Chương 82: Chapter 80: Digging.

The chief's house was dark when I arrived. No Magical Implements glowed from within. No light at all save for the faint blue pulse of the village walls reflected off the snow. I had come alone -visibly, at least. The woman was waiting outside. She was standing in front of her door, arms folded, with two shovels leaning against the wall beside her. She wore the same heavy silver coat as every other villager, though hers had been patched so many times it was hard to tell what the original fabric had been.

She looked at me and then looked past me, scanning the dark behind my shoulder. No doubt checking if I had come alone.

"Just me," I said. She picked up both shovels and handed me one without a word and started walking. I took it. Another time, I might have asked where we were going. Right now, it didn't seem to matter much. So, I just followed behind her. Idly glancing back There was a third tiny trail of footsteps behind me. One that the chief had clearly not even thought to notice. I did not smile. I wanted to. The eastern side was worse than I'd imagined. There was a section of the wall that had simply collapsed.

It had been replaced with what amounted to timber and scrap metal hammered together. The blue mana channels that ran between the proper panels simply stopped at the edges of the patchwork, leaving a dead zone nearly eight feet wide. If anything with half a brain wanted through, this was where it would come. Honestly, I did not understand how this village had not fallen already. The chief drove her shovel into the frozen ground at the base and started digging. The soil resisted.

It only cracked apart reluctantly as she grunted from the effort. I channeled mana into my arms -just enough to match her pace, not enough to make the work trivial. The difference between help and showing off was a narrow one. I had learned that, back at the soup kitchen. We dug in silence. The work had a rhythm to it, one I hadn't expected to find comfortable. You drove the blade in, cracked the frost, dug the earth out and repeat. This was the first time I had ever done something so simple before.

In either this life or the last. The cold bit through my gloves. The mana helped with that, too. It would have been trivial to use my Gift. Something stopped me. Honor, perhaps? Did I have claim to such a thing still? We did not speak. Only dug. After what must have been twenty minutes, the woman broke the silence.

"What do you call this place?" I didn't look up from the ditch. It hadn't gotten very large, despite the time I'd spent.

"Iron Hollow." The rhythm of her shovel broke. Just for a moment. She recovered quickly.

"Most people from the city say Outpost Seven," she said.

"Or Sanctuary Twelve. Whatever number is on whatever fancy ledger they're reading from."

"They have names too. I find those make them easier to remember." And harder to forget.

"So you say" She drove the shovel in again.

"Maren." I paused, confused for a moment. My shovel stopped.

"My name," she clarified.

"Since you seem to care about names."

"Esra," I offered in return.

"Though I suspect you already knew that."

"Hard not to. You dragged a bleeding man through my village last night." There was nothing to say to that. It had been a good idea. At least, as far as the expeditioners were concerned. If only they'd been the only people here.

"How long have you been chief here?" I asked, awkwardly, even though I knew the answer.

"Two months." Maren said.

"Ask me how long I've been here instead."

"How long?"

"Twenty three years." I let that settle. Many of the villagers were not actually natives. Some of them were criminals, living here because it was better than one of the draining cells. Some of them thought a life even here was better than a life in Aelheim, and there were more of those lately. I did not ask which of the three she was. Did it matter? Still, twenty three years in this frozen scrap of civilization. That still took a certain kind of person, forced or otherwise.

A person I found hard to imagine, even if she was right in front of me right now. It was hard not to respect someone like that. Back in Aelheim, people seemed to hold a high opinion of themselves for no reason at all. This was a refreshing change of pace.

"That's impressive," I said.

"It's survival," she corrected. We dug deeper. The ground grew wetter the farther down we went, which confirmed my suspicion from earlier. Water was pooling beneath the foundation. Given enough freezing cycles, it would push the wall apart no matter how well they braced it from above. It seemed like an odd problem to have. Over a hundred years, you'd think it would have destroyed this place already.

"Didn't start hundred years ago. Started ten." The woman answered when I asked.

"One day it just started happening. No idea why." So, even the Everfrost could change. Though, without knowing why or how, that was doubtless as scary as anything else.

"If the land can change, perhaps it can for the better." The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. The old woman snorted. The first bit of humor I'd gotten from her.

"You sound just like-" She paused. I let a few shovelfuls pass before I spoke again.

"The sanctuaries out here. How many of them have you seen try to do more than just survive? Reclaim even a little of what was lost."

"None." The word came out flat.

"We hold. That's all we've ever done. Reclaim? It hasn't been ours in generations."

"And if holding isn't enough anymore? If the land keeps shifting and your walls keep cracking?" Maren stopped digging. She looked at me. Her expression twisted.

"You're fourteen years old," she said.

"And you want to talk to me about reclaiming?"

"I want to talk to you about not dying here. Reclaiming is just what happens after." Something shifted behind her eyes. It was not warmth.

"Your father stood where you're standing," she said.

"About fourteen years ago. Give or take." My hands tightened on the shovel.

"He was young and full of ideas." Maren leaned on her shovel, looking at me with an expression I couldn't fully read.

"He said something very similar to what you just said. Less fancier words, but the meaning was the same." I didn't speak.

"There were thirty sanctuaries then," Maren continued. Her voice was still flat.

"Places like this one, scattered across the Wastes. Some larger. Most smaller." She shook her head.

"There are twenty five now." What could I say to that? I did not say anything. The woman looked at me. Perhaps she wondered if she should continue at all. She did.

