Frostbitten Wayfarer

Zoe went and said her goodbyes to Joe and Emma and then left through Flester’s northern gate. One day, when she came back, she thought she’d like to buy a house. Something that she could always have when she comes back to Flester.

It had become home to her over the many years since she was brought to this world, and she wanted to really cement that for herself. But for now, she wanted to leave for a while. Maybe she’d make some money while she was gone, maybe she wouldn’t.

But Zoe had gotten over her fears of her friends’ mortality. It was still there, stuck in the back of her mind. But she’d learned to live with it, to accept it as a part of her life. She would live forever, and the people around her wouldn’t always. And that was okay.

Sad, but okay. Maybe, when it didn’t seem so far away, she wouldn’t be as okay with it anymore. Maybe when Joe lost the last of his few dark brown hairs, Zoe would feel that fear rise up in her again. Maybe when Emma grew wrinkled and old, she’d desperately search for some way to get her the Cosmos skill to overcome that frail weakness of time.

It just all felt so much less important to her than it did so many years earlier when she rushed around desperately grasping at power for the hint of immortality. Of course immortality wouldn’t be something she could just grant to people. Some candy she could hand out to the less fortunate to fix them. Time was a fickle beast, and besting it was no small feat.

Even in her years of practice, Zoe wasn’t able to acquire even the simplest Space or Time Manipulation skills. Let alone upgrading both of them to their purer forms. And that was for Zoe with her Patient Decider bonuses and Mana Manipulation skill helping her along.

Somebody without all of those bonuses that Zoe had — somebody like Emma, wouldn’t be able to even grasp at the faintest hint of them before time claimed what rightfully belonged to it. Not without very significant help.

Maybe one day Zoe would find a Cosmic Elemental and be able to rip out parts of it to distribute among the mortals. She laughed at the thought.

Sure, in theory it would be possible. The Frost Elemental that Zoe killed had done a similar thing, and Zoe now had the Frost skill to show for it. But that was ignoring the obvious problem of transporting an elemental of space and time. How would you trap something that was made up of the very essence of reality like that? What cage would keep it from being able to escape?

And where would Zoe even begin to search for something like that? Hell, even just finding a normal Space Elemental seemed outlandish to her, let alone something so much greater than that.

No, it made no sense to worry about it. Immortality was attainable by all, but through your own effort, not others. And Zoe was content with that. Emma would get more classes, more levels. She might even obtain immortality through her own power at some point. Magic was something that she wanted, even still.

Her fourth class even had a hint of space magic in it. Maybe one day she’d be granted immortality by the system and all of Zoe’s worryings would have been for nothing. But Zoe had learned that her musings weren’t important. Emma’s life was her own, and regardless of how long it would end up being, Zoe was glad to at least be a part of it.

Perhaps Joe’s adamant refusal of immortality helped Zoe along that process of acceptance. No matter how often she brought it up, he almost seemed to romanticize his death. One day he would be over, and a while later he would be forgotten. That was natural, it was what he wanted. And Zoe accepted it.

She’d dealt with death before, back on Earth. Grandparents and other more distant relatives. Pets, and even a couple of friends. Zoe was no stranger to death back in her old life. She wasn’t sure why she focused on it so much when she arrived here on Abyllan.

Maybe it helped distract her from the reality of her situation. If she focused on death — something she’d already overcome so many times, maybe she wouldn’t have to deal with the trauma of having her life ripped away from her. Of being shunted into a world full of danger.

Or maybe she just didn’t want to lose everybody she had, again. Either way, that was for the past. And maybe for a future therapist.

Before Zoe left, she had bought another bracelet for her other wrist. It looked almost identical, purple with specks of colour littered throughout it. She had looked at some of the more expensive options, interested in maybe getting one large item instead of multiple smaller ones. But she decided against it.

The pricing wasn’t linear, and availability was iffy on the best of days. A bracelet with four thermal control bags was eleven gold. For eight bags, it would have cost her thirty gold.

She could afford it now, of course. But eight bags split between two bracelets was enough. And it gave her a little more confidence being able to split her belongings up across two items instead of putting all her eggs in one basket.

Zoe wandered through the wintery forest to the north, looking for the warm river she’d planned to spend her first winter at so many years prior. It wasn’t hard to find, the rushing water was audible to her from kilometers away and she soon found the lake.

But rather than the warm spring that it once was, with lush green grass visible all around and animals drinking from it like an oasis in the desert, the lake was frozen over. The river was still flowing, though bits of it were freezing. Chunks of ice bounded down, crashing into each other and up the river bank.

Zoe watched it in awe a little. Years ago, this was a lush, warm reprieve from the winter’s cold grasp. But now it stood as a testament to winter’s power, rather than a powerful defense from it. She wasn’t sure what had changed since the last time she saw it.

Had the warm spring that fed the lake run out of its warmth? Had the planet shifted and the heat was directed elsewhere? She wasn’t an expert in geoscience, even back on Earth. Let alone here where magic threw a galaxy sized wrench into the spokes of physics.

She shrugged it off as a wonder of magic, or possibly a forgotten high school science class and made her way towards the cave she’d found. The crack in the wall was still present, a small slit carved into the hill that Zoe would call her home for a while.

It wasn’t far away from Flester, sure. And it wasn’t as exciting as climbing Moaning Point either. But it would be her adventure. She didn’t need Moaning Point to explore the world. She didn’t need to go far from Flester either to explore the world.

