"LAND AHOY—!"

Gwen rested her arms on the poop's rails, flanked by their reticent officers, a contemplative Hamoul, and her patient companions. After a moment's thought, she requested clarification from the very embarrassed Marley, their talented Diviner, inexperienced sailor. "Do you mean land-ho? But we're surrounded by soot, slush and darkness. What's there to ho?"

"It isn't visible in this eternal dusk, but there's solid ground yonder," Bertie, their navigator, spoke while holding a handkerchief to his nose, one enchanted to dispel loathsome smells, such as the stink of perpetual death lingering over every inch of the once-snowscape. "The cove we're in now is Shackleton's Rest, where presumably the Endurance was trapped. We'll suffer the same once the dead of winter arrives, though we're far better provisioned, and our ship, not the wilderness, will be our supply base."

Gwen reassuringly allowed her memory to sweep over the multi-ton rations of SPAM in the cargo hold and knew that her crewmen were spared from finding food in this land of fresh Undeath.

Presently, she was overseeing the landing itself. Charlene, who had left them earlier to check the manifests, was far too busy a woman to make talk with the combat crew. As the expedition's commander, her duties were tiresome and unending, making Gwen glad for the delegation of responsibility.

"Marley, how's it looking out there?" Gwen asked after their Diviner again. Beside her, as an eager bumble bee, Ruxin's Omniscient Orb hovered toward the east, egging her onward.

"The mana signature is extremely polluted," their Diviner replied after drawing a series of mid-air incantations visible only to herself. "However, the orb seems to have the right direction, as triangulating my predictions against Bertie's chart, I'd confidently say that way lies woe—and thus the Pillar Grove of Illhîweth."

"Good enough." Gwen nodded. "Alright then. Per our discussion on the bridge, I shall take Magus Huang and Lulu and venture out to find Illhîweth. We need to make contact as soon as possible."

"Acknowledged, Magister. Meanwhile, Commander Ravenport and our allies will set up a beachhead and initiate a deep probe of the region," the Diviner replied, mindful that their Dwarven ally was also surveying the land with a critical eye. "I'll send Kuznetsova and Harrington to man the Divination Tower. We will need to test the effective range of our mobile towers and where to deploy them if we are to create a viable defence matrix. Master Hanmoul, is there anything I've missed?"

"Aye, the lads will need ta build the base ON the bedrock fer the Fabricator to draw mana," the Dwarven Iron Guard reminded the humans. "Bring her a-ground, Mister Navigator. We'll break the ice and nest her right and proper, then offload the Golems and establish a perimeter."

"Right you are, Master Hanmoul," Bertie promised with a bow of his head. "Will you leave now?"

"I shall."

"And a final reminder for your Flight, Magister." Marley tapped her rings to remind Gwen and the others. "This far from the Commonwealth Towers, your Contingency Rings will only bring you back to the ship. Until we can safely broadcast the Divination signals, there will likely be delays or an outright failure if you are caught in a Pocket Dimension. So please be very careful."

"We will," Gwen assured them by lifting into the air. "Lulu? Richard? Are your mana levels sufficiently recovered?"

"Yes, Magister!" Lulan snapped to attention. After discarding her Ash-eaten combat robe, her new garb was one of Charlene's gifts, a light combat garb that marked the best London's Enchanters had to offer.

Her cousin also responded with a snappy salute, with Lea mirroring her Summoner's action.

"Marley, inform Magus Kutznetsova that we're ready and that I would like her assistance in bringing Golos," Gwen finalised another minute the crew had marked on their final meeting. If they were to intrude upon the land of both the Dragon Illaelitharian and Illhîwenthiel's Enclave, it was probably safer to have representatives that could speak for both. Golos was close enough to Draconic royalty that the Frost Wyrm would give six seconds of consideration before nixing the Yinglong's toddler, enough for her to whip out the Ilias Leaf. "After that… then let's hope there's an end to this ash and dust..."

