† This is a story from the Longwinter roleplaying game (the Visitor’s Book). I wrote it a couple of years ago and it captures the mood that survival icebox aims for. It also felt like a good story to begin animating (reanimating?) the xenon elasmotherium discovered by Fra Martell in the Primorska Tundra this Oktober. Finally, its title is suitable and perfect as I cross from failing to run a Mailchimp newsletter and presenting something much better: stories of and from the games I make over on the wizardthieffighter patreon. That was also the one and only link for this post, as promised under the fairy moon. †
Crack!
Kuya dropped softly to all fours and breathed out slowly. Creak.
She gingerly spread her arms and legs. Her fur-lined mittens and boots pushed the dusty snow along the ice with a whispering sigh. Like the frozen lake wanted to tell her something.
Creak.
It was uncanny. It sounded just like the tea cabinet hinge in her grandmother’s apartment.
She breathed in shallowly, not moving. No creak. That tea cabinet always creaked. She’d been fascinated by it as a child. The mother of pearl inlays in the green and blue lacquer hinting at strange warm lands. Aramie lacquer, from the warm shores past the Grand Betons, where the hills are round like green sheep.
She breathed out. Focus. The ice should hold. Winterwhite’s flowers had visited the window panes five days ago and never left. The ice should hold.
Creak.
But maybe there was a hot spring beneath that blue-black cliff on her side. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t hung in icicles like a come-of-age-cake. Maybe warm water welled up. Maybe it was warm enough to ruin the green tea Granna called her gentle delight. The expensive one she never let anyone else brew. The one she quietly cursed at whenever she steeped it too long. Count the heartbeats, she said, count a hundred as you breathe, and it’s steeped.
Kuya counted her heartbeats as she breathed. Slowly. No creaking. She spread herself wide as a spider, hugging the ice of the lake, then started inching just her left hand in, towards her chest. She must look a fool. Or a tasty snack. Maybe some wolf was watching her right now. One of the big, strange ones that ran with the Architects’ redesign, the ones that patrolled the preserves and kept people out. No, that was nonsense. She was nowhere near the nearest preserve. She’d struck out south-west from the bivouac, across the high field towards the Riblinza valley. She’d kept the crinkled white peak of the Riblingberg at her right.
Still. Her heartbeat picked up again. No, no. She turned her head, the ice chilling her left cheek. A bit further back. Yes, there it was, just peeking above the grey tablecloth of cloud, like wadded up pages torn from a snow-white notebook. She breathed slowly again. Ok, she wasn’t near a preserve.
She started inching her hand inwards again. Lapel. Cap string. Iceberry pin. Backpack strap. There!
Creak.
Her breath stalled. If she fell through the ice here she’d drown. Her body would scream as the cold bit, the water in her mouth and nose, throat and lungs and gut, like a flood of liquid fire, making her thrash and flail for air, for oxygen, for life. The lack of air would shut her awareness down. Eventually. With this cold, it might take five minutes. Ten? An eternity of fire and then an eternity of silence. The oldfolk said a winter’s death wasn’t so bad. The pain of the cold lifted, a deep weariness came, and then sleep. There was gentle sleep at the end. But a water death, that was bad. The Waterdrinker was not gentle with mortals’ souls.
Kuya realized she wasn’t breathing and gulped frigid air again.
Creak.
There wasn’t time for this, she had to scuttle across this damned lake. Backpack strap. Clasp. Ice axe. Strap. Buckle clasp. Tug. No, the mittens. She needed fingers for this. She shifted more weight onto her hand, pinning hand and mitten. Slowly she withdrew her hand from the warm fur. Immediately the bitter cold went to work. Soon her fingertips would be on fire, but she had enough time.
Buckle clasp. Metal. Fingers sticking. One release. The second. Press. Stuck. Clear the strap out of the way. Ah, that cold steel burned. Press both releases.
Click.
Now the belt clasp. Down. Scraping knuckles on ice, not feeling the cuts, just the ice water. Or ice blood. Too cold. Button. Backpack belt. The big clasp.
Click.
Quick, back in the mitten. Kuya breathed quietly for a while then shuffled to her left. A handspan. Two. Pressing down her right arm on the right shoulder strap, she inched out from under her backpack, crawling out like a hermit crab abandoning its house.
With a clatter of poles and axes and carabiners, her backpack rolled off onto its side. Ten kilos more spread out.
Kuya looked up. She was nearly across the kidney-shaped lake. To her left, the blue-black cliff, to her right the gentle, welcoming slope. The lying slope. The one that promised avalanches. A hundred metres to the nearest shore, but that was close to the cliffs.
First, she’d crawl back five, ten metres, then strike out for the middle of the little beach. There, under the two boulders, the skinny and the fat one.
She pushed the backpack. A foot. Inching like a worm, or maybe a crippled crocodile, she crawled up behind it. Pushed again.
Creak.
Nothing to do now. Count your breaths. Wait for the tea to steep. Wait for the ice to thicken. Push, crawl, push, crawl. Ten pushes, three metres. Thirty, ten.
The ice had been solid here. Kuya carefully raised herself on hands and knees, the ice stopped bleeding heat from her belly. No creaking.
Now she could push the backpack half a metre and crawl faster. A hundred and fifty metres to go. Three hundred more pushes, three hundred more crawls. Too much for tea, unless Granna had trapped her for the full ‘ceremony’. No creaking from the Aramie lacquer ice tea box lake. Six hundred. Enough to steep the fine green tea six times.
“Do you taste the difference? The melody of the tea, from the first pour to the last? Ah, it’s the little things,” her Granna nodded. She’d nodded along and only tasted water from the third cup onwards.
Fourth cup. Seventy metres to go. She could almost taste the solid ground. The sweet density of rock.
Fifth cup. Forty to go. She wept. The ice whispered underfoot. The air hinted at more snow. The boulders beckoned.
Sixth cup. Ten metres to go. Yes. There was a taste. There was a melody. Ice and lake now had a different timbre. The crunch as she pushed the backpack was deeper. The vibrations under her mittens and knees weaker.
Five metres to go. Nearly there. Ice all crumpled at the shore. Floes pushed up. There had been an avalanche. That lying hillside, she’d known it.
Two metres to go. She was going to make it!
One metre to go.
Snap.
The backpack broke through a thin, upraised sheet and thumped down a handspan to the rime-coated pebbles beneath.
Kuya sobbed and giggled as she stood on shaky legs again.
Crack. Crunch.
She dragged the backpack away from the ice and bit her mitten to stifle a whoop.
† I hope you enjoyed that story. I’ve more planned, some even written, in fact. I can’t promise they will all include tea. I can promise some will be strange and others will be weak and yet others will be enticing and fantastic and possibly, just possibly, connected. †
Excuse me while I wipe away the involuntary sweat from my brow! I hope for more tales from the Lastlands and the Vastlands both...