Some uncountable number of hours later, they had still not found a map.

Perhaps Celris had never intended to open his home to visitors, though the ancient grandeur of the entrance hall made Liv doubt that. She supposed that he might have wanted to keep what visitors he did have uncomfortable, confused and dependent on his servants to find their way. He might have had the panes of glass they’d found in other rifts torn off the walls, when it became clear that his home was going to be assaulted by the Elden and human rebels. Whatever the answer was, they found no clue.

Instead, Liv led their wanderings through a vast, labyrinthine dwelling that seemed to have been cut down into the very bedrock of the world. She found herself wishing for Sidonie’s presence, and in her friend’s place, she used two of the blank pages left in her own spellbook to sketch out a map of their route, to prevent the party from becoming utterly lost.

Some of the rooms were empty. Perhaps they had once been filled with furniture of wood, cushions of cloth, carpets or tapestries – but if so, over a thousand years of neglect had seen it all stolen or rotted away. Was it even possible for things to rot in such a cold, dead place? Liv didn’t know.

Sometimes, they could guess at the purpose of a room. Along one left branch, a set of black stone steps wound up, higher and higher, to a room that rose above the icy plain. If the entire fastness had not been built at the bottom of a canyon to begin with, Liv would have called it a tower chamber.

After wearily trudging the entire way up the stairs, they discovered that the room was in the shape of a cylinder, with a round floor surrounded by curved walls that led up to another vaulted ceiling. This one was of dense ice, rather than stone, which had been formed of such surpassing clarity that the light from the ribbons of dancing color in the northern sky scattered down upon the floor and seemed to fill the entire room with rainbows of blue, green and violet.

The floor itself was formed of two concentric circles, the outer of black stone and the inner of white, carved with sigils. There was a great mechanism, as well: a seat attached to a telescope at least three times the size of the one in master Grenfell’s Whitehill observatory. The entire contraption was mounted on a series of mechanical arms and gears.

“I’ve got to admit, I didn’t think we’d find something so beautiful here,” Rosamund said. Something about the room seemed to demand lowered voices, but hers still echoed off the stone walls and floor.

“Elder Aira said that even the Vædim were complex,” Liv pointed out. “Evil co-existing with good. Everything I’ve ever been told about Celris makes me think he was a real monster, but maybe even a monster can feel something looking up at the night sky.” She crouched down on the white stone, and touched a hand to it.

“What is it?” Arjun asked.

“Mana stone, like I thought,” Liv said. “Not a waystone, though. The sigils –” She looked up through the ceiling, at the great shining ring in the sky above. “I think it's meant to receive mana from the ring.”

She stood back up and carefully made her way over to the telescope, then gently eased herself into the chair. It was little more than a metal frame, and Liv guessed it must once have had a cushion. She set her eye to the eyepiece, but saw only an expanse of stars.

“I thought it might have been looking at something in particular,” Liv explained, disappointed.

“Whatever it was could have moved a great deal over twelve hundred years,” Keri pointed out. “I wonder if we could bring a team to disassemble this. Bring it out and set it up somewhere else.”

“You’d need a pretty big force to guard something like that,” Rose cautioned. “Between the mana beasts outside and the mirrors in the great hall – and I don’t think we’ve found everything. But it’s freezing here. Can we head back down?”

“Of course,” Liv agreed. Rose was right: the observatory room wasn’t sheltered by layers of stone like the rest of the complex, and the clear ice ceiling did nothing to keep out the cold. Once Liv had made her notations on the map, they made their way down the stairs, and took the next turning.

There was a hall of sculptures, every statue of ice instead of stone, and each one a beautiful Elden woman. Where the ceiling in the observatory had been made as transparent as glass, the statues had been frozen in such a way as to be nearly as white as mana stone. The likenesses were remarkable: Liv found herself pausing to examine the way locks of hair had been carved around the pointed ears of a woman just a bit taller than she was.

“Blood and shadows,” Rose gasped, from only a few paces away. Liv turned at the sound of her voice, and saw that the dark-haired girl had bent in so close that her nose was practically pressed up against the ice. “I can see a bit of color under here, Liv. On the cloth.”

“What?” Liv hurried over to Rose’s side, and Keri came up behind them to shine the light of his spell down upon the statue.

“There.” Rose pointed with a finger, and Liv saw it: the scrap of cloth falling between the statue’s elegant legs, the only bit of clothing she wore, was actually a blue so dark that it was nearly black. It was only possible to see where the ice was not entirely opaque.

“Does it feel like the casket of ice down below?” Keri asked.

Liv reached out with Cel and Dā, letting herself feel the magic. “Similar,” she said. “But not exactly. That ice was meant to be melted, eventually, so that they could take her body out. I don’t think these statues were ever supposed to go away. I think he meant to keep them locked in here forever. Arjun, are any of them alive?”