"They went slowly. One by one. One thing goes wrong, then another, and another. It isn't always the monsters. Sometimes its infighting. Some fool with an idea bigger than his place. We don't even hear about some of 'em for years. Only way we can talk is through your big city standing in the middle." I forced my hands to unclench. The shovel's handle had left marks in my palms.

"The only sanctuary your father seemed to actually help was Ko," Maren said.

"Out on the Wailing Steppe. He made promises to all of them, helped only one." Ko was another sanctuary, the largest. In the opposite direction from the one we had come.

"What did Ko get that Iron Hollow didn't?" I asked. Maren's answer was immediate.

"Walls that don't crack." I didn't defend my father. There was nothing to defend, and she would have hated me for trying.

"I didn't know," I said instead.

"I should have."

"You're the second Veyne to tell me that." That stung and it was certainly meant to. We kept digging. The work helped. It gave my hands something to do while my thoughts turned darker places over. I shifted the conversation to the more immediate problem.

"The dragon," I said.

"What can you tell me?" I had received Count Vance's report when I'd given final say on coming here. It still made sense to ask someone who'd know better.

"About a month ago," she began.

"We heard it before we saw it. The sound was…" She paused.

"Like thunder that wouldn't stop. Heard it long before we saw it." She drove her shovel into the earth and left it there.

"Then it appeared over the mountain. Came from the north. The thing could barely fly. It didn't."

"It crashed?"

"Into the upper slopes of Everfrost Peak. Damn near caused a landslide that would have buried this village and everyone in it." Her jaw tightened.

"We got lucky. The snow held. This time."

"You said it was wounded. How wounded?"

"One of my men went up to check. Torven. Good man. Steady as they come." Maren's voice tightened.

"He came back shaking. Said the thing was bleeding. The thing was bleeding black blood, not red. He said it steamed where it hit the snow. Burned through it, he said."

"Any chance its wounds will kill it?"

"It was breathing when Torven saw it. Barely. It hasn't moved from the peak since. Hasn't made a sound neither. Maybe it's dead, but ain't no man wants to go up there and check." Corrupted. Wounded. Eira. Vaelin stirred. The same word it had used before. The same sadness. I still didn't know what it meant. I needed to find out.

"Do you know who 'Eira' is?" I asked, a change in subject. Abrupt, but I had to ask. The woman paused. Evidently confused by the change herself.

"The Goddess of Frost. One of the ten who fought the demons. The Frozen Breath, I think they called her." That answered one question, and raised a dozen others. What is this about, Vaelin? You know something, don't you? The Godblade did not answer. Its pressure almost seemed to retreat from me then, as if it did not want to either. The Chief was still staring at me.

"Has anything else come near it?" I asked.

"Nothing comes near it," Maren said.

"That's the other problem. Since that thing arrived, every beast on the mountain has scattered. Every last one." Maren climbed out of the ditch. I followed her. She sat on the frozen ground at the edge, legs dangling, and stared at the dark shape of Everfrost Peak.

"Why?" I asked.

"Don't know. If I had to guess, lesser beasts know to run when they see a Dragon." She shrugged.

'Happens sometimes. Hard to move two steps anywhere in the Wastes without getting attacked otherwise. That's when you know you're safe." She paused, stared at me.

"Its when you don't get attacked that you have to be afraid. When the only things that attack you are desperate. Or scared. Or running from something worse." Count Vance had said something like that too, hadn't he? The implications made me shiver. I tried not to think about them. Not now. Instead, I focused on what the woman was telling me. Why she was telling me.

"Those beasts were your food supply."

"Cheapest source we had, aye. The Farstep arch can bring supplies from Aelheim, but it's damn expensive. Too expensive for us." The math wasn't hard. A dragon on the mountain. No local food. A wall that cracked every few months because nobody had ever fixed the actual problem. The Everfrost was closing in, slowly but surely. It would strangle this place before long. I noticed tiny footprints appearing in the snow behind the woman. Back and forth. Back and forth. Was Sere pacing? That made me happy.

"We have to kill the dragon and fast." I said.

"Or this village is finished."

"It might already be." The Chief said and her voice quiet. We sat at the edge of the ditch for a time. The cold crept in. I did not reach for my Gift. I hadn't before, and I certainly wouldn't now. I didn't make a grand promise.

"What does Iron Hollow need?" I asked.

"From me. Not what I think you need but what you actually need." Maren looked at me sideways. Was she going to be honest, or lie to the strange girl she was technically sworn to? She chose honesty.

"Better materials for the walls. Not timber or steel. I'm sure there's something out there." She held up a finger.

"A second Farstep arch. One breaks, we die. I don't like that. Never bloody have." A second finger.

"People with Gifts. Strong ones, ideally, though I know that's a hard ask." She raised a third. There was no need to explain that one. I wanted to agree right away. To promise. Surely these three simple things were within my power. Had my father thought the same, all those years ago? Had he heard these simple requests, and thought them trivial? That stopped me. Made me truly consider.

"The walls I can do," I said.

"The supplies, I can improve. Those are within my power now, or will be soon." The price would be high indeed. That was fine. The cost was another Artifact nobody would have ever lifted from our Family Vault.

"And the rest?"

"I won't promise what I can't deliver." Maren studied me. The silence stretched, filled only by the distant creak of something far off in the frozen dark.

"Bring your friend," she said, standing.

"The one with the earth Gift. Tomorrow. We'll do the drainage work properly." A small concession. A door left slightly open, not thrown wide. I'd take it.