Going north instead of south would mean that Mirian wouldn’t have a chance to deploy her seeds of chaos design, since it required the train system for dispersal, and there were no trains that got anywhere near Frostland’s Gate.
Still, she didn’t want to give Sulvorath an easy time, so after two days of scribing spells (she was getting quite sick of that part of the cycle by now) and preparing provisions, she decided to change what kind of letters she was sending via the Royal Couriers. For her first letter, she wrote to Mayor Wolden and told him to be wary of an Akanan named Sulvorath. Then she wrote another letter to the Crown Bureau telling them of a conspiracy in Torrviol involving Adria Gavell and Sulvorath, then another letter to the Arcane Praetorians telling them the real Adria Gavell was dead. Then she wrote to Ravantha and told her that this Sulvorath person was trying to take over the lucrative smuggling operations she had going by taking over the criminal markets in Torrviol. All in all, she composed fifteen letters.
It was a good start, but it wasn’t enough. She’d learned that the souls of different species had difficult to quantify differences to them, and creating rune sequences that distinguished one kind of soul from another were complex to make. Size was much easier to distinguish, and of course, whether or not the soul had a specific mark was easy to detect. Mirian suspected Specter had made her celestial fire-trap detect soul size and mark presence so that a rat running over the flagstones wouldn’t trigger anything, but that meant any animal with the same ‘soul size’ of a human could trigger her trap.
She tested this theory by stealing a pig from one of the farmers and sending it ass-first through the window of the spy’s headquarters. The boarded up window cracked apart from the force of the squealing hog, and shortly thereafter, her hypothesis was confirmed as she saw flames erupt.
Mirian didn’t stick around to watch. Her traveler’s pack was already on her back, and she left before anyone could find her skulking about on the scene. She knew what kind of patrol routes the guards had, so avoiding them was easy. She hoped the other time traveler appreciated her handiwork, and was deeply regretting his decision to attack her.
The journey to Frostland’s Gate would be a long one. The village was about as far away as Cairnmouth, but the road there was one of the few in Baracuel that didn’t have a spellward protecting it, and it wound through forests, hills, and a treacherous mountain pass. Merchants still needed to move their cargo around on the backs of donkeys, since even a wagon with modern suspension systems broke down on the rocky road.
Most merchants started by taking a boat up Torrviol Lake’s north shore and starting on the road there, but lacking a boat, Mirian opted to circle around through the overgrown trail in the woods. No one would be stupid enough to be traveling on the road at night, so no one would see her departure north and be able to report it. Given that winter was setting in, few merchants would be on the road. Mirian would have to rely on the traveler’s obelisks when she rested, but she’d read that they were still maintained on this road since unlike in other places, there was no spellward.
Once she did leave the spellward around Torrviol, she cast nightvision, a neat spell that shifted infrared light near her eyes into the visible spectrum, making it much easier to see.
Near the lake, there was a derelict lumber mill, though by now the forest that had been cut down around it had regrown. Unlike the old growth forest, though, it was rife with underbrush and snags, and even with her enhanced vision, Mirian stumbled several times making her way through it. She was relieved to make it into the older forest, where the towering conifers and mycanoid trees blocked out enough light that the forest floor was empty. In the dim moonlight, with the huge trunks evenly spaced out, the forest looked like a shadowy hall of mirrors.
Mirian had pulled all-nighters before, and the long walk through the night and into the next morning wasn’t so different. When she finally reached the first traveler’s obelisk, though, she was tired enough that she took the opportunity to rest. She charged the obelisk so that the protective spells would last a few hours, then spent a few minutes scribing a series of glyphs on a sheaf of spellpaper. The divination portion would detect the collapse of the protective spells, which would subsequently trigger the other glyphs, creating a loud noise that would wake her.
It was a rather complicated solution to not having an alarm candle, but she couldn’t think of a better way. There was no way to maintain mana flow while she slept, so none of the active spells would do it.
Two hours later, the noise of her elaborate alarm roused her with a start. She groaned, rubbed her eyes, spent a few minutes groggily staring at nothing, then kept going.
