A white flake landed on Torrent's snout, dissolving into a drop of water as soon as it landed. He frowned and brushed it away. As soon as he placed his claw down, another snowflake fell to take its place.

The SeaWing took a step outside of the cave's protection, placing a paw into the cold layer of snow. It collapsed under his weight, and his claws sunk a couple inches into the the ground. The white powder was bunched up against his cerulean scales, chilling them to a temperature that might be uncomfortable to other dragons, but not to a SeaWing born in the frigid depths of the ocean.

Torrent took another few steps out of the cave. Where he raised his claws, a print was left behind, with five deeper imprints from his talons, webbing spread between them. He looked out over the plateau nestled between the mountains raised above him. It was covered in a perfectly smooth layer of white snow. Further away from Torrent he could see patches of golden grasses, speckling the snow like a mottled cow.

At the far end of these was the usual pack of yaks, grazing on the dry grasses that had been left untouched. A variety of hoof prints and strangely rounded prints from the nearby scavengers were scattered around the ground in a sort of maze. A few of the scavengers glanced up at Torrent to keep an eye on him, but by this point, they seem to have decided the dragons residing in the nearby cave weren't too much of a threat. Torrent gave them a snarl, but they just continued on allowing their yaks to graze. He doubted yak or scavenger would taste much better than goat, but it might be a change.

A cold wind brushed against Torrent, carrying a white flurry into his face. He closed his eyes and turned his head to keep the snow out of them. He picked up a clawful of snow and returned back into the cave, melted water dripping between his talons.

Crystal was still asleep, splayed out on the edge of a hill of pebbles. Torrent took a glance at her claws, making sure the healing gem was still in there. It was. He walked over to her and sat down, resting his blue tail against the cold cave floor.

The clump of snow in his claws was slowly melting, the temperature difference in the cave too warm for it. Torrent placed it on Crystal's back. A rivulet of water dripped down her wing membrane. He doubted it would do much good, but it wouldn't hurt at least.

"I brought you some snow," the SeaWing grumbled. "You get that a lot in the Ice Kingdom, don't you? Just reminding you of home." He sighed as more water dripped down Crystal's wing membrane, forming a small puddle.

Torrent turned to Magma's scroll. He had decided to read it fully in the past week, after Griffin had left so suddenly. It was one of the worst scrolls he'd ever had to read, barring the four volumes of Whirlpool's autobiography, but it was better than nothing. He'd also gone over some of the notes he and Orca had written from the scrolls Mallard had given him. It felt like an eternity since that had happened.

Torrent wondered how Mallard was doing right now. Had she gotten caught for helping him escape? If she had, was she in prison? He hoped not, she didn't deserve that. Maybe if h —

Torrent suddenly heard some muttering. He turned to Crystal, unsure if he was just imagining it or not. He saw her jaw move.

"Crystal!" he said. "You're awake!"

One of eyes opened, and she raised her head slightly. "I know," she muttered. "Why is there snow on me?"

Torrent stiffened up and brushed the snowball off, throwing specks of snow across the room. "It helped wake you up!" he explained. "I think maybe it's because you're an IceWing, so maybe snow has healing properties?"

Crystal let out an exhausted snort, unimpressed with Torrent's discovery. "If snow had healing properties, we'd have won the war by now. I need some food and water."

Torrent nodded and grabbed the leather bag with water and the goat meat. He started tearing up pieces for Crystal, when she grabbed his talons and gave him a glare, pulling herself up. "I can chew," she snapped at the SeaWing.

Torrent nodded, and quickly gave Crystal the goat meat. She stuffed it into her mouth, quickly tearing it apart with her razor sharp teeth. While still chewing, she took the leather pouch of water and poured it into her mouth, almost ripping a hole in the bag. She continued eating and drinking like this for a while. Torrent noticed she had dropped the healing diamond, and grabbed it, along with the Darkstone. Crystal gave him a sideways look, suspicious, but didn't stop until she had gotten her fill.

When she was done, she turned to Torrent, and looked around the cavern. "Where are Schist and Griffin?" she asked, with a nervous look.