“I don’t think so,” her friend said, shaking his head. “It feels like the blood has been completely removed from each one of these women. I don’t see how anyone could survive that.”

“The way they’re posed and dressed – or not dressed,” Rose murmured, moving about through the statues, examining them one after another. “They’re all meant to be looked at, not just preserved. I think these were his concubines. I think when he was done with them, he preserved them so that he could look at them forever. It’s disgusting.”

“Maybe we can give them burial rites when we’re all done here,” Liv suggested. “But for now we need to move on.”

Moving on, however, grew more and more difficult. The Tomb of Celris seemed to leach light and warmth from anyone and anything within it, and that included her friends. Keri’s light flickered and dimmed, requiring more and more of his mana to maintain. Her friends were constantly shivering, and any waste heat Liv made seemed to be sucked away somehow before she could do anything with it. They stopped twice to rest, and chew on a bit of jerky, and at first that seemed to help – but never for long. Finally, it was Arjun who took Liv aside.

“Everyone’s exhausted, Liv,” he said quietly, while Rosamund and Keri examined a great chamber that must once have held baths. Now, steps of marble led down into nothing but ice, and stone benches were frosted over. “We haven’t really stopped anywhere to rest for more than a night since we were up in the mountains – and that wasn’t exactly comfortable. They can’t keep going like this.”

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Liv sighed. The Tomb of Celris was larger than she’d anticipated – more extensive than either the Well of Bones, or Ceria’s tower. “I didn’t really want to sleep here,” she admitted. “I’d rather have got in and out in one day. But we haven’t even found where my aunt died, yet.”

“I understand,” Arjun said. “I don’t feel very comfortable here, either. But we need to make camp, and let everyone get some rest.”

“Alright.” Liv nodded, then approached Keri and Liv. “You think you can melt some of that?” she asked the Elden warrior.

“Probably,” Keri said. “Though this entire place seems to be completely opposed to my magic. It’s like every spell I cast here takes more out of me than it should, and gives less of a result.”

“Do your best,” Liv said. “Whatever water we can make here, is water we don’t need to use from what we’re carrying. I’m going to make us a shelter.”

She made a dome of ice, like she had in the mountains after they’d left Valegard with Wren and Sidonie. Liv left an opening large enough for them to crawl in and out of. She would have put all of the waste heat inside the dome, but once again it was leeched away before she could. Their body heat would have to do.

Keri did manage to melt some water, and they used that in a small portable pot he’d packed to cook a bit of soup. It was only sliced up chunks of jerky, dried fruit, and a few herbs and spices, but it meant they could soak their hardtack in the broth to soften it.

“What is that?” Liv asked in between bites, pointing at the gold etched sigils along the outside of the pot. “Æter?”

Keri shook his head. “Vær.”

“The same as the pipes,” Rose mumbled around a mouthful of soaked hardtack. “Utterly useless for fighting, but just about the best thing ever for everything else.”

And it would have been nice if one of them had imprinted the word, Liv thought to herself once they’d finished eating. They could have at least made an experiment to find out whether it would be affected the same way as Keri’s word of power, over the long term. Instead, she and Rose unrolled the furs they’d brought from Mountain Home and tried their best to get warm. They both stripped off their armor and set it aside, but when Liv began wriggling out of her clothes, as well, Rose gave her a confused look.

“I thought the point was to stay warm, not have fun?”

Liv blushed. “You’re not from the north,” she pointed out. “Doesn’t surprise me southerners aren’t taught this sort of thing. But when you want to warm someone up quick, you want skin to skin contact. We can use our clothes as a layer between us and the stone floor, and then put the furs on top of that.”

“If this is a clever trick to get me out of my pants,” Rose whispered, “I approve.”

By the time Arjun had come inside to get himself sorted out, Liv was as cozy as she could get, with Rose curled up around her back and both their furs wrapped around them in a knot. It occurred to her, for a moment, that they could have invited Arjun in with them. She knew that he wasn’t interested in girls, but the thought was still uncomfortable. Liv assured herself that her friend would be fine, closed her eyes, and drifted off to sleep.

☙

In her dreams, Liv stood atop a great glacier that cracked and growled as it moved beneath her. The ice stretched as far as she could see into an endless night sky, and only the dancing, shimmering curtains of light above let her see glints of reflection on the waves that crashed below. Otherwise, the dark ocean at the end of the glacier could only be heard.

There was an immense pressure, a great weight, somewhere out on those endless plains of packed snow and crusted ice. Liv turned away from the ocean and looked out into the darkness, but she could see nothing.

