11:54:47.847144Z 1C2F7.D8DE6DDF00ABF76A2F49 : ERROR ThreadID=1025981

  11:54:47.847144Z 1C2F7.D8DE6DDF00ABF76A2F49 : TrackDescription=Host L5 “Dawn”

  11:54:47.847145Z 1C2F7.D8DE7EA5F84CAD57BC7F : PostLogFile invoked -6670

  Dawn stood, unmoving, in drifting snow that rose to her hips. Her eyes were squinted nearly shut against the driving wind that carried dense, stinging flakes into her face, and she fought to keep her gaze locked on the dim shape that drifted in and out of existence some dozen yards ahead of her in the whiteout. For a moment, she wished she hadn’t sent Nyx ahead. She resumed her slow, plowing steps, her eyes fixed on the shape that grew in size and substance as she advanced.

  A boulder. Only a boulder, on which layers of ice were encrusted.

  Her eyes shifted beyond the rock and found more shapes. The tree line.

  The fronts of her thighs burning from exertion and from the cold, she pushed forward and soon passed the rock and moved into trees that began as short, gnarled specimens but quickly gave way to thick-trunked firs with heavily needled limbs, the lowest of which were buried in the snow. The trees moved closer together as she continued her trudge until she finally came to two trees close enough for their lowest branches to be touching. A third tree stood behind them, forming a nearly perfect equilateral triangle, the interior of which was partially shielded from the wind by the lowest half-dozen limbs of each tree.

  Dawn pushed slowly through the interdigitated, snow-laden branches, finding that she had to lean forward to keep moving at all against the resistance of the limbs and deep snow. Once through, she stood for a moment, panting, and looked around her open-roofed shelter. High above, the tops of the three trees were swaying heavily.

  “Suffice it must,” she said to herself, though not even she could hear the words in the roar of the wind through the trees. Bowing her head, she pushed a series of thoughts to Nyx, rendered more as images and emotions than words.

  Come. End your prowl for now. I will make shelter. We must not freeze this night.

  Dawn pulled the hood of her brown leather cloak tight around her face. Slowly and with a grimace against the pain, she flexed the stiff fingers of both hands. She rolled her shoulders once and closed her eyes. Without looking, she quickly painted an invisible sigil in the air and then spread her arms wide. Opening her eyes, she looked down at the center of the snow drift that lay around her within the shelter of the trees and gradually brought her hands together as though squeezing against an unseen resistance. The snow directly before her began to shift, with a yard-wide circle drawing inward until it had formed a compact, ovoid block of ice, flat on the top and bottom. Dawn exhaled, already feeling the mana drain, and started another block.

  By the time Nyx appeared from between two of the triad of trees, Dawn could barely stand but had shaped more than three dozen blocks of ice and wrestled them into a rough dome, with only a small gap on the leeward side and a smaller slit at the peak.

  The perfect time to arrive, Dawn thought toward Nyx, who, having still not learned to interpret sarcasm, responded with mild confusion. It is of no importance, Dawn thought next for the cheetah’s benefit and gestured for Nyx to enter. Nyx crouched as she crawled through the opening, and Dawn dropped to all fours and followed.

  Inside, Dawn sat on her knees and rolled into the entrance opening two blocks she’d set aside, which left only small cracks around the edges where the blocks did not rest smoothly against the frame. Nyx sniffed the dome wall and then curled up against it. Dawn twisted off her knees to sit cross-legged and then slid herself backward to lean against the wall with her thigh pressed against Nyx’s curled haunch.

  Dawn pulled closer the rucksack she’d earlier doffed and from within drew a hammered copper bowl Thomanji’yheri had made at her request. She slid the bowl across the still snow-dusted, rock-hard earth until the bowl was about equidistant from her, Nyx, and the far wall. With a quick meliá that required no mana and almost no mental effort, she formed in the bowl a pool of liquid fire that filled the dark shelter with amber light and—after a few minutes, during which she tightened her cloak and then rubbed her hands hard against her thighs—the first hints of faint warmth.

  We may survive yet, she thought to Nyx.

  Nyx curled tighter and gave no response.

  Reaching into the rucksack, Dawn drew forth two pieces of dried wild boar, each only slightly larger than an oak leaf, and stretched over Nyx to place one piece in front of the cat’s maw. Nyx did not move.

  Dawn leaned back against the wall and, from the other piece, tore off a small chunk with her teeth. She closed her eyes as she slowly chewed the tough meat. She wondered whether she and Nyx would survive if they trekked deeper into Wyste. The cold was unfathomable. It brought to her mind the ‘Absolute Zero’ about which Dusk had read in a library they’d visited in Shiqoku. Would they even survive to the morning if she fell asleep, or would she and Nyx slowly cool until they became just another frozen feature of the landscape, interred within their ice crypt.

  The tough meat provided nearly a half-an-hour’s distraction. When she finished, Dawn glanced at Nyx, who had not yet touched her own portion. Dawn added flame to that already in the bowl, and within a few minutes began to feel as though the air in the shelter was no longer chilling her cheeks. After a few minutes more, she loosened her hood and from its collar pulled free her long braid, letting it fall down the front of one shoulder and her chest nearly to her waist.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  This will not do, she thought. She was in a hostile land, in a hostile realm, searching for someone who, if they did exist, would not want to be found. She had minimal provisions and a single companion, and her resources would only dwindle as time went on. She looked at her hands, to which blood was slowly returning.

