Chapter 35: Red Ice
The blizzard had seemingly swallowed the entire world.
Barjuchne moved through it at a run, her feet finding purchase on the freshly frozen ground that shifted and cracked beneath her weight as the layers of mixed-temperature sediment settled onto each other. The cold pressed against her scales from every direction. Every time her stride broke and she slowed, the snow began its crawl. It started at the pads of her feet, creeping upward in a rim of crystalline frost.
She kept moving.
A bolt of ice came from above, angled down through the white. Barjuchne brought her head up and breathed.
Fire met ice in a cloud of steam that rolled across her vision. The bolt dissolved three feet from her face as the dragon didn't slow her pace.
Her lungs ached. Not from exertion, though. From the cold, which had got into the air she was breathing and was doing something unpleasant to the inside of her chest, dampening the furnace she usually carried there without effort. Her fire felt thin. Like a lamp turned down low.
"You're nobility," said Barjuchne, panting. The words came out between strides, rough at the edges. The scent of the mage had been nagging at her since the first ice bolt landed.
"C-correct," replied the voice from above, sounding unsure of its own confirmation even if it was a fact that the mage herself knew well enough. The mage was still on her platform. The ice pillar had continued rising during the fight, lifting her ten feet above the arena she'd constructed. She stood on it with a wide-brimmed hat pulled low against the blizzard and a journal open in one hand. Her other hand was poised over the page, a slender instrument moving across it in quick notations. She was taking notes. "In part," she continued. "But please don't deviate from the structure of our encounter. I need the results to be unbiased." She lifted her free hand and a new bolt formed in her palm, its edges catching what little light the blizzard permitted. The girl's voice stuttered slightly.
Barjuchne couldn't determine whether the stutter came from a cold or from something more innate.
The bolt launched.
Barjuchne exhaled flames again. The fire came out weaker than before. She could feel the difference herself, a dispiriting shortfall between what she intended and what arrived. The bolt broke apart in the stream but the fire died quickly, its heat stolen by the surrounding air before it could do anything useful.
"Interesting," said the mage, writing something. She spoke the way someone speaks when they are alone and narrating their own thoughts, completely unconcerned with the audience. "It really does look like the cold weakens you significantly..." She looked up from the journal and fixed her gaze on Barjuchne across the white distance with a soft, yet genuine, confused expression. "Are you always this impotent?"
Barjuchne stopped moving. Not missing even a second, the snow immediately began climbing to her ankles.
"Excuse me?!" snarled the dragon, almost more offended by the sincerity of the tone than the question itself.
"I need a baseline for my data," said the mage, tapping the cover of her notebook twice. Her tone was entirely devoid of anything resembling hostility. It was a worse tone than hostility. It was the tone of a person being professional. "If you had to guess, are you stronger in very hot places?"
"Why don't you find out?" Barjuchne answered the question with fire. The breath attack was launched with the full force of her anger, which was considerable, and crossed the distance toward the platform in a roaring arc.
A wall of ice appeared between them with a single sideways swipe of the mage's hand. The fire hit it and hissed. Steam billowed outward. The wall held. Then it simply faded, having done its job.
Barjuchne was already moving again, breaking the snow's grip on her ankles with a sharp pull. She kept her eyes on the platform.
"Low social intelligence," murmured the mage, writing her notes. "It likely uses force and physical attractiveness to compensate for these weaknesses, using the sociological halo effect as bait," she narrated to herself.
Was this person just baiting her? Trying to get her to lose her composure? Barjuchne decided that she needed a better plan to reach the mage. This fire thing wasn't working. The dragon paced the perimeter of the arena the blizzard had created, her feet crunching through frozen crust with every step.
"What are you?” she asked, watching the mage on the platform with the focused attention of someone looking for an opening, "some kind of scientist?"
"I am simply an acolyte researcher," the mage replied, still writing. She spoke with a distracted quality. "Frankly, I have no particular interest in dragons. No offence." She turned a page. "My field is botany. I don't usually study monsters. But we all have to do what we have to do."
Barjuchne cracked her own neck, a slow and deliberate motion. The cold was making her joints complain. "Well. If you just wanted an interview, you could have sent me a letter. There's no need for all this."
The hissing snow crunched beneath her feet. The wind pressed against her face with cold fingers.
The mage lifted her head from the journal. Her expression was not unkind. It was actually shocked. "You can read?" She sounded genuinely surprised.
Barjuchne's jaw tightened again; she really meant that question. She wasn't being snide.
"My apologies," said the mage, already looking back at her notes with the composure of someone who had moved on entirely. "But I need unbiased data on your abilities if I want to keep a roof over my head." She closed the notebook, tucking it under her arm, and raised her free hand. Ice formed in her palm again, slow and methodical. "Don't take it personally. It's just research." She adjusted her hat with the back of her wrist. They inadvertently made eye contact for a moment. The mage quickly looked away. "So, p-please do your best. I'll be testing your endurance now."
