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[Arahim]

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Murky was the wall up close, as if in refusal to drink of the argent illumination in such proximity to Arahim. Resentful of his deliberate probing.

Somber, and silent, with no voice of it's own, it nonetheless was possessed of a palpable, enduring longevity. A story, long in the telling, come to it's end with the first, fell steps sounded by the living on this hallowed, unsullied ground.

Indelibly, all things end.

Grown from it's glassy surface, in dense and tangled profusion, were perfect roses of algid crystal, twined and wound about fine vines of ice cut like living ivy. There was barely the space of a hand seperating the dark wall and the beautifully sculptured foliage, and as far as he could tell, the growth climbed snakelike, and tumbling to the ceiling in twisting, symbiotic helixes. Impossibly slender stalks bearing the weight, and rooted in glacial rock. Floor, to wall, to roof.

Lambent in a way no earthly flowers could ever be, the sinuous maze of rose sipped deeply of the eldritch wisp-lights. Creating a cosmos of chromatic spray within it's delicate petals. A translucent life pulsing through the many stems.

Thorns gilt in sparkling pearl.

Ivy leaves edged in palest blues.

No one alike in any way.

And harmonious still.

The clean, icewall beyond maintained it's dour visage, and let no mote of light mar it's surface. Let no pale reflection intrude.

And so, very slowly, Arahim ambled it's length, peering through the brambled muddle of leaf and bloom for a surcease in the jewel-like garden. Some angle where he could catch an image of his eyes, clear and unmuddied as Al'lyria had specified.

As things were, he knew time had long since ceased being an asset he could afford to waste.

His body shook with an unremitting cold as he walked on. His stomach twisting violently as though it had only now remembered it was empty, and railed against the realization.

Closing off the splendor around him, making himself deaf to the singing of his song, Arahim embraced the pain he felt. Remembered every step that had brought him here, and pictured the frost of faces left behind.

For the first time since he had shown his back to the sun and the sky, Arahim smiled.

[Arahim]

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When again he opened his eyes, his song had died away to less than echo. The chamber had not otherwise changed, but Arahim found the eerie quietude disconcerting...as if it accentuated the awful strangeness of the place; making undeniable his solitude, and the uncertainty of its duration.

The gelid garden still throbbed with an ambient energy very nearly in time with the hovering wisps arrayed silently behind him. Radiant liquid gold, silver, and blues painting his pale skin, making molten fire of his leather chestpiece. Giving the torn armor a fervid life of its own, like the flowing of blood.

Arahim's eyes held the color of rich earth. A bottomless brown that could never be mistaken for common. Often shifting to so dark a tone as to lose his pupils in its recesses like some unanswered question. A truth held back deliberately for another day.

The eyes marked him for what he was.

They collected the light of every flower curving on the thin edges of every petal, and thorny spine. Caught every gleaming movement drifting, until it fell through the air all around him, and settled weightlessly upon his quiet spirit. Readying him for what came next.

Tiny sparkles marked his ocular depths in constellations the likes which only a child would draw into being.

Gold stars upon a nightsky of fertile brown, where imagined Gods played and whispered Life down from high above. Trading secrets with voluble speech.

All this did Arahim see before him as the stoic wall relented, and at once turned to polished glass. Giving no preamble, nor explanation, and framing his image within a narrow oval of hanging ivy embraced by rose and brambled vine.

About his head, a seraphic halo of reflected wisps.

Within, the thrumming of the wall bespoke a lifeforce. A delve of ice thick enough for his purpose, and untouched by the driving snows sweeping clean the world above.

At but an arm's length away lay the Heart of Winter.

[Arahim]

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Glass flowers fell. Snapped from stem at his lightest touch, first questing curiously, then inquiring with purpose as he searched out a larger, uncluttered section on the wall's face. A place to set tools to the ice.

The narrow oval frame widened around his reflection, dropping wintry shards. Cracks climbing the heights along twisted vines of frost. Showering silver slivers fell around him. The larger fragments, intact leaves and bulb, shattering into a fine dust of diamond at his feet. Falling stars of shifting colors crashing.

Petals like thin edged razors, thorn, and broken crystal drew lines of blood on Arahim's hands and forearms as his actions drifted from probing accident to the deliberate, unalterable clearing away of root and rose. His spilt lifestuff like tongues of licking red flame. The keen pain of rent skin adding a frenetic quality to his work, as if his hurts would lessen if only he could do this thing quickly.

As if the enormity of the destruction he wrought, and the accompanying sickness of spirit he felt, could be made less real, and then forgotten completely.

