T Lain - Plague of Ice

Walking indefatigably into the wind, her white face bared to the onrushing cold, blonde hair whipping round her head, Sonja didn’t look like any human being so much as a snow sprite or some other, otherworldly creature born of ice.

Soon they discovered a cave at the base of a cliff which was reasonably sheltered from the weather, and they decided to rest there a while. In this place they discovered a used torch that seemed fairly new, it left a black line of charcoal when Lidda ran it against the cave wall. It must have been left by the other party of humans who crossed through this area slightly before the plague of ice began and whom Savanak had mentioned, they decided. Was that group responsible for all this? The cave itself seemed too perfect to be a natural formation. The walls were smooth and rounded, suggesting a magical origin.

They couldn’t stay long in this shelter. Sonja wanted to reach the “towers of ice” before dark, so after healing wounds and recovering spells, they set out into the snow again.

Regdar carried Lidda on his broad shoulders. Hennet considered offering to do this himself but realized that his slender shoulders were far less appropriate for Lidda than Regdar’s. The snow on the ground was too deep to be traversed by her short legs. Regdar matched Sonja’s pace, and Lidda leaned over to ask her something.

“Sonja, do you get cold?”

“I’m cold right now,” she explained. “I’m not immune to low temperature, but I generally don’t mind the cold. Take me to some tropical beach and the story might be entirely different.”

“So being an ice druid…”

Sonja finished Lidda’s sentence. “… grants me considerable resistance to the cold, yes, but not immunity. When I was growing up, cold was neither bad nor good, it was just how things were. Cold is not uncomfortable for me, at least not generally.”

“So you’ve never really felt cold?” asked the halfling.

“Once,” said Sonja.

“When was that?” asked Lidda.

She was interrupted as the druid started suddenly, surprised by something overhead. All eyes turned to the sky where, barely visible amid a torrent of snow, a thin, white form was passing almost directly over them, just at the limit of their vision. Its color was more like enamel than snow and glistened in the light. Its wings were streaked with light veins of blue and purple. Their span somewhat greater than its length, which was scarcely the height of a human, and they were flapping furiously in the heavy crosswind. The sound of that flapping was the thing Sonja noticed. If the dragon was aware of the party, it showed no signs.

The druid whirled to face Hennet in time to see him launch a magic missile directly at the dragon. The bolt zipped to its target and blew a small hole in one leathery wing. The beast let out a high-pitched, reptilian squeal and turned to face its attackers. It spotted the party instantly then pointed its nose down and launched a sharp dive directly for them.

Sonja, Lidda, and Regdar fumbled for their weapons as Hennet readied another spell. For a moment he contemplated using the wand of fire, but Sonja had cautioned him to preserve that if at all possible. A white mass of sticky fibers flew from his hands toward the dragon. This spell was usually used at close quarters to entrap and incapacitate, but Hennet was trying a new application for it. The web exploded in front of the dragon to trail fibrous strands across its face and body. Suddenly unable to flap its wings or even see, the beast plunged downward. At the last moment it tore through webs and spread its wings, pulling out of its dive just feet above the ground. As it whistled past Hennet and the others, the speed of its passage kicked up a thick cloud of swirling snow.

They stared into the wall of snow, ready for the dragon to burst out and launch its icy breath against the party. A shriek sounded from the cloud, but no dragon appeared, only the end of its tail which for a moment snaked free of the wall before pulling back. For a full minute they waited, watching the cloud of snow filter out.

Hennet stared at the empty field ahead of them, puzzled. “I scared off a dragon?” he asked in disbelief. “I scared off a dragon with a web spell?”

“You shouldn’t have attacked it at all,” growled Regdar. “Remember what Sonja said before? On the wing, it could have killed us with ease.”

“Hey,” shot back Hennet, “I saw a monster, and I reacted. Let’s not forget that I was the only one who thought quickly enough to save us back there.”

“You wouldn’t have needed to if you hadn’t put our lives in danger to begin with,” protested Regdar.

“I think we’re missing the larger issue here,” said Lidda, still perched on Regdar’s shoulders, which were now heaving with anger. “Why didn’t the dragon attack us? It looked pretty angry to me.”

“Perhaps it saw a family resemblance,” Regdar muttered.

Lidda ignored him. “Something made it retreat, and we should figure out what. Sonja?”

The druid’s brow furrowed. “It may have been acting on orders.”

“Orders not to kill us?” asked Hennet.

“Maybe just orders not to let itself get distracted,” Sonja explained. “The most important question would be, who’s giving the orders?”

“Frost giants?” asked Regdar. “Are we talking about frost giants?”

“By all the gods, I pray not,” said Sonja. “My parents very rarely fought frost giants directly. They’re fifteen feet tall and have legs like tree trunks. With the combined powers of us four, we might be able to defeat one of them. But,” she added, “they very rarely travel alone.”

Sonja’s words left the party demoralized. Hennet took it on himself to put things right. “Remember why we became adventurers and not merchants or tanners or cobblers. We all had a choice. Let’s remember why we chose this.”

Lidda smiled slightly, and even Regdar was inexplicably cheered by Hennet’s insight.

“So let’s get moving,” the sorcerer said. “These towers of ice can’t be very far now. The gods know it cannot get much colder than this.”

Lidda rested on Regdar’s shoulders as they plunged through the snow, covering her eyes to protect them from a barrage of hard snowflakes. She considered this undignified, the kind of thing humans did with toddlers, but it was necessary for the moment. She recalled an old fable that her grandmother once told her. It concerned a young halfling named Burrowling. Burrowling feared the cold more than anything in the world. When winter rolled around, he’d lock himself in his room and refuse to come out until the spring thaw. He barricaded himself in with supplies enough to last the season and never even poked out his head to see what was going on. He was utterly convinced that the cold would be his death. Burrowling missed out on playing with his friends, going to school, learning his trade. In the summer he was a friend to everyone, but in the winter he never set foot outside of his home.

One year, Burrowling met a beautiful female halfling named Endra, whose skin was white as snow. They fell in love. But as he felt the days growing shorter and the wind growing colder, Burrowling realized he didn’t want to spend another winter locked in his room, so far away from her. Knowing that Endra would never agree to spend the winter in his room, he suggested they leave the village and go south to a place where it was never winter. Endra agreed, and they set off.

Burrowling gave up everything he ever knew when the two of them went south together. They walked through human and dwarf lands where halflings were regarded with amusement or slim tolerance, and they continued on. Ultimately they came to a sunny land called Calandra where the locals swore that winter never came. There they settled down. Burrowling built a house for Endra and hoped they would be happy for all time.