Instead, she decided to switch tactics and direct her anger somewhere else.
Allora pulled away from him and stormed out of the cave mouth and into the blazing sun and piled snow drifts.
"Lethelin!" Her voice rang out in the cold morning air. "Where are you? I am going to tan your hide up this mountain and down the other side! Reef car--"
Here voice suddenly cut off with a small scream and then an ominous silence.
"How dare you!?"
"Have another!" came Lethelin's gleeful taunt though the cave mouth.
There was another scream. Then an answering cry from Lethelin. Mitchell rushed to the opening and saw a most unexpected sight.
The last Onyx Knight of Awenor and a divinely-touched assassin were having a snowball fight. They were laughing and screaming at each other and they looked like scruffy angels in the snow -- Allora, tall and powerful with her once-again glistening black hair streaming behind her in the stiff breeze and Lethelin, lithe and quick, her blood-red tresses almost bleached to orange in the harsh light of morning. Mitchell leaned against the opening and watched them. Rather than stop them, he thought about joining in. This could be the tension breaker that they all desperately needed. He thought that right until he noticed them both looking at him with snowballs in their hands and evil grins on their faces.
"Don't even think about it," he warned them.
They did more than think about it.
***
Compared to the difficulty of their first few days up the mountain, the next couple were relatively easy. The snow drifts were treacherous and probing ahead was often difficult but, with Allora almost back to full strength, things were, on the whole, faster. Much to Mitchell's delight, the girls were actually getting along better. Allora seemed to have taken their talk in the cave to heart and was making a legitimate effort to be friendlier.
Allora explained on the second day that they were well above where the wolves generally prowled but that they needed to keep an eye out for shadow cats once dusk arrived. To be safer, they would make camp earlier than normal and spend more time gathering fire wood.
"Do you think we'll see any this far north," Mitchell asked, remembering Allora's comment about the shadow cats preferring the southern ranges."
"It is hard to say. If hunting was plentiful down south, they may not have ventured this far north. It is best if we take precautions, though."
The third morning out from Luvari's, Mitchell was on last watch. As the sky began to darken and he figured it was safe to wander around, he decided to explore a little before the girls awoke.
After more than a week of steady climbing Allora had said they were near the peaks where the trails would begin to descend down the other side. The air was thin and bitterly cold and they were all feeling the exhaustion from the sparse oxygen. The campsite they had found was tucked into the ruin of an old watchtower. Allora said it probably dated from the time of the dragon lords before the mortal races had broken free of their servitude. Despite being ruled over by dragons, they had their own kingdoms while all swearing fealty to a kind of dragon empress named Yuliana Blood Scale. Mitchell remembered that name from Nothok, the dwarf. He had said that his clan were the ones that forged the blade that killed her.
But while they all swore fealty to Yuliana during her reign, they would often war among themselves and they used their mortal subjects to fight wars just as every ruler had since time immemorial. So, there were the ruins of forts, keeps, and strongholds littered all over Tewadunn. Some had been reclaimed and repurposed by the mortal races. Others had been left to crumble to dust like this one.
Mitchell could make out where the walls had been. He could see traces of where supports had been driven into the rocks to hold upper floors and the ground was littered with oddly-shaped blocks that still had some of the square shapes of worked stone. Their camp had been inside a passage that had been cut into the rock face with the barest hint of walls to block out some of the wind. It was this passage that Mitchell stepped out of in the pre-dawn light.
He wasn't too worried about razor beaks, despite being in their territory. He had seen a few of them flying around and they were fearsome creatures. They resembled large eagles or hawks but they walked on four legs when grounded. Allora said that their legs weren't very strong and they often struggled to support the weight of their large bodies so they preferred to dive bomb their prey rather than any sort of prolonged ground fight where they weren't as agile. They also mostly hunted in the late afternoon and at dusk, so the morning should be safe.
