/ Dawn / 6:20 AM / Museday, Fourth day 4, Year 522 AC / Waxing Crescent / Zhorath's Cave / Late Spring / Cold, clear dawn light; ember glow /
Aeris paused, taking a sip from her waterskin. "But they are not the only players. There are monasteries that view elemental power as a test of spirit, mercenary companies that weaponize it, and empires that would mine it like ore. And then there are those, like the supposed 'they' in Althaea's note, who might seek to corrupt it for their own ends."
She finished packing her satchel and looked at me, her expression sober. "My first story for you is this: the world is not just new to you, Kaida. It is constantly being made and unmade by the people in it. And right now, someone is trying to unmake the balance of storms in these mountains."
Zhorath returned with a small, worn leather pouch and a pair of sturdy, fur-lined mittens. "Dried meat. Lichen that will warm water from within. And protection from the wind's bite." He offered them to me. "The path begins where the Cleft's river finds its source, high in the Crown. A half-day's hard climb from here."
Aeris stood, testing her legs. She was unsteady but determined. "I have my notes on the ley line anomalies. "We can follow the corruption to its source." She looked at me, waiting.
As I placed the mittens on my hands and stowed the leather pouch with supplies in my bag, feeling the weight of the elder's generosity - both practical and symbolic, I turned to Zhorath, "Thank you, elder; I will remember your generosity when the time comes."
I then turned to Aeris, "It seems our first destination is set, the river's source." As I said this I wordlessly walked over and took the strap of her satchel from her shoulder, adding it to my own. This seemed to startle her slightly for a split second.
"Oh, I can-" she began, a flicker of professional pride in her tired eyes. But as I slung it over my own shoulder without breaking stride, she stopped. She watched me for a moment, her expression unreadable. A faint tinge of colour touched her pale cheeks, and she gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. "Thank you," she said quietly, the words carrying more weight than a simple acknowledgement of burden sharing.
Zhorath observed the exchange, his piercing blue eyes missing nothing. He led me to the cave's entrance, where the world opened up into the vast, vertical gorge of the Howling Cleft. The dawn light now painted the eastern rim in brilliant gold, but the floor where I stood remained in deep, cold shadow. The wind had sharper teeth up there, whistling through the stone with renewed vigour.
"The river you seek is born of ice and pressure," Zhorath rasped, pointing a clawed finger up the cleft, to where it narrowed into a steep, waterfall-carved chimney. "Follow the water's song upwards. Where it falls silent, and only the groan of ancient ice remains, you will find the Crown's doorstep. Listen to the wind. It carries warnings before it carries storms."
He placed a heavy, scaled hand on my shoulder for a moment. "You carry more than packs now, Kaida Stormwing. Walk with care."
With a final nod to Aeris, he turned and melted back into the darkness of his cave, leaving the two of us at the threshold.
Aeris took a steadying breath, pulling her travel robes tighter around herself. She looked up the daunting path, then at me, a spark of determined curiosity cutting through her fatigue. "Shall we?"
The climb out of the immediate cleft was arduous, involving scrambling over slick, water-smoothed boulders beside a rushing, icy stream.
After an hour, I emerged onto a higher, more exposed ridge. The view was staggering. The endless mountain ranges of the Aetherium Expanse spread out below in waves of blue-grey and white. Ahead, the terrain climbed even more sharply towards a towering jagged crest of pure white - the Glacial Crown. The stream we had been following now tumbled down a series of frozen cataracts from that direction.
Aeris paused, leaning against a rock to catch her breath. Her gaze was distant, analytical. "The flow is strong. The source is still actively melting, which is good. A completely frozen source might mean…" She trailed off, not wanting to voice the darker possibility. She looked at me, her grey eyes bright in the morning light. "You wanted a story. Here's one for the climb: Did you know some scholars believe the first dragons were born from places like this? Not from eggs, but from the concentration of elemental will in the world's raw places. A mountain's stubbornness becoming a earth dragon. A storm's fury becoming a blue. What do your giants say about dragons?"
She asked the question as both a distraction from the climb and genuine inquiry, watching me closely as I led the way.
"Some stories depict the original dragons as the creators of the elements and all we see, while other's portray them as the concentration of elemental will just as you said. What we do know is that dragons today are all hatched from eggs. And few if any ancient dragons still remain today."
Aeris listened intently, her breath forming small clouds in the crisp air. "A blend of myth and observable fact," she said, nodding slowly as she picked her way over a patch of loose scree. "That's the heart of most traditions. The giants' stories have more weight than many, though - they've lived alongside these forces for millennia."
The climb grew steeper. The stream beside us was now mostly ice-coated, flowing in thin, braided channels beneath a glassy shell. The wind whipped across the exposed ridge, carrying with it a strange, metallic scent - like ozone, but colder.
Aeris paused again, her sharp eyes scanning the ice. "Do you smell that?" she asked, her voice tense. "That's not natural mountain air. That's charged particulate - like after a lightning strike, but… sustained." She knelt with some difficulty, brushing snow from the ice to reveal the stream beneath. The water itself seemed to sparkle with tiny, suspended crystals that caught the light with a faint blue-white gleam.
"It's carrying trace energy upstream," she murmured, more to herself than to me. "The contamination is flowing from the Crown, not toward it. That confirms it. The source is poisoned."
She looked up at me, her grey eyes serious. "We need to be careful. If the leylines are this corrupted, the local elemental balance will be volatile. We could encounter… manifestations. Ice that moves. Winds that cut like blades. Storms that form from nothing."
As if on cue, a gust of wind started slicing down from the peaks above, howling with an almost intelligent fury. It didn't just push - it searched, curling around rocks and whistling through crevices. Aeris stumbled, and I instinctively stepped to block the worst of it, my larger frame shielding her. The wind tugged at my scales and clothes, carrying a whisper that might have been words in Primordial, the language of elemental forces: "…mine…feed…"
Aeris regained her footing, her hand briefly resting on my arm for balance. Her touch was cold through my tunic. "Thank you," she said, her voice barely audible over the wind. She didn't pull away immediately, her gaze fixed on the path ahead where the ridge narrowed into a treacherous, ice-coated ledge that traversed a sheer cliff face. "That doesn't look promising."
The ledge, a nightmare of wind-sculpted ice, was about thirty feet long and barely two feet wide in places. Below was a several-hundred-foot drop into a jagged ravine. The ice glittered, not with natural frost, but with the same faint, sinister blue-white energy from before. The wind didn't just blow - it pushed with deliberate, searching force, trying to peel us from the rock face.
"I think from here on out you should stay close behind me; it's only going to get more dangerous as we continue."
Aeris nodded, her expression grim. "Agreed. My expertise is in measuring storms, not surviving them." She moved to position herself directly behind me, her slender frame close enough that I could feel the slight tremor in her breathing - whether from cold, fatigue, or fear, it was hard to say.
I took the hempen rope from my pack and swiftly cut a generous length of rope from my coil - about fifteen feet - and returned the rest to my pack. When I returned to Aeris with the rope in hand and asked, "May I?", she blinked, momentarily taken aback by the formality in the midst of the danger.
A faint, surprised smile touched her lips, followed by a quick, serious nod. "Please do what you must."
She held her arms slightly away from her body, allowing me to work. As I stepped close to loop the rope around her waist, the howling wind seemed to drop for just a moment, replaced by the intimate reality of proximity. I could feel the slight shiver that ran through her, see the faint pulse at her throat quicken. Her grey eyes were fixed on my hands as I tied a secure mountaineer's knot, her breath warm against the cold air between us. When my fingers brushed against the fabric of her robes, she didn't flinch away.