Five glowing three-dimensional images appeared before my eyes. There was the gray skull of Death magic, the blue snowflake of Cold magic, the green and brown oak of Tree magic, the white tornado of Wind magic, and the white flame of Light magic. Fire magic would have been ideal for this situation, but that was one element I didn’t have right now, so I had to improvise.
First, I poured in a shit-ton of Death magic to serve as the fuel to power everything else; with my massive army not too far away, it was an almost limitless source of energy.
Next I pulled in the Wind magic to create a protective tornado around my party and the Jotunn. I gathered Cold magic into this to give the moving air some solidity, weaving a cocoon of rapidly moving ice. It might have seemed counterintuitive to use Ice magic against a blizzard, but I’d heard of tribespeople who lived in frozen areas who had houses of ice, which did well to protect them from the cold. This was the same principle.
I then infused the whole thing with Tree magic, picturing deep, powerful oak roots anchoring my tornado-cocoon to the mountain, so that no force of wind could uproot it and blow it into the chasm.
Finally, I pulled in the magic I hated most, aside from Blood magic of course: Light magic. It killed me to have to use this, but it was the key ingredient in this little alchemical cocktail of mine. After Fire magic, this would be the next best thing when it came to powering through the tempest of ice and snow. I coated the outside of the tornado-cocoon with white-hot Light energy, and its intensity melted the onslaught of ice and snow with effortless ease.
“You did it, Vance!” Anna-Lucielle, who’d been cowering beneath a shield, cried.
Her voice was almost drowned out by the roaring whoosh of the tornado around us, but everyone wore smiles now. As deafening as it was, it was a much more welcome sound than that of the howling blizzard.
Safe inside my cocoon of combined magical powers, we advanced up the mountain pass, making rapid headway despite the steep and difficult terrain. Everyone had a few slips and falls on the ice, which became more prolific the higher we ascended. Again, I wished I had access to Fire magic, which would have been very useful here. Nobody got hurt, but everyone grumbled about their scrapes and bruises. The power of the Tree magic to anchor my moving tornado-cocoon to the mountain had surprised me with its effectiveness. Seeing how solidly it was working, an idea popped into my head about how to stop the slips and slides that kept happening on the ice.
“Everyone, hold up!” I yelled.
After the marathon trek up the steep mountainside, everyone was only too happy to take a break.
“Why we stop?” Drok asked, the only one who looked a little irked to be stopping. He did have the stamina of a pack mule. “Drok only break a sweat now.”
“I’m going to add a little something to your boots,” I said to them. “Trust me, you’ll thank me later. Everyone, get in a line.”
They did what I told them, and I moved along the line, kneeling in front of each member of my party and touching their boots. I’d gained the skill to enchant weapons and other items with Death magic a while back. Thanks to the Dragon Sword’s ability to blend different types of magic, I could now enchant objects with other kinds of magic.
I added a little Tree magic to everyone’s boots, just enough to give them a solid anchoring to the ground, like the roots of a sturdy oak.
“I don’t think there’ll be nearly as much slipping and sliding now,” I said with a grin after I’d finished the last pair of boots.
We carried on trekking up the mountainside, but now there was a new issue to contend with; the air was so thin that everyone was getting short of breath. Again, I used the Tree magic to assist us, remembering how humid and rich the air was in the steaming jungles of lowland Yeng. I pulled some of this energy into the tornado-cocoon with the Dragon Sword, and soon we were breathing easily again.
After a few hours of arduous hiking, we finally made it to the glacier. The Hooded Man, or whoever it was who’d called up the blizzard, had given up on trying to blast us off the mountain, after my tornado-cocoon had proved to be an effective shield. I released the tornado-cocoon, and when it dissipated everyone gasped at the sight that greeted us.
The blizzard had given way to a crystal-clear sky, filled with more stars than I had seen in a very long time, and a huge yellow full moon that had just risen, like a cold sun. All around us, as far as the eye could see, were snowcapped mountain peaks, like white dunes in an endless desert of ice. Below us, stretching out for a mile like a frozen sea, was the glacier, a chunk of solid ice the size of a lake.
And there, suspended in the middle of this ocean of ice, was the object we’d come all this way to find: a complete, intact dragon skeleton. I’d known it would be big, but hell, it was far bigger than I’d imagined it would be; alive, the creature would have been at least the size of a kraken, if not bigger.
“All right,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “There it is, under half a mile of ice. Now all we have to do is get it out.”
Chapter Three
“How are we going to get it out, Lord Vance?” Rollar asked as we stared at the massive dragon skeleton, entombed in the glacier. It was strange looking at it through almost half a mile of ice; the ice was like glass, and there was very little of the usual
