Chapter 58: Classic Quest Scenario

Miro had a fitful sleep, waking up multiple times to peep whether dawn had come and whether they had enough light to keep moving. This only made the night drag on longer, each minute that he was not able to help Hima settling as a weight on his chest. When Peteri, who seemed to possess a better sense of time, walked over to wake him, he needn’t have bothered – Miro was lying with his eyes open, head turned to the eastern horizon as he watched for signs of the sun, hoping that after yesterday’s hard ride Winterbug still had it in her to get them back to the village that same day.

They ate breakfast mostly in silence, with only one question ringing in Miro’s head so persistently it made him forget to taste his food.

“Peteri, she’s still alive, right?” he asked because if he did not let it out, he felt that his head would explode.

The archer leveled him with a steady gaze. Miro did not take the man for someone who lied easily, so his silence alone was worrisome enough.

“Miro, you are doing everything you can right now,” the archer finally answered, “More than anyone could have expected.”

Miro appreciated the sentiment, even if it didn’t make him feel any better, and only done the reverse. He disagreed with the underlying premise – that somehow trying to save your friend was going beyond what anyone could have expected. It should have been the bare minimum, each time and under every circumstance, which was why he could not be allowed to fail.

By the time they were ready to keep moving, Winterbug was chomping at the bit just as much as Miro was.

They travelled through the Lowlands at a brisk pace, more frequently passing through villages whose inhabitants paid them no mind. The first sign that they were getting close was that they sighted a branch of the black river. It snaked through a number of fields, rendering them completely infertile, devoid even of a speck of green, before it crossed under a stream and forged its path of destruction on the other side. The village of some twenty houses that stood on both sides of the stream was completely abandoned, and if the shapes that their roofs were in were any proper indication, no one had lived there for well over a year.

Why did the Lowlands, with their moss-covered rocks and the odd patch of tall bright green grasses, seemed to stretch further and further as each mile passed – their vastness only seeming to grow and making Miro feel as though he was reaching out towards something that was just as quickly moving away from him. He was not going to let Hima slip so easily through his fingers. He hadn’t even used his powers since the temple, afraid that he might somehow summon the debuff back before he had a chance to heal Hima

Then, out of a landscape that Miro was convinced had begun repeating itself, emerged familiar fields and a familiar house. Before Winterbug even came to a stop, Miro hopped off, stumbling but landing on his feet, pulling at his two Agility points, and then ran into the house.

Olbav and Daimir were busy in the kitchen, and Daimir almost dropped a plate to the floor when he saw Miro rush past without greeting, straight into the bedroom where he found Nydra sitting on a chair, her chin resting on her clenched hands.

“Is she?” Miro asked breathlessly.

“She’s still with us,” Nydra confirmed, though there was no joy in her voice and Miro could easily see why. Hima was lying in bed and her whole body was now covered in a thin layer of frost, and from where he was, there was no way to tell if she was breathing or not.

He approached Hima’s side, his heart hammering in his throat so badly he felt the need to swallow repeatedly as if to keep it from jumping out of his body. He sensed Nydra rise behind him and Peteri also enter the room but their presence was secondary, like a vase in the background of a portrait.

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Nydra’s concerned voice came to him from somewhere far away.

“Do I have – no, no cracking idea. But I’m doing it anyway.”

Miro then put both his hands on Hima, confirming with his chilled fingers that the frost covering her was more than a mere illusion. There were no spells here that could have served him, no ready-made ingredients he could have grabbed off the pantry shelf. All he had to rely on was what Hima had taught him earlier – that there was nothing to ‘think about’ when it came to his powers, that it was as natural as walking. He was a newborn that was about to run ten miles.

Slowly, he let the heat flow down to his hands and then pool between them. There were no errant fireballs, no urge to pop off like a damp log on the fire. The frost around his hands began to melt but he knew this wasn’t enough – as Healer Oreksei said, this was something deeper, something only he could penetrate to. All he had to do was accomplish it without burning her.

Miro relaxed his mind, or rather, pried open the mental equivalent of a white-knuckle fist, trying to straighten out the fingers. Behind him, Daimir shuffled nervously from foot to foot but gradually that sound disappeared. There was only a slight murmur Miro could not place, until he realized that it was the rustling of the tiny layer of flames dancing along the back of his hands. In the darkness of his closed eyes, Miro started to make out shapes – the even darker outlines of the Deep Scar Mountains themselves, jagged peaks that twisted and turned on themselves, creating through their blackness a deep void, from within which came a rumbling that sounded so much like laughter that it nearly baited Miro into losing control and using his fireballs. He pushed through it, dimming the violent current of the fireballs and otherwise flooding the rest of his power into Hima. He did not see but he could tell that the patch where the frost had melted grew quickly, that his powers sunk deep into the icewinder, and just as he was on the verge of being fully exhausted, of tapping into his own life to sustain this, he opened his eyes, at the same time as Hima drew her first proper breath in days.

His knees gave out, causing him to stumble backwards where Nydra immediately caught him under his arms. “Easy there, lad,” she said, lowering him onto the chair she’d just been sitting on. Hima had said these non-spell abilities only used a fraction of the mana as regular spells did, but Miro’s remaining mana had been bled dry. It had all been worth it, seeing Hima lying on the bed, her chest visibly rising and falling with each breath.

There was a sound that came from her, a long groaning moan as if she was just coming to from getting kicked in the head by a horse. He wanted to stand up to see her but found most of his body unresponsive. The stubborn icewinder, in turn, tried to rise in the bed, lifting her head until the gentle hand of Olbav encouraged her to keep lying down. “Shh, shh, not so fast,” the old woman said.

“What?” Hima croaked and turned her head to the side, finding Miro sitting there. “Hey,” she whispered hoarsely, and her eyes briefly closed again.

“‘Hey’ to you,” Miro answered with a tired smile and found that his experience bar had popped up, and acted in a way it never had before. Though it had filled out nicely during his detour to the north, it still had not even been hallway to the next level. But now the bright blue line burst forward, filling up in the blink of an eye and, after resetting, moved forward to rest not that far from the next level.

Likely noticing his distant look through her half-opened eyed, Hima smiled crookedly and whispered, “Classic quest scenario.”