[https://imgur.com/2Q3gE3J.jpg]

East of Erebus, Gwen's team meandered in the limbless dark with only sparks shed from Golos' passage lighting up the perpetual dusk like a prison's searchlight.

"Should I be worried," Richard asked while trailing behind the wind-breaking Wyvern. "That the air is temperate here? Quite nice for early winter in the Antarctic."

"We are travelling TOWARD the dome of Erebus." Lulan gave her two yuan. "So it goes to reason that it's warmer, yes? The close we get to the fire, the hotter it becomes."

"I don't think that's how it works if we're also flying toward the Seat of Frost, my dearest bludgeon." Richard's perchance for turning to humour to hide his dismay was on full display. "The Grove is meant to keep the Elemental Fire subdued and repressed, so we are undoubtedly travelling into interesting times."

"Yeah, there was nothing like this in the journals of Shackleton," Gwen informed them. "Erebus is a naturally occurring phenomenon, a balancing force of the Prime Material. Usually, it's a node of flame set against an entire region of Elemental Ice. Assuming it's been like this for months or more, this climate is unquestionably out of season and out of the norm. Usually, there should be permafrost."

"Permafrost?" Lulan drifted closer.

"Permanently frozen ground," Gwen pointed out the obvious by sweeping her hand over the darkness, where they could spy strange rockeries and slushy streams. "Nothing here is natural. All of this shouldn't be visible if ice is filling the gaps and snow is capping the ice. I mean, do you think it's supposed to be this dark? Even Gogo is feeling the challenge."

"Calamity, cease speaking in tongues," Golos complained from below. "Why is it so dark? Is it sorcery? I can see very well even when it's lightless and stormy."

"Usually, Radiance reflects from snow," Gwen explained simply so that the avatar of brute strength could understand. "Even a smidgen of light, once refracted, makes the perpetual dusk possible for low-light navigation. With the snow gone, and the soot we see everywhere, there's no refraction or reflection. That's why we're travelling through this blackness, even though there's starlight—"

"—Hush! We've foes!" Golos hissed, banking to the right so sharply that Gwen and her crew almost ran into the turning Wyvern. "I smell birds…"

Compared to their compromised vision, Golos' mana-scenting nose proved a far more capable radar. Within a minute, the slow hovering crew saw the approach of a trio of flaming avians, first as embers, then as flapping fireflies tossed against a matt black screen.

Gwen squinted. "Looks like Ember Rocs, the pure fire variant. Patrols, you think? Or would this be a genuinely random encounter?"

"Either way, we can't hide." Richard cocked a thumb toward Golos. "There's no cover and hardly enough Elemental Ice for me to form a membrane that'll convincingly camouflage all of us. Even if we detour, neither you nor Golo can achieve velocity AND subtlety."

Six swords materialised beside Lulan, each an enormous, rotating skewer.

"No need for subtlety—I shall lure them toward us." Golos grinned cruelly, likely drooling at the prospect of pruning the pretty feathers from the Roc's breasts. Though her understanding remained vague, Gwen knew that most Big Birds and the Dragonkin were competitors from before Men, hence her Wyvern's eagerness. "We can't let them escape or return to their nests."

"Agreed… Caliban!" Gwen called forth her lightless fiend in its Da-peng form. As for Ariel, the Kirin was far too conspicuous a creature for an ambush. "Cali, hide… and strike when Golos gives the signal."

"SHAA—!" Caliban dutifully tucked its white-fingered claws back into its feathered underbody, making it near-invisible thanks to Golos' eye-catching juxtaposition.

"And remember, Gogo," Gwen gave another piece of advice in case Golos lost himself in the passion. "We need their Cores intact."

[https://imgur.com/2Q3gE3J.jpg]

With three Roc Cores safely nestled in the bellies of Golos and Caliban, the group travelled east for another hour, following the directions of the Omni-orb before it slowed to a halt—then steered northward.

"Are we too late?" Richard's eyes followed the orb. "It would be a shame if we arrived to find a stump."

