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No, she mouthed as fury replaced sense.
This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening to her. She’d been in a pond, a warm pond in the countryside in Domara in the summer. It couldn’t have frozen over like that. Not that fast.
She placed her hands on the ice and sank down into that place that was now an empty crypt in the pit of her stomach. All the magic she had lost. But she still had something, didn’t she? Magic resistance. She could break spells. It had saved her more than once. She refused to believe that whatever had caused this ice was of the natural variety.
It was another spell to break.
As she channeled that feeling into the sheet above her head, she watched in desperation as ice thawed and thinned. Then, a hole appeared. She forced her head through the opening and gulped in great, heaving gusts of clean, fresh air. Her head was dizzy from the oxygen deprivation, and she had to hang on to the sides of the ice to keep her head above water.
Now that her immediate concern was mitigated, the cold hit her like a dragon to the chest. Her hands pushed against the ice to widen the hole big enough for her to crawl her way out of the water. Her hands and feet slipped against the snow-slicked surface. Still, she curled herself up onto the ice inch by painful inch, shaking with all of her might as the water threatened to drag her down.
It wasn’t until she was safely on the surface of the ice that the terror abated. Her teeth chattered noisily, and it took a solid minute before she could open her eyes again to survey the landscape.
Her friends were gone.
The clearing had been transformed into a winter wonderland. The waterfall frozen over like a series of giant icicles down the rock face. The surrounding land was coated in a full foot of snow as far as the eye could see. The boughs of the trees were heavy and drooping toward the ground. Not a single footprint in sight. Not a single bird chirping or animal rustling or person speaking. The space was oddly silent. Deadly silent, like a predator had set up shop and was staking out its prey. The silence was a warning.
Kerrigan pushed herself unsteadily to her feet. She didn’t know what predator would be in these woods. But she still didn’t have her magic, and now, she was freezing. She needed to get to Vera’s home and find a way to warm up. Otherwise, she would freeze to death before she figured out how any of this had happened.
She stumbled on shaky legs across the ice. The snow was deceptive, and each footfall felt precarious. Her shoes slipped on the wet surface. She threw her arms out to try to brace herself, but that redistributed her weight. She gasped as she heard the first distinctive noise in the strange, cold world—the cracking of ice.
“Scales!”
She made a break for it. Her footfalls were hard and uneven. She could hardly care to be safe about it as a giant crack was chasing her across the pond and back to Keres’s original position at the point of the star. Her foot nearly fell through a hole as she reached the edge, and she dived forward, as she had so often in dragon training. Her back protested the roll, but the other option was plunging back into the freezing water. By her estimation, she only had about an hour before her limbs were going to succumb to hypothermia … if she was lucky.
Kerrigan came back to her feet, stretching her fingers and toes against the cold. She was soaked from the pond, and she’d only been in dark pants and a loose shirt before that. Thankfully, she hadn’t taken off her sturdy boots. At least she had a modicum of protection against the elements.
Whatever was out there was still hunting though. Now that she was out of the water, she could sense a stalking presence through the snow. Something much more suited to this climate than her. Even though it had only been summer moments earlier, it made no difference now.
She trekked through the downy snow and onto the trail they had followed not long ago. She was thankful to see that it still existed even if obscured by the snow. She had an excellent sense of direction, and finding her way, even in this new white landscape, wasn’t a problem. It was the cold that was the problem.
And the thing at her back.
A shiver raced down her spine, and she whipped around, wondering if she would have enough energy to even fight the thing. But nothing was there.
The same deadly silence remained. Ever present and terrifying.
She gulped and then continued the way she had been going. She couldn’t feel her toes any longer. The boots weren’t doing much but keeping extra snow from her already-frozen feet. Her fingers would be next. And then it would crawl up her body until it stopped her heart and she died. She’d read about it with her friends back in Alandria. Cold was much deadlier than heat.
