T Lain - Plague of Ice

Sonja bolted from the tower in a great burst of speed. Her spell of concealment faded as she raced right past Glaze. Immediately the dragon was after her as she charged toward the rift, but she had intentionally run to his right, knowing the beast would have a harder time turning away from his injured side. She ran and ran, and when she was sure she had enough distance between herself and Glaze she stopped and whirled to launch her spell.

As she did, a well-placed mephit exhaled a blast of ice along the back of her head and neck. Its breath would have constituted little more than a nuisance in another circumstance, but the unexpected assault broke the druid’s concentration and scuttled her spell. Lightning flashed down from the storm but without Sonja’s direction. It struck randomly, disintegrating an unfortunate mephit and melting the ice within a ten-foot radius. A splash of steaming water struck the mephit that attacked Sonja and instantly dissolved its wings and half its body. The creature flopped to the ground where it squealed in agony until the warm liquid melted it completely.

Undeterred, Glaze bounded headfirst into Sonja, knocking her backward into the snow. She reached for her cudgel to strike back, but the dragon was quicker. He unleashed the full force of his powerful breath onto her. Her hand jutted forward in an instinctive but useless act of self defense. The dragon’s breath buffeted her with an awesome mix of freezing air, gale-force wind, and icy magic. She was wrapped in a cocoon of cold, unable to breathe or see. Searing waves of cold pierced the core of her being. When she tried to scream, her throat filled with ice. She tried to struggle, but ice bound her limbs in place. A white field wrapped across her eyes, burned her face, shut her off from the world.

Exalting, Glaze moved in for the kill. Mephits flanked him, several alighting on the dragon’s back or hovering next to his shoulders, all of them hissing in glee at the ice druid’s impending death.

Across the field, still standing guard before the rift, Hennet looked at Lidda, Lidda looked at Regdar, and Regdar looked at Hennet. Each sought some sort of encouragement or dissuasion. They needed confirmation that the plan could be changed, that they had to fight for everyone’s life. Most of all, they had to agree that letting Sonja die that way would serve no higher purpose.

Abandoning their positions at the rift might be wrong, but no matter the consequences, it was what they needed to do.

As one they sprang across the field toward Glaze and Sonja. Hennet launched a magic missile, the last he had prepared, and it struck the dragon’s side. Glaze turned away from Sonja to face the new threat instead. The mephits flew away and winged their way toward the rift, cackling delightedly to each other. This had been their hope all along. But none of the advancing heroes turned back to watch the mephits vanish through the undefended rift into the Plane of Ice.

Glaze sucked in a mighty breath, but then his targets scattered, leaving the monster unsure where to attack. Regdar veered to the right, Hennet to the left, and Lidda kept coming straight on. Confounded, Glaze lunged toward the smallest foe, but the halfling dived into the snow. She slid under the dragon and slashed her sword upward as she went, drawing blood from Glaze’s tender underbelly. Hennet drove his spear through the dragon’s already-damaged wing and sliced with it, and Regdar slashed at the scaly, flailing tail.

The dragon snarled, clawed, twisted, and roared, railing against his assailants. Lidda sank her sword deeper into Glaze’s belly. Hennet stabbed his spear into the side of the dragon’s neck, bringing a steady stream of blood that pulsed like a tiny geyser. Shocked and howling with pain, Glaze made a last attempt to escape. Jumping, whirling, spinning uncertainly, he spilled dragon blood across the white field until the ground was cloaked like a red carpet.

Recovering his wits at last, Glaze gathered his limbs beneath him and set himself to bound free of his attackers. In the moment when the dragon was coiled and motionless, Regdar’s greatsword stabbed into his flank just ahead of Glaze’s right haunch. The blade sliced forward through flesh and ribs until entrails tumbled free. The dragon roared, firing a blast of icy power straight up into the sky then down into the ground with such force that the frozen paving stones buckled. His attackers scrambled away from the flailing limbs. Thrashing and writhing, Glaze raged against the pain until the beast finally lay still. Within moments, frost coated the gory heap.

Hennet, Regdar, and Lidda didn’t spare a minute on the spectacle of the dead dragon. When they turned to look at Sonja, they saw her emerge from the cocoon of ice. She was transformed, no longer a frail human in a hostile environment but master of the element glorying in its strength. Her pale cheeks were streaked with lines of fiery red. She clutched her cudgel in a fist rimed with ice, and glittering crystals scattered from her blonde hair, to be carried on the wind toward the yawning rift.

They faced her almost sheepishly, having violated her orders to guard the rift no matter what, but there was neither disappointment nor blame in her voice, only determination.

“None of you must follow me now,” she said. Her voice rang with icy, otherworldly detachment. “None of you could survive where I must go. This time, your own lives depend on you obeying my command.”

With that, she turned toward the rift. Her white robes fluttered and crackled like ice as she ran and jumped. A white flash outlined the invisible rift, and she was gone.

For long moments they stood gazing at the spot of air where she disappeared. Eventually Regdar said, “We must still guard the rift. If any of the mephits find the pendant, they’ll try to come back through. It’s up to us to kill them before they can do any more damage.”

Lidda agreed, but Hennet said nothing. He was lost in his own thoughts.

“Hennet?” Lidda asked, tugging at his leg.

The sorcerer looked down on the halfling and put his hand on her head.

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

Hennet turned to Regdar, meeting his eyes for the first time since their feud in the treasure room, and said, “I have to know.”

At that, he too rushed through the rift, vanishing into the cold oblivion.

“Hennet, don’t!” Lidda shouted but too late. She clutched Regdar’s hand. “Regdar, we have to go after him. He’ll die in there!”

Regdar shook his head. His first instinct was to say, “Some of us have to be smart,” but he thought of Naull and what he would have done, months ago in the City of Fire, if a portal had existed linking him to her. With that memory in mind, he gauged his words more carefully. Instead, he said, “Hennet made his own choice, as surely as Sonja has.”

All they could do was wait.

A world of white.

So it seemed to Hennet, as if the entire world had faded away and been replaced with only whiteness. As a little boy it had always bothered him, that moment of winter when the sky and the land lined up in color so precisely that the horizon could not be identified, so that ground and air ceased to be separate entities but merged and transformed into a vast gray-white waste. This place, the unloved pocket of the multiverse Sonja called the Elemental Plane of Ice, was a thousand times worse.

The ground beneath his feet was rock solid but white. Hennet wondered if there was any real surface land on this plane at all or only ice on ice. The air was filled with tiny, white particles, something akin to snowflakes but more jagged and hostile. To Hennet’s horror, they weren’t falling. They hovered in the air, perfectly still and stable, kept in place by forces Hennet could not even guess at. As he waved his hand through the air, they melted away from the heat brought by proximity to his flesh. Above, he could see through this forest of ice an indifferent, bluish glow which seemed to emanate from all parts of an apparently sunless sky. This was all he could see. His vision was so impaired by the impenetrable weather that he could not see Sonja, the ice mephits, or the rift through which he just came.