She began counting.
"Sixty. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight."
The blizzard changed.
The difference was immediate and total. Where before the storm had been a hindrance, it now became something else, pressing in from all sides. Barjuchne's vision collapsed to the space immediately in front of her face.
Beyond that, pure white.
She breathed fire. It died within feet, snuffed out by air that was no longer merely cold but actively hostile to life.
She lashed out with her wings, trying to create movement that might break the spell's pattern. The air resisted her, dense with compacted snow that had lost any distinction between falling and standing.
Her scales registered the temperature drop with rising urgency. The draconic inner workings of her body, built for life in the heat, began the involuntary process of pulling inward, conserving core warmth at the cost of extremity functions. Her claws slowed. Her tail dragged. The light behind her eyes, that constant red heat, guttered and dimmed.
Barjuchne was slowing down. She tried a step forward. The snow held her ankle. She pulled. It released with effort and took her other ankle immediately.
Her breath came short and shallow. Steam disappeared the moment it left her nostrils.
Barjuchne's knees met the snow.
She folded her arms around herself, her body's last argument against the cold, and felt the snow close over her shoulders.
She stopped fighting.
Everything went dark.
High above on the ice platform, the scholar princess Ead stood with her eyes on her journal and her count on her lips.
"Four. Three. Two. One."
She lowered the hand she'd raised for the spell and looked across the arena.
White. Undisturbed.
The blizzard had quieted, its purpose served, and what remained was a field of unmarked snow several feet deep in every direction. No movement. No fire. No sound of heavy footsteps or frustrated growling.
She surveyed the space for a long, quiet period.
Then she opened her journal.
"Specimen likely deceased," she said, writing quickly. Her voice had the particular quality of someone dictating to themselves, without inflection or emotion. "The strength tier was likely overestimated. The draconic global threat perception is suspected to be the product of a social contagion rather than a demonstrable capacity for danger." She made a small, precise mark in the margin. "The body will be collected for study. My mentor will be informed." She paused, considering. "I'll leave the collection itself to the university team. I am not doing that part."
Then she opened her journal again and began writing about what she was going to read once she got home.
She sighed. "Why did they need me for this?" she wondered. Dozens, if not hundreds, of mages must have been here before she was. Did none of them think to just do what she did? Ead shook her head, pondering the falling educational standards of the nation.
Everything was dark.
Everything was heavy.
Also, it was very warm. That was the oddest part for the dragon.
Barjuchne half-expected to see the black void of death again, except this time with much more grief than before. Her mind ran to Veliah and Rou-ya and her many princesses.
Who would take care of them if she were gone? Who would feed them? Veliah needed her hair brushed every morning and Blibli the slime princess needed to be regularly moisturised or she'd get crusty.
Barjuchne's first conscious observation was the weight over her. But it was confusing. The pressure on top of her was not from the crushing weight of deep snow, though that was present too, but a different weight. Warmer... Something pressed against her from above.
The dragon girl blinked.
No light came. But heat did. It arrived slowly, moving through her scales from a point of contact above her.
The smell reached her, or, more aptly, she just became aware of it now.
Perfume. The smell of hair, of a person. It let out the kind of warmth that came from a living body, from skin and blood and the particular signature her instincts had learnt to recognise without needing to think about it.
It smelt like a princess. But there was something wrong with her. The smell was off, almost sour. It was like a piece of bad meat from one's favourite cut.
Clearly, Barjuchne figured that she herself was in the midst of delirium.
The dragon girl's hands found sensation first, blood moving back through frozen fingers in prickling waves. She reached around herself without thinking, her claws searching, and closed on something soft and rounded that gave slightly under her grip.
A startled sound, small and surprised, came from directly above her.
The darkness resolved into the underside of a snow cavity, and above her, propped on hands and knees, was a face she had never seen before.
Small. Round. Gaunt. But the stranger’s taut features were framed by an abundance of cream-white wool that spread across her shoulders and curled at her temples in natural formation. The greyish skin beneath was pale and thin in the way of someone whose health was not robust. Her eyes were wide, brown, and fixed on Barjuchne with an intensity that she wasn’t sure was a trick of the light or not. She was like a thin stick, covered in too many leaves, so one couldn't see its actual shape. But the leaves were becoming thin and droopy now.
The new stranger looked like a person who had started transforming into a sheep but had changed their mind about it a quarter of the way into the process.
"I finally found you," said the unfamiliar face, using her woolly body to warm the dragon that she was wrapped around.
Barjuchne stared at her from the ground with the expression of someone whose cognitive functions had not yet fully activated after waking up in the morning. "...Who the hell are you?"
“Yours,” replied the unblinking princess, not sounding offended or hurt in the least. “Forever.”
“...Wha -?”
The strange princess leaned down and kissed the dragon before she could finish the one-word question.
Barjuchne's eyes went very wide.
On her ice platform, the mage princess Ead snapped her notebook shut.
