“The obvious solution would be to use Elyse’s Light magic to melt the ice,” I said.
“I can do that, but it’ll take quite a while to burn through this much ice, even with my beam at full power.” Elyse sounded doubtful as she glanced up at the full moon.
“There’s also the problem of what happens to the melted ice,” Isu said. “Some of it will be vaporized as steam, but some will remain in the form of water.”
“Neither of those things are big problems,” I said. “I’ll use my Dragon Sword to channel Elyse’s Light beam and amplify its power to melt and vaporize the ice faster, and Rami-Xayon can call up a tornado to suck out leftover water. I’m more worried about the beam damaging the dragon skeleton once we get to it.”
Yumo-Rezu chuckled. “Don’t worry about that, Vance. Dragonbone is impervious to heat. You could drop that skeleton into the crater of a volcano, pull it out of the magma a day later, and there wouldn’t be a mark on it.”
“I guess this will be an easier task than any of us thought then,” I said. “Elyse, Rami-Xayon, let’s begin.”
Elyse called on the power of the full moon, and in a second she was clad in her dazzling golden armor, holding her glowing golden mace. Rami-Xayon conjured up a whirling tornado, and I gripped my Dragon Sword in both hands, summoning Death power from my army.
I saw two glowing images: the gray skull of Death magic and the white fire of Light magic. Now that I’d gotten over my initial feelings of distaste at using Light magic, I found myself looking forward to blasting out a stream of white fire from the Dragon Sword; it would, after all, be partly powered by Death magic, so it wasn’t as if I would be wielding pure Light power. When this distinctly unholy cocktail was ready, I aimed the point of the Dragon Sword at the skeleton and channeled magic through it. I let out a satisfied chuckle when I saw that the torrent of fire was tainted with gray and smelled a little of grave-rot. This was my Light power, not the Lord of Light’s.
I’d imagined that the Death-Light flame would sear through the ice with little resistance, like an arrow through fog, but the glassy ice of this glacier proved to be extremely resilient. Even with the potency of the focused Death-Light flame, getting through the ice was like trying to chip a tunnel through a boulder with a butter knife. I gritted my teeth, growling wordlessly with effort, and pulled more Death power from my distant army into the flame. Elyse was putting all of her strength into it too, so much so that her limbs were trembling. After I poured more power into the flame, the ice started melting, hissing and bubbling. The potency of the fire broke it down into water and steam, which Rami-Xayon sucked out of the growing tunnel with her tornado.
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep the Light fire at this level, Vance,” Elyse gasped. “It’s too potent, it’s draining my strength at too rapid a rate!”
“Hang in there, Elyse,” I said through gritted teeth, with sweat oozing from my pores and pain burning in my muscles, “I’ve got this. We need more power … and I’ve got more power.”
I hurled part of my spirit across to the lake where my undead kraken was lurking in the murky depths. I needed the strength of this leviathan to boost the power of the flame. I linked my spirit to the kraken’s and channeled the raw power from its gargantuan zombie body, pouring it into the torrent of Death-Light fire. It now felt as if there was so much energy rushing through my body that my bones would splinter and my muscles would explode, but I held firm, roaring with both agony and triumph as the new flame blasted a furious passage through the glacier, kicking out waves of boiling water and massive clouds of steam. Now, instead of burning through inches of ice, the flame was searing through yards of it in seconds.
Finally, we reached the dragon skeleton. Once I’d burned all the ice off it, I called off the flame. Elyse dropped to her knees, gasping for breath and shaking, while I leaned on the Dragon Sword, panting and drenched with sweat.
“Glacier zero, Vance one,” I muttered. “Now, let’s get that skeleton out.”
“It must have looked magnificent when it was alive.” Anna-Lucielle stared in awe at the gigantic skeleton.
“I can imagine such a creature chewing on mouthfuls of people like a monkey eating nuts.” Layna licked her lips.
“You’ll see a living dragon soon enough,” I said to them. “Once I get all the ingredients together, I’m going to make one killer of a concoction. God killer, to be exact.”
Friya was silent; she’d been staring at the skeleton from the time we’d arrived here. I knew what she was thinking about: those enormous bones down there would soon be her bones, inside her body. It was one thing to resurrect an extinct monster, but another thing entirely to irreversibly turn into one. She looked excited at the prospect, though, and had long ago accepted this fate as her destiny.
The tunnel I burned through the ice went down to the skeleton at an angle of around forty-five degrees. My Jotunn would be able to get down easy enough but carrying that huge skeleton and coming up the slippery slope would be a lot harder, even with the boost in strength and endurance that came with being undead. I gave each Jotunn’s boots a quick enchantment with Tree magic to give them extra grip on the steeply angled ice.
It would take them a while to get the skeleton out, so while the Jotunn went
