T Lain - Plague of Ice

“What are you?” the druid asked. “Can we see you?”

“I have a light heeeere. Don’t be afraid. No fire! No fire.”

A magical torch set in a knot on the wall flared into light. Lidda, Regdar, and Sonja found themselves staring into the leering, red face of a great horned creature, its mouth wide open revealing dozens of white teeth. For an instant they thought this mouth was doing the talking, but it was an intricate carving set into the slate-gray wall of the chamber. Its long, thin arms ended in jagged claws, and a set of spines ran along its back and onto the tail that encircled the entire room, where a thin, circular stairway snaked up and down the tower.

The creature depicted in the carving was a tarrasque, the most fearsome monster of legend, but another, very real monster was in the room as well. Crouched on the floor was a thin, ethereal being that was only slightly taller than Lidda. It certainly wasn’t any halfling. Its skin was the chill blue of a frozen ocean, and two leathery wings were folded behind it. Two tiny horns topped its hairless head. Its nose was large and angled, and saurian ridges traced along its icy limbs.

Lidda was shocked by the demonic appearance of this being. Was it some sort of imp or quasit, she wondered? Sonja knew better. “You’re an ice mephit,” she said. “Yeess,” it answered, giving the vowel a proud trill, “a mephit.” And it offered a little bow.

“A mephit,” said Regdar. “What on earth is a mephit?”

“A creature born of the elemental ice,” explained Sonja. “Like an elemental, only more concrete in form.” She turned to the little creature. “You’re from the Plane of Ice, are you not?”

The mephit nodded. “The othersssss come with your friend.” The mephit’s wings suddenly unfurled behind its shoulders but never flapped as it levitated a few feet off the ground. It rose to eye level with Sonja and studied her face intently. “Yooou are warm and yet you are cold. You are not like the others.”

Sonja didn’t appear uncomfortable talking to this bizarre creature hovering inches from her face.

“I am a druid of ice,” she told it. “I used to encounter your kind on the Endless Glacier where I grew up.”

The mephit cocked its head in unfamiliarity. “Endless… Glacier? I know it not.”

“I’m not surprised,” Sonja said. “You’re no longer on the Plane of Ice.”

The creature grumbled to itself. “Thiiiis we know. The great winds blew us through the hole in the planes. We are stuck now. You must help us.”

Regdar and Lidda didn’t know what to say as they observed this exchange.

“Sonja,” Regdar said, eyeing the mephit suspiciously, “are these creatures evil?”

“Neither evil nor good, in my experience,” Sonja said, some annoyance apparent in her voice at being asked such a question in the creature’s presence. “They did not aid the frost giants, nor my parents. They lived alone in secret and made alliances with no creature.” She turned her attention back to the mephit. “Now you want us to help you?”

“Times are strange,” the mephit said. It hovered back to the ground and let out a piercing squeal. Somewhere down in the dark, another squeal echoed.

“Your friend is below with the otherrssss,” the little creature said. “We must go down.” It unfolded a single wing to indicate the stairway leading down. “There all we will explain.”

“What do we do, Sonja?” asked Lidda.

“That’s easy,” said the druid, removing the magical, smokeless, heatless torch from the wall. “We go down.”

She took a step or two down then hesitated as she peered into the blackness. Her knees felt suddenly weak, and she almost dropped the torch. Regdar grasped her arm in support, but she shook him off. She knew she needed to be strong and to lead, no matter how unsettled she was in these close quarters.

The others followed Sonja down the stairway, which wound straight down some twenty feet before stopping at an archway. The opening led to a vast, open area beneath the frozen city. Slender pillars supported the ceiling, and massive, circular walls marked the locations of the towers above, like great roots extending into the earth.

“Yondalla above,” said Lidda as she looked around the room. “Whoever built this place didn’t do anything small, did they?”

The incredible depiction of a tarrasque was nothing compared to the mural that lined the outside of the cylinder from which they emerged. Beasts of legend frolicked in gardens and infernal flames. Griffins floated through the heavens and serpents stalked the oceanic depths. Titans battled fiends, heroes confronted dragons, and set between them were arcane glyphs and writings in ancient languages. No vault any of them had seen contained such art, nor any king’s palace. The walls of their cylinder were only the beginning. Along the floor and the other cylinders they could see similar images, all coated with a layer of clear ice that clung thickly to the walls and distorted the images through its ripples.

The ice had taken its toll down here, too. The floors were slick and frozen, and portions had warped and heaved up under the cold. Huge icicles hung precariously from the roof like the stalactites of a cave, threatening to fall at any moment. The magical, white torchlight struck the ice and sent strange reflections all along the walls and floor, and a tiny army of reflections followed along as they walked.

The occasional decayed desk or bare table stood next to the cylinders, some of them collapsed and broken. The mall looked unused for centuries. The impression was of a vast storehouse, fairground, museum, dance hall, or dining hall, an all-purpose subterranean meeting ground for the wizards who lived in the long-neglected towers above. To Sonja, Regdar, and Lidda, this place seemed like a blow to the heart, not only for its size and intricacy but also its emptiness. It felt every inch as desolate as the snowy, white world through which they’d just come.

This wasn’t an expanse of nature, free of man. It was a relic of man’s faded glory. It was a tomb.

Their mephit escort had little patience for the newcomers’ awed stares. It let out another high-pitched squeal, and another replied from across the cavernous hall from the dark. The sound grew in echoes until it had the force of a jungle cat’s roar.

“Your friend should be in that direction,” the mephit explained. As they crossed the marble floor, keeping their footing carefully on the slick ice, their every footfall echoed throughout the hall.

Hennet was easy to find. He was backed against one of the cylinders, using his short spear to hold at bay a whole colony of ice mephits. There were about a dozen of the creatures. All of them looked almost exactly like the first, with only small deviations of size and face to tell them apart. The art on the cylinder depicted a stark starfield. Hennet and the mephits seemed to be floating together in a void. With the torch brought close, Hennet could finally get a good look at the things surrounding him.

“Hennet!” Sonja shouted. “Is that any way to greet our hosts?” Her voice reverberated throughout the mall.

The sorcerer turned to face Sonja. At that moment four or five of the mephits leaped into the air, swiftly grasping the shaft of his spear and ripping it from his hands. These mephits flew off with it while the others surrounded Hennet, hovering mere inches from his face, as if daring him to make any move. The mephit who greeted Sonja, Regdar, and Lidda flew over to join them and was soon indistinguishable from the rest.

“Please!” yelled Sonja. “We have an opportunity here. Let’s not spoil it!”

“He killed three of ours already,” whined one of the mephits. “We saaaaved him, and he repays with death!”