There was a blizzard raging across the ice.

A lone man, clad in layers upon layers of clothing, was slowly struggling through the fierce winds and shards of ice that bore into him. The chilling weather was taking its toll on him, with shivers wracking his body, but he bore onwards regardless.

It was a long journey to where he needed to go, and he was only halfway there.

Hours passed. The lone figure continued to force his way through the snow, through the furious gales and the sharp ice in the air until at long last, he arrived at the mouth of a cave.

The cave was menacing in its very design. Light barely reached into the mouth of the cave, darkness quickly swallowing up and hiding whatever might lie within. From what little he could see, hundreds of thin stalactites blanketed the ceiling, and from the look of them, each one was as sharp as a steel blade. The floor of the cave had no snow, but instead was formed from ice, the unnatural azure shade an indication of the cave's origins.

He was scared. He didn't want to so much as take a single step inside the cave…

He walked in, passing through the opening and into the encompassing darkness.

One hand stayed on the wall at all times, ensuring that he would not accidentally stagger into the side of the cave, but the man had no other sense of where he was headed. He could only hope that the cave would lead him to the center, to where he needed to reach….

To the person who had sequestered themselves inside.

Time passed. Without any light or change in his path, he could only blindly guess at how long it had been. At his best estimate, the man thought it had been hours since he entered the cave, but for all he knew, it could have been mere minutes or it could have been days.

Finally, however, he saw light.

It began as a dim glow in front of him, and he at first questioned whether his mind was playing tricks on him. But as he drew closer to the light, his certainty of its existence grew until he could truly see the floor beneath his feet, the blades of ice above his head, and the walls of snow that he had been clinging to throughout his time in the cave.

At long last, the narrow tunnel widened and opened into a cavern, and the man saw the source of the light.

Fire.

But it was no normal fire.

Balls of flame were encased within ice, flickering behind the icy walls of the room. Despite every piece of knowledge he had saying that such a thing was impossible, the fire and the ice seemed to be ignoring each other, the ice not melting one bit and the fire burning merrily away with no sign of dying out.

This oddity quickly lost his attention when the man's eyes found the figure in the center of the room.

A woman sat cross-legged, with naught but thin, loose-fitting clothes clothing her body. She was obviously healthy despite her presence inside of a deep, empty cave without food.

Despite the oddity of the woman, her condition was not the eeriest part of what the man could see. Along with the flames that burned inside of the ice walls, six obelisks of stone were arranged in a hexagon pattern around the motionless figure. Each earthen pillar was in constant motion – the tips of the rocks were constantly eroding away into miniscule debris, the small stones tumbling down the sides of each tower. However, despite this, none of the pillars lost any height; the material lost from the top was being constantly re-absorbed into the bottom, a never-ending cycle of destruction and growth.

Gulping, the man stepped forward to speak only to be hit with an updraft of air. For a brief second, the unexpected current stunned him, but in that second before he could recover and speak:

"You should not be here."

She spoke the words with no emotion, her words dead and flat in a way that disturbed the man more than anything else in the cave had.

"I-" the man stuttered, reaching for words that he had practiced many times. "I understand that y-you have withdrawn from the world, but we- we truly need your help, your people are… your people are in danger!"

There was no response. The man took it as a cue to keep talking. "We were attacked, and-!"

"Stop."

Her single word echoed around the room, the power and presence in the voice causing the man's jaw to click shut audibly. He started shivering, and after a few moments he realized it wasn't just due to fear. The temperature in the room was dropping rapidly, and within seconds the man's teeth were chattering with the force of his shaking.

Then the woman's eyes opened, and her visitor realized the true depth of his error.

"You come to me with tidings of trouble. You tell me that you require my aid. You say that my people are in danger.

"But you are mistaken," she snarled. "I have no people, and I have no reason to aid you. The smartest thing you have done is to acknowledge that I have withdrawn from the world, and my withdrawal is one that will not be broken."

As she spoke, the enraged woman began to float off of the ground, the swirling air within the room gaining the force of gale winds. "My duty is to maintain balance, but it is not up to others to decide how I fulfill this duty. It is my role to fill, and I shall fill it as I see fit."

Eyes lit up with the power of many, glowing with a harsh, bright light. The man drew back in fear, even as icicles began to form on his clothes and exposed face.

"I am Isole. I am your Avatar. And my balance is complete. Your interference will not be tolerated!"

As soon as she finished speaking, Isole's eyes lost their glow, and her floating form lowered back to the packed snow floor. Before she closed her eyes, the woman looked at her unwanted visitor and smiled.

She once again closed her eyes, and the last image her vision saw was a human statue of ice, slowly crumbling into fragments.


This has been finished for MONTHS. I don't even REMEMBER when I wrote this.

But I'm planning on doing some more writing for this (since I need to get back into the swing of writing before I shove myself back into my Dragon Age story), and found that this finished chapter had been sitting in my "unfinished' folder and wasn't posted.

So here you go, and more is to come! No promises on how many chapters or when they'll arrive, since I've learned my lesson about making promises that I won't keep regardless of my intent to keep them.