In the darkness that threatened to swallow her, she heard two voices. They sounded young, though not young enough to be children, and forlorn. Two souls that struggled to meet each other, even when standing face-to-face:
"Listen now," said the first with a note of impatience; a young man. "There's a lake—"
"I know the one," the other, a woman, coldly interrupted. Though she was being dismissive, Ferris knew the tone: Tired, when you no longer even have the energy to be upset, so you just brush the things that bother you aside.
"No, it's a small lake in one of the caves. Not a lot grows there, but there are crystalline stalagmites that rise from the water—like a half-submerged palace revealed by a parted sea." The man paused, as though waiting for a certain reaction, but it never came. He sighed deeply, "One day... I could take you there."
There was no rest, no easy creep back to consciousness: Just the stark change from awareness, to emptiness, to awareness again. All of her pain fading only to come back with her in the form of a horrible and all-too-recent memory. Sinking to her knees and clutching her insides, Ferris doubled over in the dirt. Her heart pounded without provocation. Though nothing had passed her lips in hours, it was hard to shake the taste of iron and bile from her mouth. She rested her head in her lap and released a mute scream.
It wasn't real. It didn't hurt. Get up.
Get up! It took a few minutes before her body would obey her commands. She removed one hand from around her stomach to prop herself, fingers lacing into the soul. The chill of the night pricked her skin, easing some of the burning, and the heavy scent of evergreens helped shake off the putrid smell still lingering in her head. All the while, the last of the stars she'd found twinkled beside her; in all ways, perfectly brilliant and blind to her agony.
Ferris didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. She'd been so careful, so why now?! Ciara! Ciara was completely out of her reach and there were too many enemies surrounding them to count! She had to find her, she—!
She spotted a cluster of dephnells growing at the base of one of the trees. The girl felt a natural revulsion toward the flower that killed her, but there was another, innate feeling much stronger than that: Anger.
That's right. Castellar was still waiting for her in the alcove. She was trying to make medicine. Ferris accidentally bit the inside of her cheek as she clenched her teeth. The taste of iron returned even stronger than before. She had half a mind to pluck a fistful of the damned plant, march back up the incline, and shove it in his mouth. Maybe he'd enjoy the taste of poison on that snake-like tongue of his!
It took the muffled boom of a distant spell to snap her attention back to the greater danger. Though to little success, the girl tried to calm down. She felt for the potion bottle, hearing the tell-tale slosh of the liquid inside of it. There was no faking his injury and it would take a lot longer for him to recover his strength without any care at all. He wouldn't be able to follow her easily. Though he will certainly try... The instant he realized she was gone, he'd probably come after her like a rabid animal.
Well, she had twenty minutes at least—maybe a full half hour, if she was lucky. That was a good enough head start. If that older mage, Lamont, caught up to him, even better.
Since Castellar still had her dagger, she took some of the dephnells with her as a precaution. Thankfully, while the area was blanketed by frost, it was too thin and dry to leave any obvious tracks. Ferris was sure he could find hers anyway, but it wouldn't make the chore of it any easier. She took off at a sprint, coursing through a portion of forest she knew couldn't be seen from the rocky shelter above.
Besides being angry at the skeleton, she was also pretty angry at herself. She knew better. She reminded herself daily that this wasn't a situation she could trust and she still somehow managed to let her guard down. Rather than give them a second chance to fall back and make a better choice, she couldn't have saved her place in time at a worse possible moment!
A half-truth is almost always more believable than telling a blatant lie. He'd told her plenty of truths; about how dangerous the power she wielded truly was, how many people wanted it, and what they would do to get it. Now, she was starting to realize he knew all of that so well because it was what he and his guild planned to do to her! And it wasn't so simple to ignore the threats anymore, not when the mentions of confinement and torture meant to scare her into obedience might actually have been her unjust sentence.
Ferris tripped over a thick briar hidden among the undergrowth. The near-tumble startled her and, for a moment, she lost where she was. Not that it matters! Other than through the chaos of the fighting around her that she desperately had to avoid, she had no sense of direction. She needed to find the town, if only to get Ciara and leave, but what was she supposed to do when she got there? What if Castellar lied about that too and taken her sister somewhere else, or what if they figured they didn't need her after all and—!
That idea tormented her more than she could bear. She was suddenly scared to move, worried that the vision summoned by her grim imagination was actually real. What had she done? It was all her fault for leaving Ciara alone with him!
She was frozen.
There was a loud crack behind her. Ferris spun around, expecting an attack, but there was none. The noise continued, albeit much fainter than before. Listening closely, she looked to the patch of earth at her feet to see an ever-growing seam breaking along its surface.
Then it shattered out from under her.
The initial shock of the fall was followed by a foreboding realization as the shadows of the pit engulfed her: Whether it was the impact itself, any traps that lay below, or the need to poison herself a second time because she was too broken to move, she was going to die again.
She was going to bleed again.
She was going to hurt again.
She was going to be alone again.
Again. And again. And again. And again.
She crashed through yet another ceiling. It was cold and wet, so Ferris' first thought was that she might've fallen into a pool of ice water. The very next second, however, she recognized the texture of snow. It was an extremely deep pile of it; soft enough to cushion her fall, yet compact enough that it hadn't folded around her.
Blinking myopically at the hole above, she could see the light of the moon pouring in after her. Ferris climbed out of her self-made crater, looking around to find herself in a wide space filled with the soft, white powder. She could just make out a stone-carved stairwell several meters away. She slid down and walked into the center of the chasm, pausing to catch her breath.
And there, she began to cry.
Thankfully, there was no one around to see, because there was no controlling it. Hot, fat tears that she thought she'd long forgotten how to shed flooded her eyes and her entire body shook. Moving farther away from the light, the girl covered her mouth to keep quiet, not about to let a mistake like this get her caught.
As though to punish her, the tears bit at her skin while they rapidly cooled. Ferris wiped her face with her sleeve as she reached the stairs. They stretched through a narrow tunnel even darker than the chasm. It was much too high for her to climb back up the way she came, it she was impossible to tell where the path ahead would lead.
"Though the road ahead may be unclear, those frozen in indecision will always lose their way."
Ferris thought hard about the riddle on the stone tablet. Soon enough, its true message became clear: "Keep going or the path will swallow you." There were certain places where the ground was more fragile than others. If she waited too long, just like what just happened, she'd end up falling deeper within the tunnels. And maybe next time she wouldn't be lucky enough to have anything catch her.
In any case, it meant that she still was heading toward Icefield: To both her sister and to persistent danger. Steeling her nerves, she marched on.