“It’s beautiful,” Arjun gasped.

Every time that Liv had come this far north with her father, she had come during the summer, when the sun never quite dipped below the horizon. Even when she and her friends had made the rushed journey to her grandfather’s deathbed, it had been Harvest season, not winter, and there had been light during the day.

Now, in the heart of winter, the only hint of sunlight was a faint orange glow along the flat southern horizon, fading up into the deep blue of a star-sprinkled night sky. The ring shone white above them, as it always did, and cast the snow-covered plains in shades of luminous blue, rather than white. Hazy ribbons of green and purple danced above them in the sky.

“Don’t get distracted,” Liv warned her friend. “Keri, Rose, make a triangle with me. Arjun’s in the middle. I have point for now.” The brilliance of an active waystone, she knew, would have drawn something: the only question was what.

“There,” Arjun said, pointing off to their right.

Liv turned, and caught a glimpse of a white-furred fox, crouched low to the ground, watching them. It didn’t look particularly larger than a normal fox, which told her that it might have only wandered into the shoal recently, and not yet been twisted by the raw mana of the rift.

“Not a threat,” Keri said, and Liv was inclined to agree.

“Let’s move,” she said, and stepped off the waystone. She’d seen the great crevasse that marked the way to the heart of the rift before, and led them toward it confidently. Her Dakruiman boots weren’t precisely the sort of thing that was suited to these conditions. They weren’t lined in fur, and they didn’t grip the ice underfoot. If she’d been a normal person, instead of a mage, they wouldn’t have been enough to keep her feet warm.

Thankfully, Liv’s armor pieces were doing a decent job of keeping the worst of the cold away, and the moment she cast her first spell using Cel, she’d channel the waste heat to make it a moot point. For a moment, she still considered untying the snow-shoes that were hanging off the back of her pack and strapping them on – but she wasn’t precisely certain how she was going to get them down to the floor of the crevasse, yet, and she wanted to take a look first.

Every other time she’d passed through this waystone, Liv had rushed in or out of the shoals on horseback. This was the first time she was staying around, moving slowly, and it made her feel exposed. There was nowhere to hide on the great plains of ice that stretched away in every direction. From somewhere off to the left, she heard a low roar. It didn’t sound close yet, but that could change quickly.

Liv trudged her way over an icy rise, leaning forward into the wind that whipped across the land, and then the rift was in front of them. It was like someone had plunged a dagger into the white plains, then dragged it to form a long, jagged wound. Bare faces wept icicles; powder swirled through the open air below when the wind gusted through the canyon; and solid, frozen masses of ice shone blue and reflected the dancing lights in the sky above. The landscape was beauty and danger all rolled into one. It could entrance as quickly and easily as it could kill.

“What’s your plan?” Rose called to her, over the wind. “Summon a few birds?”

“I don’t like the sound of the wind whipping through the canyon,” Liv said, “or how close the rock faces are to each other. I’m not sure we could fly down through that. There should be a personal waystone somewhere down there, if we can find Celris’ actual home. But that will only help us get back.”

“Something’s coming,” Keri warned. Out of the corner of Liv’s eye, she could see him shift his long spear around, coming into a guard that looked set to stand against a charge.

“Mana-platform,” Liv decided. “Unless someone sees a staircase cut into the rock anywhere.” She looked from face to face, but each of her companions shook their head. She drew her wand and summoned a disc of blue mana with a whispered incantation, then stepped onto it. Arjun followed her, and then the bear came rushing up over the bank of snow and down toward them.

It was the bear that Liv had seen in her vision, when her father had brought her to sit at the edge of the Bald Peak shoal. White-furred, large as a small house, with crystals of ice sprouting from its back like mushrooms growing on the trunk of an oak. It barreled directly toward Rose and Keri, who hadn’t stepped onto the disc yet. Both of them shouted spells at the same time, though the results varied dramatically.

A roll of earth beneath the snow surged forward like a wave in the ocean, cracking the crust of snow that made up the surface of the plain. At the same time, a beam of brilliant light, so bright that it left a black bar in Liv’s vision, erupted from the head of Keri’s spear. While the roiling wave of earth and broken snow moved swiftly, the white-hot beam simply appeared, connecting Keri and the bear without seeming to cross the intervening distance at all.

It suddenly made a great deal of sense to Liv how Keri had managed to cut off half Calevis’ body. Burn off, more likely.

Unlike the traitorous Elden warrior, however, the northern bear had a defense against Keri’s attack. After the first, smoking impact, the monstrous animal hunched its shoulders forward so that the ice-crystals on its back moved into the path of the beam. Instantly, shards of rainbow-brightness scattered around the bear onto the pale snow. A cloud of steam surrounded the creature, but it neither fell, nor even seemed particularly wounded.

