After a couple of days flying blind at a crawling pace for Elisime, Christian finally drops his barrier.

  The bridge’s front window has been coated in a thin, creeping layer of frost for a few hours despite the environmental control measures in place to prevent it, and as the golden veil falls, the reason becomes apparent. Stretching out before them is a rolling sea of white, with snow and ice-capped rocks forming steep valleys between peaks, swept by fierce, frigid winds.

  “Woah,” Tom mutters in awe. “I never thought I’d get to see real snow.”

  “Have you ever seen any?” Dante questions without tearing his eyes away from the frozen expanse.

  “Yeah. The Poinsettia mansion in Chroni’s been covered in the stuff for weeks now. It’s really pretty, and their gardens are open for visitors most days.”

  “Tsk, show-offs,” Dante grumbles, circulating his mana and emanating warmth.

  Emily tunes their conversation out, checking her sensors’ readings and scanning the mountain before them for signs of life. She isn’t surprised by the lack of ships surrounding them, since she’s been watching the fleet thin through her readings, but she does raise a brow at Christian’s ship keeping pace with them, climbing up through the thinning air. She can sense a thin layer of mana wrapping it, using twisting currents of wind to trap the sparse heat within.

  “Clever,” Emily muses, pushing herself out of her seat as they approach the nearby peak. “I’m going to go have a little chat with our guide before we can truly explore. There’s something I need to confirm.”

  Her children move to follow while the others wave her off, so Emily wraps them in mana before Blinking outside. Ice washes over them the moment they’re exposed to the elements, but none of them flinch. Silica’s body-temperature instantly thaws any frost that tries to cling to her, while Emily and Mensacus circulate ice-tinted mana, numbing themselves to the cold bite.

  They fly towards the open hatch at the rear of the ship ahead of them on a wave of solid air, and touch down on the metal a few metres from their disgruntled host.

  “Miss Coldstone.” Christian nods, schooling his expression into a dead stare.

  “Mr Belmont,” Emily replies in kind, matching his tone. “Now that we’re here, I’d like to clarify a few of the terms of our agreement.”

  “Oh? What didn’t we make clear enough for you?”

  “Nothing too big, it’s just, my permission to explore within the boundary of the mountain range didn’t have any stipulations other than limited crystal excavation, correct?”

  “That’s right. As long as you stay on the mountains, if you find any untouched crystal deposits, you can take up to fifty kilograms worth.”

  “Perfect.” She smiles, watching the mages in front of her shiver before she turns her back and sends a flood of instructions to her army.

  Elisime’s cargo hatches open, and a flock of mechanical birds takes flight with several Cutters escorting them. Emily feels a hostile gaze drilling into the back of her head but doesn’t turn back as she releases a stream of mana, weaving a spell below her ship with a blend of lightning and metal. Her mechanical soldiers step out of the ship one by one, their falls slowing, within the boundary of her spell, to a controlled descent towards the mountainside.

  “You brought your army?” Christian growls before she can step off his ship.

  Emily glances back over her shoulder, meeting his eyes with charge burning in hers.

  “You never said not to.”

  ***

  As her legion spreads out to cover more ground, and Elisime flies to the centre of the range, Emily retrieves her friends and takes them down to the northernmost mountain’s peak.

  “It’s freezing out here,” Dante grumbles, as they touch down on the snow, quickly sinking as the mana leaking from his skin starts to melt his footing.

  “You didn’t have to come,” Tom points out, pulling a set of heated robes Emily has enchanted for him tighter around his chest.

  “It’d be boring staying behind.”

  “He’s hiding from his dad,” Enzo cuts in, earning an exaggerated, betrayed look from his friend.

  “What are we here looking for?” Ivor signs, catching Emily and Pod’s attention. “Won’t your soldiers cover more ground than us?”

  “They will.” She nods, crouching down and sticking her metal arm into the snow, clearing the white layer away to take a sample from the permafrost beneath. “But none of their detection equipment is as acute as my magical senses and instincts. And, while most of the half-golem droids bear magical signatures, they’re noticeably inorganic. Anything that reacts to living beings will pay them no heed.”

