Draya had run, but not through the doors; that had been an illusion. She hadn’t had much mana for the spell, but Jasper’s glances toward her had done enough to convince Elsa. So far, it was the only helpful thing the fighter had done. During the distraction, she had raced up the stairs. She heard the combat below and hoped her companions would keep Elsa busy for a few minutes while she searched for the Frosthold. It wasn’t hard to track down. The cold tugged on the dragonkin woman like a fish on a lure. It sucked at all the available heat, and Draya could have found the room with her eyes closed.
The chamber lay in the center of the ice castle. At first, it looked circular, but closer examination showed the room was actually an icosagon, a 20-sided shape, 30 feet in diameter. Each short, angled wall segment rose fifty feet into a dome of ice comprised of hundreds of interconnected ice triangles. At midday, this room would be marvelous to behold, and even at night, with the stars shining and the castle's inherent magical glow, Draya’s breath was taken away.
Though, that might also have been from the Frosthold.
The magical item was fifteen feet away in the center of the room, rotating in the air above a marble pedestal. It was a tesseract, a 4-dimensional cube, existing in both space and magic. Its dimensional depth hypnotized Draya, as she could never clearly see the cube within a cube as it slowly spun. Through magic, she could perceive the 3-dimensional snowflake trapped in the center, and it drew her in.
Draya took the first step into the room, and the wind started, dropping the temperature well below zero. The young woman was weak. She had spent all her mana fighting against Elsa. She had used the mana from her dress to power the spell, so her Dragon Spirit had expired. She was used to having continuous Dragon Strength active when she held her staff, but that was locked in a block of ice below. Her dress had only powered her magic back to a few hundred mana, but she didn’t feel she could waste more time.
On her second step into the chamber, the wind nearly threw her from her feet. On her third, she dropped to one knee, her fingers and toes going numb, and her brain threatening to shut down. The cold sucked at her from all directions, both spatially and magically. She dropped a fireball at her feet, but other than restoring feeling to her toes for a few seconds, it did little else, the wind whipping the flames into oblivion.
Draya struggled to move another step closer, and she dropped to all fours, her bare hands sticking to the icy floor. She reached inside for her dragon fire again but couldn’t find it. With just her regular mana, she cast another fire spell to free her fingers, and the floor only turned to liquid briefly before freezing again. Her health was plummeting, and her mind had frozen over. She needed to concentrate to connect to her dragon core, but she was suffering too many banes to allow that. She produced 100+ mana every round and instantly spent it on another fire spell, but it wasn’t helping.
The Frosthold dug its icy fingers into the woman, sucking at her heat, magic, and life. It found the dragon core deep inside her and was thankful it was contained within a shell of intense mana. It wouldn’t rupture if the woman died, and though the magical intellect was primal in its reasoning, it was smart enough not to touch it. Instead, it sucked at every other aspect of the woman until her heartbeat was so faint it was almost non-existent. But it didn’t fade entirely away. Once every six seconds, a flood of fire washed through the woman, keeping her on the edge of life. It wasn’t dragon fire, so the Frosthold felt safe exploring this powerful device.
It was a curse, woven into a dress that was connected to . . .
The Frosthold pulled back.
The demonic plane.
If dragon fire could hurt it, demonic fire could destroy it. Then the dress pulsed again. More fire. Regular fire. Not demonic fire. Always hungry for more, the Frosthold crept forward tentatively, probing into the dress and following the path down into hell.
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Ignis Ardeat was a peculiar demon. He kept to himself mostly. The other denizens of the lower planes relished power, control, destruction, and corruption. Ignis only cared for one thing: fire. He liked to burn things. The problem was that so few things in the lower planes actually burned. Obsidian, iron, salt, and stone didn’t produce the best flames. To get a really good fire going, you needed to go to one of the realms were life flourished. Once there, a simple campfire would enthrall him far more than sticking hot pokers into a dozen helpless victims.
Yes, people burned, but not very well, and the screams usually detracted from the enjoyment. Ignis wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t evil. He just liked to burn things. And he didn’t care what it was. A match. A village. They were both delightful to watch. The problem was getting the fire to the realms. Demonic fire was powerful, and it was plentiful in the underworld. That was likely why so few things in his plane burned. Demonic fire had already consumed everything.
To move demonic fire into the realms above took enormous power, and Ignis wasn’t that strong. He saw the other demons around him casting their influence above, promising eager mages abilities beyond their wildest dreams, and as those mages used that magic, the demons grew stronger.
The transaction worked remarkably well. Demonic energy was common in the underworld but was of near infinite value above and made the mortal men, elves, dwarves, and others who wielded it a force to reckon with.
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Conversely, life above was also common. Birds, fish, insects, and even grass had access to it. But when that life was brought down below and fed to a demon, they grew in strength exponentially. That was how the demons took power. The men above got to live as gods, and the demons below became so powerful they could challenge the gods. Everyone was happy.
But that didn’t excite Ignis. He had seen others like himself, fascinated with fire, have their servants above offer them women burned at the stake to cultivate power. The idea sickened Ignis. He’d much rather watch a woman burn a steak for dinner. But more enjoyable than watching it happen was when someone used his power to do the actual burning.
