T Lain - Plague of Ice

Lidda and Regdar looked up to see a small trapdoor built into the ceiling. A feeling like a small tremor spread across the room, and the trapdoor shuddered above them. Somewhere off in the darkness, an icicle was shaken lose by the vibrations and crashed to the floor.

“They attacked me!” protested Hennet.

“Only because he attacked usss first!” another mephit shouted.

“Please, please everyone,” Sonja said, lowering the pitch of her voice in hopes that cooler heads might still prevail. “We’re together in this thing. We must cooperate if we’re to accomplish anything. I ask you to release Hennet, and Hennet, you must be calm. Just come over here.”

“He is dangerous!” shouted another mephit. “A killer! You ask us to free him?”

“I ask you to give him a chance to repent for his mistakes,” Sonja said. “He never would have killed you if he knew the truth.”

“What truth?” Hennet shouted at Sonja. “What are these things?”

“With any luck,” the druid told him, “they’re our new friends.”

With that, the mephits relented at last, pulling away from Hennet, dropping his short spear at his feet. He cautiously bent over to recover his weapon and walked over to join the others, dragging the spear’s point on the floor. They kept a collective scowl trained at him, as if to say that they would have their revenge yet.

Again, the trapdoor above them rocked under a draconic assault.

“You killed some of them?” Sonja whispered into Hennet’s ear. “You don’t know what you almost did.”

She turned her attention to the mephits, crowded around a small corner of the floor, all of their unearthly blue eyes staring at their human guests.

“I am Sonja of the North,” she said. “These are Regdar and Lidda. Hennet you’ve met. We came to this city to investigate the origins of the cold that is currently expanding and devastating the countryside. We encountered the dragon up there several times in the past few days.”

Lidda and Regdar exchanged a worried glance behind Sonja’s back. Why was Sonja telling these monsters everything? She said they weren’t evil, but that didn’t make them friends.

“He is called Glaaaze,” explained one of the mephits. They seemed to have no obvious leader. A different mephit spoke almost every time.

“Glaze,” Sonja asked. “Is he the one who did this? Unleashed all this ice?”

The mephits nodded fervently. One of them proclaimed, “With the Ilskynarawin!”

Sonja shook her head at the difficult word. “The… Ilskynarawin?”

“It’s an artifaaact,” said a mephit. “It tears a hole in the worlds. Brings ice onto Prime. This issss what has happened here. It blew us through, and now we can’t go home.”

“It does more than that,” supplied another. “It summons. It summons creatures of ice here. It turns place into cold place.”

All this would explain how Savanak got here, Sonja reasoned. He was probably native to the plane of ice, but a powerful summoning spell uprooted him from his home and placed him here. That would explain the snowbloom, the polar bear, and other oddities of the cold zone. But the mephits’ description also set off a long-lost twinge of memory in the back of Sonja’s mind, something her parents told her when she was a child.

“The Frozen Pendant,” she said. “I think I’ve heard of it, under the name ‘the Frozen Pendant’.”

“What do you know?” asked a mephit.

“Only a story I heard as a child,” Sonja said. “I always thought that my mother invented it, but maybe not. It took place in an ancient kingdom in the middle of a hot desert. I don’t remember many of the details, but there was an evil, foolish chancellor or vizier who presented a piece of jewelry to the sultan. The chancellor opened a box, and when the sultan touched the pendant, it erupted with ice, killing him, the chancellor, and everyone else. The ice went on to devastate the entire kingdom.”

“There’s a halfling story not unlike that,” added Lidda.

“It may or may not have beeeen the Ilskynarawin,” a mephit offered, “but ‘Frozen Pendant’ is a good name.”

The others nodded in agreement, their little heads bobbing up and down aggressively

“Where is this Frozen Pendant now?” Regdar asked.

Every one of the mephits faced the ground. “Down, down, down. Hot down. We cannot go. You may go, not weee.”

“Slow down,” Sonja said. “Tell us about Glaze. Tell us how all of this happened.”

The mephits whispered to each other for a moment in an unintelligible language all their own. Regdar took the opportunity to whisper in Sonja’s ear.

“Are you sure this is smart?” he asked the druid. “How can we know they aren’t deceiving us?”

“I don’t,” Sonja confessed, “but they saved our life. We should at least listen.”

“The dragon Glaaaze,” said one of the mephits suddenly, “lived far to the north, where his kind were being slaughtered by giants of frost.”

“That could be the Endless Glacier,” said Sonja, “where I was born. How do you know?”

“He told us when we arrived. He wanted us to stay in this new snow world. But we want to go back home.”

“Why can’t you just walk through the rift again?” asked Regdar.

The mephits talked to each other in their own language, almost as if they were deciding on the proper response. “Wiiinds!” one shouted. “We get blown back through.”

“You refused to cooperate with Glaze?” asked Lidda.

“And he killllled some of us.”

“We took refuge in the towers…”

“… where Glaaaaze cannot reach us.”

It was unsettling the way the mephits began and ended one another’s statements, sometimes switching speakers two or three times per sentence.

“He is young but smart, for one of they, one whiiiite,” other mephits said. “He did not want to fight giants. So he left.”

“He wanted to find new place, place free of giants.”

“He traveled from snow-capped mountain…”

“… to snow-capped mountain. For a while…”

“… he finds peace, but older, more…”

“… aggrrrressive whites live…”

“… there already and force him…”

“… out.”

“But he heard about Ilyskynar… Frozen Pendant. He heard it here, in lost city in forest near mountains…”

“… he went seeking. Many yeeears he search forests. Find nothing.”

“Then he finds this city, in this forrrrrest. He searched city…”

“… breakedthrough to this underground. Open…”

“… doors to towers, searched towers. Maked lair…”

“… in one tower, broken…”

“… open at top.”

The mephit extended a wing to one of the cylinders in the distance, indicating the bottom of one of the great towers. A tremendous pile of broken wood was heaped against the door and welded together with ice, meant to keep the dragon out. Sonja assumed this was the work of the mephits’ icy breath—not as strong as that of a white dragon or a winter wolf but still potent.

“And then,” a new mephit took the dialogue, “heeee found a stairway…”

“… down, down, down.”

“He follow. Into hot place. Hot…”

“… place under towers.”

“Magically heated,” reasoned Hennet. “Too hot for you to go there yourselves?”

The ice mephits shuddered at the thought. “Boil, sizzle, boil!”

“You mean,” said Sonja, “that Glaze found the Frozen Pendant somewhere beneath this underground mall. When he activated it, the rift opened, and you were blown through along with the elemental ice.”

The mephits nodded together.

“Earlier,” said Lidda, “we encountered a creature that looked like a giant scorpion, only it was made of ice. How did it get here?”