Liora POV
The wards were singing off-key.
Liora knelt, palm in the snow at the base of a ward-pole, and listened.
The crystal at the top hummed in Elayne's clean, eight-petaled tone. The metal carried that note down—then it wobbled. Somewhere below, the song went hoarse and came back wrong.
"Loss is worse," she said.
The junior ward-mage beside her clutched her slate.
"How bad, High Priestess?"
"Baseline anchors down around a fifth," Liora said. She shifted her hand, feeling the drag. "North-east anchors… closer to a third. The ground is pulling cold into our work from underneath."
She stood. The camp moved around them in efficient uncertainty: tents half-struck, men ready to march either way.
At the gap in the ring, Elayne, Brynjar, and Darius were waiting.
"Well?" Elayne asked.
"If we keep this dome over the whole column and walk it into the Eternal Winter," Liora said, "it fails in a day. Two if the anomaly stops growing." She lifted a brow. "It hasn't shown that courtesy yet."
"How far is a day inside the Land of Eternal Winter?" Brynjar asked.
Liora didn't need to ask what he meant. Every northern map drew that pale line across the top of the continent and wrote four neat words in the margin: Land of Eternal Winter. Mages, being lazy with syllables, had already crushed it into one ugly little sound—Tloew. The name had stuck.
"Not far enough," she said. "We'd strand everyone between the edge and whatever's driving this."
Darius's mouth tightened. "We expected heavy conditions."
"We did," Liora said. "We did not expect erosion at this rate on the lower runes. That's new. We should see what changed in the lattice before we drag a thousand people into it."
She brushed snow from her gloves and turned toward the command tent.
The network lattice hovered above the table: lines of light, thick where leylines ran, thin where the world was quiet. Across the north, one blunt band of cold energy sat like a wound.
"That's the Land of Eternal Winter," Elayne said simply—the old frozen boundary of Tloew.
At her small gesture, the band split into two images—one faint, one bright.
"This is the last-century baseline," she said, nodding at the dimmer one. "This is yesterday. Today overlays as soon as you feed it in."
Liora touched her pendant. The newest measurements slid into place. The brighter band thickened, pushing further down along several branches.
She traced one branch that used to end well north of E'nathyr.
"This terminus was stable for a hundred years," she said. "Now it's moved within fifteen leagues of the southern node. Flux is up roughly fourfold at this point."
"Assumption one," Elayne said calmly. "Spontaneous destabilisation of the old boundary. The field is sagging on its own."
"Test," Liora said.
She flicked her fingers. A sampling spell ran along the line, sniffing at the shape of the energy.
A new layer appeared: a row of sharp spikes on that branch, like teeth on a saw.
They came at regular intervals.
"Same shape, every time," Darius said.
"Roughly," Liora said. She isolated one spike, then the next. "Minor variance in strength, but rise and fall are almost identical. If this were spontaneous, we'd expect more noise. This behaves like something repeating a pattern."
"Assumption two," Elayne said. "Single large ritual, fired at regular intervals from an anchor point."
They watched the spikes for a handful of heartbeats. More appeared, evenly spaced. None drifted or shifted.
"A single caster or circle holding that kind of consistency over weeks would be…" Liora shrugged. "Difficult. Not impossible. But they'd be correcting constantly. We don't see corrections."
Brynjar tapped the edge of the table with a knuckle. "Assumption three?"
"Many identical endpoints," Liora said. "All given the same simple structure. Each triggering on its own. Their errors average out. The pattern stays crude but consistent."
"Undead. Constructs. Bound things," Elayne said. "Anything repeatable."
Liora thought of the frozen stream from the day before, ice trying to stand up.
"Whatever it is, it's not refined. They're forcing a basic shape through the lattice at scale."
Brynjar looked from the bright band of Tloew down to the little mark that represented their camp and ward-shell.
"Source isn't certain yet," he said. "But we can safely say this: the Land of Eternal Winter is no longer static, and this branch is carrying more of it toward us."
"Yes," Elayne said. "That much the data supports."
"And if we do nothing?" Brynjar asked.
Liora pinched the map, sliding time forward on their rough model. The bright branch crept closer to the southern node with unpleasant clarity.
"Assumption: rate holds," she said. "Result: the cold line touches the Underdeep routes in weeks. After that, anything connected to that node is at risk."
Silence settled, filled only by the faint hum of distant ward-poles through the canvas.
"We still don't know who is doing this," Darius said. "Or where they stand."
"Then that is the next question," Liora said. "What we have now is enough to decide the size of our next step, not enough to assign blame."
She shrank their ward-shell on the map until it clung close to the camp.
"With a full column, the contact area is too large," she said. "Bring this shelter into Tloew and the field eats it from beneath before we reach any anchor. We lose people and gain nothing."
"Pull everyone back, we save the column and stay blind," Elayne added.
"So we send fewer," Liora said. "Four at most. We leave the wards here, where they belong. Treat what goes in as a probe, not a shield-wall."
Brynjar considered that. "You're sure four is enough to read this?"
"We don't need an army to listen," Liora said. "We need one person to see the lattice, one to interpret, and a pair to make sure we're not interrupted."
Elayne nodded. "The rest withdraw and bring home everything we've measured so far. If Tloew's influence accelerates, at least the capital has hard data, not rumours."