  “So, we’re here to draw out anything that wants to eat us?” Pod questions with a fearless grin.

  “It’s like the Salvia expedition all over again,” Enzo mutters, shaking his head ruefully and drawing the young mechanic’s gaze.

  “What happened on the Salvia expedition?”

  Emily looks up from the drill extending into the ground from her palm with a quirked brow.

  “Don’t look at me like that, you weren’t exactly subtle,” Enzo says, rolling his eyes.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “I’m not disagreeing, I’d just quite like to know what exactly you’re referring to.”

  “Really? The wendigo! You didn’t even try moving until it had killed five of us. You just… watched. If I didn’t know you better, I would have thought you froze. But hell, you looked relieved when it ripped Cormac’s head off. I’m guessing that’s when you worked out how to beat it, right?”

  He shivers at the memory and Emily blinks in surprise.

  I didn’t even consider how that would have looked for them. I rewound so many times that day, I got sloppy.

  “Yeah.” She nods. “It was so fast I didn’t want to draw its attention till I’d read its movements enough to predict them.”

  ***

  Their small party treks south-east, leaving one peak and heading for the next. They slide down frozen waterfalls on thin layers of frigid mana and scale sheer rockfaces with powerful updrafts, heading deeper and deeper into the range.

  They run into several creatures that inhabit the frozen slopes, from small icy hares, with powerful hopping legs and crystalline teeth, to a large boreidae, a robust insect the size of a hound with vicious curled mandibles and a long, hooked tail tipped with venom. Emily lets her friends deal with any that get too close while her robotic army collect hundreds of specimens from further afield, funnelling a constant flow of magical materials into Elisime’s cargo holds.

  At the end of their fourth day scrambling through the snow, whilst they’re sitting at the base of a steep frozen valley, roasting icy hares over a burning pile of wood sprinkled with powdered fire crystals, a distant rumbling draws their attention.

  “That’s not Elisime, is it?” Tom asks, holding his hands out to the flames and glancing nervously up at the steep walls of ice flanking them, already on edge from the faint creaking and cracking that could herald a sudden collapse.

  “No,” Emily confirms while scanning through dozens of reports from her dispersed troops about sudden, wild fluctuations in air pressure and temperature. “A storm is coming.”

  Dark clouds gather above as the last light of the day fades, and the storm breaks in the dead of night when most of the party are sleeping. Emily inserts a water crystal into the barrier disk that’s already keeping the worst of the cold out, helping it take the brunt of a sudden downpour of snow and sleet, and configures the barrier to block out sound, letting her friends and children rest peacefully.

  Emily turns her attention to the valley’s walls next, tinting her mana with ice and letting it seep into the ground before spreading out. She reinforces the layered ice-sheets rising up on either side of their camp, making sure the storm can’t shift them.

  The sky flashes, and though silence reigns within the barrier, Emily can feel the hum of charge raging in the dense black clouds above.

  “I’m going out for a bit,” she informs Pod, pushing herself up from the ground. “Keep an eye out and send me an alert if anything happens. I’ve reinforced the valley, but lightning could still do some damage.”

  “Got it.” Pod nods, not looking up from the tablet in his hands as he tracks the robotic army still braving the storm.

  Emily makes her way out into the elements, patting Silica’s head that’s resting in her brother’s lap on the way past to keep the fox from stirring to follow, before taking to the sky. She calls on her lightning connection, feeling the air around her quiver as two crackling wings sprout from her shoulders.

  With a single beat of the buzzing limbs, she shoots up to the top of the valley, and with a second, she meets the mountain at its peak. A third and she slips into the rumbling clouds, letting thunder wash over her and rattle her bones.

  Frigid winds batter her exposed body, but the sparking plasma dancing across her skin fends off the water that comes with it. She feels oddly at home floating in the hostile environment, so she pushes towards the centre, swimming through the dense charge that hangs in the air, forming sparking tongues that reach after her.