Keeping an eye on the sky just in case, Mitchell toured the ruins of the watch tower and wondered at the ancient civilization that built it. Were there humans among the builders? There must have been as his people had been taken here just as wherever Allora's people had come from, as well as the other races. Were they ancient Europeans? Asians? Africans? Mitchell had scene various different ethnicities of humans when he had been in Besari and traveling the Diran Road, so they had yanked people from all over Earth, it seemed. He thought of the stories of expeditions gone missing and other mysteries like the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Virginia.
Every school kid heard about the early American settlement that had reportedly vanished without a trace in the 16th century. More than 100 settlers gone with the only clue a strange word that had been carved into a tree much higher than a human was tall. Mitchell had gone to Colonial Williamsburg with his parents when he'd been fifteen and they'd visited one of the recreations of a Revolutionary War camp. While visiting the facilities, they'd gone into one of the cabins and the tour guide had asked them who they thought this bunk house had been for. Looking at the small beds everyone concluded that it must have been for kids, but the guide had said no, these were soldiers' beds.
Now that Mitchell knew about interdimensional travel and other worlds, he thought he had a pretty good idea what might have happened although he doubted the Roanoke colony had ended up here. The dragon lords had taken humans much earlier than that. By the time Roanoke happened, the reign of the dragon lords had already ended -- at least in linear time. It did move differently between universes in a way he couldn't even begin to comprehend. By the time he got back, his parents could be dust in the ground. Or it would only have been a few weeks.
"Fuck if I know," Mitchell grumbled to himself as he leaned against a half-crumbled wall.
He breathed in the crisp cold air and, while the chill did burn his nose, taking in the larger breath helped dispel some of the exhaustion he felt with the lower oxygen this high up. The mild headache even receded a little bit.
Not wanting to waste precious quiet time, he decided to practice his firebolt spell and also begin working on a new spell called "blade burst". His book listed it as a conjuration spell and, according to the description, it was supposed to fill the space around him with spectral blades for a few seconds that would slice at anyone that got too close. It only lasted about five seconds but since he didn't have armor he thought the extra bit of room in a fight would be useful.
After drilling with the firebolt spell for a few minutes, making sure he could still cast it at will, he pulled open his spell book and started learning the rune form for blade burst. He studied it, taking note of each line as it formed its geometric shape within the circle of the rune and shut his eyes and tried to recreate it in his mind. It was getting easier to do the more he practiced but it still took work. Each rune was basically a circle framing shapes contained within, but remembering them took patience and focus. He could see what Revos meant about time being the biggest hindrance to would-be spellcasters and why so many chose to specialize, even to the point of ignoring some of the mana types they could use. Mitchell was determined not to do that, though. He would try to learn as many different spells as he could.
While he was going over and over the rune in his mind, drawing it and redrawing it, checking the page, and drawing it again, a chill suddenly came over him. He was cold pretty much all the time these days, but this was different. This coldness started in his chest. Without warning his whole body broke out in goose flesh and he began to shudder. Something was very wrong. As he returned his attention back to his surroundings, he noticed that the wind had stopped. The occasional snowflake drifted lazily to the ground, having been disturbed from some higher peak, but all was quiet. He was being watched. There was a pressure on his mind that made him want to curl into a fetal position. It was pushing against his skin as well. Against his eyes and even his hair. Suddenly he struggled to draw breath and he shuddered as he exhaled. Fighting against the pressure that told him both not to move and yet to run with all his might, he reached for his sword. The sound of the metal blade leaving the scabbard was loud enough in the unnatural stillness that it made him wince.
Sword out and at the ready, he began to turn, trying to see what it was that was about to kill him. Not just kill him, but obliterate him -- destroy him so completely that it would be like he had never existed at all. But there was nothing. He looked down the trail they had come from yesterday and it was quiet and still. He looked up the path where they would head today, and it was equally empty.
"Up!" the voice in his head screamed at him. "Look up!"
Mitchell looked up and wished he hadn't. If he hadn't already relieved himself behind a boulder he would have done so now. As it was, he thought he felt his balls retract up into his pelvis in pure, unadulterated terror.
Perched on the ledge above the path, not five meters from where Mitchell stood, was a dragon. An honest-to-god, Dungeons-and-Dragons, Dragon-Riders-of-Pern, Reign-of-Fire motherfucking dragon.
