Broken Lands

“I can’t fit the last egg,” Sophia reported across the mindlink. “Not without forcing it in, and that’s likely to tear the bag.”

“Well, don’t do that. It’s only one egg?” Xin’ri asked from inside the warming station. “Dav, if you take your pack off, do you think you can carry the egg instead? I’ll have to adjust the harness, but I have one that should be close enough.”

Sophia shook her head and muttered out loud. “She really does prepare for everything.”

“I think she just wanted to be sure we got something,” Dav whispered back. “She’s convinced the roc eggs are valuable and they’re the first real treasure we’ve found. You know how she gets.”

Sophia nodded. She did know how Xin’ri could get when they hadn’t made any money in a while; no matter how much they had, spending instead of earning made Xin’ri nervous. It wasn’t something that came up often while they were in Mazehold, but it was part of the reason they spent as much time at the Arena as they did. The rest of the reason was how much they all enjoyed the challenge, of course. “It has been a while, hasn’t it.”

Dav nodded, but the answer he sent across the mind link was to Xin’ri. “I think I can. It will … hm. No, I’m not sure it will slow me down. It might help me fly faster. I’ll have to test that.”

Sophia squinted at Dav. “Faster? What, does more mass mean you can jump farther?”

“Maybe.” Dav sounded thoughtful. “It warps space more, so that might work. It’s not what I was thinking of, though; the egg holds a bird, and birds can fly. So clearly holding a bird should make me fly more easily.”

Sophia stared at him for a long moment before she sighed. “It probably will work that way, won’t it. Your eldritch Abilities are heavily conceptual.”

She’d rather say that they were weird, which they were, but heavily conceptual was more precise. It took Dav years to really begin to understand what they did, and even now he was often surprised by what worked and what didn’t, but they’d learned that physics was nothing more than an often-ignored suggestion when it came to his Abilities; understanding and conviction were far more important. That was true of magic in general; Sophia’s wings didn’t actually let her fly like a bird, they gave her the power of flight instead. Dav’s Abilities were just … a bit extreme.

A few minutes later, Dav was proved right. With the roc egg cradled in front of him by Xin’ri’s harness, he could fly faster than any of the others. It did cost his endurance, however; by the time they reached the buried warming station where the gryphon youth waited, he was exhausted.

The roc didn’t show during the entire time, but about half an hour after they landed, a loud roar filled the sky. It was impressive; they were two mountains away from the roc, and its anger at the loss of its eggs was still loud. They definitely weren’t going to head up above the clouds any time soon, so it was a good thing they didn’t have to.

As they expected, the two adult gryphons did ask for help finding a new nesting place - this time, below the cloud layer instead of above it. It took a day of searching while split up to find a warming station that was better protected than the one in the pass that the young gryphon found while still being within the fog layer; it seemed like most of the warming stations that low were either in a bad place because of the wind or buried by landslides.

The only problem with the new nest was an infestation of mountain worms. They were three feet tall, twenty feet long, and looked like segmented earthworms with a distinctly non-wormlike mouth and eating habits. Ci’an had half of them paralyzed before Sophia and Dav arrived at nearly the same time to finish them off. Like all of the monsters in this area other than the roc, they were simply not strong enough to stand up against any of the Flying Stars.

Getting the young gryphon to the new nest was a challenge until Sophia thought to summon a large Echo. The dragon could carry a person easily at this point and the young gryphon wasn’t so much larger than a human that it caused any issues once Xin’ri altered one of the gryphon harnesses enough for the youngster to keep his grip.

While the gryphons settled into their new home, Xin’ri rearranged all of their stuff. Everything the gryphons had carried plus one of the roc eggs ended up on Sophia’s Echo, but that didn’t last long. The extra weight meant that Sophia had to stop fairly soon to resummon the Echo, and moving everything made Xin’ri reconsider the arrangement. She enlisted Dav to carry the last roc egg again and loaded down herself and Sophia as much as she could. Ci’an escaped, because the only way she could fly was in her nightowl shape and she couldn’t carry enough to matter that way.

There was no door that led away from the gyphons’ nest, so they clearly hadn’t finished whatever was necessary to earn entrance to the next region of the Moonlit Branches. Sophia guessed that it would be wherever the key led; that was definitely enough zones.

