The mountain did not want us there.
I realized this about twenty minutes into the climb, when the path beneath my feet crumbled without warning and I nearly tumbled into a crevasse that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Koro caught me by the back of my borrowed fur cloak and hauled me up like I weighed nothing, which to him I probably did.
"The mountain tests those who climb it," he said, setting me back on solid ice. "It has always been this way. Even before the Freezing."
"Great. A mountain with a personality. And it's a jerk."
Koro tilted his head. "I do not believe mountains have personalities."
"It was a joke, Koro."
"Ah. Yes. A joke." He did not laugh, but his ears perked up slightly, which I had learned was his version of acknowledging humor without understanding it.
We continued upward. The path, if it could be called that, was little more than a series of frozen switchbacks carved into the sheer face of Frostfang Peak. The wind howled constantly, driving snow and ice crystals against us like nature's own sandblaster. My borrowed cloak had accumulated a thick layer of frost on its outer surface, and my eyelashes kept freezing together every time I blinked for too long.
The remote's countdown continued its relentless march. Sixty one hours. Sixty hours. Fifty nine hours.
I tried not to look at it too often. Watching the numbers tick down only made my chest feel tight, and I needed all the lung capacity I could get for this climb. The air was thin up here, thinner than anything I had experienced on Earth, and every few steps I had to pause and catch my breath while my head spun.
"The air," I gasped, leaning against an ice formation that jutted out of the mountain like a frozen spear. "Why is it so hard to breathe?"
Koro stopped ahead of me, seemingly unaffected by the altitude. "Thundra's atmosphere is thinner at high elevations. It is one of the reasons the mountain has remained unconquered. Most who attempt the climb turn back before reaching the halfway point. Their bodies simply cannot sustain them."
"And the ones who don't turn back?"
Koro's ears flattened. "They do not return."
"Right. Of course they don't."
I pushed off the ice formation and kept climbing. My legs burned. My lungs ached. My face was so numb I could not feel my own lips. But every time I thought about stopping, I remembered the village. The funeral pyres. The Yutari children with their fluffy white fur and their dim blue eyes. Elder Nara's ancient face and her quiet certainty that I would stand at the peak.
I did not know if I believed in prophecies. I did not know if I believed in anything beyond my next shift and my overdue rent. But I did know that I could not turn back. Not now. Not when people were counting on me.
Even if those people were ten foot tall furry aliens I had met less than a day ago.
We climbed for another hour. The storm grew worse, visibility dropping to almost nothing. I could barely see Koro's massive silhouette ahead of me, and I found myself following the sound of his footsteps more than the sight of him. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. A steady rhythm in the howling chaos.
Then the rhythm stopped.
"Koro?" I called out, my voice swallowed by the wind. "Why did you stop?"
He did not answer. I stumbled forward, squinting through the blinding white, until I nearly walked into his back. He was standing perfectly still, his massive body tense, his ears pressed flat against his skull.
And then I saw what he was looking at.
The Ice Wyrm's tracks were everywhere.
They crisscrossed the narrow mountain path in a chaotic pattern, gouging deep furrows into the ancient ice. Some were old, partially filled with fresh snow. Others were so recent that the edges were still sharp and crystalline. And everywhere, splattered across the white like spilled paint, was that frozen blue blood.
"We are in its territory now," Koro whispered. His voice was barely audible, but I could hear the fear in it. Real, primal fear. "It knows we are here. It has known since we reached the base of the mountain."
I pulled out the remote. Its screen glowed softly through the storm.
[ICE WYRM PROXIMITY: EXTREME.]
[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT MAKE SUDDEN MOVEMENTS. DO NOT MAKE LOUD NOISES. DO NOT BREATHE TOO HEAVILY. ACTUALLY, JUST DO NOT EXIST. THAT WOULD BE SAFEST.]
[UNFORTUNATELY, YOU EXIST. PROCEED WITH TERROR.]
