The air feels thin up here, high above the world, where the wind howls almost as if alive. My seal-heat rune keeps most of the cold out, but my fingers touch the ice directly, and some of it filters through. The mountain is an unyielding beast of frozen cliffs, stone, and whirling snow that swallows the sunlight. I dig my fingers into another crevice. My boots scrap against a glassy ledge, searching for some grip. Each time I get too hot and toggle my seal-heat rune off, my breath forms misty clouds that linger for a few heartbeats around me before they vanish. The traces of my passage vanish under a blanket of snow. I grin.

  There are no plants, no animals, no life anywhere. But I feel alive.

  I sit on a ledge to calm my wheezing breath and thundering heart. I take the compass out while munching on nuts and dried fruit to recover my energy. It still points onward.

  The wind calms down, letting the snow drift to the ground like plucked feathers, revealing the skyline. I look over the peaks I passed and snow-covered valleys. I can’t even see Minas Kalin anymore. Just white and still emptiness everywhere.

  Something moves beneath me at the base of the cliff I just climbed up. What is that? A snow-avalanche? No, no! It’s moving upwards. I can barely make it out. It appears and disappears in the shadows, sleek and soundless, weaving through the snowdrifts. It’s a big cat, a snow leopard, or a mountain lion, definitively a hunter. Its white and silver-blue mottled fur blends perfectly with the frozen world, making it look like a ghost—a whisper of unease curls down my spine.

  I continue my climb upwards, looking down a few heartbeats later to see what it does. It stops and looks up at me, paw frozen halfway through its next step. Its eyes burn with a cold blue light. It waits for a while, just watching me, searching for a reaction. How long has it been following me? Is it waiting for me to exhaust myself, to misstep once my limbs grow heavy?

  It takes a step forward, every attempt at stealth forgotten, and starts walking up the cliff almost like it is an even horizontal surface. Shit! A mana-beast. One that is adapted to hunt in this terrain.

  Can I beat it in a fight? I don’t have any directly offensive rune. At most, I could try to blind it with a light beam. A physical confrontation would be ill-advised here because I need at least one of my hands not to slip and fall. Well, not that falling would necessarily kill me. Still, fighting while hanging on the cliff feels awkward. It’s too late to hide, too. Even if I could, I have nothing to erase my scent trail. I need to try to outrun it somehow. Or at least I need to get somewhere I can stand with my arms free to use my bow.

  The snow moves again below me in total silence. It is closing the distance.

  I can’t afford to slow down. The summit is close, jagged, and glistening against the skyline. My fingers tremble. The ice beneath my boots crackles and shifts slightly. Some of it breaks apart. It falls, dragging more ice and snow in its wake. Maybe that will solve my problem. I look down, hoping the thundering avalanche will sweep the leopard away, but it just sprints to the side and lets it flow past. Then it glares at me before starting to close the distance again, moving to the side not to be directly beneath me.

  I have reached the top, a more or less even, ice-covered boulder, maybe ten meters wide. It’s a bit slippery, but at least I can stand. There are a lot of other mountain peaks in every direction I look. Some are far away, others close by, separated by deep chasms.

  I look down where I came from. The leopard is closing. It’s merely about a hundred meters away now. This is it. I have no time to doubt myself. I blow on my hands to breathe warmth into my frozen fingers.

  Ninety meters. I take out my bow and stick a handful of arrows with the point down into the snow at my feet to reload in an eyeblink if the need arises.

  Eighty meters. My breath hitches as I nock an arrow. The bowstring bites into my fingertips, still stiff and raw from the ice they came into contact with.

  Seventy meters. The snow leopard climbs the frozen cliffside with effortless grace, almost like a dancer. Its claws find purchase where no living thing should. The twilight washes over its shimmering fur. Its glowing eyes lock onto me, unblinking, unafraid. I flinch. My heartbeat thunders louder and louder in my chest.

  Sixty meters. I remember to exhale. I blink and take another breath to calm down. I align my arrow with the beast and start pulling the string.

  Fifty meters. I let the arrow fly. It slices through the thin air, a whisper of motion against the wind, straight towards the leopard. For a heartbeat, relief floods me. Is this it? But then the beast reacts. It twists mid-climb with a flick of its body. The arrow glances off the ice where the big cat had just been before burrowing itself harmlessly into the snow. Shit! How can it be so agile and perceptive? For a single, breathless moment, the leopard hangs in the air with coiled muscles, almost as if floating over the chasm. Then its claws find purchase again. I hear it scoff. It leaps forward way faster than before. It will reach me in seconds.

  Forty meters. I shoot another arrow as fast as I can. It goes wide of the target. The leopard doesn’t even react to it. Shit!

