Frostbitten Wayfarer

It was a tedious process of clearing away all the rubble, Zoe found. Some of it was her own rock, and she was able to dissolve it away to reclaim some of the mana without too much effort. But the bulk of it was detritus that had fallen from the cavern walls during the fight and ice that piled up from the intense cold that enveloped the cavern.

Of course, Zoe would be able to grasp control of all of it and dissolve it away if she put in the time for it. But she looked around and shook her head. There was just so much, it would take her days if not weeks to work through it all.

Instead, she broke the massive chunks of rock down into more manageable pieces and moved them off to one side of the cavern with the help of her bracelets. Hundreds, if not thousands of the small icy splinters covered the cavern floor, concentrated most towards the tunnel where Zoe had held her ground at, but there were plenty everywhere she checked.

Zoe started from the outside and worked her way in to the center in a spiral as she filled her bracelet with rock and piled them up off to the side. She looked for any more tunnels that might lead deeper, any trinkets or treasures left on the ground but nothing stood out to her.

The temperature kept plummeting as she made her way closer to the center of the room, and Zoe wondered what was causing it. She wanted to rush in and check it out right away, but stuck to her methodical approach of inspecting everything.

She had found more splinters than she’d ever know what to do with, and a part of her was excited to get back to her cave and work on building out her little home with all of her newfound knowledge and icy splinters. Zoe daydreamed of a magical forge that compressed all of the smoke, a room carved into the wall and filled with shelves of all the loot she’d find on her journey.

And before she knew it, she made it to the end of her spiral. A massive boulder was all that was between her and the end of her first adventure. The cold bit into her skin at this point, and Zoe was flooding herself with Restoration at a constant rate while she worked.

Zoe stepped back from the boulder and looked at it. Beneath it would either be glory or disappointment. The end of a year long journey into the depths.

She summoned her pickaxe and enchanted it with Mining, Spear-fighting and an explosive Frozen Arsenal enchantment then started smashing into it. Ice exploded from the rock with each impact and left deep grooves in the surface as the metal pick cut into it.

The boulder shattered into smaller pieces, and Zoe moved them off to the side and tried to temper her excitement. There was no guarantee that something was causing the cold, no guarantee that there truly was some magical climax to her adventure. It might just be a floor.

But her excitement grew despite her best efforts as she tossed the chunks aside and felt the cold continue to intensify. At the bottom was a jagged ball of opaque blue ice. Zoe identified it.

[Frost]

Zoe reached out and grabbed it. Her fingertips turned blue almost the instant they touched it, and the frost began to creep up her hand.

She jerked her hand back, but the ball came with it like a tongue stuck on a frozen lightpost in the winter. No amount of waving her hand around seemed to make it come off and she felt her heart race as the frost reached her wrist. The feeling in her hand was gone, cut off where the growing frost touched.

Panic rose within her. Zoe tried flooding the ball with mana to wrench it off with her Frost skill, but the sensation of her mana within it frightened her. It was a bottomless pit, happy to eat up however much mana she could throw at it. She’d never saturate it before it consumed her.

Zoe slammed her hand against the ground, hoping to shatter her hand but it bounced off the icy ground and wrenched on her forearm where the frost met flesh. She tried to store the Frost away in her bracelet and it vanished, taking a massive chunk of her mana with it.

Health: 483/1000

She fell on her back and breathed a sigh of relief. Dying to some stupid ball was not her idea of a good time. What was it, anyway, she wondered. Identify just said Frost, but what did that mean? Was it a physical version of her Frost skill, or was it something else?

Zoe checked her bracelet storage and made sure the Frost was in its own bag so it didn’t freeze everything else when her mana regenerated, and then looked at her right arm. It was frozen right up to the elbow. There wasn’t any pain, but she couldn’t feel anything.

Would it thaw on its own? Restoration had filled her health back up, and the cold was nowhere near as intense as it was just a few minutes earlier so she wasn’t having any troubles with keeping her health full either.

But her arm was still frozen, despite her health being full. What did that mean for health, then? Was her new normal state to have a frozen arm? She tried to avoid thinking about it too much. She wasn’t in pain, her health was fine, her arm would recover. She hoped.

Zoe started walking back up the tunnel and followed along her map. There were a few cave-ins she had to dig through along the way, but she never got too far off track. By the time she made it to the top again, the frost had receded a few inches below her elbow. Even at the top without the intense cold, her health was draining bit by bit and she had to keep topping herself up with Restoration.

She hoped that meant her arm was being healed and not that the Frost in her bracelet was leaking out. It shouldn’t, she hoped. Her bracelet was four separate, isolated spaces. There was no way that cold would leak out through it.

Zoe stopped at the pile of lumber she’d chopped down last year — over the year of practice she’d made a small covering to keep snow and water from piling up on it and the wood was noticeably more dry now. She grabbed a few of the smaller pieces and made a small shoddy campfire with her one good arm and then sat down next to it.

Hours passed through the night as she kept piling on more bits of wood and watching the ice on her arm slowly crack and chip away as it worked back down her arm. The ice melted away by the time the morning sun rose, and even without Restoration filling her up, she wasn’t taking any damage anymore.

She breathed another sigh of relief, glad that it wasn’t the Frost leaking out her storage item. That didn’t make sense, but the whole time she sat next to the fire her mind raced with possibility and danger. Not that having it wasn’t dangerous, but if it was isolated in its own space then it wouldn’t be too bad.

Zoe stood up and stomped out the fire then started making her way back through the forest to her cave. Winter was just a few days away and the snow was beginning to pile up. At Zoe’s command, the snow in her path floated off to the side and made a corridor almost as tall as Zoe for her to walk through.