"They're both fine," Torrent reassured her. He didn't know how much she remembered from when she last woke up earlier. "Alive. You're not planning to go back to sleep again, are you?"

Crystal looked at Torrent with a confused smirk. "Believe me, I don't ever want to go to sleep again. How long was I out?"

Torrent thought for a moment. He hadn't really bothered to count the days. Since the Deep Palace was far enough beneath the waves that the time of day didn't make much of a difference, counting days wasn't too important to the Sea Kingdom. They had a royal astronomer in the Deep Palace, who, in addition to keeping track of the moons, the seasons, the tides, and the undersea current flows, usually created a calendar for the Sea Kingdom, but keeping track of the exact day wasn't all that important, except for when it came to meetings.

"Fifty days, maybe?" Torrent replied uncertainly. "Maybe more or less?"

Crystal gritted her teeth and winced. Fifty days. That was long. Much longer than she had thought. She tried to think back to her sleep, but her memories pulled up blank. "Well, it's not like I'm missing anything," she snorted. "Maybe Queen Glacier will have given up on finding me by now." She looked at Torrent quizzically. "What happened?"

Torrent craned his neck from side to side. "Not much," he answered. "I've just been here, while Schist and Griffin have been helping prepare for winter at some nearby village."

"No, fishbrain," Crystal laughed, "I meant, what happened to me. Why I was out for two months?"

"Oh," Torrent said. "Something similar happened to Orca after she enchanted Griffin."

"She was asleep for two months?" asked Crystal skeptically. "And no one suspected anything weird was going on?"

Torrent shook his head. "No, only half an hour, although she was really sick for the next few days. I've read a couple scrolls which have said something similar about other animuses." He glanced over to Magma's scroll, then back to Crystal. "Use too much magic or create a larger enchantment than what you're used to, and the effects will take a physical and mental strain," he repeated.

Crystal nodded, thinking. "And being a non-animus dragon who had never enchanted anything before, creating something to heal others was far too much for my mind and body. Wait. Then how did we, I mean, the IceWings animuses, create the gifts if they had never used their magic before?"

Torrent snorted. "Really?" he asked. "You believe that they'd never used their magic outside of the gifts? Of course they did, they just were never caught, and used magic sparingly enough it never had much of an effect on their souls."

"Fine," Crystal frowned, clearly a little uncomfortable with the prospect of her kingdom's glorified legends being false. "Even then, it's still a large change from one or two tiny enchantments to the Great Ice Cliff."

Torrent thought a little for a moment. "They probably made the enchantments slowly. Like when Frostbite made the Gift of Light, or Albatross created the Summer Palace."

Crystal was slightly impressed. The Gift of Light wasn't well-known except to the IceWings and the SandWing border towns, and the name of the dragon who created the tree even less so. "The Summer Palace?" she asked. "Is that a SeaWing gift?"

"Sort of," Torrent responded. "It's a large palace that one of our animus dragons, Albatross, made. It's very . . . aesthetic. It would probably be a little more so if Albatross hadn't murdered most of the royal family after he'd made it."

Crystal nodded, then looked back at where she had been sleeping. The Darkstone was there, a couple feet away.

"Can you still . . ." Torrent waved his claws around in a circle. Crystal looked at him with a puzzled expression. ". . . er, use magic?" Torrent asked worriedly.

Crystal thought for a moment. "I doubt it." She turned to Torrent's scrollcase. "Scrollcase, I enchant you to vibrate for a minute!" she ordered. Nothing happened.

A nervous look passed over Torrent, and he laid a claw on Crystal's scales, ready to steady her if she fainted again. After it was clear the enchantment hadn't worked, he let go.

"The Darkstone," Torrent said as he walked over to it, picking it up. He nestled it in his claws' webbing, looking at the ethereal glint in it. "You said you got it from the IceWings. How? Is there more where it came from?"