Time seeped unbidden into the carven room, restoring weight and motion to the great frozen fountains. Running along the walls and floor, gifting age to the many tiered levels, and stairs of the frostbitten cavern. Disrupting the spell that allowed this place to exist just a step past reality in it's own space.

Nothing held as the domineering laws of the waking world skimmed across the perfect, preternatural beauty of the silver shadowed chamber.

A raucous din of a million breaking windows sang out in shrieks and grinding screeches.

Whether the tremulous dismantling of the dreamlike architecture, or a new chorus wisp-sung hardly mattered to Arahim.

This was the end.

Tearing at the last gasping bunch of blood soaked roses, he noticed, for the first time, emerging threads of dischord spreading throughout the wall before him. Crumbling under its own weight, but slowly as if unwilling.

His mirror-twin retained it's coherence, though a crown of fractured glass tore across his brow. A melancholy king whose time had come, and at the unexpected hands of one he so trusted.

Upheaval all about, Arahim drew the two steel stakes from his belt and smashed them into the breaks in the wall. Both hands striking in unison. The jarring impact sending jolts of fire through each arm, and shards of sharp ice spray into the air.

Frantic, he pumped both arms over and over again, cleaving the polished wall in a wide circular pattern. Spikes angled inward in a desperate attempt to work the beating Heart of Winter from it's nest of thick, crystalline frost.

A clap like striking forked lightning split the air asunder as large chunks of the wall above his fragmented circle broke free. The wall falling into itself with a tremendous groan. The impact sending Arahim, half falling, half back-peddling, several yards away from the final, shuddering cataclysm.

On all fours, dusted in a layer of powdered ice, he watched his life paint the ground between his hands crimson in a steady stream.

Choking out a sardonic laugh, he rose to his feet. His face a gory mask.

And just so, all was silence.

The musical, argent air gone...giving way to a cold, singular glow just heartbeats away, and nearly swallowed in debris.

[Arahim]

---

Crouching, Arahim picked through the broken bits of debris with methodical care. Sounds like scraping glass on scraping glass rewarding his progress. Setting his teeth on edge. The discarded shards still found fresh skin on his hands to lacerate while he worked. His digging and shifting not uncareful, but clumsy.

Too persistent a chill, far too long in duration, making insensate his fingers. His dexterity struck dumb.

Thin shafts of cerulean light broke up the still air at every significant bit of progress. Burning trails through the dark in several different directions, and at varying angles. The beams tight and focused.

His face awash in blue, Arahim culled the last of the rubble, and with a wearied reverence, pulled forth the Heart of Winter.

It was shaped like a large canine tooth; smooth and rounded at one end, tapering down in uneven striation, and cut grooves, to a dull point at the other. The ice was so clear, he could see straight through it to his right hand which held it steady.

A faint throb pulsed within.

Holding the very essence of primordial Winter, Arahim felt his last vestiges of fading warmth and comfort flow in an unchecked torrent into the cold crystal. It's azure glow flaring in intensity.

A faint throb pulsed in time with his own life rhythm.

Remembering Al'lyria's instruction, he drew forth the foul feeling sac she had given him, dropping the Heart back into it's nest of shattered crystal.

Shivering uncontrollably, he unfolded the bag and set his prize within.

At once, his core flooded with returned heat. His shaking abated.

Al'lyria's bag adhered completely to the size, and shape of the beating cone of ice. Distending itself, and stretching along the curvatures until the sac discolored in the tautest areas giving it a noisome, porous appearance.

Slinging the strap over his head and across his chest, Arahim settled the bundle at his hip. Resting his near hand upon it, and taking an unexplainable comfort in the touch. Breathing what seemed his first unburdened breath in weeks, yet knowing his travails were nearly, but not quite, over.

Having secured his object of need, Arahim found his one salvaged rune still tucked safely in his belt pouch. The smoothed ash was burnt with the othala symbol, marking it as his passage to Minoc's moongate.

An odd relief scrubbed him over at not having saved the rune to his home.

The moongate was a short distance from Minoc's gypsy camp. There he could buy, or borrow a coat, and set out to Ilshenar, and Al'lyria's meeting place...if he was not already too late.

Seeing his way past his body's hurts, to the spark inside that made him...him, Arahim sent himself along the white ley lines of Holy power with naught but will and two trigger words. Blindly travelling uncounted miles to the world he remembered coalescing before him.

The darks of the labyrinthine barrow under the mountain trading places with the sorcerous glow of the two dimensional tear in reality set between Vesper and Minoc. Locales safer, but lacking in any mystique.

Snow clung to the soft ground.

It was night.