Liv built her intent off the same mental images she’d used during her duel on the beach - except that instead of creating one rose, she made six. Mana poured out of her into an elaborate construction, half a dozen rings in an instant, but she focused particularly on the bulb that surrounded her and lifted her off the cavern floor.

Years of practice and experimentation had taught her that the difference between a clear piece of ice, and one that was milky white, came down to three things. First, the water she used - in this case, the ambient moisture in the air of the cave - needed to be pure, rather than carry all sorts of sediments. For Liv, that wasn’t usually a problem.

Secondly, she needed to take her time. The more quickly Liv froze something, the more opaque the ice that resulted. With the other five bulbs, it didn’t matter so much whether they were translucent or opaque, so Liv let them form without much in the way of guidance, simply relying on her recollected intent from when she’d practiced and used the spell in the past. The one that would protect her, however, she needed to be able to see out of, and that meant taking the time and care to do it properly.

Finally, freezing from one direction, instead of just building outward in all directions, made an impact. Liv’s father had some theories as to why, but at the moment what mattered was building the bulb up from her feet, carefully, layer by layer, until Liv was sheathed in a glass-clear bulb of icy rose petals.

That took time.

The mammoth stone-bat wasn’t going to give her time. As frozen rose vines spread across the floor of its home, climbing the stalagmites as if they were each a convenient trellis, the thing opened its eyes and hissed. As massive as the bat’s head was, grown to fit the rest of its enormous body, it didn’t seem any more intelligent than a normal bat. It cast about the cavern for a moment, trying to figure out what was happening, and for a moment Liv hoped that would give her enough time to close the bulb around her head.

But no, the ice was just climbing up to level with the tip of her nose when its eyes locked on her. The v-shaped casque atop the bat’s skull flared with the golden-blue light of mana, and Liv grimaced. Of course. The things could sense mana: they could track a mage by their spells, and Liv was using quite a lot of magic. She would need to make use of the other parts of this spell before it could close on her.

“Celent’he Aiveh Encve Sekerim’o’Vradim,” Liv intoned, sending another five rings of mana into the coiling vines with the touch of her wand against the base of her protective bulb. As the bat shook its leathery, stone-encrusted wings out, five of the thorns on the vines nearest it exploded outward, shooting across the intervening distance like crossbow bolts and burying themselves in the bat’s chest with rapid, meaty thunks.

The bat screeched and reared back in pain, knocking itself against the cavern wall. Pebbles and dust rained down from the ceiling of the cave, and even one broken stalactite fell to shatter on the ground.

“Go!” Liv shouted, looking back toward the low crevasse where Matthew and Beatrice sheltered. The ice crept past her face and closed over her head, but she’d managed the trick: it was clear enough that Liv could watch an only-slightly-warped image of them running across the cavern toward the tunnel that led up. She thought she even got a glimpse of the dark, fluttering shape of Wren flying past, but Liv didn’t have time to be certain before she shifted her attention to the stone-bat.

It would have been nice if the thorns took it down, but Liv hadn’t really been counting on that in the first place. It was bleeding from the chest, for certain. The pain only seemed to enrage the mana-beast, however, and it barrelled across the cavern, splashing through the subterranean stream as it came toward her.

Liv had pulled every bit of mana she could hold from Master Grenfell’s giant hunk of mana-stone, before heading back into the mines. That meant she’d begun with thirty-six rings to work with. Four to form the chute that took her down from where the tunnel had collapsed, and another dozen on forming the rose-garden of ice that covered the floor of the cavern, then launching an attack with thorns. That meant sixteen rings were gone, leaving only seven for her to work with before she needed to draw on what was stored in the various chunks of mana-stone she wore.

The bat crashed into the bulb of frozen rose petals that cradled Liv, but even against its great size and weight, the adamant ice held. It might have been hard as steel, but Liv had seen metal break or bend, and she didn’t want to risk taking any more hits from the stone-bat than she had to. If it broke through, the leather armor she wore wouldn’t stop her from being smeared into a bloody paste against the rock of the cavern.

“Celent’he Aiveh Encve Manim’o’Belim,” Liv chanted. Five rings, and a wave of weakness caused her to sway on her feet, but it was enough. The other five bulbs opened their petals.

Liv had used this spell against the princess because, as a mental image, it gave her a great deal of flexibility in intent. In the years since, she’d given a lot of thought on how to use it even more effectively. Instead of a single rose, a garden. One bulb to protect herself, of course: but what use for the others?

Five soldiers of ice, each carrying a gleaming sword, charged down the opened petals and across the cavern floor. Liv grinned, thinking back to every time she’d provided targets for Matthew to spar against in the courtyard of Castle Whitehill. It turned out that she’d gotten just as much out of those sessions as he had, if not quite in the way that anyone had expected at the time.