Darius exhaled through his nose. "You're asking us to walk in without the people we're supposed to protect."
"I'm saying we're the ones who understand what we're looking at," Liora said. "Anyone else in our place would just die confused."
He thought about that, then gave a small, sharp nod. "Fine. Four it is."
They took the big ward apart in sections.
Each pole came up with a dry crack. The wide dome thinned as Elayne drew its power back out of the crystals and into safe patterns she could carry. Air outside their shrinking ring cooled, losing the last pretence of gentleness.
"No anchors left," Elayne reminded the junior mages. "Everything goes back with you. Nothing stays planted near Tloew's boundary."
They nodded, pale but steady.
Liora walked the line of officers as the column formed up to retreat. She laid small, practical blessings on ward-poles, on gloves, on helms—not to fight Tloew, but to keep hands precise and feet sure on the long road home.
"You'll be back, won't you?" one young soldier blurted, as she traced a quick curve on his brow.
"I don't enjoy leaving work unfinished," Liora said. "Or the world in this condition."
That drew a ghost of a smile. It would have to do.
Brynjar gave the column practical instructions: routes to follow, signs to watch for, what to do if the cold deepened faster than expected. Darius offered them a short, clean prayer that asked for clarity and intact nerves, not miracles.
When the last pack was lifted and the last ward-pole stacked onto the sleds, the camp felt suddenly naked. No hum. No shell. Just four transcendents and the dull grey sky.
"From here on," Elayne said quietly, "no more fixed wards. Only what we can carry in our bones and our hands."
"Then we don't waste either," Brynjar said.
The column turned south, toward safer leylines. Snow swallowed their tracks quickly.
Liora watched until the last glint of crystal vanished into the haze.
Then she turned to face the Land of Eternal Winter.
Up close, Tloew was more felt than seen.
To ordinary eyes, the snow ahead simply changed hue and texture. To Liora, the lattice fractured: leylines stiffened, light along them turning harsh and overbright where the old boundary of the Eternal Winter began.
"Baseline just outside," she said.
Elayne raised her staff—not to cast a shelter, just to sample. Threads of light reached into air and ice, then snapped back into her.
"Ambient mana density is about one point three normal," Elayne said. "Negative bias is moderate. Pulse amplitude stable. Period around fifty heartbeats."
Liora pressed her hand into the snow. Without a ward under it, the cold was closer, more honest. It pressed against her skin the way an overeager sculptor pressed at clay.
"It's already eating at anything we'd try to anchor," she said. "Leaving the poles behind was the right choice."
"Small mercy," Darius muttered. "No temptation to build another dome."
Liora drew a slow breath, more for rhythm than need.
"Assumption," she said. "Inside Tloew, we'll get cleaner readings on direction and source behaviour. Test: go in, measure, try not to die."
"Acceptable parameters," Elayne said dryly.
Brynjar adjusted his grip on his shield. "Forward, then."
Liora stepped first.
There was no visible threshold, but she knew the exact moment her boot crossed.
The field hit her like a second gravity. The world's hum jumped from background to roar; cold climbed up through her bones, trying to tell her she belonged in that stillness.
She told it otherwise.
"Ambient density roughly double," Elayne said behind her, voice already tighter. "Negative bias high. Pulse amplitude up about a third. Period still unchanged."
They kept walking.
The sky ahead was a flat grey lid. The ground was no longer snow so much as layered frost, refusing to follow slope or wind. Each step made a thin, brittle sound, like glass thinking about cracking.
"It's like walking into a badly lit hall someone painted over in one colour," Liora said. "No depth. No details."
"Keep complaining," Brynjar said. "If you go quiet, I'll assume you're frozen or thinking of something worse."
She snorted. "You should be so lucky."
They advanced until Elayne lifted a hand.
"Pause. Let's see what we can actually read from inside."
They halted. Elayne sent another sampling spell into the Land of Eternal Winter. The network resolved in Liora's mind as a tighter map this time: fewer lines, more detail. Every flow of cold leaned broadly the same way. The repeating spikes they'd seen on the table back in camp now had a tilt, a preferred direction deeper into the grey.
"Candidate anchor path," Elayne said, indicating the convergence only they could sense. "Not certain, but the field is denser that way."
"What's our spread rate from this side?" Brynjar asked.
Liora ran a quick mental comparison against the readings from outside.
"Still matches the estimate," she said. "If the pattern holds, Tloew's influence hits the southern node in less than a season. Margin of error is… irritating, but not comforting."
Darius blew out a breath. "So we've confirmed one thing. This isn't local noise."
"No," Liora said. "This part of the network is clearly under Tloew's field, and it's pushing along these lines. Whether that's wights, artifacts, or some other stupidity, we don't know yet."
"Which is why we keep going," Elayne said. "We need a closer look at whatever is stamping this shape into the world."
"And if we find out we can't adjust it?" Brynjar asked.
"Then we still take the reading," Liora said. "Someone should at least know exactly what broke, if we can't fix it."
A distant surge rolled through the ground under their boots. The Land of Eternal Winter's weight pushed at them; four transcendents pushed back.
Then they walked deeper into Tloew, not as an army under a dome, but as four instruments moving toward the heart of a bad equation.