Outside Influences

Bel winced with pain as she straightened out. She’d been burrowing a tunnel through the snow for an hour or so, and the dull ache in her damaged ribs was making her regret her plan. She didn’t have a lot of experience trying to survive in the snow, but she knew that staying under the snow would risk her being buried by a blizzard or an avalanche, or whatever other disasters happened on the fifth layer.

Back when she and James were staying with Ventas in Satrap, she’d gotten the kindly uncle to tell her a few stories of his time travelling the land and curing diseases. At some point he had ended up stranded in some snow-covered mountains. He’d gone up one of the peaks in the Spine to eradicate the bone-dissolving disease from its last holdout in some remote mining encampments.

The miners didn’t publish where they worked – each group had their own favorite spots that they refused to share – so Ventas had been forced to stay in the frigid conditions for months as he traversed the mountainside in search of any signs of the disease. He told her that he’d made a base camp in a cave, and from that relative safety he’d gradually explored the area. His story had plenty of near misses: deadly avalanches, deep crevasses through the sides of mountainous glaciers that would be impossible to escape, blizzards that would last for days.

James had piled on with his own scary stories from the Old World, stories about people becoming trapped in mountain passes and eating one another while they waited for rescue. Bel had promised them that she wouldn’t go wandering around any frozen mountains, but, well, fate – or her mother – had other plans.

For the moment, the only relevant bit of information that she’d taken from their stories was that she should find a nice cave where she could hunker down. Some place with enough wood to fuel a fire would be ideal. Her current plan was to make it to the nearest rocky hill and hope that it had a suitable cave.

“Or we could just give up and sleep here, buried under a bunch of snow that could collapse at any time.”

Bel turned to Orseis, but she didn’t get a response. Her eye locked onto her nearest snake instead.

“Yeah, I’d feel safer with some nice, solid rock around me,” she explained to the small serpent. It barely moved in response, lethargic from the cold. Sparky writhed into her field of view and hissed loudly, eager to voice her complaints about their current environment.

“Yeah, you don’t trust the snow either, I get it.”

Bel’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “Hey, what about my new friend?” She reached up and felt around her head for the plant-based spirit snake she’d acquired while breaking out of the Pillar. She pulled the snake from her head so she could see it. “How about you, Flora?”

The green snake hung limply in her hand, its foliage slightly wilted. Bel’s eye widened at the sight. “Oh no, are you cold? Or is it too dark down here?”

Can my spirit snakes die? Is that something I have to worry about? Ah, James always said that I should have come with an instruction manual.

“I guess that I’d better get back to work.”

Bel clenched her teeth and crawled back to the end of her tunnel. The task was more compacting than digging, shoving her hands into the snow and pushing it to the ground with a satisfying crunch. She was worried about the whole thing collapsing, but it hadn’t happened so far so maybe she would be okay. It wasn’t like she had another option – it would take her days to fully clear a path to the rock rather than burrow under the snow.

Luckily, the deeper snow was more dense and stable than the stuff above it, which was how she was crawling on it without sinking. A bit of the stuff falling on her wouldn’t be too deadly – at least that’s what she hoped.

After every few strides of progress, Bel rolled over, and took a brief break. Then she grabbed one of the parachute cables and dragged Orseis and a few hunks of now-frozen meat forward. She was still hoping for a cooking fire and warm food when she made it to the rock, although her need for sleep was beginning to overpower her other desires.

She turned over to give another pull and froze; Kjar’s Sight revealed a snout quickly rushing down her tunnel.

Crows, it’s another one of those worm foxes.

Seeing it racing down her tunnel made it obvious that their tube-like bodies were optimized for burrowing through the snow as well as travelling on top of it. Bel cursed her inattention to detail as she curled her body in an attempt to turn around quickly. The pressure on her ribs elicited a hiss of pain, but within a few seconds she was crawling back to Orseis. Once she was crouching over her comatose friend she raised her hand and got ready to release a shockwave.

Wait, won’t that collapse the tunnel on us? she realized.

Bel hesitated, an overwhelming sense of panic coursing through her body as she saw the creature halve the distance between them. She reached down to Orseis’ pack, fumbling for a pair of claws that she’d taken from the last tube-fox. Her searching hands found the weapons, but her cold-numbed fingers didn’t have the strength to grip their makeshift handles. Bel pulled her hands to her face and breathed on them. That’s too slow, she realized.

She transferred warmth to her right hand with thermal regulation until her digits were tingling painfully. She reached down and pulled out one of the claws just as the creature lunged.

Bel yelled in anger and swung her weapon forward to threaten the beast. Instead of coming after her, the creature’s jaws snapped shut a good stride short of her, closing around the meat that she’d been saving instead of her own body.

“Kjar-damned cannibal,” she cursed at it with disgust.

It twisted its head and pulled backwards, taking all of the meat with it. A moment later Orseis followed, her parachute cocoon pulled out from under Bel.

Bel’s eye widened. Shit, the parachute cord!

She’d been using it as a convenient way to tie everything together, but it was attached to the parachute, which was wrapped around Orseis. The monster was going to slurp her like a noodle.

Bel crouched on all fours and galloped after Orseis, her back scraping against the ceiling of the tunnel. “Get back here with my friend, you ten-legged freak!”