It might not be the safest option since it blocked her vision, but in snow this deep she didn’t think much would be approaching her that she wouldn’t be able to hear first.

The forest was peaceful. Birds were singing their morning songs, and there were even a few deer and rabbits that hopped through the path that Zoe had been making around the hill. She took her time wandering and enjoyed the sights. It was a nice break from the hours of danger she’d just been put through, and Zoe found herself smiling.

Sometimes the best thing to do was to just relax and enjoy life for what it was. The splattering of snow that fell from the canopies above, the gusts of wind that blew puffs of snow in your face and the peaceful brightness of winter was just a pleasant time.

Zoe froze when she got back to the other side of the hill. She noticed something she hadn’t seen in over a year. Outside her cave were tracks. Human tracks, and they were recent too. Maybe an hour at most. They came from the forest, and wandered up and down the hill outside her cave before they went in. And haven’t come out.

She put all her attention on the sounds around her. The birds chirping, the wind rushing through the treetops, ice cracking and almost inaudible footsteps from deeper in her cave.

“You sure?” Zoe heard a deep, masculine voice echo from her cave.

“Yes I’m sure.” A hushed feminine voice responded.

“Just seems weird. Why would all this crap be out here if nobody’s using it?” The man asked.

“Don’t ask me. Weird magic stuff, maybe it’s the beginning of a dungeon and we’re gonna be rich. Does it really matter? These weird ice crystals seem valuable too. I bet we could get a couple silver for em.” The woman said.

“But what if whoever lives here needs them?” The man asked.

“Who’s gonna live here Yorn? Flester is just a few hours away and you think somebody’s going to choose to live out here in this stupid hill? That’s stupid and you know it.” The woman said.

“I don’t know, maybe they just don’t like being around people.” Yorn said.

“And they’d rather be around whatever the fuck’s out here? Come on, be real. This is some ancient home somebody built and we’re just bringing it back to civilization.” The woman said.

“Lane, the bed’s brand new. It hasn’t been here for decades, it’s been here for I dunno, years? There’s still hair in it, too.” Yorn said.

“Fine, we’re stealing. What’s it matter anyway?” Lane asked.

“Just feels wrong, is all.” Yorn said.

“What’s gonna feel wrong is if we don’t eat tonight because you didn’t want to steal some random crap from some idiot’s hideout.” Lane said.

Zoe heard a begrudging sigh from the man. “Fine. We’ll take the weird ice crystals, but leave the rest okay?”

“Fine. We’ll be nice to the idiot we’re stealing from. Happy?” Lane asked.

“Yup! Lets get back to Flester, I’m hungry.” Yorn said.

Zoe heard their footsteps approaching, and ducked down into the snow. She covered herself with snow from her Frost skill and left a small hole to see through.

Two people left her cave, both in scrappy, torn leather armour with ripped cloth shirts and pants full of holes. They were both green marked, the man was a level thirty-six mage and the woman was a thirty-four warrior.

They looked around when they left Zoe’s cave, and then ran off into the forest. Zoe stayed under her snow for a while longer, and then got up and went in her cave. The front door she’d made was destroyed, a gaping hole in the center of it that the two thieves must have smashed through.

Inside her cave was a mess, bedsheets were floating in the pool of water, her box of belongings was toppled over. Her fishing rod had been snapped in half, pressed up against the cave wall.

Zoe rubbed her head and sighed. If she wanted to live here long term, she’d need better defenses. A simple rock wall that wasn’t hidden at all wasn’t going to cut it. Even if she only had her place broken into once ever year or two, that was far too often to be able to make a comfortable survival here.

Was it even worth living in here anymore? What if those people decided to come back and see if whoever lived here set up more of the icy splinters? If she added a stronger door, wouldn’t that just entice them to break in again and loot more of her belongings?

She picked up her bedsheets from the pool of water and hung them up on a pillar of stone she extruded from the wall with her Earth skill to dry, and then sat down on her bed.

This cave was hers. She liked it, she’d grown attached to it. Moving felt like defeat, to her. Maybe it was the right decision, but she’d already put in so much effort in this cave with her chimney, flattening all the ground while she practised with her skills, cleaning up the jagged walls. This was her cave, throwing it all away because of one bad experience just felt so pointless.

If it was broken into again, she’d move. But you didn’t move just because you were broken into once, right?

Zoe stood up and walked to the entrance. It was a big crack in the side of the hill and stood out quite a lot. If she could add her front door here instead, then it might keep people out a little better. And this time she’d try and match the Earth she used so it didn’t look like an intentional obstruction, too.

She took a few hours to create a wall of earth that matched the hill and filled in the gaping crack that led to her cave. Most of the time she spent manipulating the existing hillside to make it a little more steep and cliffy so that her wall of rock wouldn’t stand out as being unusual — connecting dirt and grass to her door didn’t seem possible to her. By the time she was done, she felt pretty satisfied with her work.

Even knowing where the entrance was, she couldn’t tell there was anything unusual with the cliff. Zoe carved out a small, Zoe sized hole from the new cliff and enchanted the bit she carved out with the same enchantment she’d used before. It squished off to the side when she pushed mana into it, and Zoe walked in to her cave.

She took a few minutes to clean up the mess the thieves had made and help dry off her bedsheets with her Wind skill. Immaculate Enchantments did a great job of removing the dirt and grime from her belongings, but it didn’t dry things off.

Zoe sat down on her bed and laid down for a bit. Now that exploration was done, she wanted to take some time to get her cave built up just the way she wanted. And then it was on to the next big adventure. Maybe back to Moaning Point to see what was at the top she thought as she drifted off to sleep.