Frostbound

Chris

The waves of pressure felt suffocating. The thickness of the air and pressure bearing down on me made it hard to breathe, like sucking syrup through a straw. The sheer density of the mana was like nothing I'd ever seen before except for once. My trip up North, but that mana didn't feel suffocating. The purity was another that stood out, but not nearly as much as how dense it was.

Standing near the stony orb, I felt like I was drowning even though my head wasn't underwater.

Mana affinities were odd like that. An area saturated enough in one type would cause effects similar to that affinity. Just walking felt like I was swimming through the air.

The North, to outside observers, would feel like freezing to death. Being in Vincent's forge with all the Fire mana felt like I was about to combust randomly.

The only other high-density area I'd been in was Nature. The band in Wisconsin we passed through that was rife with the stuff made my body feel like it was overflowing with Vitality.

Fighting here would be difficult.

Ice could freeze water, science dictated that much, but magic had a way of evening things out. Just because science said Ice froze Water, didn't mean that I would excel against it at every opportunity.

In an area this fixated in Water would take my entire mana pool to freeze and even then, I wasn't confident in holding it frozen for long. Even with my newly expanded capacity.

Tactics had never been my strong suit, but I could see what this would mean for the future.

I built my City the farthest North I could for the Ice. Mountainside did the same for Earth. Everywhere, pylons and Cities were probably springing up around treasures or areas like this, drenched in the desired affinity or affinities.

This meant if, for whatever reason, we had to siege down a City or attack another person, we'd be fighting through a major disadvantage on top of being the attacker.