Her final words startle me, but before I can ask anything, Glacia begins to fade. Unlike when Andor did so moments ago, the temperature begins to drop severely when she goes. I gasp, looking at my hands to find they are turning blue.
“It’s too cold, Neve,” I gasp. “We’re not meant to linger where only the dead can touch.”
“You do!” she hisses.
“No, I linger in-between to help souls pass on.” My gaze roves around the cavern, the cold sinking in deeper until my teeth begin to click together. The light in the cave is fading without Glacia’s glow. “This, this is something more. The Icebound are older than the Reapers, as she said. The Spirits of Winter are eternal.”
Neve’s eyes finally snag on mine, hurt and confusion warring in her gaze. “W-we can’t leave her here.”
Her teeth chatter like mine, her arms looping around me as I look toward the woman on the wall. She’s still frozen, caked in frost, a silent specter to our conversation with the winter spirit. “She can’t come with unless we unfreeze her.”
“I don’t know how! You do it. You have ice magic, too.”
“That’s not something I’ve ever been able t-to do.” I wrap my arm around Neve, dragging her toward me. “We need the shadows and to be outside of this cave. I don’t think we’re welcome anymore.”
“I know,” Neve replies, leaning into me. Even though there’s a cold ache in my hands, I can tell her skin is frigid. She’s starting to turn blue, and if we don’t leave soon, I don’t think we’ll leave at all. “What did Glacia mean at the end? Tick tock?”
“I think she’s counting down to something–”
I cut myself off, my attention catching on the wall the girl is frozen to. Keeping Neve close, I drag us into the shadows and hop over to that side of the room.
Even here in the dark, where Death should reign supreme, the cold licks at us. Glacia wasn’t exaggerating when she spoke of our place as an exception. This is the kind of magic I don’t think we could combat even if all four of us Reapers came here together.
She’s not meant to be challenged. She’s meant to be Death itself, something older and more powerful than we are. We should go—the cold is penetrating through my magic, but my eyes search the wall to see if there’s a hint of something here.
Tick tock. Like the Mad Queen says. Those white rabbits… they’ve said it, too.
I drop the shadows, the cold hitting us hard enough that Neve gasps. “There.”
“There, where?” she asks, and I point to the woman’s chest. Wrapped around her neck, frozen in place, sits a heavy chain. At the base sits a clockface, frozen in time.
“I-it’s a timepiece,” I explain. “We need to get it.”
“We can’t do that without freezing!”
I attempt to anyway, trying to bend the ice despite telling Neve I can’t. I don’t know how to, but I give it a go anyway. It feels too important to leave behind.
My magic doesn’t bend the ice; it does nothing at all. Pressing my fingers to the solid, frozen surface, it doesn’t even let me sink my hand in.
Neve tries beside me, pushing into the ice, but it yields no results. We share a twin glance, knowing that we can’t waste any more time here.
“W-we have to go,” I say as I cloak us in the shadows once more. If the ice won’t give, we’ll have to come back. For the two of us to feel the cold in here, it must be unbearably frigid. We need to get out before we go too far and can’t escape.
Neve clings to my neck, making it easier to hop through the shadows. My magic seems to resist, dragging the process out longer than usual to escape back to the outside of the mountain. Each time I hop through the darkness, it feels like invisible hands push us back a step.
The dead are here, the Icebound who linger behind us. I don’t think they want us to leave.
By the time we break through the side of the mountain, I’m exhausted, and we slump together on the side of the cliff. The blizzard is gone, the dark of night lingering above us.
Neve sits on the ground beside me, trying to catch her breath. Realistically, it’s still bitterly cold, but compared to the subzero temperatures in the mountain cavern, this feels downright balmy.
She lies down in the powder, and I find I’m too tired to do much else but copy her. I’m drifting toward blessed sleep myself when Neve’s voice floats through the air.
“What now?”
Chapter 26 Neve
“You found a timepiece, you almost froze to death,andyou’ve met the Spirit of Winter. Why the hell do you get to go on a cool adventure while we freeze our asses off?”
