Yaldabaoth lifted its head from where it lay on the ground by Teagan’s feet, baring teeth as long as daggers, all the flesh of its muzzle rolling back until it was nothing but bone and muscle as a growl shook the trees around them. Callum held up his hands, as Teagan hissed a command to the creature in its hideous tongue. After a moment of glaring, the creature settled and all there suppressed a shudder. Teagan looked at Callum, her eyes imploring him not to argue.
‘This is a job we can’t back out of, Callum. If we were going to, we’d have had to when we were still in Russenholde.’
The two mercenaries shared a long look, before finally, the strong man placed his head down in one hand, raising the other in a supplicating shrug.
‘What do we do then? How do we handle this one?’
Teagan sat back, looking up. The stars were clear tonight. Idly, she began marking the constellations, like her father had taught her. It let her mind drift over the problem, circle it like the hunters and animals on show up there.
‘We scare them. Best case scenario, we never have to fight them at all. You know the deal the boss lady gave us. She does as we say, we play nice. We just have to come in with enough shock and awe that she doesn’t even consider there’s another option. Make ourselves as big and scary as possible, you know, like we’re scaring off a bear…’ She trailed off, thoughts running rampant, and as they did, a small chuckle bubbled up to her lips.
‘Does that mean we’re getting “scary Teagan” again?’ Lukas asked with a melodramatic sigh, after the silence had hung for several moments.
Teagan chuckled again. ‘Sure as the moon rises, Lukas. Sure as the moon rises.’
Their rest did not last as long as they would have liked. If any of the three had had their way, the trio likely would have slept all through to the next afternoon. Sadly, all three were awoken just after the sun had begun its ascent, not that they could see it. The sky – no, the world – was grey. Fog and snow blocked the view of what lay just beyond their camp.
Thelonious was the first to be awakened, the cold picking at his bones until it roused him from his slumber. He awoke to find himself half buried in snow already, more falling with a ferocity that could mean only one thing.
Thelonious pulled himself free from the snow and shook the girl’s tent frantically.
‘Blizzard!’ he yelled over the roaring wind. ‘We need to find shelter!’
If the blizzard continued, that tent would be no protection for the girls, to say nothing for him and Alma. The horse was already panicking, pulling at her reins where they were tied to a nearby tree. While the girls extracted themselves from the tent one after the other, Thelonious got the horse free, holding tight to her reins so she wouldn’t run off.
‘Head inland!’ Amberly shouted, holding her cloak tightly around herself as Syline slipped out of the tent behind her, wrapping Corax in her scarf so the little raven wouldn’t freeze. Syline was still barely awake, stumbling to Thelonious’s side. With that, the trio set off with Amberly leading the way, a destination seemingly in mind. Thelonious followed after her, dragging his fearful horse, and Syline stayed right behind him, clutching his back to have him act as a windbreak for her. They struggled on; the wind was too great for them to exchange any words. Syline conjured forth a pair of magical lights, one for her and Thelonious, one for Amberly, so the trio wouldn’t lose each other in the grey, endless fog.
The journey only lasted ten minutes or so, but to the trio, it felt like an eternity. Each step was difficult and each breath froze their lungs more than the one before and made the one to follow even more of a trial. Amberly slowly led the others around a great hill that took up the centre of the island. On the other side of it, only found by Amberly guiding herself with a hand along the rocks, was an opening, just large enough for two people to move abreast. In the fog, she could have easily walked by it ten times over, and for all they knew, she had.
‘Come on!’ she yelled to them, disappearing into the dark of the cave as it turned away, deep enough for her to escape the wind and chill for whatever lay inside. Thelonious sent Syline running after their newfound friend before he set to guiding the fearful horse in through the thin opening. It took a lot of assurances and less than gentle encouragement, but he managed to get himself and his beloved steed out of the cold to stand with the girls in this hidden sanctum.
Past the small entrance way, they now stood in a fairly large, oval shaped cave. It dipped off towards the end, going down in a wider opening leading deeper beneath the dirt. The magical light provided by Syline didn’t go far enough to show what lay beyond, but it lit the cave in warm, orange hues, making it seem positively cosy in comparison to what they had just escaped.