The armored men, all cold, sharp angles, fell upon the bat and plunged their swords into its flesh. The blades she’d made under pressure, constructing them of adamant ice, but the soldiers themselves needed to move, and she hadn’t got the trick of animating anything but normal ice yet.

That meant that when the bat spun away from Liv, it crushed the first of the ice-soldiers immediately, grinding it down into cold dust. The others continued to swarm about it while Liv pulled mana from the gold bracelet and rings on her left hand, the pommel of her wand, and the mages’ guild ring on the finger of her right hand. Fifteen left. She needed to finish the thing off quickly.

Liv raised her wand, and let the word of power roar at the back of her mind as she focused her intent again. “Celent’he Aiveh Encve Vradim Kapium!”

The thorny ice-roots coiled along the floor of the cavern shifted, then writhed, grasping out to wrap the bat’s legs in twining, thorny knots. It screamed, pulling at the frozen vines, which cracked and shuddered against the monster’s horrific strength. The three remaining soldiers - she hadn’t even seen when it had shattered the second - leapt onto its flanks, puncturing the leathery hide. One even tore at the membrane of the left wing. Blood streamed down the mana-bat’s body, and it threw its head back.

Liv didn’t properly hear what happened. An instant, stabbing pain from inside both of her ears caused her to clutch at them reflexively, dropping her wand onto the cold bottom of the bulb. Hot blood wet her palms, and she felt sick, as if she would pass out. The world spun, and Liv shut her eyes against the dizziness. The venison broth she’d drunk earlier came up again, and it wasn’t until after she’d finished retching it up that Liv realized she couldn’t hear anything other than a sort of ringing or buzzing sound.

Her mind raced, cataloguing the symptoms, until she remembered how Master Cushing had taken her to help treat a boy who’d lost his hearing. “The ear is severely infected,” Liv recalled the old chirurgeon explaining. “If the pressure builds enough, the tissue inside - the eardrum - can rupture. Symptoms include nausea, bleeding from the ear, loss of hearing, pain-”

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She groaned, pushed the memory aside, and reached out for her wand, then scrambled back to her feet. Liv was covered in her own cold vomit, and the air inside the bulb stank. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like that would be a problem for very long, because the stone-bat was continuing to scream, and the ice all around was cracking.

Liv couldn’t hear the sounds, but she could see every time the thing paused to take in a deep breath, then began to howl again. With each scream, a frozen soldier, loop of coiled vine, or the petals of an open bulb cracked, then shattered. She was lucky the thing didn’t seem capable of simply destroying everything she’d built at once, with a single attack, but that was only going to draw the fight out.

When her own bulb collapsed, Liv scrambled back out of it and ran to take shelter behind one of the larger stalagmites. She only had nine rings left to work with, and the last spell loaded into her wand. The thought of trying to stab the bat herself, after seeing what it had done to the frozen soldiers she had sent in, was laughable. All around her, the frozen garden was falling to the floor of the cavern like snow. She had to do something.

“Celent Ai’Veh Creim!” She ducked out from behind the stalagmite, flicked her wand, and summoned a cluster of adamant crystals around the bat’s feet. They grew quickly: her father had drilled her exhaustively in this spell. As the clusters of sharp ice-crystals sprouted more and more offshoots, the legs and feet of the giant stone-bat were torn to ribbons.

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the bat from breaking its way through them, like a charging bull knocking aside drovers. Maybe it would die of blood loss eventually, but not quick enough to save her. Four rings left - hardly enough to do anything.

Liv broke out running, but the damage to her ears threw her off. Her sprint turned into ungainly staggering as the floor of the cavern seemed to roll and pitch like a rowboat on the Aspen River in flood. She only just managed to make it into the low crevasse that had sheltered Triss and Matthew before the bat reached her.

The leather armor Kaija had made for Liv kept her from getting bruised or scraped too badly when she threw herself down to roll across the stone, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant. If she hadn’t spent years reinforcing her bones every evening with mana, she was certain she would have broken an arm or a leg right then.

The bat’s face smashed up against the stone face outside the crevasse, and while Liv could no longer hear the monster, she could certainly smell it. The reek of its breath would have made her empty her stomach if she hadn’t already, but she couldn’t help gagging and coughing. A long, pink tongue slithered in between the rock, snaking toward her.

“Celet’co Aiveh Aimāk Scelis’o’Mae,” Liv gasped, thrusting her wand at the tongue. A single, needle-thin shard of ice - all that she had mana for - shot out and pierced the tongue in a splatter of hot, reeking blood. The bat withdrew, and she hoped that it was feeling a great deal of pain.

There was no way back up the rockslide; even if her chute down into the abyss hadn’t melted too much to be usable, Liv didn’t relish the thought of trying to climb up the smooth ice. One fall would be the end of her. If she couldn’t kill the bat, she needed to get past it, and the moment it was recoiling in pain was probably the best chance that she would get.