Zoe had realized something in the past few years. She didn’t get joy from levelling, from spending months fighting zombies. No, Zoe enjoyed learning about every little thing the world offered her. Even around Flester there was so much she hadn’t experienced.

There were wolves that she’d never seen. This hill that she’d never really gotten to the top of. Herbs all around her that she’d never collected, alchemy that she’d never truly experimented with.

She wanted to explore, but the journey was the fun part for her, not the destination. She wanted to take her time as she wandered the world. She’d find a nice place to settle down, build up a place for herself and take her time seeing everything she could. And once she got bored, she’d pack up and go find somewhere else.

It didn’t matter if it was a dungeon, if it was a town or the middle of nowhere. Zoe had such a small perspective of the world that everything excited her. A new tree, new herbs, new rocks to experiment with. New cultures and animals to meet.

Her first stop was only a few hours from Flester, but it was meaningful to her. Zoe summoned a small bed that she’d purchased before she left and placed it in the cave as almost a symbolic gesture of her intention to stay here, and then left to wander around a bit.

The hill was full of much larger cave openings and Zoe was interested in seeing what they had to offer. She walked to the nearest gaping hole where the hill met the ground, and peered inside. It was about seven feet across, and somewhat reminiscent of an oval in shape.

About ten feet down was the ground. Specks of frosted grass poked up through the scattered rocks and dirt where the sun shone through. The cave continued downwards out of her vision, and Zoe decided to come back to this one later. A dive into the depths excited her, but there were less dangerous options for her too.

Instead, she walked over to one of the large open slits in one of the cliffsides and looked inside. The cave grew smaller and twisted out of her vision from the entrance, so Zoe wandered in. The damp rock walls closed in on her as she followed the twisting path through the hill, and then after a very tight squeeze, opened up to a large room.

The ceiling was twenty, maybe thirty feet high. The walls were staggered and rough, leaving a somewhat pentagonal room. Towards the point was a small pool of water that was filled from a tunnel below it, and off to one side of the room was a small hole Zoe thought she’d fit through about six feet off the ground.

Zoe kicked herself for committing to the smaller slit earlier and went back to grab her bed. She’d much rather call the large room with possible fresh drinking water her home. It was difficult to get to so she didn’t think there would be many animals that would bother her. Maybe some bugs or whoever called the cave home.

But the only entry points were where Zoe made her way in from and coming up through the water or the small hole in the wall. Even if something was going to harass her, they wouldn’t be very large. She summoned her bed and put it up against one wall in the larger cave and sat down on it.

What would be her plan for the area? She wanted something she could call her home for a while. Maybe she could even turn it into something more permanent, a place she could always return to when she wanted to come back to Flester.

First, the room was too big. Having everything in one big room made her feel a little anxious. What was the opposite of claustrophobia? Was there a name for that? She thought she might have it, if it was a thing.

If she wanted to call this place her home for a while, she needed to close it off. The room was tall enough that she could fit in two stories, if she could manage to build something stable enough for that. She thought she could, with enough time at least.

And the floor area was large enough for her to fit in a couple of useful rooms. Maybe a bedroom, a kitchen and a workshop for her various skills. One problem with that would be ventilation, though. If she made a fire in here, it would burn up all the oxygen and she’d be dead before she even realized anything was happening. Probably.

Maybe she’d notice her health dropping, or maybe the system would give her a notification for carbon dioxide poisoning. Worth testing, but she’d rather just have some ventilation to be safe.

The small hole on the wall could be good for that if it led outside and she could get some air flow. Maybe something enchanted with her Wind Manipulation could help with that.

Zoe walked up to the hole and clambered her way up the wall to squeeze into it. The walls scraped along her clothes as she slid along the narrow tunnel until it was too tight for her to fit. She could see it continue on a little while longer, and even felt the odd breeze wash over her sweaty eyebrows.

She thought about it for a moment, and then started using her Earth Manipulation to chip away at the rock and dirt and stored it away in her bracelets. It was a slow process and took a few hours, but she broke through to the surface and got a faceful of frosty dirt and snow.

The hole she’d dug was quite a ways up from the base of the hill, and she couldn’t see the river that she followed to get to it so she must have dug straight through to the other side. Zoe crawled her way back to the little room she would call home, and sat back on her bed.

Ventilation was solved, at least partially. She’d need a proper chimney so that it didn’t get clogged or filled with water, but that was approachable at least. Her next priority was how she’d actually get any building done. Would she need to support the rock ceiling to keep it from collapsing on her?

It had lasted this long, so maybe not she thought. But it had lasted this long without somebody living in it and adding an abundance of heat and vibrations to it, so maybe it would be a good idea after all.

And finally, was the water actually safe to drink? Zoe had come a long way since eating a Klir leaf just to see what it did, and just drinking the water herself gave her a little anxiety. But she was also in a much better situation now to try it. Her health was high enough to absorb much more poison, she regenerated much quicker now than she did before and she had an active healing skill to bolster that.

Zoe reached into the pool and cupped some of the water up in her hands. The cold water dripped between her fingers as she dumped it into her mouth and swallowed. She waited a moment for a notification and watched her health to see if it dropped, but nothing happened.

She smiled as she sat back down on her bed. It wasn’t far away from town, it wasn’t some grand adventure through a dungeon. It was just some random hill she found years ago. But somehow, it filled her with so much excitement and anticipation nevertheless.