  Thirty meters. I nock another arrow. Calm down and take enough time to aim. Twenty meters. The arrow flies, but the leopard evades again without losing speed, focused, trying to win the race. I start turning around, storing the bow in my ring, half of my arrows left behind. There is no time.

  Ten meters. I slip but get up instantly to sprint towards the opposite side of the boulder. I can see the leopard arrive at the top of the cliffside behind me out of the corner of my eye. It stops. I hear it scoff, thinking me cornered.

  I run towards the edge before it changes its mind and pounces. Then, I jump over the emptiness as far as I can.

  I activate my air step rune as soon as gravity starts to pull me down and step forward with all my strength. One step, two steps, three steps, four steps, five steps, then I’m over the chasm. I fall onto the next ice and snow-covered peak and roll on the ground a few times to bleed my momentum. I would love to keep lying in the soft snow to recover my breath, but I pull myself together and stand up on wobbly legs.

  I look back to the other peak. The leopard looks at me with wide-open eyes. Then, it looks down into the chasm between us. A freefall of nearly four hundred meters. Then it glares at me. Its cerulean eyes twinkle before it huffs audibly and turns to where it came from.

  I sit down and breathe, in and out, until my racing heart calms down. Once the shock passes, I start feeling a stinging pain in my right arm and left knee I wasn’t aware of before. I am full of bruises and a few nasty gashes.

  I channel my body restoration rune. The pain dulls, but the wounds may take a while to heal. It could be dangerous to continue like this. I need to be at full strength if I encounter another predator. Everything else would be suicidal. Can I camp here?

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  I walk around the top of the new peak. I’m on a more or less flat and circular surface covered in ice and snow about fifty meters in diameter, almost like the point of a needle hanging over the clouds. I walk along the perimeter, looking down, trying to judge how hard climbing up here would be. The cliffs around the peak are all almost vertical, between maybe four hundred meters and more than one kilometer deep, before they connect with the sides of other adjacent mountains. Groups of snow-white raptor birds seem to nest between the cliffs. One of them floats by in absolute silence, carrying a snow rabbit. It looks at me and screeches but then drifts past, carried by the wind, before disappearing on the opposite cliff.

  I shrug. This seems as safe as it can get up here. Apart from the leopard and the birds, no one knows I’m here. There is no trail leading towards me. The leopard seems to have lost interest in climbing up and down more cliffs, and the birds are too small to be a menace.

  Even so, I take up one of the ward cubes I stole in the forest and set it up. The one that checks for temperature changes. Then I pull out my tent and stumble inside, exhausted. I activate the variation of the eternal spring rune I inscribed on it to let it keep warm inside, using only the ambient mana. Then I stop channeling my seal heat rune and divert all my mana into my body restoration rune. The sooner I can be healed, the better.

  I wince, checking the gash on my forearm again. If my skin and muscles were tempered, I probably wouldn’t have taken that much damage. The last time I tried tempering, it didn’t go so well. I need to figure out how to do it safely. But not now. I’m too exhausted, and I can’t risk further injuries until I am somewhere safer. Let us get out of these mountains first. I take the compass out. It still points to somewhere on the other side of the mountain chain. At least I seem to have passed the highest peaks. Maybe I’ll be able to reach that valley tomorrow.

  I wake up under the dull glow of the blue moon. I must have fallen asleep at some moment. I’ve never taken the time to think much about it before. It is a different moon from the orange moon that floats over the Solarian kingdom. I do believe that I have heard about this one before. The blue moon that visits our skies every ten years or so, barely rising over the horizon. In the country I am currently in, It hangs straight over me, and the orange moon is nowhere in sight. I wonder if there are more celestial bodies elsewhere that you only see if you travel far enough. Maybe I’ll discover it someday.

  The horizon starts to glow brighter. I take out a hearty rice meal with fish and steamed vegetables. I need enough energy for the day. A sliver of the sun appears, casting yellow light beams over the mountain peaks. I take in the breathtaking view and smile. This is freedom. The dangerous wildlife doesn’t matter. They are at least honest in their intentions, not like Dogface and his idiot cousin, that Kevin guy. Why did I even let them drag me into their den like that? Dogface was never the most trustworthy fellow. Maybe I was too distracted by the news of Dante’s demise. I shudder. Stop thinking about him. It’s not my fault.

  Well, at least there is nothing I can do about it anymore.

  I stand up and start picking up my campsite before continuing. My wounds are nearly closed. Only a faint whitish scar remains on my forearm.

  I air-step towards the next peak my compass points toward, more carefully this time. I land in a crouch without difficulty. I wait for a few minutes for my mana to recover. Then I continue wandering and slipping down the mountainside, always trying to follow the compass.

