It took another five days before there was a shout from one of the mortals near the front of their crowd. D’Argen could not figure out if it was in fear or excitement so he opened his mahee and rushed the woman. She did not look like she was in danger and started shouting at him as soon as he was there. She was, however, shouting at him in her native tongue and D’Argen had a hard time splitting the sounds apart to understand her. Then she shoved something in his hands and pointed to the horizon.
D’Argen looked down at the metal tube in his hands. It took him a moment to recognize it as a looking glass and he quickly lifted it to his eye and pointed in the direction the woman had indicated.
Finally.
He grinned when he put the looking glass down and then motioned with a hand toward the woman. She grinned just as wide in response and this time, when she shouted, it was in the common language of middle Trace, “Mountains!”
Thar was the first to arrive beside them and look through the looking glass. Then Haur and Nocipel rushed over, surrounded by a few other mortals.
“Let me see!” Haur said.
Thar handed him the looking glass without looking away from the horizon.
Haur used the looking glass to scan the horizon too. D’Argen could tell he had seen the sight because the man’s body suddenly relaxed. When he put the looking glass down, he was smiling.
“Let me.” Nocipel was next to look. By then, the other three Never Born arrived as well. Abbot and Lilian traded the glass before handing it off to the mortals.
“Finally,” somebody said from right beside D’Argen. He turned to look at Yaling, the citrus scent of her mahee at work revealing that she was looking at those mountains without the need for a tool. “You said a forest, too?”
“Of a sort. What do you think? Three days? Maybe four?” D’Argen questioned as the looking glass was being passed around.
“A week, at least,” Nocipel corrected. “Maybe longer.”
“There, there.” One of the mortals came up to Nocipel with the glass and pointed slightly off from where the mountains were.
D’Argen considered learning their names, especially this woman who the others treated as having some sort of higher status or leadership role. Maybe she was their Haur? When D’Argen noticed a mortal man pulling out another looking glass with a frown he decided that the man was probably their named leader but the woman was who the others looked up to.
How similar mortals were.
“I think I see it,” Nocipel said and handed off the glass to D’Argen. “Use your mahee. Is that the forest you spoke of?”
D’Argen opened his mahee and muttered the words to better his sight before looking through the magnifying glass again. The branches that stuck out from over the horizon had no trunks and were completely bare. They looked like burned skeletal fingers against the white background. They were too strange for his weather, without needles to be evergreen for the snows.
“Yes, I think so,” D’Argen confirmed.
“Alright, everyone! A bit longer!” Haur yelled over the din.
Thar was already standing away from the crowd and D’Argen quickly joined him, wanting to be further out from the press of excited bodies. “What are you thinking?” D’Argen asked in lew of anything else to say.
“I do not feel it,” Thar responded.
“It is quite far out.”
“No. Not just that. I do not feel land between us and those mountains.”
“Ah,” Nocipel inserted herself into the conversation with a sigh. “I thought I was imagining it. There is another break in the land, no?”
Thar hummed and then nodded.
“And the ice?” Nocipel asked.
“I will not know until we are closer, but it is there for sure.”
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“Hard enough to hold us?”
Thar did not respond at all.
“He’ll make it hard enough to hold us, if need be,” D’Argen prompted with a grin. The twin looks of disbelief he got from the two of them made him hesitate and go back over his words. It was true. Nobody had said anything about Thar’s mahee when the ice broke or how strong it was, but they all knew it. Creating a solid path through the ice for everyone to walk on, even on top of the water, would be so easy for him.
“Are we all going to pretend—”
“D’Argen, I need you to go ahead,” Haur interrupted him. “Thar, can you…?”
Thar hummed in response, but Haur must have been used to understanding his non-verbal responses because the man nodded and turned back to the horizon.
D’Argen did not even realize what Haur had asked since Thar did not move to do anything.
“I think we should send someone back to the ship. Let them know,” Nocipel spoke up through the mounting excitement around them. The rest of the group already started walking ahead, facing those mountains and the promise of more. At those words, the unnamed woman that led the mortals stopped. The others followed her example.
