Liv and her father paused to clothe themselves for the cold before activating the waystone. For her, that meant donning leather gloves and a heavy wool cloak, both lined with fur. In her father’s case, however, there was a sleeved and hooded tunic of hide, also lined with thick fur, and fringed ornamentally at the edges.
“I want you in the saddle as soon as we’ve fed mana to the waystone,” Valtteri told her. “Once we’ve arrived, follow me no matter what happens. You aren’t obligated to defeat anything that assaults us, only to keep moving, you understand?”
Liv nodded, and followed him to the set of sigils they needed. “This is a lot of mana for only one person to give up,” she pointed out.
“One of the reasons that it has never been possible for me to go and return in the same day,” her father agreed. When he placed his hand on the stone, she tugged her left glove off and followed suit. The sensation of the stone sucking at her mana was strangely familiar, by this point, and Liv simply let it happen. She’d never borne the cost with only one other person to share, and realized that most of her friends probably wouldn’t be able to.
The moment the waystone lit up, Liv tugged her glove back on, rushed back to Steria, and pulled herself up into the mare’s saddle. Should she draw her wand now? Better to be safe and ready to react in a moment, Liv decided. She looped the reins around her left hand and pulled the bone wand with her right. Around her, a column of brilliant white light rose up into the sky.
In the dark between space, Liv spent a timeless moment that stretched somewhere between a heartbeat and eternity. The unseen presences that she had felt before seemed to turn toward her, as if taking notice, and she felt the urge to reach out to them. But this was not the first time that Liv had made a journey by waystone, and her father had warned her there would be danger on the other end. As hard as it was to think of anything beyond the darkness as being real, she kept hold of herself and waited for the inevitable arrival.
Light and cold and motion exploded into existence around Liv simultaneously, in a panicked confusion. The intense pressure of mana around her was nearly overwhelming, and in that first moment it was all Liv could do to breathe in and get the magic under control, so that it couldn’t ravage her body.
“With me!” her father shouted, and the charms braided into his hair shone. Crystals of ice sprung up to their sides, howls ringed them round, and Liv caught a glimpse of fur and fang launched toward her.
Liv clicked the second button on her wand and thrust it out, as much on instinct as conscious thought, and five shards of ice shot forward, taking a great white wolf in the chest and flinging it back to the ground in a spray of blood. The monster was near the size of Steria, its back encrusted with icy-spikes as long as her arm, and two frozen horns curling back from its forehead.
Ahead, Liv heard her father shout, and she kicked the mare into motion, following Valtteri off the waystone and onto the hard-packed snow. The cold of the air burned her lungs every time Liv took a breath, and once she had a moment to glance round she saw they were being pursued by an entire pack of wolves. The one she’d struck with a prepared spell was down in a pool of blood, and several more corpses stained the forest of crystals that her father had raised back behind them.
Liv leaned forward in the saddle. It wasn’t often she rode at a gallop, but the shaggy mare gamely kept up with her father’s gelding, and she resolved that Steria deserved every treat in the world for taking her away from the wolves. Liv reached behind her with the wand, and clicked the third button, raising a wall of ice behind them to delay the pursuit. There was a yelp and a crash as the foremost wolf proved unable to halt its momentum in time to avoid a collision.
It was only once they’d gotten a bit of distance from the winter wolves that Liv was able to take in her surroundings. To their right, the great, icy chasm of her memories stretched out further than she could see. Along the edges were strange frozen formations, some of which put Liv in mind of arches, pillars, or frozen staircases.
A sudden, nearly irresistible urge to ride up to the edge and look down possessed Liv, and she turned Steria’s head. “Liv!” her father shouted. “This way!” Valtteri rode up at her side, reached out, and grabbed the reins from her hand. For a moment, she thought it would be perfectly reasonable to simply leap off the galloping horse and walk to the edge herself. Then, whatever the feeling was, it broke, and she turned away.
After less time than she would have expected - only a few moments - her father slowed the horses to a walk. “Can I give you the reins again?” he asked. “What was that?”
Liv shook herself. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just felt like I needed to look over the edge, and see what was down there.”
Her father’s frown was frightening, but he didn’t scold her. “Keep close to me,” he warned, instead. “A pack of wolves will follow for days sometimes. They’ll turn aside when they smell Kelthelis.”
That ride was a strange one, for Liv. Until travelling to Freeport, she’d never realized just how much she took for granted the mountains and forest that surrounded Whitehill. Even at the capital on the sea, however, there had been buildings to break up the horizon. In the far north, there was only an endless plain of white, stretching along a flat horizon in every direction. There was nothing to stop the wind that howled across the crusted ice, and the reflection of the sun off the ground was nearly blinding.