  Either I must abandon my effort, she thought, or I must become a melióδin who knows more than the handful of meliá my master and a deranged imposter taught me.

  Dawn stared vacantly across the dome. The amber light rippled hypnotically over the surface of the wall.

  If what Reeve told us is accurate, she thought, that through our magic Dusk and I are controlling the fabric of which the world is made, then I must not consider the meliá unique and unrelated tools, like a hammer or saw, good for only one purpose and shedding little light upon the function of the other, but as creations that come from something deeper, as the many meanings carried by language can be built from sentences that are themselves built from words and they from only a finite set of letters.

  She leaned her head against the wall.

  But how can I understand how a meliá is created when I have learned only the final form of a few? Hearing a few phrases of an alien language tells you nothing of their meaning or why they were built as they were.

  Although the interior of the shelter was still far from warm, the heat of the fire had softened the air’s icy edge, and Dawn’s mind began to drift gently on waves of thought that were no more under her guidance than were waves on the sea. Outside, the wind scoured the dome, but inside, the air seemed to become heavier and more still.

  She opened her eyes and sat forward, causing Nyx to stir slightly with a sound of disapproval.

  “I may only know a few phrases of a language I do not understand. But if they all follow the same underlying rules…”

  Dawn looked around the shelter, gauging the space available. Pushing up one sleeve several inches, then the other, she used a few quick flicks of her fingers through the air to draw the sigil from which she and Dusk had learned their first meliá. Once finished, the glowing blue rune floated in front of the wall opposite her. She paused for a moment and then began the sigil of the next meliá they had learned.

  Soon, a matrix of sigils hung before her, and Dawn stared intensely at the collection, oblivious to the extreme mana fatigue she felt after casting so many sigils, each of which she had performed using a standard mana spell wrapped within a meliá.

  As the wind whistled over her shelter, Dawn began casting a new matrix of sigils, or part-sigils, each made of one or more components she could identify in two or more of the meliá she had been taught. Some shapes seemed purely meliá in nature. Others seemed related to the standard spell a meliá was used to call. And as her matrix grew, Dawn began to see other similarities—some that must surely make reference to objects, some to actions, some to context, some to the area affected, and some to the duration or repetition of the spell. She rearrange both the position of the sigils within the matrix and the color of the sigils to try to understand the relationships. By the time she found herself starting to repeat and undo edits to her glowing array for the second or third time, she felt headachy from the effort and the cold, which the fire could not fully banish.

  I should wait until morning, she thought, when my head will be clearer, before I pursue this riddle further.

  She closed her aching eyes for a few seconds and then opened them and looked down at Nyx.

  But perhaps I will sleep better if I know whether there is anything to this, or if my meticulously arranged sigils are nothing more than decoration for this frozen crypt.

  She ran her eyes over the rows of sigils, looking for a safe place she could begin.

  Yes, she thought, as she focused on two of the first meliá their master had taught them. The sigils representing the meliá were side-by-side in her matrix, and as she looked between them, the similarities were clear. She was also reassured by the fact that they both were innocuous—one produced a small, tightly contained flame far weaker than the warming fire that still danced in their shelter; the other produced an odorless and harmless but dense haze large enough to conceal one’s comrades or to disorient a group of foes.

  Dawn studied each step of the first, then repeated her analysis on the second. Although the sigil representing each meliá was made of more than a dozen components, the components seemed naturally grouped into a few collections, and she sensed a point in the first spell when she could transition to a latter portion of the second spell.

  Dawn shrugged. The most likely outcome of her experiment—that her bastardized creation did nothing at all—would be a suitable sign that she should give in to sleep. She shifted her position to face slightly away from her matrices of sigils and mentally ran through the steps of her creation. Confident in the sequence, she began moving stiff fingers to paint in the air what she hoped would be not a sequence of meaningless gestures but a new meliá. As she finished the last motion, she shifted her focus to a location a few feet in front of her where either of the original spells would have begun to manifest.

  She saw nothing.

  At first, she saw nothing. And then she squinted and leaned forward in the fire-lit semi-darkness and found a nearly black, smokey orb floating before her.

  “Well!” She said brightly.

  The orb exploded, and the shelter with it, and for a few seconds Dawn could see nothing but white and hear nothing at all.

  She landed in a deep drift, and the world was dark again. So deep was the snow that, as her throbbing lungs begged for air, for a few terrifying seconds she could not tell which way was up. She flailed, and one hand hit a rock. She began to orient herself, and a second later found purchase with her feet and pushed herself up through the surface of the drift. Gasping to fill her lungs, she looked around with wild eyes. The silence was beginning to evolve into a high sound like a mosquito landing by one’s ear at night.

  The shelter was gone, with only a few blocks of the lowest circle remaining. There was no sign of Nyx.

  Dawn looked around the triangle within the trees, which was already beginning to be covered by freshly blown snow.

  The sound in her ears changed further…

  Hhhhhhhhhhhhh.

  Recognizing the high hiss, Dawn looked up into one of the three trees.

  Thirty feet off the ground, Nyx clung to a combination of branches and trunk. The cheetah hissed again.

  Dawn motioned apologetically at her Companion. “I’m sorry, I truly am.” She smiled. “But you will see, it was worth it. For I have discovered something.”

  Nyx hissed.