Liv scrambled back out of the crevasse and did her best to sprint across the cave, as much as she could with her balance thrown all out of whack. The bat didn’t notice her at first, inundated by its own pain, and she pumped her legs, heading for the same tunnel that Matthew and Triss had taken up and out of the cavern.

From what she could see of it, the mana-beast was in terrible shape. Its chest had been pierced by thorns, its flanks stabbed by swords, its feet and legs shredded first by thorns and then crystals. Even its tongue had been pierced.

Unfortunately, its eyes still worked - and, presumably, its mana sense. The bat flung out a great, leathery wing, blocking Liv’s route, and she had to veer to the left to avoid running right into the membrane. She slipped on half-frozen dust and shards of ice, scrambled back to her feet, and dashed for the nearest place to hide: the tunnel that went down.

Liv splashed through the subterranean stream and down the incline; once again, the stone-bat was unable to pursue her only because of its immense size. She got far enough into the tunnel that she hoped she could avoid the tongue, and slumped against the wall for long enough to catch her breath.

As she sat there gasping, the bat throwing itself against the entrance as if to force its body through, Liv could feel that the ambient mana of the rift had pooled more densely further down the passage. She chanced a look in that direction, and frowned: the veins of mana stone looked different.

In every other part of the mine, the softly glowing veins spread through the mountain like fat marbling a cut of steak. They curved and spread, sometimes thicker, sometimes thinner. The mana stone down this tunnel, however, ran straight and true, like a rule or a plank of cut wood.

For a moment, Liv was seized by the simple, basic urge to go and look. Curiosity nearly drove her to get to her feet, but another impact from the stone-bat trying to force its way to her brought her back to reality. She didn’t need to go deeper into the rift: she needed to link up with Matthew, Triss and Wren, and get out. Liv knew she wouldn’t be able to fight anything without mana, which meant she needed to make it back to the encampment to rest and recharge.

Or did it?

Liv had avoided it before, out of a fear that she might damage the structure of the mines even more, but that hardly seemed to matter now. She stood up, and reached for the nearest vein of mana-stone. She put her palm to it, and pulled. Power flooded into her, as the glow from the vein dimmed.

But that wasn’t even everything that was available, was it?

Liv had long hours of practice in preventing the raw mana of a rift from overpowering her body: every time her father had taken her north to visit her grandparents, they’d passed in and out of a rift even more powerful than this one. Even now, she was aware of the crushing density imbalance: her body was practically empty, and the mana that surrounded her was desperate to get in.

Instead of restraining or slowing it, Liv breathed it in.

The mana of the rift filled her in the space of a heartbeat, and it was all Liv could do to direct it, pushing it out into every last piece of her body, to the toes and fingers, because there just wasn’t enough room. She had to do something with it, and she had to do it now.

Something about the feeling reminded Liv of the very first day she’d ever used her magic, reaching out desperately to pull Emma from the icy waters of the Aspen River.

“Hand,” Liv muttered, and her voice was very soft and far away, hardly even audible over the ringing in her broken ears. “Celet Ghesia!”

The intent was familiar, half remembered. From the subterranean stream, a massive hand of ice, a mirror-image of Liv’s own, rose. The fingers stretched and clenched, and she stumbled to the edge of the tunnel to see better. The bat spun around to face this new threat, but Liv had it by the head before it could get out of the way.

She squeezed her left hand into a fist, and the hand of ice squeezed the head of the bat. The wings flapped for a moment, jerked, and then something popped. Blood and viscera squirted out between the fingers of the frozen hand, and the enormous body of the stone bat went still. Liv released the tension from her hand, and the fist of ice loosened, dropping the corpse to the cavern floor.

For a moment, she wondered how much she could sell the bones, the casque, the meat of the monster for. There was no way to get the entire carcass out of the cavern, of course: the poor beast was as trapped in death as it had been in life. But perhaps a piece...

Liv twisted the hilt of her wand, and it became the core of a sword shaped from adamant ice. Using the sword like an oversized hunting knife, she climbed onto the cooling body and set to work cutting the bat’s skin away from the casque on its shattered head. Then, she grew a layer of small ice crystals to crack the casque from the bone of the skull.

Carefully, Liv brought the hand of ice down, shedding the outer layers so that the gorey remnants of the stone-bat’s death fell away. She used it to scoop the casque up, and then stepped into the open palm herself. There was plenty of water, and plenty of mana. Since stepping into the rift, she'd only been managing the swell of mana, so that she didn't hurt herself. Now that she was willing to open up and invite it in, the power surged through her with enough force to make the fine hairs on her arms stand on end.

The pouring waters of the subterranean water froze in great crusts and roils, pushing the hand up the right hand path, with Liv riding in the palm. She kept her wand in her right hand, and held onto one of the massive frozen fingers with her left, and the wind of her passage brushed her face. Faster and faster she moved, until Liv doubted a horse could have paced her as she rode on up the tunnel.