I was running up the stairs without a second thought. Chantelle was in trouble. I grabbed my short sword from where I had left it in the entranceway and shoved the door to my building closed on my way out.

The snow was up to chest height in the clearing in the direction I wanted to go, and still falling.

I stepped off the platform around my building and immediately sank into the snow, my body heat being reinforced by my orb quickly melting it as it touched me. Sinking a wave of heat into the snow blocking my path to the forest left me with a meter of water to swim through. Some of it was draining off into the surrounding snow, but that quickly refroze and kept the rest of the water blocking my way.

Infusing the water with my power I pushed it up and out of the trough I had made. Getting to the end of the section I had melted I infused my power into the snow and shoved it out of my way. By the time I had gotten out of the clearing and past the area where I had been cutting down trees a noticeable amount of energy had been drained from my orb.

Chantelle was moving directly towards me. Her panic had subsided some, though at the pace she was moving she must be running. Nine and a half kilometers separated us, and if I melted the snow in a straight line to her I would make it maybe two kilometers. And be completely out of energy when I reached her.

I started infusing my power into the snow, shoving it up and out to the sides. I made it fifty meters before the snow was well above my head and I couldn't see where I was going. I needed a better way to move.

I compressed the snow in front of me into a set of stairs and climbed them to the top. Infusing my power into the path before me and compressing it down gave me a path I could walk, and I made it a dozen meters before slipping and falling into the snow at the side.

I made another set of stairs, and this time I melted a layer of snow and refroze it to water while holding a rough pattern. No more slipping, but it slowed me down further and was a bigger drain on my orb than I was really comfortable with.

What I really needed was something that let me walk on the snow without compressing or melting it. Walking with my weight on the balls of my feet sank into the snow even with how much I compressed it, forcing me to walk by pressing my foot flat to the snow with each step. With my ice method I didn't have to do that, but what if I could spread out the size of my feet even further. Or, more specifically, my shoes.

I stopped for a few minutes and cleared an area of snow to work in. Cutting down a few trees to use as material, I set them on fire while I worked, no need to waste energy. I cut out two wide, long, and thin sections of wood. Placing them on the ground on top of a lot of leaves I stepped onto them and grew the cloth wraps of my shoes to wrap around them.

After they were secured to my feet I took a test step forward. It was awkward, like wearing boats on my feet, but I could manage. I formed a ramp back up to the top of the snow, compacting it as little as possible. I wanted to know if the snow shoes would work before testing them on snow several meters deep.

My first step into snow that I hadn't touched with my power worked perfectly, and I set off again towards Chantelle. She was seven kilometers away by this time, and I'd only covered about one. She was making much better time than I was, but I could pick up speed now that I wasn't having to push my power into the snow before me to compress it. Or so I thought, before I walked into a drift of lighter compressed snow and sank in to my knees.

I started spreading my power into the snow in a wide arc in front of me, not actively doing anything with it, but it gave me a sense of how dense the snow was. After a few more times of sinking I was getting the hang of how to sense drifts of snow, easily navigating my way around them and still making good time. I found I could spread my power out thinly over the surface of the snow and get better range, still being able to judge the density of the snow from the first few centimeters.

I had been alternating between walking and jogging for about half an hour and was within two kilometers of Chantelle when my next step went straight through the surface of the snow with a crack.

I toppled forwards and landed briefly face first before hearing another crack. I let out a yelp as I fell ten meters down. I landed spread out in soft snow, but still had my breath knocked out of me. I hadn't dropped my sword or orb, though.

As I recovered, the snow around me melted and I sank down to a wide piece of ice. I seemed to have fallen through a thin covering of ice over a ravine, and was now standing on a river at the bottom of it. The only light was coming in from the hole in the roof I had made, and the ravine disappeared into the gloom in either direction without much change, the walls made of stone.

Thinking back to it, I should have noticed that there was a wide gap in the trees in a fairly straight line. And I need to sink my power into the snow deeper. I could move around the areas of less compact snow faster spreading my power out, but falling into random holes would set me back further than the time I gained.

Moving over to the wall of the ravine on the side I wanted to get out I sank my power into the stone. Pulling out a two meter cube of stone I pushed it out onto the river. The next section of stone a meter in and up was cut into four one meter cubes and joined the two meter cube on the river. Then it was just a matter of climbing and dropping the stone I cut out behind me.

A couple of meters up the stone turned to dirt and I made much faster progress, pulling the dirt down in a controlled cave in with rough steps as I climbed to the surface. A few tree roots got in the way, but I easily cut through them and pushed them behind me.

Getting to the top, I had about a quarter of the energy that I had started with in my orb. Chantelle had stopped moving towards me, and seemed to be moving at a right angle to me, and had also slowed down compared to earlier. I made another snow slope to the top of the snow, which was still higher than my head, and set off towards her again, sinking my power deeper into the snow as I went.

Not far into the trees past the ravine I came across horizontal threads of ice stretching between two trees. They looked like thin ropes made out of ice. They weren't blocking my way, so I left them alone and continued on.

They started to become more common, forming rope walls tens of meters tall between the trees that would be difficult to get past. Though most of them didn't block the path I wanted to take, and the ones that did soon had a turn that let me go the way I wanted. I realised after a few turns that the whole thing was a maze. I could see through the strands, but the combination of snow, trees, and walls further back limited what I could see.

The next wall I came to blocking the way I wanted to go I decided to try to manipulate with my power. I pushed my power out towards it... And nothing happened. My power wouldn't enter the rope at all. Lifting my sword over my head, I swung down in an one handed chop into the wall. And chipped my sword. There was no damage to the ice rope strand I had hit. Though the vibration from my strike travelled along the rope and continued around the next corner.

The only other things I could think of was to build some stairs and go over, or... I rested my sword against the rope and pushed heat into it, focusing it at the edge. And more heat. And more.

Finally, as the edge of the blade started to glow the strand it was pushing against snapped with a twang. Pushing my blade down on the next rope it snapped much more quickly, and the rest of the wall from my head to my knees followed soon after.

Stepping through the section of wall I had cut through, there were much fewer obstructing walls, and the snow was more compressed. There seemed to be an inside and outside of the maze, and I was now on the outside portion.

I made it another one hundred meters with only slight detours from the direct line towards Chantelle before I came across another wall that was directly in my way. I cut through it and the wall five meters over from it that made up the maze passage.

As soon as I was through that wall I could hear a chittering sound coming from a distance off to my left and behind me. As I stepped forward in the direction of Chantelle, who was less than a kilometer away, I heard an answering chittering coming from up a tree in front of me.

There was a giant ice spider looking right at me from less than twenty meters away.