"Helpful as always," I muttered.
The wind shifted. It was subtle, just a slight change in direction, but I felt it immediately. The air, which had been merely freezing, suddenly became something else entirely. It became cold in a way I did not have words for. Cold that did not just touch my skin but seemed to reach inside me, wrapping around my bones and squeezing.
Koro felt it too. His fur bristled, standing on end until he looked twice his already massive size. "It is close."
"Where?"
"I do not know. Everywhere. Nowhere. It is a creature of the deep cold, Janitor Ray. It does not move through space the way we do. It moves through the cold itself."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"Many things about the Wyrm do not make sense. That does not make them less real."
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the LED flashlight. It felt pathetically small in my frozen hand, a tiny beam of light against an ancient predator of living cold. But it was all I had.
The wind shifted again. And this time, I saw it.
A shape in the storm. Massive and serpentine, coiling through the swirling snow like a fish swimming through dark water. It was hard to track, hard to focus on. My eyes kept sliding off it, as if my brain refused to acknowledge what it was seeing. But I caught glimpses. Scales that gleamed like frozen blades. Eyes that burned with a pale blue light, cold and ancient and utterly without mercy. And a mouth. A mouth full of teeth that looked like icicles, long and sharp and translucent.
The Ice Wyrm was beautiful in the way that natural disasters are beautiful. You could not look away, even as part of you knew you should be running.
Running would not have helped anyway.
The Wyrm's head turned toward us. Those pale blue eyes fixed on me, and I felt something I had never felt before. Not fear. Fear was what you felt when you watched a horror movie or heard a strange noise in the dark. This was something deeper. Something primal. My body knew, in a way that bypassed my conscious mind entirely, that I was looking at a predator. And I was prey.
"Janitor Ray," Koro breathed. "Do not move."
I did not move. I could not have moved if I wanted to. My legs had locked up, every muscle frozen in place.
The Wyrm's massive head descended toward us. It moved slowly, almost lazily, like it had all the time in the world. Which it probably did. It was ancient. We were temporary. A brief flicker of warmth in its eternal cold.
Its breath washed over us. And it was cold. So cold that the fur of my borrowed cloak crackled with frost. So cold that I felt my thoughts slowing down, my mind starting to drift toward a quiet, peaceful nothing.
The remote pulsed against my chest. Warm. Insistent.
[WARNING: COGNITIVE FREEZE DETECTED. MAINTAIN FOCUS. DO NOT LET THE COLD TAKE YOUR MIND.]
I blinked. The fog in my head cleared slightly. Not completely, but enough.
The Wyrm's head was inches from me now. I could see every detail of its scales, every chip and scratch in their frozen surface. I could see the wound Koro had mentioned, a long gash along its throat that oozed that frozen blue blood. And I could see its eyes. Ancient. Hungry. And curious.
It was studying me.
"Why is it just looking at us?" I whispered.
Koro's voice was barely a breath. "It has never seen anything like you before. You are small. Warm. Strange. It does not know if you are prey or something else."
"Can we convince it I'm something else?"
"I do not know how to convince an Ice Wyrm of anything."
The Wyrm's mouth opened slightly. Its breath washed over me again, and this time the cold was sharper. More focused. I felt frost forming on my skin beneath the cloak. My fingers, already numb, stopped feeling like anything at all.
It was tasting me. Testing my warmth.
The remote pulsed again. Harder this time. Almost angry.
[ICE WYRM ASSESSMENT: CURIOUS. HUNGRY. INJURED. POTENTIAL WEAKNESS DETECTED IN THROAT WOUND. RECOMMENDATION: EXPLOIT WOUND IF HOSTILE ACTION BECOMES NECESSARY. PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL IF HOSTILE ACTION BECOMES NECESSARY: LOW. VERY LOW. EMBARRASSINGLY LOW.]
The Wyrm's head pulled back slightly. Its pale eyes narrowed. And then, without warning, it lunged.
