Cold. Unreasonably, freezingly cold. Which I assumed meant one thing. She had decided to return from wherever she had been for the past few days, and decided that camp would be a perfect place to release... the spirits.
I decided that I simply did not have the energy to lecture her about responsibility. Mostly because I had accepted that she was a lost cause and I had better usages for my breath than speaking to her.
I dragged my body out of my tent, my feet starting to go numb from the ridiculous cold.
The camp was a ghost town of frost. A thin sheet of ice coated the canvas of my sleeping quarters, and the embers of last night's fire had been suffocated under a neat, aggressively geometric pile of blue-white sleet. At the center of it all, sitting cross-legged on a boulder like she owned the very concept of winter, was Isra.
She was draped in layers of pale, translucent silk that fluttered without a breeze, her pointed ears twitching slightly as a cluster of glowing, multi-eyed phantom wisps orbited her head like a tiny, aggressive solar system.
She didn't look up when I stumbled out. She just reached out a pale finger, poked one of the wisps, and let out a soft, melancholic sigh that somehow dropped the ambient temperature another five degrees.
'You're killing the rations,' I muttered, rubbing my hands together to desperately coax some friction back into them. 'The frost spirits are eating the moisture out of the dried meat. If the jerky turns to powder again, Kaelis is going to try to eat me out of frustration.'
Isra finally blinked, turning her head with agonizing slowness. Her pupils—solid pools of pale, luminous silver—locked onto mine.
'The Northwind weeps today, Aren,' she said, her voice sounding like ice cracking over a deep lake—or rather, three different versions of her voice speaking slightly out of sync, a lovely habit she had whenever she spent too long communing with the dead. 'The spirits of the tundra are mourning. They say the path ahead is choked with red.'
'The path ahead is choked with mud and Kaelis's snoring,' I corrected, shuffling past her to find the kettle. 'And if you don't call your little floating lanterns back, my boots are going to snap off my ankles.'
She tilted her head, the cluster of ghostly eyes blinking in unison. A faint, ethereal frown touched her lips. "You smell... different today, Aren. Like old paper and stale dust. Where have you been?"
I paused, my hand hovering over the frozen kettle.
Where had I been?
For a briefest fraction of a second, the camp-fire smoke didn't rise. Instead, it hung suspended, jagged and gray, like rough road.
A phantom scent of antiseptic and cold steel tickled the back of my throat—so out of place amid the pine needles and mountain chill that it made my teeth ache.
I blinked hard, shaking the strange fog from my head. "I was right here, Isra. Knocking Kaelis upside the head for stealing my share of the salt pork yesterday."
Isra stared at me a moment longer, her silver eyes narrowing until they were thin, crystalline slits. Then, slowly, the oppressive cold receded, the frost melting from my boots in a sudden hiss of damp steam.
"Yeah. I hope so," she whispered softly, so low I almost missed it over the crackle of the thawing wood. "I really do."
"What's wrong? I've learnt from enough experience that, infuriatingly enough, I have to decode your cryptic nonsense because it usually ends up being important." I almost laughed, although it would be significantly funnier if the last time I'd ignored her hadn't almost ended in the unwilling divorce of my head and body.
"Lay off me, my leg aches for some reason." I asserted, trying to get her to leave me alone so I could go back to my ever-so-tiring job of doing nothing.
She stepped closer. Slowly enough where it looked like she could stop and drop the matter at any point, just fast enough that I knew she wouldn't.
"Your leg... aches?" She questioned, the voices gaining a solidarity and condensing into one.
"You've never complained about aching before. Either that you just don't ache, or that you don't like to speak about it, either way, you've never complained about it before." She pushed her face closer to mine, forcing me to defensively take a step back.
"What are you talking about?" I turned my face away, the eye contact between us feeling a bit too much at this point.
"Why would your leg ache? You've been resting here for the past few days."
"No clue. But it does. So go away."
She leaned closer one more time, to the point where I could smell the sharp, clean scent of crushed pine needles and biting frost.
She didn't back off. Instead, her silver eyes narrowed further, the multi-eyed wisps orbiting her head suddenly freezing mid-air.
"Tired? Really?" Isra murmured, her triple-layered voice dropping to a low, resonant hum that vibrated straight through my collarbones. "Let's leave it at that, shall we?"
I swallowed hard, suddenly intensely aware of how close she was, and more importantly, how terrifyingly ominous an elf who hangs out with spirits could actually be.
After a second, I swatted the air dismissively.
"You do know I can see spirits, right? Asking them to sneak up and prod me was, firstly, rude, and secondly, never going to work."
She didn't respond. I don't even think she registered what I said. Instead, her silver eyes were locked onto the empty space right in front of my chest—searching, probing, waiting to catch whatever she thought was hiding there.
I waited for her to point out a phantom, or warn me about a lingering hex from a skirmish three days ago.
But the seconds dragged on. Her brows drew together, a flicker of genuine confusion crossing her face. She looked down at me the way a scholar looks at a text that has completely unspooled their life's work.
"Anything wrong?"
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
She didn't even acknowledge that I had spoken.