Crystal shook her head. "Don't worry, this is the only one. It took years to purify enough of the mineral to make this, and it will be quite a while before the IceWings can manage to make more, and that's just before they start testing and using it. It knocked me out for two months to create a healing stone; I doubt creating something major would be possible for much longer."

That didn't assuage Torrent's concerns. "How long is 'quite a while?'" he asked.

Crystal thought for a moment. "Ten years? Now that my father is dead, it'll make it a lot harder for them to purify the mineral. He and I were the only ones who knew the best method. So five years, at least, probably ten. And that's not including the time to test it out."

Torrent closed his eyes. Ten years. That was longer than he'd been alive. He was, what, six now? Seven? By the time the IceWings could create another Darkstone, dragonets still in their eggs would be adults. Coral's daughter, one in which Torrent didn't know her name, might even be queen. "And by then, the war would be over," Torrent predicted. "The IceWings would have no reason to use the Darkstone as a weapon."

"Maybe," Crystal replied. "Maybe a new war could have started. Me stealing the Darkstone was only a temporary solution to the problem."

Torrent nodded in agreement. He looked at Crystal, straight in her black, beady eyes. "You do understand how awful it would be if the IceWings got animus dragons, right? If Queen Glacier became an animus?"

"Of course," Crystal scornfully answered. "Do you think I would have fled the Ice Kingdom if I hadn't?"

Torrent tapped one of his claws on the cave floor. "How did you steal it, anyways?" he asked curiously. "I'd think something like that would be under guard at all times."

Crystal sighed, with a slight wince. This wasn't something she particularly wanted other dragons to hear. "I mentioned to you that my father, Boreal, was a scientist, and had accidentally discovered the mineral which the Darkstone is made from. I was apprenticed to him; he was to teach me the scientific knowledge in the Gift of Wisdom, and I was to serve as his assistant."

"You served as an apprentice to your father?" Torrent asked. "That seems like it would get annoying, real quickly."

Crystal shook her head. "No. It's a normal thing in the Ice Kingdom: parents usually train their dragonets in whatever their practice is. It makes sense a lot of the time; the parents are able to start the training as soon as the hatchling breaks the eggshell, although not every dragonet wants to continue their parent's legacy." She thought of her sister, Clarity. Rebellious was one word to describe her. "Boreal wasn't a particularly . . . affectionate father, either. He was too busy serving the queen to take care of us. By no means was he an awful parent, believe me, plenty of IceWings resent their children, but Clarity and I were mostly ignored. After I had come of age to start my apprenticeship, he took me under his wing and decided to teach me in his art."

"His art?" Torrent asked.

"He was a scientist. An inventor, as he liked to describe himself. He was the one who discovered the minerals that we used to create the Darkstone, and led the project because of it. After Queen Glacier found out what he was doing, and he convinced her he could bring animus magic back to the IceWings, she placed him on her council, the Empty Circle. He would bring me to the meetings, which is how I found out about their plans for the Darkstone.

"Originally, the council was enthusiastic over the prospects of having Gifts again, but as the war went on, with no sign of stopping, they decided it would be better suited as a weapon. A few months ago, the council held a vote and decided that if the war was still going on, the first thing they would enchant with the Darkstone would be a weapon to destroy the MudWing army. I believe the exact words would have been 'enchant this spear so that any physical effects it causes on a MudWing soldier are caused on all soldiers.' Effectively, if they killed one soldier with the spear, it would kill all MudWing soldiers."
"Wait," interrupted Torrent in alarm, "but the MudWings have a draft. Almost every MudWing in the kingdom older than four — "

" — would be killed," Crystal finished. "I know. And none of them seemed to have any problem with that. 'It's war, there are no rules. We'll be able to save thousands of IceWing lives this way.' It's what Queen Glacier told me when I spoke up during the council. Boreal didn't care what they were going to use the Darkstone for, so he abstained from the vote, and continued to work on it.

"Over the next few months, I did what I could to slow down my father. Occasionally we'd have important tools go missing, or test subjects who suddenly decided they didn't want to be tested on, but it wasn't enough. He eventually finished the Darkstone, and we found a loyal IceWing who was willing to sacrifice his life for Project Darkstone, as we called it. So, I did what I had to do. I stole the finished Darkstone, destroyed the lab, and killed both the test subject and Boreal."