Bel galloped over Orseis, grabbed the double-strand of thick cord, and sawed at it with her knife. The claw that formed her makeshift weapon was sharper than it had any right to be and made quick work of the cord. Bel slid to a halt and Orseis bumped into her from behind.

The worm-fox gnawed on the cord still sticking out of its mouth, no longer interested in eating it when it wasn’t attached to something it wanted. Bel swung her arm through the ceiling, knocking down large clumps of snow. Maybe I can just seal up the tunnel, she hoped.

Snow sprayed her in the face at the creature’s snout poked through her ineffective barrier. Its head rotated to the side so that it could close around her midsection in the narrow tunnel, and its hot breath washed over Betl’s body. She reflexively slashed at its nose, forcing it back. It flinched and yelped in pain before retreating, but almost immediately decided that she posed little threat; it snapped forward for a second attack. Bel lifted her arms and stepped into the bite, ensuring that the creature’s teeth would only be closing around her armored midsection.

She snarled in pain when it compressed her already injured ribs, but she kept her composure, glaring at the beast the moment she could make eye contact. Its body locked up and Bel lifted her makeshift dagger high over her head. She slapped the top of its skull with one hand, forcing her liquify ability into the top of its skull. Then she brought her weapon down, cutting through the softened bone with a sickening squelch and carving a path to the creature’s brain. The body slumped and its teeth slid down her body.

“Ah, crow’s crotches, that hurts! It’s teeth are sharp!” Bel quickly forced the creature’s jaws apart. She eased herself out of its maw, carefully to avoid touching its sharp teeth with her unprotected lower legs a second time. She’d still gotten a few long gashes running down her legs, another set of scars to remind her of her failures.

“I guess I could have predicted that would happen,” she mumbled to herself.

“Well, whatever. I can replace the missing food it ate, and I can collect more essence for myself. Big win.”

Bel poked the monster in the head, but hesitated. “I wonder if it’s got any useful abilities?”

She examined it again. “Then again, even if it’s got something useful for burrowing, I don’t think that I’d want it.”

Instead of feeling around its core for something useful and risking all of its essence, she immediately cracked it, sucking out the essence like someone would slurp seasoned lobster from it shell. She smiled with pleasure as her own core swelled and pushed through another threshold. She puffed out her chest with pride, then immediately curled over in pain, clutching at her injured ribs.

Embarrassed and tired, she looked at Orseis, then down her tunnel, then back at the worm fox’s corpse. She sighed. There was no airflow in the tiny passage, especially not with the corpse clogging up one end of it, and the space was already filling with the smell of blood and fur.

“I guess that I’d better get back to work,” she muttered unhappily.

She glanced at the corpse one last time, and she could swear it was leering at her even in death, mocking her with its toothy grin.

Get a grip, Bel.

She crawled back up the tunnel, dragging Orseis behind her, the sounds of the slick parachute sliding over the snow and her grunts of effort oddly muffled by their soft surroundings, making the experience feel even more lonely than it already was. She faced the dark end of her tunnel and got back to work, shoving her hands through the snow and compacting it down. To her surprise, her hands pushed into a hard rock instead of soft snow.

Bel shook her hand out, cursing in pain after stubbing her fingers.

“Well, at least I made it to the rock. Now I can go up.”

She tried to clear a shaft following the slope of the rock, but the snow just collapsed into her tunnel. She cursed when she realized that tunneling up would be just as arduous as burrowing sideways.

She puffed warm air onto her hands as she worked herself up to the task, and then got to digging. As she went up, Bel was delighted to find that the snow became less dense and her progress sped up. In far less time than she’d feared her hands abruptly burst through the last layer of snow and into the open air, allowing light and sound through the opening.

Bel winced at the sudden brightness, but the welcoming sound of birdsong called her forward. She stuck her head out of the hole and looked around.

She was at the base – or at least the base of what was visible – of the large rock that had been her target. It was taller than she’d thought, and more sheer, rising out of the snow like an enormous shark’s tooth. It was also covered in life, and had an earthy aroma, the first scents she’d encountered in the fifth layer that weren’t worm fox. Small bushes grew in the cracks of the stone. They provided hiding places and berries for the flock of puffy white songbirds whose trilling calls had lured Bel into the open. Some spots on the rock had been worn down and cracked open, creating small pits and crevices that were now occupied by hardy trees that grew twisted and gnarled in the harsh environment.

Bel’s head spun at a clopping sound. She turned to see a small herd of hoofed animals somehow making their way up the sheer side of the rock. The small quadrupeds – a bizarre saber toothed deer – snorted at her, but felt content to move slightly farther from her reach. Bel eyed their range warily, but after watching them scrape and eat lichen from the rock wall she decided that they weren’t a threat.

A smile bloomed on her face. “This is perfect! Hopefully there’s a cave too.”

She tilted her head back, scanning up the length of the large rock. Her search stopped when she saw a line of winged shapes drifting through the sky. She squinted, forcing more mana through eye of the huntress to enhance her vision. The shapes resolved into a group of people in dark cloaks hanging from wings made of cloth.

“Blood and offal,” she cursed, “we’ve got a ratty parachute but Nebamon’s people have artificial wings? This sucks.”