Another hour into her travel and she saw her first dangerous myrvite. A chimera—this one looking like a giant boar with porcupine spines—watched her from a hundred feet away. They stood and stared at each other before the creature trotted off, perhaps deciding mushrooms were easier prey. Mirian cast an enhanced hearing spell just to be sure. Annoyingly, that made the crunch of her own footsteps that much louder, but she didn’t want to waste a cycle getting eaten by a myrvite. The spies had drawn most of the predators near Torrviol over to the derelict tower, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more lurking in the woods.
Soon after that, she was in the foothills of the Littenords and the path grew steep. At the crest of one hill, she finally got a view of the path ahead and got the feeling that she was woefully unprepared. Through a gap in the trees, she could clearly see the Littenord Range. From her vantage, the slopes seemed impossibly steep, rising up high above, and from the peaks to the passes, they were drenched in snow. They were utterly gorgeous, and also more than a little intimidating. She found herself thinking, I have to walk over those mountains?
And that was the small range separating Torrviol from Frostland’s Gate. If these were the Littenord, no wonder only fools tried to see what was beyond the Endelice Mountains.
The guides she’d read had mentioned the journey took about six or seven days to make it to Frostland’s Gate, and since she was young and fit, she’d thought maybe she could manage five. But with the heavy pack already a burden on her shoulders, she got the creeping feeling her journey was going to be on the long end of that number. At least up here in the north she didn’t have to weigh herself down with water since it was so abundant around her.
That night, she slept under a traveler’s obelisk again, and she dreamed of the Ominian again. It was a familiar dream. Together, they walked across Enteria. Sometimes, it was the scrublands near Alkazaria, sometimes the foothills of grand mountains, sometimes strange forests she’d never seen before. Always, the places were devoid of all signs of human habitation, but other life grew about in abundance. Always, she found herself thinking, this place. This place. This place, over and over again. The feeling she got was the same feeling she felt walking around Torrviol, or Arriroba. It settled over her like a warm blanket.
When she woke, she was sad to be alone, and sad to not have bought a thicker bedroll at the market. Her back was sore, and the morning frost had seeped into her bones. She quickly wrapped herself in a warmth spell and ate another breakfast of jerky, hardtack, and dried fruit. Again, she looked up at the mountain pass ahead, and still couldn’t believe she had to go up that thing. Torrviol still wouldn’t get snow until the 12th, but up here in the mountains, the soft flakes were drifting down already, and the mountain peaks scraped against the bellies of dark clouds that promised more.
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
Mirian steeled herself, adjusted the straps of her pack, and began her ascent of the pass.
The trail devolved into constant switchbacks to account for the steepness of the slopes. At first, the trail was bare and the snow mostly kept off the ground by the thick canopy of pines and caps of the mushroom trees, but as she rose, the trees thinned out and the path became drenched in snow. Fortunately, decades of travelers had left the marks on the road, and there were helpful sigils, cairns, and fallen trees laid parallel to the ground to help guide travelers as the road became subsumed by white drifts. Though she’d seen no one yet, there was at least one traveler and some donkeys ahead of her, and she was thankful their prints on the churned snow also helped mark the trail.
By the end of the third day, Mirian knew she’d underestimated the time she needed. The next obelisk was halfway up the pass, below the overhang of a sheer granite cliff that offered some respite from the winds that were now blowing. She was by no means in bad shape; she’d run regularly and dueled regularly before the start of the time loops, and that fitness had stuck with her even after she’d mostly stopped exercising. However, as she lay down on her bedroll, her legs were sore as anything, and the snow had started falling much heavier.
When she woke, it was to a pile of snow about ten feet high surrounding herself and the obelisk.
That morning, she worked on scribing several divination spells. One would help her find the next obelisk, and the other, signs of the road. In a blow to the dignity of arcanists everywhere, the spell detect human presence worked by detecting human feces. She made sure it worked, then checked the other divination spell on the obelisk she was already at. She knew once she left the shelter of this one, the trail was going to be nearly impossible to find without the spells.
What she really wanted was a levitation spell. Sadly, the inks she needed to scribe the spell weren’t easily available in Torrviol, and she hadn’t had time to make them herself. She had to figure out another way she’d get over the pass. There was far too much snow to clear with heat spells, and it had grown too deep to walk in. What she needed was a pair of snowshoes, but of course, she didn’t have the materials or the expertise to make them.