“Hello?” she called, and her voice was lost in the wind. Storm clouds overhead blotted out the sky, and white flecks of powder began to drift down around her. Liv turned about again: so far as she could see, there was no one else with her – but the feeling of building pressure said otherwise.

A great shadow loomed toward her out of the plain, an avalanche of snow and ice that had caught up great boulders and carried them along in its wake. The entire mass towered above her, as tall as a pine tree or a castle tower, but rather than fall down upon Liv’s head, it paused, hanging above her.

The great bulk shifted, and Liv could glimpse a chin, a brow, cheekbones. Then, a great mouth opened, enormous and dark, gaping wide enough to swallow her whole. The words that emerged were all Vædic, and they were the grinding of an oncoming glacier, but somehow Liv understood them.

“Blood of my blood, child of my seed,” the monstrous face of Celris, Vædic Lord of Cold addressed her. “You come to my dwelling? Walk my halls, gaze upon my works, and think to leave again? Foolish, foolish little thing. Warm flesh has no place in my home.”

“You’re dead!” Liv shouted up at the face, and it laughed.

“What is death?” Celris asked her. “A trick of the body? Do you die when your heart stops beating? Do you die when your lungs cease to draw breath?”

Liv shook her head. “No. When someone drowns, you can force the water out of their lungs – breathe for them until they can do it again on their own.” She wasn’t as certain about the heart, but Master Cushing had told her that sometimes even if it stopped for a moment, it would begin beating again.

“And when every component of your body is scattered across the vast universe, and you see only the great dark between, are you then dead?” Celris asked her.

Once again, Liv shook her head. “No. The waystones bring your body to another place.”

“Do they?” the head leaned back, grinning wide. Celris’ teeth were ice and granite, his breath was a northern wind. “This grows wearisome. Have I not killed you once already? You look familiar.”

“That was my aunt!” Liv shouted back. “She died here almost forty years ago!”

“Forty years. A blink of the eye.” Wind whipped around her, and Liv had to squeeze her eyes shut against the snow it drove into her face.

“I destroyed Costia’s body,” Liv spat into the storm. “I’ll destroy yours, too. I’ve seen it! A skull with the crown on its brow.”

“Costia was only a shell,” the storm howled in her ears. “You are close, very close, but you do not understand. Very well, daughter of my son’s son. I see you now. You walk in our path, though you do not yet understand where it leads. Come to me and test yourself. Throw yourself against me, batter your body into the ice until your bones break and your blood stains the snow.”

“Spend all that you are against my inevitability. Watch your friends and lovers die, and their bodies cool. Watch my darkness swallow the light in their eyes. And when there is nothing of you left, you will come at last to my final truth: the end of all that is, was, and shall ever be. Silence and stillness and darkness. Come to me, as do all that live.”

The storm blew harder, and Liv fell to her knees –

☙

With a gasp, Liv opened her eyes. She was pressed between Rose on one side, arms wrapped around each other, bare legs tangled, and on the other, Keri’s broad back. He must have placed his sleeping furs right next to them, for warmth, when he’d finished keeping watch.

Arjun was gone. Liv guessed it was his turn to stay awake.

“Celris,” she whispered, and Rose stirred sleepily.

“Go back to sleep,” the dark haired girl mumbled. Half conscious, she ran her hand over Liv’s back, making slow circles as if she was soothing a child.

“I will,” Liv promised. She hesitated for just a moment, and then leaned in to kiss Rose’s forehead. Then, she waited until her friend’s breathing became slow and steady once again.

Watch your friends and lovers die, Celris had told her. It was a threat if Liv had ever heard one. Nevermind that she had, at most, a single lover – though, in all honesty, even after the talks they’d had, the night sleeping together in one cot in Varuna, she’d still been holding herself away from Rose at arm’s length. Just now, Liv had kissed her forehead, but not her lips.

In the dark of the night, Liv knew she wasn’t being fair. First she’d let Cade pursue her for six years, and now she was letting Rose do the same. Why? Because it felt good to be wanted? Rose didn’t want to control her, at least, but did that make it right to let her waste her entire life on someone who would still be young when she was dead and gone.

Carefully, Liv began to extricate herself from the furs, from the tangle of Rose’s limbs. It was hard to do – not because she couldn’t move, but because she was leaving all the warmth, the comfort, the life wrapped up in that embrace. Finally, she stood up and stretched in the darkness of the ice dome. The cold assaulted every inch of her bare skin.

“Where are you going?” Keri asked.

Liv spun about in shock, and saw that he had rolled over. She could just make out his eyes in the darkness, and she felt herself flush from toes to eartips at the realization the only thing shielding her body from his sight was the shadows.

“Celris is going to make me watch you all die,” Liv said. “I have to go on without you.”