Not at me. At Koro.
The massive Yutari had moved. Just a twitch, just a shifting of his weight as he prepared to protect me. And the Wyrm, ancient predator that it was, had interpreted that movement as a threat.
Koro roared and threw himself sideways, crashing into the ice wall of the mountain. The Wyrm's jaws snapped shut on empty air where he had been standing a heartbeat before. Frozen teeth shattered against each other, sending shards of ice scattering across the snow.
I was still frozen. Not by the Wyrm's breath this time, but by pure, undiluted terror. My brain was screaming at my legs to move, to run, to do literally anything, but my body was not listening.
The Wyrm turned back toward me. Its eyes, which had been merely curious before, were now something else. Annoyed. Like a cat whose toy had been taken away.
Koro was struggling to his feet, but he was slow. The impact with the ice wall had dazed him. Blood, red and warm, trickled from a cut on his forehead and froze almost instantly in the bitter cold.
I was alone. Facing an ancient ice monster. With nothing but a flashlight and a remote that insulted me.
The Wyrm lunged.
And something in my brain finally clicked.
I did not think. I just moved. My frozen fingers found the LED flashlight, and I aimed it directly at the Wyrm's pale blue eyes. Then I clicked it on.
The beam was not particularly powerful. On Earth, it was just bright enough to illuminate a dark hallway or check the back of a closet. But the Wyrm had never seen artificial light before. It had spent its entire existence in the dim glow of Thundra's auroras and the soft blue pulse of ancient ice.
The flashlight hit its eyes like a supernova.
The Wyrm recoiled, hissing. The sound was like steam escaping from a cracked pipe, high and sharp and full of pain. Its massive body thrashed, carving deep gouges into the mountain path. I scrambled backward, my feet slipping on the ice, and nearly fell into the same crevasse Koro had saved me from earlier.
Koro was on his feet now, shaking off his daze. "Janitor Ray! What did you do?"
"I don't know! I panicked and pointed a light at it!"
The Wyrm's thrashing subsided. It was still recoiling, its head weaving back and forth like a snake trying to shake off an injury. But its eyes. Its eyes were fixed on me again. And this time, they were not curious. They were not annoyed.
They were angry.
"Okay," I said, my voice shaking. "Okay. It's angry now. What do we do when it's angry?"
Koro grabbed my arm and started pulling me up the path. "We run. We run and we hope it does not follow."
We ran.
Behind us, the Ice Wyrm roared. The sound was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was the sound of glaciers cracking, of ancient ice breaking apart, of a cold so deep and so old that it had forgotten what warmth even felt like. It shook the mountain. It shook my bones. It shook something in my chest that I did not have a name for.
We ran until my legs gave out. Until my lungs burned so badly I thought they might actually catch fire, which would have been ironic given the circumstances. Until Koro finally stopped and I collapsed into the snow, gasping for breath, my heart pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears.
"Is it following us?" I managed.
Koro was silent for a long moment. His ears swiveled, tracking sounds I could not hear. "No. It has returned to its territory. We have passed beyond the boundary it guards."
"Passed beyond. So we're in the clear?"
"For now. But we must still reach the peak. And when we return with the core, we will have to pass through its territory again."
I closed my eyes. The remote pulsed against my chest.
[TIME REMAINING: 58 HOURS 12 MINUTES.]
[ICE WYRM STATUS: ALERTED. ANGRY. HUNTING.]
[RECOMMENDATION: FIND A DIFFERENT ROUTE DOWN. OR DEVELOP A VERY CONVINCING DISGUISE. OR BOTH.]
I opened my eyes and stared at the frozen sky.
"I really, really hate this job."
Koro made his rumbling almost laugh sound. "You have said that several times now."
"Because it keeps being true."
He helped me to my feet. We kept climbing. And behind us, somewhere in the storm, the Ice Wyrm waited.