That night was at the gryphons’ new nest. In the morning, they followed the key’s trail to where it seemed to dead end at the mountainside. They diverted over the pass, and were able to pick up the trail on the other side. They could hear the roc as its rage continued through the night and into the following day, but the Flying Stars stayed below the cloud layer until the noise disappeared on the other side of the pass.

The temperature plummeted. Before long, it was cold enough that Sophia was blessing the Warming Aural Plumes that developed out of her Keep Warm Ability as she dug their cold weather gear out of her pack. Out of the entire group, Ci’an was the only one who was comfortable in the weather, since her Keep Warm Ability had developed into far better natural cold protection in her Nightowl form. She refused to shift out of it for even long enough to don her winter coat.

Sophia couldn’t blame her. As long as Ci’an stayed in her nightowl form, she wouldn’t benefit from the coat anyway.

The last of the fog turned to an icy mist that was almost blizzard-like in its density, without the wind. It became very clear that the ice was not simply a natural feature of the area when laughter that sounded like cracking ice began to ring out around the group. They tightened together at first, until Sophia decided she’d had enough of it and had everyone pause so that she could flip into her Arcane Plumes.

She could feel where three distinct shapes pushed her plumes aside, which made it easy to target them even though she still couldn’t see anything that didn’t look like the ice fog. They were large enough that Sophia decided to dedicate three second upgrade fire skyeagle feathers to each, in case they were basically constructs instead of creatures.

Her attacks tore through the monsters, whatever they were, and the ice fog began to clear. She never got a clear enough look at them to know what they looked like, but Cliff helpfully informed her after they were dead that they were Snow Frosts, mischievous and deadly spirits that had more in common with will o’ wisps than with the elementals they resembled.

They were also first upgrade versions of the monster, so her attack was complete overkill.

With the fog gone, they could see for miles across the snowy landscape. It wasn’t long before they noticed a series of lumps in the snow that were suspiciously regular, maybe even pyramidal under the snow.

The first one they examined confirmed their suspicions: they were smaller versions of the warming stations from the pass, identical small single-building pyramids that were clearly designed for the snow. Unlike the warming stations, they were completely magicless and cold. They investigated a pair of them before moving on; there was nothing to find that was going to be worth more than the roc eggs they already had, and those might be on a timer. The one that Dav carried might well be killed by the cold, if it hadn’t been already, while the ones in Sophia’s pack could hatch at any time.

According to Xin’ri, having the roc in the egg die was better than having to kill it after it hatched; it would mean they couldn’t sell the egg to any of the beast taming Clans, but they’d still be able to sell it to alchemists, while a dead roc hatchling was likely to be worth less than the egg.

They were about to settle in for the night when Ci’an told them that she saw a light in the distance. It was a cool white instead of the red of the warming stations and it lit at sundown instead of going out, but that was still enough to make them hurry towards it instead of camping. Sophia’s tent would be warm enough, but a night in an inn sounded far better. If they were unlucky and couldn’t reach a way out of the zone quickly, they could still set up the tent.

It took roughly two hours and a series of fights against snow snakes, many of which could either fly or teleport, before they reached the source of the light.

As they expected, the light came from a building. This one was stepped like the warming station the roc took over, but each step was not a full building; instead, it was more like the face moved back several inches at the top of the first floor and midway through the second, with a pyramidal roof above that. It was hard to see more than that, because the light came from a circular panel that seemed to have been added above the first step. It was partially occluded by a bird that stood in front of it, but the real problem was that it came from the middle of the circle and the sides stuck out more and sent the light towards the path instead of the building.

Sophia shifted her magelight to illuminate the door. The doorframe stuck a little above the first step and was covered in ice, but there were two other details that really stood out: while it was clearly an entrance, there was no obvious way to open it, but there was an obvious keyhole.

A keyhole that looked exactly the right size to take the wardkey that led them to the building in the first place.

“We ready?” Sophia waited for everyone to assent, then inserted the wardkey into the opening. The door began to glow and spat the key back into her hand, which made Sophia step back.

She was happy she did, because it let her get a look at the building in far better light. Ice dripped across the entire building, blunting but not concealing its original design.

The walls were covered in carvings, almost like hieroglyphics though they didn’t really look Egyptian, with a pair of statues on either side of the door. The door itself glowed with pale, swirling light in the shape of a cone surrounded by a door frame that looked like it was made of light. Above the door, the bird that once blocked the light now glowed like a hologram, all in white. It looked like a falcon to Sophia’s eyes, though she wasn’t certain she’d ever seen a falcon with a crest like that.