  Emily drinks in natural lightning mana as she moves, keeping her circles full despite the expenditure of her connection as power flows through her. It barely feels like using her own mana, as if the world itself were bending to her will and pushing her forward. She quickly accelerates, turning into a streak that tears through the sky, tracing a jagged path as she surfs through channels of wind and electricity that she can sense more than see.

  The mana saturating the cloud thrums in beat with her wings, and the crack of lightning grows more and more frequent.

  Emily feels something else in the sky with her, her instincts sending shivers down her spine as it watches her, but she can’t see anything but thick, swirling clouds, and can’t hear anything but the screech of a thousand birds.

  She reaches the far edge of the storm and pivots, twisting through a distorted current of air and turning herself back without losing any speed. She climbs in altitude as she traces a blazing path northbound, rising into the positively charged upper layer of the cloud and drawing the bolts of plasma it’s generating into herself.

  Emily returns to her original position in half the time it took her to get away and turns again, building more and more speed as the world starts to blur around her. The armour plating covering her body heats up, and her exposed skin buzzes as her thoughts narrow and expand, her cores all focusing on the sensation of flying freely and getting lost in the erratic movement of lightning.

  She doesn’t notice the choral counts in her head skipping forward and ceases awareness of each turn she makes to remain within the storm as she flows with it naturally.

  She blinks, unable to see anything but the crackling white of charge enveloping her being, and suddenly she’s not alone. Nothing changes in her vision, but the pins and needles tearing up her face turn to a gentle caress as lightning seeps through her skin, reaching within to touch her circles and depositing a message directly into her heart.

  ‘Hey!’

  An elemental?

  Emily’s surprised by the reveal of her observer, still unable to sense what circle it is or where its core is hiding.

  ‘Hi,’ she responds in kind, transmitting her intent into the charge embracing her and trusting it will reach its intended target.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  She begins to form a response, but a second message comes before she can get a word out.

  ‘What are you?’

  And a third.

  ‘Are you having fun?’

  A fourth.

  ‘Want to race/Where are we/Why are you so solid/Can I be solid?’

  So many messages reach her at once that they begin to overlap, and she feels excitement and intrigue pouring into her with them. Although the language of mana and intent comes to her far less intuitively than to the elemental, Emily doesn’t miss a beat in gathering her answers to sate the hyperactive force of nature’s curiosity, twisting them together into a stream of information that she sends back, forming a feedback loop as it responds with more and more questions.

  ‘You know what?’ she asks back after Goddess knows how long, unaware of her position in the storm as her body moves on its own. ‘If you want to know more, you don’t have to stay here.’

  ‘Can’t leave/Untethered/Free/Bound.’

  It takes Emily a fraction of a second to unravel the complex response: unlike the water elemental she learned the language of the elements from, her new conversation partner seems unable to stick to a single, focused intent, leaping from one half-formed thought to the next, yet still painting a vivid picture for Emily’s cores to interpret.

  ‘You don’t have a core?’

  ‘Nope!’ the elemental all but giggles, buzzing against Emily’s skin with amusement. ‘Restrictive/Gross. I’m better!/…/It’s a problem/ I’m worse!’

  The giddy excitement and pride that starts the message switches to a blend of disappointment and frustration like a bolt from the blue, and Emily feels an odd resonance in her chest as the desire to undo that sadness rises.

  ‘This storm’s your vessel?’ she asks more for herself than the elemental as realisation settles, receiving a confirming buzz immediately. ‘Then… If you want to leave, could I carry you?’

  ‘…’

  The silence that follows feels like an eternity despite lasting an instant, and Emily feels charge coil around her spine like hairs raising before a fight, a stark contrast to the odd, numbing, resonant hum blocking out sensation in the rest of her body. Then, the tension vanishes like a lie as the shivers down her spine spread with a foreign sense of euphoria.

  ‘Maybe/Okay/Let’s try!’

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