Book One – Chapter 13

The memory was unsettling in how it shaped her perception of the scene unfolding before her. She watched as each of the orich’s gestures brought waves of ice upon the beast-wizard. The shards expanded upon impact to form a growing lattice of ice, binding him to the mountain, layer upon layer.

There was something fundamentally wrong with all of this. Midnight’s mind was drawn back to her earlier contemplations — lingering at the edge of her mind: the image of the arachnid that had become her concept of existence. In her time spent beneath the earth, she had come to recognise the mountain itself as such an entity. It, too, was layered like a web, each stratum of frost, stone, and snow building upon the last, claimed by the mountain in the same way as the arachnid claimed the threads it spun. The mountain was not the ice, nor was the ice the mountain. Much was thrown off by relentless winds, by beasts and battles, yet everything retained by the mountain became part of it, defining and shaping the eternal frost of the Albweiss.

What felt so profoundly wrong to Midnight was the realisation that the Albweiss Mountains – this intrinsic entity of rock and ice and breath and life – could be controlled by an ork. Midnight felt it. She sensed this with a forbidding certainty, a deep unease threading through all that tied her to the Albweiss. He had grasped the elusive.

He was not simply manipulating the elements, not taking the snow, ice and wind from the mountain to make them forces of the orich. He was not tearing through the layers that defined the mountain. He did not sever the web to steal from all that inherently belonged to the mountain, from all that was of the mountain. No, he left the web unharmed. With his magic, he directed the arachnid to pull the threads for him. And the mountain complied.