"Yeah... yeah. My fault, sorry," she murmured after another few beats, sounding like she was answering a completely different conversation. Her voice was uncharacteristically flat, the confidence she'd just had vanishing entirely as she took a slow step back.
I frowned, genuinely unsettled now. "Where's Isra, and what did you do with her?" I tried to lighten the tension with a joke, which obviously didn't land. "Since when did you apologise."
It's not like she never apologised because she was arrogant. She never apologised because she never needed to; she was never wrong.
Instead of responding, she simply turned away, walking in the direction of her tent, her footfalls eerily silent.
I watched her go, a lingering sense of unease scratching at the back of my ribs.
Normally, Isra leaving an argument meant she had decided you weren't worth the air required to curse you. Walking away because she was confused? That was a territory map uncharted.
I rubbed my aching leg, staring down at the frozen kettle. The frost on it was already creeping back, knitting itself together in intricate, needle-sharp patterns.
Before I could puzzle it out any further, the air to my left compressed.
There was no sound of approaching footsteps—only a sudden, violent displacement of wind that violently whipped my hair across my face and carried the sharp, coppery scent of a predator clearing its throat.
And then nothing.
The pressure in the atmosphere spiked. It wasn't the creeping, delicate frost of Isra's magic, but a raw, physical concussive wave that made my teeth ache.
From the periphery of my vision, a heavy shadow tore through the canvas flaps of a nearby supply tent. Kaelis was already mid-rotation, her body coiled like a taut spring of pure, predatory muscle. Her right leg whipped horizontally out of the blind spot, aimed straight for the side of my head with enough rotational kinetic force to be considered a geological event.
The displacement alone terrified me. The air screamed as her shin sheared through it, creating a visible, warping ripple in the light.
There was no time to duck. No time to raise a guard.
"Rime."
Isra didn't even turn around.
The single word fell from her lips like a drop of water hitting a frozen pane.
BOOM.
And the earth, already slightly deformed from our... 'adventures', erupted upwards.
With a sound like a glacier calving into a dark ocean, a jagged, impossibly dense wall of blue-white ice vaulted straight out of the permafrost, rising dozens of meters into the grey sky in less than a heartbeat.
Kaelis's kick struck the barrier dead center.
The impact drove her shin deep into the thick, freezing mass with a deafening groan of compressed frost. A shockwave exploded outward in a 360-degree ring, tearing up the grass, flattening the nearby tents, and throwing a blinding blizzard of ice dust across the entire camp. The concussive backlash rattled my ribs, stealing the breath straight from my lungs and slamming me backward into the dirt.
When the dust finally settled, Kaelis was crouched against the towering, multi-meter-thick monolith, her orange tail bristling stiff behind her. She shook her right leg with a grimace, staring at the crater her shin had carved. The impact had driven feet-first into the ice, hollowing out a massive dent and sending a web of deep, groaning fractures spiderwebbing through the core of the glacier—coming dangerously close to punching all the way through to the other side, but not close enough
"Damn it, bird-brain," Kaelis growled, shaking out her leg with a sharp hiss of pain, her golden eyes flashing with a mix of fury and begrudged respect. "You're getting entirely too fast with that parlour trick."
Isra stood a few paces away, her back still turned, her pale silk robes fluttering gently in the frigid downdraft created by her own magic. She didn't look back at Kaelis. She didn't look at the massive wall of ice looming over us like a frozen wave.
Her silver eyes remained fixed on the ground ahead of her, staring into nothing.
I stayed flat on my back in the dirt, staring up at the towering wall of ice blocking out the grey morning sun. My leg still throbbed with that dull, phantom ache.
Kaelis straightened up, wincing slightly as she rotated her bruised ankle. "Next time, give a warning before you summon the entire fucking North Pole. Some of us actually like our circulation."
Isra didn't answer. She didn't even twitch an ear. She simply raised a pale hand, her fingers curling inward with lazy precision, and the massive, towering glacier dissolved. It didn't melt; it simply un-manifested, the blue-white ice turning into a cascading waterfall of glittering mist that vanished into the damp morning air before it even touched the mud.
She walked past us toward her tent, her steps completely silent, her silver eyes still glazed with that unsettling, vacant stare.
"What's her problem?" Kaelis muttered, crossing her arms and eyeing the empty space where the ice wall had just been. "Staring at ghosts again, probably. Gods, I hate camping near old battlefields. It makes everyone twitchy."
"Yeah," I rasped, finally pushing myself up from the dirt and brushing a layer of frost and pulverized ice from my knees. "Twitchy."
I looked down at my right leg. The dull, throbbing ache was still there, sitting right beneath the skin like a bruised knot. It didn't feel like a muscle strain from a hard march. It felt awkward. A physical awkwardness in the joints.
It was a stupid thought. I brushed it aside, forcing my breathing to steady.
"You okay, boss?" Kaelis glanced over, her golden eyes narrowing slightly with the uncanny, predatory intuition beastfolk were cursed with. "You look... pale. Pale even for a human who hasn't seen the sun in days. Seriously, go outside more."
"I'm fine, Kaelis," I snapped, perhaps a fraction too sharply, turning away to find my kettle before she could start sniffing around for weaknesses. "Just didn't sleep well. The dead won't stop complaining about the weather."