"Not to worry, Dick," Gwen mentally commanded Golos to adjust his course. "From what I've seen from Almudj, a Great Tree can be felled, but the effort and time required are usually measured in centuries. Likewise, since Illhîweth is well-rooted and native to the Seat of Frost, our invaders require immense volumes of mana to thrive against the push from its role as a Planar Pillar."

"Meaning—" Richard followed without question but not without curiosity. "The thing you proposed back in March?"

"Yes, I truly believe our allies—either the Dragon Illaelitharian or Lady Illhîwenthiel—are suffering but safe. Back in Cambridge, the faculty and I theorised that the battles for Elemental preeminence in both the north and south should have reached an existential equilibrium—assuming my suspicions of a dual-pole Elemental invasion are correct. Tipping said scales further would require magnitudes more power and mana than unfriendly Elementals can afford to bring to the south. That's the rationale behind our expedition and its overabundance of firepower—to tip that balance in the right direction."

"I don't understand," her soldierly Swordmage confessed to her incomprehension of the macrocosmic consequences of exploding birds with metal shards. "But I know that whenever Dragons are involved, the landscape changes."

"And in our case, a Dragon is likely soaking up the damage to both itself AND the landscape," Gwen hypothesised. "But we'll find out soon, I wager… Yes, Gogo? What's wrong?"

"Calamity, I think we have arrived… I can smell it." Golos slowed to a crawl. "The stench has grown. AND I dare say it's alive."

"What's alive?" Gwen touched the tips of her fingers to her rebreather. The Dwarven design was extremely robust in dispelling the various gasses and stenches of the underground caverns, equally viable for sulphurous lava as it was for toxic methane.

"Can you not smell our foe's hostility?" The Wyvern mocked her. "How foolish to abandon one of the five senses to your Magitech! Do you not know that our Draconic body is impervious to mortal perils?"

Seeing sense in her Wyvern's unusual wisdom, Gwen depressed a button on her head unit and allowed one of the filtration capsules to pop. In the next moment, she was nearly balled over by something akin to concentrated Surströmming collated in a pot and slowly simmered by warming weather until every microbe and bacteria participated in an orgy of stench.

"DON'T—Dear God—Don't REMOVE your masks!" She quickly replaced the filtration tablet, then sternly admonished her Wyvern. "Gogo, that was deliberate, wasn't it?"

The Wyvern's cackle indicated it knew what it had done. Ignoring her admonition, her Wyvern replied by condensing the circulating lightning around itself into a Daylight Orb.

Gwen saw and knew then that they did indeed arrive.

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Thanks to Golos' disembodied, frazzling bulb, they could now make out the landscape below and a little more in the distance.

Only a few hundred meters away, a shadowy forest of fumaroles began.

Without the snow cover, Gwen found it difficult to encapsulate what she saw. From the ghostly silhouettes in the dark, the Grove seemed an utterly alien landscape, constructed not of trees but enormous calcite deposits, some hundreds of meters tall and so wide that the skyscrapers she had financed on the Isle of Dogs felt miniscule.

A forest of ice?

Or perhaps, a stone forest, now uncovered?

But where were the trees? The famous Rime Oaks promised by Shackleton?

Whatever had once thrived was now at the mercy of the Negative Energy oil slick that permeated the base of every "construct".

"Golos, can you sense Illhîweth?" she asked her Wyvern as they glided closer. "Also, is anything down there… alive in the animated sense?"

What Gwen referred to, now that they were close enough to feel the clammy cling of rot and decay like wet fingers clambering upon their Positively-aligned souls, was the liquified bodies.

A hundred thousand carcasses? A million cadavers?

It was impossible to tell, for the warming air had stripped scale from skin and flesh from bone, creating something of a dark, putrid soup congealed into a dead-fish jelly lake. Countless eyes, their glassy membranes still intact but their pupils white or vomit-green, refracted the pulsing light from Golos' light sphere, animating the dead.

