Book One – Chapter 14

Breathing heavily, yet only able to draw in shallow, stained breaths with his ribs pressing against the stone, Nagrak clawed at the icy walls with his free hand; futile attempts to find purchase. The icy surface was too smooth and ancient to give in. Somewhere during the fall, he had lost everything: the staff, his dagger, his entire belt — all gone. He had nothing sharp, nothing remotely useful, and his frozen fingers were numb and trembling.

The only sounds were his own ragged breaths and the howling of the storm above, muffled by the walls of the fissure. The bitter cold wrapped around him, seeping into his very bones. He could not feel the anymore, only horrible, pulsating pain in both of his arms. And then, beneath the chill of the mountain, there was something else. A sound. A faint, unsettling noise that rose from the cavern below.

Nagrak twisted his neck, trying to face the void, but his position and the Full Dark left him with no view, only sound. It was a low, sibilant hiss, barely audible at first, but growing louder as it echoed through the jagged walls. Something was here with him. It shifted and slithered across the stone beneath him. Then it started to climb. And Nagrak, arm pinned and body trapped, could do absolutely nothing as the thing from the depths ascended toward him.

Only the darkness could transgress flawlessly beneath the veil of T̰́̇ͦ̀è̸̷̸̬̤̗̊_̸̵̰̦̗̒͜ȟ̗̍ͤa̶͉͉͍̭̰̅̀̈͜ͅȓ̶̶̛̦͇͙̟̈̿͒ͮ͑̋̚͡u̟͖͔̖̙͙͆̄̿ͩͧ̃̽̓̈̌̀͟͞n.

Midnight flowed across the Snowtrail, her movements seamless and soundless, a ripple of nothingness stretching and contracting along the myriad of mountains that comprised the frozen expanse. The rough terrain, fractured by ice and carved by millennia of howling winds, posed no challenge to her essence. She surged forward, covering distances that would break mortal endurance: entire mountain ranges passed beneath her in minutes, hundreds of kilometres vanished in less than an hour. She applied the influence of T̰́̇ͦ̀è̸̷̸̬̤̗̊_̸̵̰̦̗̒͜ȟ̗̍ͤa̶͉͉͍̭̰̅̀̈͜ͅȓ̶̶̛̦͇͙̟̈̿͒ͮ͑̋̚͡u̟͖͔̖̙͙͆̄̿ͩͧ̃̽̓̈̌̀͟͞n to its fullest, pushing her boundaries farther and faster than ever before.