37
ALAR
"Beware the silence that follows the storm. Beneath the cover of snow, fury lurks untamed, ready to unleash chaos without warning or sign."
—Elucian Proverb
The auroras above us twisted around the clouds, coiling like serpents made of light. I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision, but the hallucinations only intensified. The magnetic currents that guided dragons through these skies seemed visible now—ribbons of force that wound through the air like luminous streams of energy.
"Keep your eyes on the person ahead of you," Lysara called from the front of our line. "The hallucinations will get worse now. Don't trust what you see in the distance."
Easier said than done. Morek's form wavered in front of me, sometimes seeming to split into two or three versions of itself. Beyond him, Kailin's golden hair caught the strange light, creating a halo effect that made her look like an angel.
I tightened my grip on the rope connecting our group, using its solid presence to anchor myself to reality. The hemp fibers bit into my gloved hands, the slight discomfort helping me to focus.
"Does anyone else see the green and purple dragons?" Codric asked from behind me, his words coming out slightly slurred.
"Not real," Shovia called back from the front of our line. "Blink a few times and purse your lips. Sometimes it helps."
Could Codric and I have the same hallucinations?
I saw the dragons too, massive shapes formed from the flowing lights above, diving and weaving through the air in complex patterns. They looked so real that I could almost hear the beat of their wings.
"Thanks," Codric said. "It helped."
Shovia lifted both gloved hands, thumbs up.
The wind picked up, driving needles of ice against any exposed skin. The weather was turning again, the relative calm of the morning giving way to another storm.
"It's coming back," Morek said, his words nearly lost in a sudden gust.
"We need to reach the summit before it hits," Lysara shouted from somewhere ahead. "Keep moving!"
That was bad news. It meant that there was no shelter between us and the summit, and the distance to the cave we'd left behind was not any shorter than what was still left to the summit.
The path narrowed again, but since we'd been walking in single file anyway, it didn't make much difference. The hallucinations made depth perception unreliable, and the dropbeside us seemed to shift and waver, sometimes appearing bottomless, other times deceptively shallow.
I didn't like the edge being so close, and I could only imagine how difficult it must be for Kailin.
As a low rumble rolled through the mountain, I wasn't sure whether it was another illusion or if it was really happening, but then I heard a guy from another quintet ask if anyone felt it.
"It's just the wind," came someone else's reply, but it didn't sound convincing.
The rumble came again, stronger this time. Small rivulets of snow began sliding down the slope above us.
"Avalanche!" The cry came from further up the trail. "Move! Move!"
Everything happened at once.
The world tilted as a wall of white roared down the mountainside. We plastered ourselves against the rock face as snow thundered past.
We were lucky.
There was a rock ledge above us, about fifty feet or so up the mountainside, shielding us, but the third quintet up the trail wasn't as fortunate. There was nothing above them to provide a shield; they were exposed, and the avalanche hit them hard, a surge of white that seemed to attack with deliberate malice.
One moment they were there, five dark shapes against the white; the next, they were gone, swept away like leaves in a storm.
Their screams cut off abruptly as they vanished into the void.