"I sense hostility." Golos' perception navigated the impossible mass with ease, making Gwen glad. "I could Lightning Breath a path and see what hails us."

"No, no." Gwen swallowed. "Don't do that. Knowing our encounters on the sea, I have a good inkling there's probably something large and tentacled hiding in all that muck."

"There must be a whole Shoal here…" Lulan repositioned her iron slabs to act as shield and sword.

"A GREAT SHOAL," Richard considered the scene. Lea, a creature of water and life, hugged her Master tightly, loathing the death below but unwilling to leave her Summoner alone. "Assuming the thickness of a single storey—likely more—there are as many Mermen down there as there were in Auckland, if not more."

"How did they all get here?" Lulan asked. "Mermen can't travel far from the water. Nor survive the ice."

"Necromancy, of course." Richard pointed toward what seemed like a small island making up the upper body of a mountainous turtle creature. "Someone transported them here… Maybe an ancient Juche Summoner?"

"According to my Master's notes." Gwen had been pondering the same thing. "Even Lich-like Necromancers muster no more than a dozen elite companions, paired with a hundred or more disposable troops and thousands of temporary fodder. What's here looks like the work of a conspiracy of Necromancers, with the sole purpose of polluting the land with Negative Energy."

"Aye, it's not easy—but it IS a common enough tactic," Richard explained to their vanguard, whose education of history under the CCP was limited by magnitudes. "The fallow land fuels the generation of more powerful Undead. During the Great War, the first sign of an Undead incursion was the zombie waves, whose remains would turn the land into putrid fields of Undeath to support the awaiting army of skeletons and Death Knights. The "No-Man's Land," as the popular vernacular went, both demoralised us and made our ground operations impossible, while Undead forces were both energised and bolstered. It was a perfect stratagem."

"How did the Mageocracy win against such a force?" Lulan enquired, likely pondering what her swords could do against such a wall of unfeeling flesh.

"The Mageocracy hunted the Necromancers with Hunter Killer Flights." Richard grinned.

"I am not sure these isolated Elves know to clean up after every battle..." Gwen pointed out a presumed naivety of the Frost Elves. "Which could be why this disquieting aftermath is still here and why it's so… richly laid out."

"True enough," Richard concurred with a smirk. "Necromancy is, after all, the most capable of magics. Don't you agree?"

Rather than replying, Gwen urged her Wyvern forward, ignoring the slithering something below, trying to bait their curiosity.

"How much further do you think this stone forest will go?" Lulan asked a little timidly.

"No idea." Gwen pondered with some seriousness. "Which is why we need to keep Ruxin's Orb handy. Once we're in deep, it's safe to assume we'll be no longer entirely in the Prime Material."

[https://imgur.com/2Q3gE3J.jpg]

It wasn't often that Gwen felt validated—though this time, she would have preferred to err.

There was a reason why the atmosphere outside was so supernaturally calm, and that was because, like Tryfan, the true Grove of Illhîweth did not begin until an hour's flight into a Planar Distortion.

At first, Gwen was sure they were trapped within the spatial folds of some strange dimension, for their Message devices were all dead, and her Divination clued nothing to indicate weal or woe. Even Golos, who could navigate by instinct, felt disorientated and confused.

Yet, Ruxin's orb triumphed—conceivably, its operations fed on principles far more mystical than instinct and thus directed them in zig-zags until, like a pin piercing a veil, the foursome emerged into the fable snowscape of Illhîweth.

"My god…" Gwen held her breath as the fabrics aligning the Planar tapestry unwrinkled, turning dusk to dawn.

"Lea, cover us with a refraction barrier. Make sure we're invisible," Richard instructed Lea to shield the party as they adjusted to their shaken mental state. "Well, well. You've found your tree, Boss. It is happening just as you predicted. How about that, eh?"

The that which Richard referred to with feigned nonchalance was the very thing stealing the hope from Gwen's gaping lips.