But that was the catch. He wasn’t powerful enough to move his demonic energy into the physical realm. In order to get that power, he needed the life of those above, and he wasn’t interested.
Then Ignis had found the loophole. Yes, demonic fire was supremely powerful, but it was overkill. You didn’t need to summon hellish brimstone to light a campfire. A simple match would do. Demonic fire was twice as powerful as dragon fire, which was twice as powerful as volcanic fire, which was twice as powerful as regular fire. And while moving demonic fire to the realms was hard, moving common fire was eight times easier.
Ignis had found an exchange that worked in his favor. He could transform the demonic fire around him into regular fire, with an eightfold yield, and could then easily move that energy into realms above. He found a few pyromaniac priests to write spells for him and spread them through the realm. If anyone wanted a fire potion, enchantment, or curse that gave them unlimited access to fire, Ignis was ready to make a deal.
It still required a life to establish the connection, which Ignis regretted, but it was the nature of being a demon, and he was pragmatic about it. As a result, he now had dozens of connections to the realm and got to experience his power burning all sorts of things. Yes, sometimes they burned each other. In fact, that is what they did most of the time, but he didn’t gain power from the deaths, and they weren’t on his conscience. Often, noble fighters used his energy to kill the evil mages who worshiped his more powerful peers and that bit of chaos he delighted in.
And, occasionally, someone used his magic to light a simple campfire, and he got to stare into those flames for hours.
He had lost count of all the enchantments he had contracted, so when he suddenly felt a stab of cold in his soul, he had difficulty finding what it was. The cold was little more than an annoyance. With his depth of fire strength, it could never cause him permanent harm. He wanted to ignore it and pay attention to a few battle mages going at it in a forest. One misplaced spell would set dozens of trees on fire, and he would have a front-row seat. But the pinprick of cold was like the constant dripping of a sink or a stone in his shoe. He needed to get rid of it.
Once he found the source, he remembered it. A curse on a dress to deal 100 fire damage to the wearer. Its first use had been to incinerate an evil witch. Not his cup of tea, but inventive. However, every other time it was used – and used a lot – the fire damage was instantly converted to mana. Boring. Also, the continual damage would often last for hours. He was used to massive explosions once or twice a day. This curse was more of a slow drain. He wasn’t in danger of running out of fire from it, but if he approved too many more enchantments like that, he might need to actively collect demon fire to keep up.
Now, the curse seemed to be acting in reverse, sending cold damage down to him. That was definitely not what he wanted. He almost severed the connection, but he was honorable, and disenchanting the dress would violate the contract. Instead, he was curious. Ignis found it simple to travel back up the curse to the physical plane, pushing the cold out of the way. He was not prepared for what he found.
A heat vortex was killing a dragon.
No, that couldn’t be. He shook his head and looked again. It was a woman with a dragon core, having the life sucked out of her by a vortex. The magical device was a black hole into the other side of Hades where cold reigned – hell frozen over. Ignis couldn’t read the demonic signature on the device to know which demon was responsible for bringing the vortex into the realm, and it was very uncharacteristic for Gandhi to allow such a thing. Barriers must have been breached.
Either way, one of his servants was being killed, and even though this woman had only used his power as a mana source, she was three levels from 20, which would allow her to transform into a dragon, and then she would be burning all kinds of things. Ignis had never been joined with a dragon before; they obviously had their own sources of fire. But all that was moot if she died. Ignis was pretty sure he could fix that.
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Draya was barely holding on. A sixth sense kept triggering her mana each round into a burst of fire, keeping her from passing out. But her health was now dangerously low. She craved the fire bursts from her dress like a parched woman in a desert, but soon, that wouldn’t be enough either.
Then, her dress flared with 2000 points of fire damage.
Draya’s mana pool was suddenly overflowing, and she cast a spell using only the excess, dropping an explosive blast into the room. The winds shifted and then stopped as heat overpowered the chamber. Draya stood, suddenly back in contact with her dragon core, and dropped a pillar of fire in a circle at her feet that wouldn’t soon disappear. Three paces brought her to the pedestal, and she gripped the 4-dimensional object and pulled it into her spell. She cast her dragon breath and drenched the Frosthold.
The confusing pathways intertwining the cube within a cube were made of crystal-clear ice but now turned red as they filled with dragon fire. The sucking power of the snowflake in the center stopped, lest it flood its parent plane with never-ending dragon fire. In a matter of seconds, the device was rendered inert. Draya dropped the pillar flame and didn’t extend her dragon breath, letting the dress fill her mana pool again. She was still low on health and took a round to drink a healing potion.
She held the Frosthold up and could finally concentrate on the swirling vortex in the center. It still resembled a 3-dimensional snowflake and did not look like it was melting, but it was trapped within a geometrically impossible entanglement of dragon fire connections. Hopefully, Gromphy could use this without freezing Jace’s stronghold or burning himself to a crisp
Draya sighed deeply when she knew she was safe and wondered what had happened with her dress. Why had it suddenly produced so much fire? Before she could explore the conundrum further, the ice floor beneath her feet began to crack, and Draya realized the severe implications of shutting down the source of power that had built this castle. She stored the Frosthold in her inventory and raced out of the room.