As the trio dusted the snow off themselves, Corax squawked and flapped his way free from Syline’s scarf to roost on her shoulder. Alma decided this was all too much stress for this early and lay down, the horse’s breath coming in great shuddering billows through its nostrils.
‘How did you know about this place?’ Syline asked Amberly, looking back and forth.
She stretched herself out with a little yawn – she had to admit, she felt better than she had in days, despite their rude awakening. She’d woken briefly, and considered striking up a conversation, but both girls mostly just wanted to sleep and had woken up tucked in against each other for warmth when Thelonious had come shaking the tent. She hadn’t felt that jolt of fear from Amberly being close, that she did even with Thelonious.
‘When we first arrived on this island, I did a little bit of exploring while Thelonious set up camp. I get cold feet sitting around in a new place. I spotted the entrance, thought a bear might be better than a blizzard. At least we can stab a bear.’ Amberly sighed and looked outside. The blizzard raged on, snow building up before the cave’s entrance. If it kept going like that, they’d be snowed in, in no time.
‘Good thing you did,’ Thelonious put in, brushing snow off Alma’s coat. ‘We’re going to be stuck here until the blizzard clears up. We should probably explore deeper in, make sure there aren’t bears or anything worse.’
‘What could be worse than bears on an island like this? Surely, all the monsters were already killed by Syline’s father,’ Amberly said, getting a grin from Syline.
Syline snickered. ‘Hornbears?’
‘Icebears?’ Amberly added, grinning.
‘Dire bears?’ Syline continued.
Thelonious chuckled gently as he drew his sword out of its harness on Alma’s saddle. ‘Or any other kind of “something”-bear.’
Amberly looked down at herself. All she had were the white robes. No belongings had been on the pyre with her, of course.
‘I’ll need a weapon unless you two want me to stay back here with the horse and – no offence to Alma, here – but I think you two are probably better at conversation.’
Syline knew that Amberly was – well, had been – a member of the Morning’s Fury. Chances were, out of the three of them, she might be the best swordsman. It would probably be a pretty close contest, though. Thelonious was pretty damn impressive.
‘Syline, do you want to give her something? You’ve got an axe and that sword on your belt.’
Syline perked up a bit. She hadn’t drawn her sword since she’d killed that man just outside of Russenholde and she didn’t really want to, either. Whilst the axe had saved her from a man who she felt was more evil than anything she had faced thus far, the sword. She could only think of that man’s eyes. But it was her family sword, and yet. She silenced her endless internal back and forth with herself by removing her sword belt and offering it to Amberly.
‘I’ll want it back eventually, alright, Miss Penzare?’
‘I’ll take good care of it, Syline. I’ll take it as an honour that a Petranski is giving me her sword,’ Amberly said with a little smile, buckling the belt around her waist.
‘Amberly, I don’t suppose you still have any of that knee scuffer magic?’ Thelonious asked, standing up from his horse and starting to walk down towards the slope. The magical light followed him, just above his left shoulder. He already liked it. He could see better in the dark than most, but not perfectly; having a little floating ball of light freeing up his hands from a torch was a valuable thing.
‘No, no I don’t.’ An agonised sigh left her, her words coming choked. ‘Soel has left me, just like the church.’
‘What did you really do, anyway? We’ve caught the basics, but what’s the full story?’ Syline asked, curious.
Thelonious quickly glanced her way but shrugged and kept walking, leaving something unsaid. They descended into the depths once Syline fetched her staff from Alma’s saddlebags. Alma was content to stay behind and the horse merely watched them as they left. Syline had tried to get Corax to stay with the mare, but each time she put him down, she would find the raven hopping after her again only a few moments later. Eventually, she relented and the raven was once more happily roosting in her robes, which she’d wrapped around her new dress rather than take the time to get changed. Through their mental connection, she received feelings of love and affection from her familiar, warming her heart, even if the blizzard still left the rest of her frozen.
‘I’m an orphan,’ Amberly began. ‘My family were travelling here from the east. Past Dawnsteel. My mother was a tundra elf, my father human. I can’t,’ she shrugged, ‘I was very young, I can’t really remember our home. I do remember a woodfire, a bearskin rug, my mother’s smile watching some kind of festival, that’s it really. I can’t even remember their names, but I was a child, I knew them as my mam and dad.’ She let out a hollow chuckle. ‘I wonder what they’d think of the turns my life has taken.’