"You killed your father?" Torrent exclaimed in horror.

Crystal fidgeted nervously. "I had to, for the sake of Pyrrhia. If I hadn't, they'd have started on another Darkstone as soon as I would've left. Maybe two years before the MudWings would be obliterated."

"Yeah, but he was your father!"

"So?" Crystal growled defensively. "He was just as guilty as the rest of them! He knew what they were going to do with it, and still worked freely! If your sister was going to destroy a tribe with her magic, you'd have killed her too, right?"

Torrent looked down, clenching his snout. Orca had given him that choice. She'd given him the dagger, and had told him to kill her, but he hadn't chosen to. Sure, she hadn't killed anyone else in the end, but what if she'd beaten Coral, and decided to destroy the SkyWings as her next target? It could have happened; maybe Torrent was just lucky. But, even if he had known that, he still didn't think he could bring himself to kill her. "No," he muttered.

"Well, then you're wrong," Crystal snapped. "Letting an entire tribe die for the sake of one dragon, that's just selfish."

Torrent slowly nodded in agreement. Crystal was right. Maybe now, he'd be stronger. He'd be able to kill Orca, if it had come to that. "So, then what?"

"After taking the Darkstone, I fled to my sister, Clarity," Crystal continued. "She helped me out of the Ice Kingdom, and told me about a SkyWing friend who lives by the SandWing-SkyWing border. I went to see her, and she told me how to get across the Sky Kingdom, to where I met you." Crystal made a face of disgust while mentioning Avalanche. "After hearing about your dagger, I decided to join you. If it can disenchant animus magic, maybe it can destroy the Darkstone."

Torrent nodded. He had thought about that, too, but hadn't wanted to try it while Crystal was asleep, since it was possible that disenchanting it could somehow harm its user. "Do you want to try that now?" he asked.

"Uh, yeah!" Crystal replied in surprise. She had expected Torrent to have tried it already while she was asleep. Why hadn't he?

Torrent used a claw to roll the Darkstone between his webbing, nestling it in between his talons. With his left claws, he took out his dagger from its sheath, and brought it to his other forepaw. Crystal opened her mouth, as if to say something to Torrent, but didn't make a sound. Torrent gently pressed the dagger's tip onto the Darkstone and rubbed the emerald on its hilt. He waited a moment, then put his dagger away.

"I don't think it worked," Torrent claimed.

"Why?" Crystal wondered, sticking her snout towards the Darkstone to peer closer at it.

"There's a weird light in it that shines on its own," Torrent explained. "It's still there. If it had been disenchanted, then I think the light would have faded."

Crystal frowned, unconvinced. She picked the Darkstone out of Torrent's claws, and rubbed it on her wing membrane. She closed her eyes, in thought.

"Er, what are you d — "

"Quiet," Crystal interrupted Torrent. He shut his mouth, and she continued dragging the stone along her wing membrane. After doing this for a while, she stopped, and her beady eyes fluttered open. "You're right, I don't think it worked. It gave me a faint tingly feeling when I touched it before, and that's still there."

Torrent grumbled in frustration. "So, how else can we get rid of it? We could drop it into the ocean or into the MudWing swamps, no one could find it there."

"Maybe," Crystal replied, "but maybe not. I think I should just keep it with me; it's safer than risking someone finding it."

Torrent thought for a moment, and starting pacing back and forth around the room. He wanted to trust Crystal, but the risk was large. "Okay," he agreed, "but don't try to use it, and keep it in your bag; don't wear it."

"Fine," Crystal said as she furrowed the scales above her eyes. Does he think this is his choice? She took the Darkstone and placed it in her leather bag, tucking it and rendering the gem unseen. The IceWing then took a step towards the exit of the cave, and stretched out her wings, her muscles slowly loosening up. "Let's see how hard it is to fly after two months of sleeping, shall we?"