How will you breathe without lungs?”

Thar once more fell into silence and D’Argen realized he snapped at him again. “I’m sorry I’m so irritable.”

Thar hummed in response.

“I swear, it’s just the pain. You’re one of a handful of people I’d prefer to be trapped here with. Not because you’d be trapped too, but because you’re actually entertaining. In fact, I could probably only survive with either you or Vah’mor. Anybody else is as likely to kill me as the snow. Anyway, I have an idea. What if we tie the rope around the pole and throw that across? I just haven’t figured out how to secure it on the other side yet but…”

When Thar raised his brow in question, D’Argen realized how stupid his idea was.

“Well… do you have any insights?” D’Argen grumbled out.

Thar shook his head.

“You never really realize how much we depend on the mahee until we can’t use it, do you?” D’Argen continued to grumble, now bitter. He could consume the sound of the running water enough to dull the pain in his body, but it was not enough to heal him unless they stayed here for days. Alternatively, he could consume just enough to do a few more spells to better his circulation, focus on his fingers and hands, or focus on the broken bone in his leg that he would need to support him, but he was starting to feel the effects of using too much. Although he had not opened his mahee to run, using all of these different spells was exhausting. He could not even imagine how Thar felt.

“I’m a fucking idiot!” D’Argen suddenly shouted.

Thar pointedly looked at where D’Argen was waving his hands as he said, “Keep your fingers warm.”

D’Argen snapped his hands back under his pits and hunched over. He glared at the other but then decided to mutter a spell under his breath rather than use his fingers to guide it. The long-distance communication spell usually required a direction to aim at. With how far they had fallen, D’Argen believed that up would be enough.

He sent out a message, uncaring who it reached first.

A few minutes later, he felt a twinge in the corner of his jaw that travelled down to the soft spot right under it. Excited, he accepted the message only to hear his own words.

“Hold on, let me try again,” he said and sent out the same message, reaching for the others. This time, when the twinge came back, he dismissed it. The spell left him and a moment later Thar informed him that he received it instead. “Maybe not up?”

“I already tried,” Thar finally said.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”

“I assumed you had tried as well.”

D’Argen tried not to take that as an insult and instead asked, “When did you try?”

“Multiple times. Since we first fell in,” Thar responded and closed his eyes as if he was about to return to meditating without finishing the conversation.

“And it didn’t work?” D’Argen prompted.

Thar shook his head in a negative. “Something is interfering.”

“What can interfere with the spell? It passes through…” D’Argen trailed off and tried to remember how the spell was first described to him. Sound did not pass through anything. It circled it and bounced off surfaces until it reached its destination. It could find tiny gaps, like the hole from a nail in his window back at Evadia, but it could not penetrate the underground chambers when the doors were closed.

“We’re not in a bowl,” D’Argen said, more to himself than Thar. He decided to send out the spell again, this time directing it to the other end of the cavern first, then the tunnel they had emerged from, then the cavern wall, and finally, the running water itself. The one from the water returned to him immediately, the one from the cavern wall touched Thar a few moments later.

The other two disappeared. At least both of them showed a way out.