Ahead, in the uncertain, immeasurable distance, rose the gnarly visage of the Great Tree of Illhîweth, an enormous fumarole enchased in crystalline ice, branching out at the highest peak into a semi-dome display of sparkling, translucent, surreal magnificence.

And around the base of this immeasurable pillar of Para-Elemental Ice slept the great serpent Illaelitharian, the Ice Wyrm of Illhîweth, its body somehow coiling around the circumference of the tree, forming a protective barrier against the putrid forces laying siege.

A besieged World Tree—Gwen's heart shuddered with horror.

As a Mage of tenure, Gwen had seen plenty of spectacles by her twentieth year. Yet, the notion that something akin to a Pillar of the Spiritus Mundi could be sieged was as novel a notion as seeing Illhîweth itself.

With her Essence-enhanced eyes, she could make out the milling-millions—whole cohorts of half-frozen bodies, some moving, some still as statues, roving across the disturbed fumarole pillars to clamber upon the torso of the Great Wyrm, which laid still as the landscape.

Great gashes were visible upon the magnificent creature's elongated length, for many of its sleek segments were besotted with craters of smoking flesh like dormant volcanos, around which the ice-white scales had turned green-black with disease and rot. From these festering sores, Gwen's learned eyes saw the seeping signs of a Necromancy that drained not only vitality but diminished the Dragon's Essence.

It wasn't her Master's sorcery—but she had seen it performed first hand, many years ago, in a more innocent time when all she wanted was to escape poverty and mediocrity. It was the Necromancy used on Almudj's Egg, or at least, possessed the same potent purpose and design.

Below the unmoving Wyrm, she could spy with her eyes the marshalled Rime Wardens of the tree, few in number but superior in prowess, sweeping away the encroaching tide with Elemental sorcery beyond the ken of Humanity. True to Shackleton's memoirs, the majority were the male spider-Centaurs exercising destruction through their upper arms and fore-limbs, slashing and tearing through the Undead Tide, perhaps searching for the Masters of the foetid horde. As for their tools of war, Gwen noted that many wielded complex sculptures of ice that were half-glaive, half-bow, capable of both close and ranged combat—with a capability no less than Hanmoul's Golems.

Comparatively, the female Elves were few and dispersed, hovering over their glaive-wielding guardians. These Rime Witches reminded Gwen of Solana, for they shared the same air of effortless grace, their svelte figures stark white and wreathed with frost as they hindered the tide. Whatever assailed these maidens of frost were instantly slowed and frozen solid or were blown apart by unseens tendrils of wind that seemed to fill their surroundings, visible only by the dark ichor.

From their vantage near the edge of the Pocket Plane, Gwen could see tracts—enormous furrows and burrows carved by some unknown arcane force, criss-crossing the root-scape of the World Tree as valley-sized scars. Cobalt sap froze into jiggered shards of eldritch ice where the cuts were still fresh. Other sections, long worn or repeatedly assailed, had turned dark and sodden, with the trunk becoming spongy, puffed like stubborn mould.

Closer to where the Frost Wyrm Illhîwenthiel laid, a solid carpet of diced Mermen spread in every direction. In the parlance of Gwen's urban-minded observation, if the Great Tree itself were a city's glimmering Tower and Illhîwenthiel its glittering suburbia, then the Undead were a solid, multi-kilometre band of slums, abandoned and neglected until the sewers overflowed and streets turned to rot.

"By the Nazarene, for how long have they been fighting?" Richard inhaled a breath of frigid air.

"Weeks, perhaps a month or more, from the looks of those wounds in the tree. The worst of it seems over, though." Gwen took in their new circumstances with a learned eye from the Fire Sea. "Whatever made Illaelitharian into that state is thankfully spent—else they would have toppled the tree's defences long ago and invaded its inner roots. What we're seeing, I am guessing, would be the equilibrium—meant to keep the tree from recovering and the weather patterns of the Prime Material off-skelter for the next phase of their operations."