Then she got an idea.
She combined her knowledge of the spells heat displacement and warmth to make a spell that would chill the ground under her feet, taking the heat energy it was displacing to warm her. Then, she made a staircase in the snow with manipulate water, and once on top of the snow, she used Jei’s crystal spinner spell. Usually, she used it to make fine quartz wands, but here, she could spin the snow into hardened ice that radiated from her boots in a web. That was, she could make snowshoes out of ice. The material was, after all, everywhere.
It took some time and several attempts to get them right, but in the end, it saved her from simply being stuck by the huge mounds of snow covering the pass.
An hour later she was on her way, legs still aching, but making pleasant progress. With the trail completely covered, she made her best guess at the direction of the pass. It wasn’t that hard; the trail had been taking her between two of the tall peaks, so she figured as long as she stayed in between them, she was fine. And she had looked at a map back in Cairnmouth.
Even with the ice-shoes, though, the trek was brutal as she slogged her way up steep mounds of snow, weaving through towering cliffs and boulder fields. The reflection of the sun off the snow was bright enough she found herself using a veil light spell to protect her eyes. When at last she got to the top of the pass, though, it was worth it.
Enough clouds had parted that far beyond she could see the Endelice Mountains, jagged teeth of ice surrounded by moats of majestic glaciers; they stretched across the horizon. A plain of snow, and then a vast untouched forest lay between the two ranges, the colossal trees dusted white, interspersed with strange mycanoid trees with colors and growth patterns she’d never seen before. In the distance, wyverns drifted across the sky. Frostland’s Gate was still out of sight, the river valley it sat in still blocked by the smaller mountains she still had to cross.
By then, the sun was beginning to set, so Mirian searched for the obelisk with her divination spell. At first, she could barely sense it. She’d strayed quite far from the trail, so dusk was approaching as she finally found it.
In the morning, she reformed her ice-shoes and set off down the slopes. The abundant snow made it easy to half-walk half-slide down the mountain, and she found herself making up for her lost time. But in her haste to gain distance, she’d strayed from the trail again, and it took her three hours of searching to even get a signal on any human traces or the obelisk. After that, she tried to stay closer to the path by casting divination spells once an hour to make sure she was close.
Once she made it to the forest, she was finally out of the worst of the snow drifts, but the thick tangled roots of the trees and mycanoid growths had overtaken the road, and then the road started to go up again. She only just made it to the next obelisk. One more obelisk, she thought, settling down to rest for the night. She just needed to go over another small pass, rest there, then trek through a valley, and she’d finally be at Frostland’s Gate.
The next day, she was making her way up another slope when she heard a loud crack! echoing through the woods. At first, she thought it was gunfire, but she’d heard plenty of that; the sound was wrong. She looked around. There were trees, big outcroppings of granite, and dense underbrush scattered throughout, but no movement. Mirian continued on her way. Then, a few minutes later, she heard the same sound again.
This time, closer.
Mirian didn’t want to enhance her hearing to listen for whatever was approaching because she didn’t want to damage her hearing. Instead, she quietly set her pack down, turned her spellbook to the incineration beam page, and went still, listening carefully.
The next crack! was closer, and this time, her eyes caught movement. A white and blue form moving past a tree, and as it did, part of the tree shattered, sending bark and frozen sap spraying out.
The creature approached the tree, sniffing around, perhaps for insects, and then it sniffed the air again and saw her.
Its body and form was similar to a grizzly bear, but instead of fur, it was covered in thick icy plates, jagged icicles protruding from its back like a spine. Instead of the normal jaw of a mammal, its jaws swung out to the sides like those of an insect. Its paws were large, broad, and had razor sharp black claws. It watched her with four beady, cerulean eyes.
When Mirian had been preparing for myrvites, she’d expected to maybe fight some frost drakes or a particularly brave lesser wyvern. Maybe a chimera or two.
This was something else entirely. She tried to remember what Professor Viridian had said about glaciavores, because though she’d only seen them in textbooks, there was no doubt in her mind that this was one.
‘Never get into a situation where you’re near one,’ was what she was pretty sure he’d said. They could easily outrun a human, they were stronger than a bear, and, of course, they were spell resistant. There was only one option for her, then.
Mirian got ready to fight.