“Not D’Argen, I need him to find our edges,” Haur added. He glanced at Thar and so did D’Argen. It was only because he was looking right at the man dressed in white that D’Argen noticed Thar nod subtly. “Any volunteers?” Haur asked louder.
It was not a surprise that no one jumped at the opportunity. Now that they had a clear destination in mind, everybody wanted to go there.
“Very well,” Nocipel sighed. “Together forward. The ship will return if we miss it and we already have the opportunity for some local fauna to replenish our supplies.”
“Those trees are weird,” Yaling muttered under her breath. She, like D’Argen, had used both the looking glass and her mahee to better her sight and look at them. “You said foxes?”
D’Argen nodded quickly then said, “They were snow white. Some new version?”
“Foxes means rabbits or some type of rodent. Probably even birds, maybe fish. And I doubt they would be at the top of the food chain here. Maybe bears or wolves?” Yaling was muttering under her breath but her voice got louder as she spoke and noticed more people were listening to her.
D’Argen nodded along and he was not the only one.
“D’Argen. Go on ahead. And do not forget to count your steps,” Haur ordered.
D’Argen raised his chin to bare his throat and then opened his mahee and ran. He reached the edges of the strange forest much faster than he thought and then confirmed Yaling’s suspicions. He found the foxes, rabbits so big they were half the size of the predators hunting them, and eagles so large they looked like they could even trouble the mortals. Then he went further. He left the dried-out husk of a forest, a tiny plot of dried branches, and went even further ahead.
The farther he ran, the colder it got. There was no other fauna but the mountains came closer. When he felt the ground crack under him on one of his stops, he realized he was no longer on top of land anymore and was instead on another ice shell. It was there that he saw something even stranger – it was a new animal. What was more worrying, however, was the fact that the snow around the animals had that same grey tint that the blood snow around the pillar had.
D'Argen hesitated. He touched his mahee and played with it, trying to see if it would react the same way as it had around the pillar. It did not. Everything was normal. Maybe the snow was something else? As he watched the large creatures fighting, he thought it may be actual blood. Without disturbing them, he collected some of the snow and packed it into a tight snowball. It has grey streaks running through it. With the snowball in one hand, he ran back to the group.
“The forest has some animals but very little vegetation,” D’Argen confirmed when he reached the group again just as they were setting camp for the night. “The mountains are much further, maybe another week or two, but we have to cross another ice shell to get to them.”
Nocipel was holding the snowball D’Argen had given her on his arrival. She played with the snow and then stared at her hands, muttering under her breath. “It is not the same,” Nocipel finally confirmed. “I mean, it is the same as the streaks that got us started on this adventure to begin with, but not like the snow around…” she trailed off. Even talking about the pillar seemed painful.
D’Argen found himself facing the thin vertical line in the distance.
“Wait till you see the predators on the ice,” D’Argen spoke up, wanting to take attention away from all thoughts of the pillar. “At first, I thought this may be their blood. Head of a mouse, body like a dolphin or a shark, fins like a fish but not really…” he made some motions with his hands to indicate that the head was still bigger than his own and the body was as wide as he could spread his hands. “It was swimming in the water, the breaks of the ice. There were dozens, probably more. Some had huge tusks, like an elephant, but pointing down. And they were fighting one another, though I couldn’t tell for what reason.”
Abbot was already sketching away based on his descriptions and D’Argen pointed to a few sections on his drawing to explain them differently. As he did, Nocipel and Haur had huddled in to discuss how to proceed. Thar was not hunched over with them or even looking at them, but he was standing close by. Every now and then, Haur would look at Thar before he made a decision.
In the end, they decided to continue ahead as planned and stay in the forested area only long enough to resupply for their trip back and another two weeks on top of that. D’Argen tried not to think about the white foxes and their predators and prey. Soon, they would all become victims of the mortals and the Never Born that had come onto their land.
“No settlements,” D’Argen confirmed late in the night when Haur asked him to recount his run once more. “Even that forest I saw? I don’t think it will last long. Not a single evergreen tree. It’s almost like winter has come here just recently.”
“Not with how thick the ice is,” Thar immediately refuted.
“And no other constructs?” Haur asked, for what felt like the hundredth time.
“None that I could see. Or feel.”