"Gwen, are we going to help them?" Lulan's voice came across their localised Comm-devices. "Without support from Master Hanmoul, I cannot condone committing our limited forces."

Below them, a deeply disgruntled Wyvern made a disapproving snort.

"Nonsense! Calamity, as a fellow Drake, we ought to attack!" Much to Gwen's surprise, Golos's tone lacked its usual flippancy. "What's happening here isn't fighting among ourselves to strengthen our flights. We need to put an end to this calamity. As Ryxi's pet, you should know better."

For a few brief breaths, all felt Lulan's Elemental Iron flare red-hot.

"I concur—BUT—" Richard cut in before Lulan proved herself by dashing forward with a berserker howl. "But let's also acknowledge that we're in no rush. The Necromancers down there are human. We're human. They're Mages, more or less. We're Mages—if we rush into to aid the Elves, how do we present ourselves as allies? Gwen's magic is hardly... aesthetic. Nor is Caliban. Did you see that Warden with four arms? That damned thing burst a Corpse Hulk at a thousand paces with his centaur bow. And those Rime Wardens are throwing Hail Strikes like Magic Missiles!"

Gwen could not deny that, as wondrous as it would be to ride into the siege like the Riders of Rohan, carving their way through the Necromancer's blockade of the tree, this wasn't Gondor, and they were not the Elves' friends, and she wasn't Gandalf.

But she also knew what to do. With an understanding as natural as photosynthesis, prompted by the flawless face of Solana nodding in approval from a Plane away, Gwen's fingers wandered to her breast.

Deftly, she retrieved the Ilias Leaf, removed both her gauntlets and then held the eternally vibrant Elven device against the flesh of her palm. With all her concentration, she bathed the leaf with Almudj's Essence while focusing her mind on transmitting the scene below, relaying every ounce of horror and every mote of urgency.

Before she had even finished, the Ilias Leaf pulsed in turn, speaking clearly and with utter clarity as though it knew it precise second she would call.

"Take the seeds…" the declaration came. "…Plant them where the land still thrives. The woes of the Hvítálfar... should be solved by the Hvítálfar."

In her hands, the Ilias Leaf grew bulbous, as though the hundreds of seeds within were sorting themselves into regimented order. When she tipped the leaf pocket's opening against her palm, two pods, each bulging at the seams with seed, slid from the slick folds.

"This time, My dearest Child of Kilroy." the impressionistic vision of the Bloom in White flashed against her frontal lobe, making Gwen feel as though the woman was a Force Ghost. She also sensed a smidgen of mischievousness in Solana's tone, even if the overall message had an air of command. "Do not impede the tree's growth, else you would truly upset our rarely impatient Arch-Warden Eldrin."

"I shall," Gwen acknowledged her next task. She wondered at Solana's prophesy but also knew that this much interference was already beyond the scope of Tryfan's Credo, the consequences of which were only acceptable because to do nothing would be more catastrophic. "And just you know, it was neither cheap nor easy getting here..."

What answered her was Solana's emotionless, polite mirth, then silence.

The leaf was replaced.

The gauntlets were slipped back on.

The seeds sat in the palm of her glove.

She met Richard's smirk with dignity.

"So… The Elves simply lacked the means to migrate from Tryfan to The Grove of Illhîweth." Richard touched a thoughtful finger to his chin. "I guess they knew we would get here?"

"You guessed correctly." Gwen felt used, but to stymy whatever the Necromancers, Spectre and the Elements planned, she was willing to fund a multi-million HDM blackhole. Whatever the case, she hoped the world would be a little more united after news of it hits The METRO's front page. "You're right, of course. We're merely couriers of Tryfan's will. But… you know what?"

"Go on?" Her cousin appeared keen to see how she'd react to her latest indignity.

"International freight, my dear Dick," Gwen spoke as she rolled the seeds back and forth between her fingers, calmer now that the solution to her sunk cost AND the Great Tree was on hand. "Is calculated by weight and distance! After which, compounded with labour costs, shall make for an extensive invoice."