That was when Rose’s wave of earth reached it, heaving the ground out from under the bear’s feet and dumping it onto its side. Keri’s beam of light winked out, and they all waited to see whether that would be the end of it.

With a roar that was equal parts pain and anger, the white bear rolled to its feet, hunched forward again, and gave a kind of awkward shrug. Half a dozen crystals erupted from its back, flying forward toward the group like enormous crossbow bolts – or perhaps, Liv thought, it was closer to how a volley from the new scorpions on the walls of Whitehill would look.

Liv thrust her arm out and clicked the third button on her wand, raising a wall of adamant ice that caught the flying crystals. They smashed against the wall, instead of impaling her friends, shattering into fragments and dust. The wall, however, was shot through with cracks that spiderwebbed out from the impact points, and Liv didn’t trust it to hold anything else back.

“What’s the word for bear?” Arjun asked, raising his own wand of Neem wood at Liv’s side.

“Retcoa,” Liv told him.

“Costet Aiveh Scelis’o'Retcoa!” Arjun shouted, just as the bear crashed through the icewall, sending frozen chunks as sharp as glass flying in all directions. Bones shot out through the mana beast’s muscled bulk, sending sprays of blood in every direction. The poor creature’s ribs unfurled into spears and shot down into the ice, hooking it in place so that it fell forward. By the time Arjun’s spell was complete, the bear was little more than a steaming red hunk of raw meat.

“Ring count,” Liv called out, just as Matthew had done the first time she’d ever gone to cull a rift.

“Fourteen,” Arjun called back immediately, and Rose followed.

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“Ten.”

Keri was a heartbeat behind, as if he wasn’t used to the request. “Thirteen.”

Liv nodded, already grabbing the waste heat from her wall and spreading it out among the four of them. “Let’s get going, before we run into anything else.”

Rosamund and Keri backed onto the mana disc, weapons still at the ready, while Arjun and Liv kept their wands to hand. None of them showed any indication of relaxing their guard, which Liv approved of. She began to lower the disc, but before their heads passed below the lip of the crevasse, Liv caught a glimpse of that little white fox padding forward over the snow. It looked at them once, then lowered its muzzle to begin eating the hot flesh of the bear.

“Alright, did you see it launch those crystals?” Rose asked, after a long moment of silent descent. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“I’m more worried about how it defended itself against my spell,” Keri muttered. “That blast should have cut the thing in half.”

“Like Calevis?” Liv asked, with a grin. “It was the crystals that did it. If you see another mana beast that has them, aim away from the crystals. Line up a shot where it can’t defend. Also? I want to experiment with that at some point.”

“Calevis.” Keri practically spat the name. “I should have had him at the Hall of the Ancestors.”

“Well, don’t worry, we got him for you in the end,” Rose teased him.

“Look!” Arjun interrupted, pointing at the cliff face. “I think I can see something carved there.”

Liv squinted into the darkness. What light came down from the sky above was rapidly dwindling away as they went lower into the frozen canyon. “Keri? You said you could eliminate the need for torches?”

“Savelet Orvis,” Keri said, and thumped the butt of his spear against the mana disc. A ball of sunlight formed just above his shoulder and slightly behind him, hovering there with the kind of slow, easy bobbing motion that brought to mind a leaf carried along by the current of a stream.

Where the warm, welcoming sunlight fell upon the near cliff face, it revealed immense forms worked into the rock. Men and women, side by side, lined the canyon descent, hewn from the stone. Some carried weapons and others wore crowns, but every one of them possessed those subtly unnatural features in the face that Liv had noticed the first time she’d seen Ractia.

“Who are they?” Rose whispered.

“Vædim,” Liv answered. “Look. You see the man with the hammer? That has to be Antris.”

“The woman with the snake wrapped around her would be Iravata,” Keri pointed out.

“There’s so many,” Rose said, peering from side to side as they continued their descent. “And I don’t think I could even name half of them.”

“That’s not all,” Arjun said. “Look below us.”

They all leaned over the edge of the falling mana disc. Below them, the floor of the canyon was finally visible. It seemed that the narrow crevasse shielded the depths somewhat from falling snow, for Liv could see boulders with only the thinnest coating of powder. It looked something like the banks of the Aspen River after a flood had receded, with detritus tossed all about without rhyme or reason.

There were more boulders, yes, and jagged shards of rock that looked as if they had tumbled down from the sides of the canyon. One of them, Liv was fairly certain, was the broken remnants of a woman’s nose, which meant that somewhere above a goddess’ face had been disfigured.

But there was plenty of the unnatural here, as well. Rusted hulks of metal, broken and tossed like a child’s discarded toy, littered the floor of the ravine. Some of them were clearly recognizable as Antrian war-machines like those they had fought before, with the ancient engraved sigils of their enchantments occasionally visible beneath a crust of white powder.