The sound was crisp and final in the cold air.
"I cannot believe I came all the way here for this," she said to no one. She looked at the closed cover of the journal, then at the unmarked snow below, then back at the journal. "Oh well." She tucked it under her arm and began mentally organising her bag. "At least I'll have my peace now. I hope."
Her mentor would be pleased with the data. He would take credit for it publicly, which suited her completely. Public credit meant public attention, which meant people looking at her and expecting her to respond to their many, many questions.
She, however, was already thinking about the third shelf from the left in the east wing of the academy library, where three volumes on fungal root systems had been waiting for her for weeks. Ead turned to climb down from her platform.
The ground shook.
She let out a surprised cry, her feet sliding and slipping around on the ice. She threw her arms out and caught her balance, barely, her notebook hitting the surface and sliding to the edge before stopping.
Below her, the snow erupted like the spew of a white volcano.
The dragon came out of it the way a lunging predator comes out of deep water to attack a boat, an explosion of movement and displaced mass, its dark scales catching the pale sky above with sudden and violent clarity. The blizzard had scoured the colour from the landscape in every direction. Against all of that white, the dragon was impossibly dark.
Ead's hands moved before she finished processing what she was looking at, all of this in under a second.
A fresh shielding barrier of ice formed between them, broad and thick, responding to the instinctive force of her magic.
The dragon's jaws opened. Ead braced for more fire. But instead, a prismatic light poured out.
Holy magic, bright and radiant and entirely unlike the fire she'd catalogued in her notes, hit the ice wall with the full weight of the dragon's velocity behind it. The ice did not melt. But it did something Ead had not considered in her hasty construction.
It intensified.
The holy light scattered inside the ice, fractured and multiplied by the crystal structure, and the far side of the wall, the side Ead was on, became a source of light so concentrated and complete that it exceeded anything her eyes could manage. It was like sunlight moving through a magnifying glass that she was just on the other, immediate side of.
The mage cried out, blinded, throwing both arms across her face to shield her eyes. Her next spell fired from reflex, aimed at nothing useful, launching upward into the open sky and dissipating harmlessly.
The ice wall shattered as something hammered through it.
Struck with black claws wrapped around her, Ead left the platform. They fell together straight back down on the other side of the pillar, crashing through layers of snow that had accumulated, sinking until solid soil stopped them.
Ead's back met the ground with a solid impact that took the breath from her. Heavy weight settled on top of her, pinning her down below it. She opened her eyes.
The dragon was above her, one hand on either side of her shoulders, her hair falling forward and her expression arranged into a smug, satisfied shape.
"If you went outside more often," said the dragon, grinning with a satisfied, almost smug expression. "- You'd be used to bright lights." The words came out with the satisfaction of someone who had been waiting for their moment.
Ead's hand covered her own mouth for a second, as if to muffle a scream.
"Now you're mi -"
The dragon stopped abruptly, frozen, as if the frost had reached her heart after all. Ead's arm had snapped up in that second.
Barjuchne's eyes went wide. Her black pupils dilated, consuming the red of her irises fully. Her entire body went still. Ead’s thumb was inside of Barjuchne's mouth, pushed in past her lips that wrapped around the digit.
The blood from the small bite Ead just gave herself dripped onto the dragon’s tongue. The dragon's black pupils had expanded to fill almost all of her ruby iris.
"Princess' blood," said Ead, conversationally. She removed her thumb and began extracting herself from beneath the dragon's frozen form with careful, methodical movements. "A paralytic aphrodesiac for dragons. Unverified until now." She looked back for a second. "You’ll excuse me if I leave before I need to prove the rest of the claim.”
She crawled upward through the snow, found a grip on solid ice, and pulled herself toward the surface. Looking back for a second, she escaped. “Oh, I- uh, thank you for your participation. This has been very useful.”
Her voice echoed slightly in the snow cavity as she ascended.
Frozen in a way that even the snow and ice hadn’t managed, the dragon remained exactly where she was, like a perfect statue.
Ead's head broke the surface of the snowbank, followed by her shoulders and torso. But nothing more than that.
The scholarly princess tried to get out of the tunnel, but her lower half was stuck in the solid, compacted ice. “Curses…” she muttered, starting to try and dig herself free in annoyance.
She hated fieldwork.
Slowly, a shadow fell across her face.
Ead looked up, squinting at the silhouette that stood against the sunlight as the summer returned over the faded blizzard.
A Vildt girl stood at the edge of the crater. Small-framed, pale-woolled and wrapped in a travelling cloak that had seen better days. An abundance of soft, cream-white wool framed her face.
In both hands she held a length of ice bolt that had been picked up from the battlefield, gripped like a cudgel. What was more concerning, however, were her eyes. They were fixed on Ead with the concentrated, unblinking attention of a serial killer. Her heavy, laboured breathing steamed the air.
The icicle struck down, smashing the saggy cone of Ead's wide-brimmed hat flat against her skull.
Everything went dark.