T Lain - Plague of Ice

“What’s she doing?” asked Regdar.

Hennet shrugged. He had long since stopped asking that question. He was just happy that she seemed to have some plan.

As Sonja ran, she extended her hands in preparation for a spell. When she thrust them forward, the scorpion burst into blue fire. The brilliant, azure flames shimmered across its icy back.

“What?” Regdar stammered. “How can ice burn?”

Hennet laughed, understanding instantly what Sonja had done. “She’s clever! It’s not real fire but faerie fire. No heat, no smoke, just light. Pray that the monster doesn’t know the difference.”

The giant scorpion had never seen fire before, let alone been engulfed by it. As a creature of ice, however, its fear was instinctive. Too wide and bulky to roll over, it spun instead, desperate for some way to tip itself onto its back. Lidda was forgotten. Sonja rushed back to join the others, and Hennet lifted the wand, readying it to launch the fireball.

Lidda tried not to look back to see what Sonja had done, but when she heard the sound, something between a camp-fire crackling and a lion’s roar, her curiosity won over. She spun on the top of a stump just long enough to see a blood-red sphere of flame rocket across the field from Hennet’s wand. It struck the ice scorpion with thunderous force. The explosion sent a wave of flame roaring out in all direction, incinerating stumps, evaporating snow, and scorching the frozen ground. She felt a blast of heat against her face. The warmth was jarring. When the flames flickered out, the scorpion was reduced to a puddle of hissing slush.

Relieved, Lidda waded back to the others, avoiding the scorched area. She could hear Hennet’s exclamations of glee long before she reached the sorceror.

“That was beautiful,” he shouted. “It worked perfectly!” His arms were wrapped around Sonja. “That thing didn’t know what hit it!”

“What was it?” asked Regdar. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

Lidda congratulated Hennet with a sincere “Well done.”

“Many thanks.” He bent down and clutched the halfling by the waist before lifting her up to his eye level. “What about you?” he gushed. “Diving under a giant scorpion with nothing but a short sword? If that’s not heroism, I don’t know what is.” He kissed her on both cheeks before plunking her back onto the ground.

“Unfortunately,” continued Hennet, “that’s it for the wand of fireballs. When they gave it to me in Atupal, they told me it had only one more blast in it. I hoped they might be wrong, but they weren’t. That’s it for the big fireworks.” He tossed the spent wand aside.

“My sword!” Lidda said, looking back at the scorpion’s molten corpse. “Do you think it survived?”

“Maybe,” said Hennet. “We should look for it before that melted mess can freeze solid again.”

Hennet and Lidda’s jubilation faded when they saw the concerned expression on Sonja’s face. Regdar stepped up next to her, looking every bit as stern. “We can celebrate later, you two,” he said. “We need to know what that was, and we need to know if there are any more. Sonja?”

“Whether there are any more I can’t say,” the druid said. “Nor am I entirely sure what it was. I’ve certainly never seen anything like that on the Endless Glacier. But I’ve heard stories…”

“What kind of stories?” asked Lidda. She wondered if there might be some connection to Burrowling and Endra.

“I’ve heard that many creatures native to this plane have equivalents, like them in most ways but wrought of solid ice, living elsewhere.”

“ ‘Elsewhere’?” Hennet asked. “You mean, as in other planes?”

“Cosmology is not my specialty,” Sonja said. “Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve heard of the elemental planes. There are planes of fire, water, air, and earth, each of them populated by elementals and other creatures of those elements. On the borders of those planes are other, smaller, and less-known regions where the elements mix. Perched between the planes of water and air is the quasi-elemental Plane of Ice.”

Regdar looked both perplexed and disturbed by Sonja’s conjecture. “You think that creature was native to the Plane of Ice?”

She shrugged. “I can’t be sure, but that would be my guess. If someone or something opened a portal to the Plane of Ice, that could he the source of the scorpion, the winter wolf, and all this ice and snow. That doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t explain how a fully grown snowbloom turned up in an area that wasn’t even cold a few days ago, but at least it’s a theory, which is more than we’ve had so far.”

“Sonja,” said Hennet, “aren’t you jumping to conclusions? Maybe that ice scorpion was created in some evil mage or priest’s laboratory. Isn’t that possible? We don’t even know for sure that this Plane of Ice exists.”

“I know,” said Sonja. “It exists. I’ve been there.”

Stunned silence fell over the others. “When? How?” asked Lidda.

“All of those wishing to be druids must pass through some sort of extreme test of endurance. Many initiates die, and the ritual is seldom spoken of. My test was to spend time on the Plane of Ice. My parents opened the portal for me.”

Sonja looked at Lidda. “You asked me before if I was ever cold, and I said I was once. This was the time.” She closed her eyes as if trying to block out an unpleasant vision. “I don’t know if I can describe it to you. There’s no sun, no moon or stars. There’s no natural heat from any source. Fires won’t burn. The wind never ceases howling. Blizzards last years, icebergs are the size of continents. The cold there is simply unimaginable.

“I was there for only a day. When my parents retrieved me I was frozen nearly to death. I have seen the Plane of Ice, my friends, and I have no desire to see it again.”

Hennet’s exhilaration over defeating the ice scorpion was soundly demolished. “What happens if we don’t seal the portal?” he asked.

Sonja answered, “Our plane eventually becomes like the Plane of Ice.”

“Then we must not fail,” Regdar said with utter conviction. He lifted Lidda onto his shoulders. “C’mon, Lidda. Let’s go find your sword.” They left Sonja and Hennet alone.

“Don’t be so crestfallen, Hennet,” Sonja said. “Remember why you became an adventurer.”

“I always try to,” replied the sorcerer. “Still, at moments like this, I wish some other adventurer were doing this instead of me.”

“Hennet,” she asked, “do you love me?”

Hennet was taken aback at the question. Instead of answering, he simply stared.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Sonja. “It doesn’t matter if you love me or if you don’t or if you’re envious of Regdar or he’s envious of you. It doesn’t even matter if I love nature and despise civilization. In the face of this, none of our concerns matter. The worst things we dared to dream are all true, and it’s up to us to set it right.”

“That’s very humbling, Sonja,” said Hennet.

“Is it?” she said softly. “I think rather the opposite is true. The heroes on whose stories you were weaned had no personalities, no personal concerns. They were not people, and neither must we be. If you want to be a hero of legend, the hero who saves not just the girl, but also the world, this is your chance. But if you become a legend, you’ll no longer be Hennet.”

There was no mistaking the towers of ice of which Savanak spoke. They were stark, ivory-white ziggurats, reaching so high above the ground that the party wondered why no one had seen them while the Fell Forest still stood. Perhaps nobody ever cared to get close enough to look. They loomed in the distance like mysterious giants—frost giants, of course—standing, watching, ever silent. There were seven of them in all, each cylindrical and twice as thick as any redwood, placed irregularly and unpredictably across a strangely terraced surface where snow collected on different planes. The impression was of a nightmare painting or the surreal contours of a frozen level of the Hells.