Lying across the canyon floor, however, was a great, broken mechanism like nothing Liv had ever seen before. It had the same clusters of tubes that had been mounted on Karis’ shoulder, and that she had seen again when the Antrian soldiers tested the defenses at the bridge in Varuna. Instead of only having a single one of those weapons, however, this hunched juggernaut was fitted with four or five.

It reminded her of nothing so much as an immense, armored tortoise, though without legs or a head. In fact, Liv had a difficult time seeing just how the machine would move at all: it had no wheels, like one might find on a carriage. There were, however, bands of Vædic sigils, flickering with a cold blue light, that ran all along the perimeter of the armor. If she had to guess, those would be the mana-shields that Karis had deployed to defend himself against her spells.

Liv could see no blades, but there were other forms attached to the armor that she had no real frame of reference for: one long, crumpled metal log, extending out from the middle of the machine, with two boxes mounted to either side of it. If she’d had to make plans to assault the monstrosity, she would have assumed they were some sort of additional weapons, just to be safe, but the entire mass seemed more of a rusted out hulk than anything functional.

As her mana disc neared the bottom of the great canyon, their view diminished in scope – but at the edge of the sunlight cast by Keri’s spell, two prowling wolves approached. Both of them were large enough to be hitched to a carriage or a wagon, and crowned with antlers that gleamed with the shine of dawn on ice.

Liv held out one hand, and paused the motion of the disc, holding it perhaps ten feet above the canyon floor. The two wolves regarded them calmly, and then one tossed back its head and howled.

“Calling the rest of the pack?” Rose guessed.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Keri agreed.

“I don’t want everyone to waste their mana before we even get into the ruins,” Liv said. “Let’s not make this easy for them. Everyone look out for an entrance.”

Rather than complete their descent, she sent the disc skimming along the canyon floor, just higher than she thought the wolves might be able to jump, and away from them, into the opposite end of the canyon.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Keri asked.

Liv shook her head. “But I have even odds of getting it right the first time.”

The wolves paced them, remaining just at the edge of the moving light. As the group searched the base of the cliffs for something other than the carved feet of the Vædim, more members of the pack appeared, until Liv lost track of how many there were, slinking in and out of the shadows.

With every wolf that came, the taste of a storm in the air grew more and more pronounced. Liv could feel Cel stirring in sympathy – at the magic the wolf pack was working, or at her presence in the home of Celris? Perhaps both.

The wind picked up, howling through the canyon as if it meant to pick them up and throw their bodies down to the wolf pack waiting below. Liv and her friends all crouched down, keeping their bodies as close to the blue mana disc as possible, their fingers wrapped around the curved edge of the platform.

More and more snow filled the area, driven before the wind until they could hardly see. Liv was forced to slow the movement of the disc, because she didn’t want to risk a sudden, jarring halt against one of the rocky outcroppings that marked the irregular contour of the crevasse. If one of her friends were thrown down to the wolves waiting below, she wasn’t certain she’d be able to see well enough to save them.

“There!” Arjun shouted, above the wind. He’d sheathed his wand at some point, just as Liv had, and now the healer pointed ahead with one hand while using the other to hold on. “Doors! Ahead and to the left!”

Slowly, Liv brought the disc around, turning in the direction her friend indicated. At first, she squinted against the blowing snow and couldn’t see anything. In an instant, however, the building storm died away, revealing two immense stone doors, towering up above them, graven with sigils that glowed a steady, pulsing blue.

“I don’t think the wolves like this place,” Rose pointed out, and Liv risked a look behind them. The entire pack had assembled in a semi-circle, sitting back on their haunches and observing. Sure enough, not a one seemed willing to approach the doors. Perhaps the storm dying down was a sign the pack had given up on their hunt.

“Any idea how to get those things open?” Keri asked.

“At the rift up in the mountains, we melted snow and then froze the water to widen gaps in the stone,” Liv explained. “It’s called frost wedging. It took a while, but eventually we broke one of the doors off.”

“Your aunt got in somehow, though,” the Elden warrior pointed out, his spear gripped tightly in one hand. “And she did it without breaking anything.”

Liv opened her mouth to reply, but the sound of grinding stone erupted from the set of doors, and they began to move, swinging open. The light from the sigils brightened until it cast shades of blue onto the faces of her friends, even against Keri’s sunlight. Deep inside her, Cel stretched eagerly, feeling like nothing so much as a hound that has caught sight of their master coming. It was not a comfortable feeling.

A line of darkness appeared between the doors, as they swung in, but Liv could see no light within the Tomb of Celris. Behind her, the wolves began to howl as one.