The air itself was not as cold as Liv had expected; more like early flood season in the Aspen Valley, than the heart of winter. The oddity was that a place could be this cold, while somewhere like Whitehill was so sunny and warm that the only relief would be to go down to the river and splash around.
They rode for several hours, though she could feel when they left the shoals of the rift long before that. If the pack of wolves was still tracking them, Liv could neither hear nor see the animals, so she felt comfortable enough to ask her father questions as they occurred to her.
“I assume Kelthelis is far enough away from the rift that you don’t have to be fighting off mana-beasts all the time,” she began.
Her father nodded, but never ceased scanning the horizon. “It would be convenient to be closer to the waystone, but the attacks would be constant and never ending. It’s hard enough to deal with eruptions when they come.”
“Is that how my aunt died?”
“She led a culling team down into the chasm,” Valtteri confirmed. “It was nothing she hadn’t done before - her third or fourth eruption, I believe. There shouldn’t have been anything in the shoals that would present any real threat to her, but-” he paused.
“But what?” Liv asked.
“My sister always had a fascination for the depths of that place,” he answered. “She thought that if she could fight her way to the very heart of the Tomb, she might be able to put an end to the eruptions, somehow. The idea drove her to take dangerous risks.”
“Is there any truth to it?” Liv regretted the question as soon as it was out of her mouth.
“I don’t know,” her father admitted. “Even if there was, she failed. I would have rather had her back.”
After that, they rode in silence.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
☙
Kelthelis reared up from the icy plains like shards of broken glass from a window pane. As they drew closer, Liv could see the palace - there was no other word for it - had been built from bricks of ice. The graceful arch rising above the gate, the towers, the outer walls - all of it was elongated, compared to the rather squat fortification at Whitehill, but at its core the construction was not so difficult as to be strange. Only, instead of gray or white stone, or even the red brick of Freeport, here every piece glittered a pale, gentle white, and every wall seemed only half opaque.
The roofs of the palace were peaked, and a crust of thick white snow sat atop them. On the walls, men and women in hide tunics just like her fathers looked down at Liv silently. “Is it all adamant?” Liv asked.
Her father raised his hand to the guards on the wall, and one of them waved back in acknowledgement. “Every brick,” Valtteri assured her.
“And it doesn’t melt on the inside? I presume you have fires, to cook on if nothing else,” Liv said.
“The ice is layered with enchantments,” her father explained. “It sheds heat, whether from the sun, the air outside, or fires within, redirecting it all into the air inside the palace. You’ll find that, between the walls cutting the wind, the cooking hearths, and the body heat of those inside, the rooms are comfortably warm."
There was wood here and there, and glass, Liv observed as they approached the gate into the palace itself. She imagined they must have traded for every pane of glass, every great door of oak, from other Eld to the south, perhaps bringing the supplies in by sleigh. She wouldn’t have wanted to try to bring cargo through the waystone, given how dangerous the rift clearly was.
They saw the horses settled in a stable constructed from the same frozen blocks as the palace itself, and a young Elden girl with hair dark as midnight promised Liv that Steria would have warm oats.
“Most of these people are your very distant cousins,” her father explained, as they walked through an enclosed tunnel that connected the barn with the palace. “Many generations removed, of course. Syvä was not descended from any of the Vaedim, nor was her husband. As a result, the family is split into two groups: those of pure Elden blood, who don’t live as long without the aid of magic, and then just the few of my brothers and sisters who have ever existed.”
“Are there more than my aunt?” Liv asked.
“My father’s first kwenim - what you would call his wife - bore two children who did not survive to adulthood,” Valtteri answered. “And one son who did, Aulis. I never knew him; he died of a plague that swept the north centuries ago. The sickness took his mother, as well, and my father did not bind himself to another partner for many years. My mother, Eila, is much younger than him, and came to us from the House of Däivi.”
Liv opened her mouth to ask what magic her grandmother’s family practiced, but before she could speak the tunnel opened up into a great antechamber, with a curving staircase of ice leading up to the palace’s second story. Two Eld waited for them there: one, a pale man whose long white hair was no longer the pure white of new fallen snow, but instead dirtied with gray and thinning. His face was set with deep wrinkles, but his eyes glittered brightly, and he wore a long robe of white fox fur that trailed along the ground behind him.