  I’m alone again. There is no movement on the cliffs, no life in sight apart from the birds that drift lazily through the clouds before they dart to the ground somewhere in the distance.

  I look at them in envy. Flying would make crossing these mountains easy, but I have no runes that could let me do something like that, and I think the mana costs would be astronomical.

  Something moves on another cliff a bit below me. I stop. Is the leopard back? I try to glimpse at the movement, trying to make out its fur, but there is nothing. Nothing remotely animal-like. The ice shifts, moving with the wind, slowly drifting towards me like an avalanche that creeps upward. What is that? Could it be one of those Ice spirits the men that came back from guarding the tunnel spoke of? What are they? Elemental beings?

  I move forward like a shadow, each step measured, each breath barely more than a whisper. The towering figure of frozen crystal continues to creep closer. Another one appears a bit further away and starts creeping in my direction. They move deceptively fast. They only seem slow because they are enormous. How do they detect me? They don’t have eyes, as far as I can see, just a blue pulsing core somewhere in the middle of the moving masses of snow and ice, only visible because parts of their bodies are transparent.

  I press myself against a ridge of ice, trying to blend with the snow, ignoring the pulse that hammers in my ears. Then I turn on my invisibility rune and dart forward.

  It doesn’t seem to work. The creeping masses of ice shift to adjust their trajectory. Okay, it’s not light they sense. What about heat? I change invisibility for my seal heat rune that I had turned off to save mana, relying on the enchantments of my cloak to keep me somewhat warm. The closest mass of creeping ice stops for a second, almost as if confused, but then drifts closer again. Well, it seems they do sense heat, but also something else. What about sound or vibration? I activate my silence rune. There doesn’t seem to be a difference.

  What about mana-sense? I activate my seal mana rune. If it is soul-sense like what high-ranking mages have, there is nothing I can do. The elementals stop. I look at them. They resemble just another part of the mountain now. I shiver. Dangerous ambush predators. Okay, they have heat-sense and mana-sense then. I can work with that. I slowly step forward, changing my direction a bit. Who knows if they are intelligent enough to guess if I am still there and have not disappeared?

  The wind howls between the peaks, rattling through the frozen spires like a wailing ghost. One of the elementals shifts, its massive limbs grind against themselves, rumbling like cracking glaciers. I hold my breath and advance carefully. The last thing I want is to cause an avalanche that could reveal my position. Even if my mana seal may hide me, it also cuts me off from the ambient mana. It can’t compensate for the drain my active runes exert on my slowly emptying core. I’m on a timer. I need to get enough distance between me and those creatures before I run out of mana.

  I take a step, then another. The nearest elemental turns slightly, seeming to sweep its senses over the pass. I start to walk faster, keeping an eye on him.

  For a long, aching moment, nothing happens. Then, with a deep groan, like distant thunder, the elemental continues forward, passes over where I was a few minutes ago, freezes again, and then turns back to where it came from.

  I let out a slow, shaking breath and press forward. I slip through the frozen landscape like a wraith, fearing that one wrong move will call down the mountain’s wrath.

  I press onward until my mana runs out, forcing me to stop channeling my runes. I look around like a frightened deer. Nothing moves.

  Finally, my mana recovers, and I continue. I jump down a cliff, trying not to think of the altitude. Successive air steps arrest my fall until I arrive in a valley. The ice is melting here into a stream that flows downwards between patches of green grass poking out of the snow. Its mirror-clear water flows quickly beneath a thin lace of ice. I freeze. Something is moving ahead. Then I breathe out in relief. It is only a snow bunny hopping around. I have no idea if there are predators here, but at least the snow and ice here are too shallow for one of those Ice-spirits to hide in between. I may have left the worst behind.

  I start walking downwards, following the stream, trying to step on the firm ground to keep my feet dry and not fall into hidden crevices. I can hear my boots crunch over frost-limned grass. See the breath I exhale curl in the crisp air. I activate my seal heat rune again to combat the shivers that assault me. The highest peaks start to fall behind, still lost in the grasp of an eternal winter. But here, the ice is thawing. I feel like I am advancing through the seasons the further I descend. The first shrubs appear. Bright green, covered in butterfly-shaped flowers with white petals. The snow is losing the fight with the patches of vegetation. It only remains in the deepest shadows under dark pines that have started appearing.

  I follow the stream, winding between meadows, more pines, and solitary birches. It slowly widens, receiving more and more tributaries flowing down from adjacent valleys. A bird calls from somewhere between the branches of the trees. I take in the scent of pine, damp earth, and the moss around me and smile. Then I turn off my seal heat rune. It’s not that cold here.

  I take out my compass. For the first time since I entered these mountains, it isn’t pointing northwards anymore. Huh?