At the man’s side was a woman whose skin was several shades darker than either her husband, or her son. It was her hair that truly surprised Liv: an inhuman blue so dark it was almost black, but definitively not. She looked no older than Duchess Julianne, which was to say like a woman old enough to have a son grown.
“Mother, Father,” Valtteri greeted them. “This is my daughter, Livara.”
Liv hesitated. Despite the letters they’d exchanged, she still felt an unreasoning fear that their faces would harden, that they’d cry out ‘bastard’ and turn away from her.
Before she could take a step back, the woman with blue hair moved forward and caught Liv up in her arms. “My granddaughter,” she said. For the space of a breath, Liv stiffened, caught by surprise. A faint scent of perfume, something with traces of musk and spice that put her in mind of wild places, settled around her, and when Liv breathed out again she let herself relax and return the embrace.
“Grandmother?” she tried the word out, never having been able to connect it with a real, flesh and blood person before. “Is that right - I should have asked if there was an Elden word.”
“We will teach you,” Eila murmured, then released her.
Liv’s grandfather approached her next, and his eyes were visibly wet. “Valtteri told us how much you looked like her, sculpted you in ice, but seeing you-” he shook his head, and hesitantly raised a hand to touch Liv’s cheek. “Not an imitation or a mirror,” Auris decided. “Your aunt was taller, a warrior trained for battle. More solid. I see her ghost in your eyes, but you are your own woman. Good. That is as it should be. May I?” he stretched his arms out, and this time Liv was the one to move first. She wrapped her arms around the old man, and laid her face upon his chest. It was hard to believe she was holding someone who had seen the fall of the old gods, the passage of over a thousand years in the world.
There was something about her grandfather’s arms that reminded her of hugging Gretta. A tremor, perhaps; the sign of strength once present that was now fading. How many years would it take to leave her grandfather entirely, Liv wondered? Decades? In that moment, she regretted not pushing harder to come sooner.
☙
Ten days at Kelthelis passed by Liv in a blur.
She was given rooms of her own, that Grandmother Eila told her would be kept even in her absence, hers alone. The floors were covered in the furs of all manner of northern creatures: fox and hare, bear and wolf, and the bed was piled with the same, only thicker and more luxuriant still. Liv would never have believed that she could sleep warmly in a room made entirely of ice until the first morning she woke, cocooned in furs and thrillingly cozy.
“There are no hot springs here, I’m afraid,” her grandmother apologized the first morning at breakfast. “You would have to travel south to Mountain Home for that.”
“That is where Inkeris lives with his family,” Liv’s father told her. “Our closest neighbors, though I wouldn't say they are actually particularly close.”
“And where is your family?” Liv asked her grandmother. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good map of the north in Master Grenfell’s books.” The food laid out before her was like nothing she was used to: a kind of flat, round and yellow bread. There was meat, some of which looked a lot like venison, and fish. There was also some sort of raw, frozen fat, like lumps of suet before they were dropped into a cooking stew.
“That is because all of our trading with the human kingdoms is kept to the foreign quarter in Al'Fenthia,” Liv’s grandfather explained. “We don’t usually permit traders from Lucania to wander our lands freely. The only real exceptions are a few trusted members of the mages’ guild. It’s too early to be certain, of course, but so far they have proved themselves willing to assist us with eruptions. Though none of them have ever made it this far north.”
“None until today,” Liv told him, and held up her right hand to show off her guild ring. She couldn’t help but grin. “Though I’m not much of a guild member to speak of, yet. I’m just an apprentice who hasn’t even been to college yet.”
“My parents lived in the taiga,” Eila explained, coming back around to Liv’s earlier question. “My mother still does; she’s the one with Vædic blood. My father passed many years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Liv said. She looked down to the table for something to drink, and saw that she’d been provided with two cups: one of water, and one of something dark and thick.
“Seal blood,” her father explained. “Drink it while it's warm.”
Liv stared down at the cup. Hesitantly, she reached down and lifted it to her lips. It was an effort to force herself to swallow: it was like tasting your own bloody nose. She immediately grabbed the cup of water, and used a big gulp of that to wash down the blood.
“Can I ask what your family’s word of power is?” Liv said, to distract herself from the lingering taste.
“You can,” her grandmother said, leaning back in a fine chair of carved wood and some kind of bone. “The House of Däivi specializes in Dā, which governs the passage of time.” Whatever expression Liv wore must have been truly amusing, for her grandmother and grandfather both chuckled at it.
“Time,” she said, finally, whirling to face her father. “Your mother has time magic, and you never told me?”