A Thin Sheet of Ice

13th of Kaien, Sauðhéðr pass, the Isspjót mountains

(Three days later)

As they slowly descended the mountain, Orm noticed something unusual. She turned to the others to get their attention and pointed.

“What’s that?”

It seemed like a large piece of stone, the sun’s light shining onto it, a natural spotlight that exposed parts of it that, upon further inspection, showed that it wasn’t a stone. Instead, they noticed that the “stone” had required masonry to be, gluing together several of some kind of white brick. Without waiting for anyone else’s observation or opinion, Orm slid along the ground to where it was, picking up dust and leaves as she did.

“It’s part of something,” she told others after her investigation, standing up and turning to face them so they’d hear her.

“There shouldn’t be any villages around these parts, abandoned or otherwise.” Fin, having watched from the path with folded arms, also descended, intrigued by Orm’s discovery.

“Then, perhaps an odd archeological find,” Orm said with a shrug, turning back around to further inspect the stone. “It looks old, but not old enough to have been sitting in the dirt for millennia.”

Fin joined in on the investigation once she reached the oddity.

Flowers grew, more or less unbothered by the rubble, though the dirt and foliage had not yet climbed onto it. There were a couple of patches here and there, but not even moss grew on it consistently, yet.

“It fell from the sky,” Hal said, still standing along the trail and looking above them all. She pointed.

“Can you see it there, something in the clouds?” She asked, giving the others a moment to try to look, though none but Fin could discern anything, and only she could with a swirl of her shards and a magnification spell.

“She’s right,” Fin agreed after further examination. “There’s something there, like the tip of a building.”

Fin pulled down her shards and turned back to the others. “But I don’t understand - how did it not create an impact crater when it fell?”

Hal shrugged, looking away from the floating building and back down to Fin.

“My guess is it simply floated down,” she answered with a chuckle as both Orm and Fin slowly climbed back up to the rest of them.

“They tend to do this sometimes,” Hal finished, taking Orm’s hand and helping pull her up for the last couple of steps between the side of the ledge and the trail, then doing the same for Fin.

“Oho, you sound like you’ve been to a floating island before,” Orm smiled, eyes bright with curiosity as Hal nodded.

“Yeah, I grew up with my mother on one of them, though I don’t know if they’re all the same.” With the group all together again, Hal looked back up at the sky, thoughtful.

“Orm,” she said finally, “Can you take us there?”

“Sure about that?” The curious glint in her eye shifted to mischief. “I thought we were ‘taking it slow.’” She grinned, broad, curious, and pointy.

“Maybe Fin can cover for us with her spell?” Rei asked, looking over to Fin as she did.

Rei couldn’t lie, it was very exciting to see something like a floating island, and even more so the idea of actually getting to go to it. The enthusiastic little bounces on the balls of her feet as she asked betrayed her excitement.

“It’s not completely impervious, you know that, right?” Fin sighed. “It can probably stop someone from seeing us for a second or two, maybe three if we’re lucky, but that’s about it.”

The fundamentals of the spell was that it created mirrors all around them, she’d told them this already when they saved Orm. For something as big as Orm got as a full-bodied dragon, though, it would be extremely hard to create something that mirrored the sky from all directions.

Though, she had to admit to herself, because the sky seemed rather clear that day, the risk of being noticed was much lower. It wasn’t hard to blend in when the only thing to match was ‘blue.’

“How slow do you think I am?” With her hands behind her back, Orm’s grin widened even more, twisting as she contorted, scales covering her completely, and she grew. “A second or two will be more than enough.” Wings sprouted from her back, her tail lengthened, and in just another second, she was back to being a huge dragon.

“Wait…” Rei paused, halfway on top of her, tilting her head at a thought before she kept going, “What happened to the dress?” She peeked over the side, half-expecting to see the red dress in tatters on the ground.

Don’t worry.. Orm’s voice echoed through Rei’s head as she settled onto her massive, furry back with the others. I’ve created the rest of my body with my human form as a ‘core,’ for lack of a better word. You could say that your clothes are now nestled close to my heart.

“I don’t know if that’s better or worse…” Rei imagined the clothes being alongside the fleshy interior for a second, making a face as she did so.

Don’t let your imagination get the better of you. It’s the same as a pocket of air. The clothes are fine.

“That’s not what I was worried about. I just didn’t want you wearing rags again…” Rei blushed as Orm, disregarding the other’s embarrassment, spread her wings, angling them to catch the wind, with Fin concentrating on her spell.

No? Well, then I think you’ll be quite pleased once I’m human again, I promise. With a rush of wind that kicked up dust and rubble, Orm took off, shards of glass around her shielding her from prying eyes as they ascended to the clouds.

Hal was right. As they flew towards the direction she pointed, a floating city made of white stone became visible, then grew larger in the sky. Orm was right as well: it didn’t take too long for her to get there at all. Finding a place to land, however, took longer, the ground long since crumbled and brittle, making things more complicated than they should have been.

After taking a moment to see the state of things, Orm decided it was a better idea to land on top of a building instead of the ground, since it seemed as though the ground might give at any moment. She waited for everyone to get off of her before she flew up and…

Heads up, Hrim heard her voice clearly in his head, and knew he needed to hold out his arms. He looked up.

… Orm changed form mid-air, a precautionary measure since she realized that her true form might be too heavy.

Rei gave a yelp, worried that something had happened and that Orm was going to be hurt.

Hrim silently caught her as she fell.

“So, an abandoned city.” Hrim looked around him now as he put Orm down on the false ground. From the building on which they’d been dropped off, they could see the city was large, buildings of all other sorts littering the clouds. Many of them seemed to be residential, but they saw others made for purposes they didn’t know. At the center of the city was a large spiral, tall and imposing.

It didn’t take too long before everyone figured out that the spire was most likely the building that Hal had noticed from terra firma.

“There are no bones.” Orm looked up to smell the breeze, her nose twitching endearingly as she did. “I smell no decay, either.”

She looked back to the group.

“That doesn’t mean much,” Fin replied as she slowly descended, her shards clinging onto the surface of the building as she did. She safely reached the ground, testing it with part of her weight before stepping on it fully to make sure it was stable. She looked up to the others, watching their descents.

“Maybe whomever lives here does not have flesh,” she continued once they were within earshot. “We’ve run into things like that before.”

She smiled at Hal and Rei, thinking back to the golem.

“That’s true, but it’s better to check for things like that anyway.” Orm followed her with a little leap as the rest scaled down with a rope rather than just jumping. Hal could have jumped down, herself, but didn’t - mostly because she felt bad for Rei and Hrim since they couldn’t.

“Still, it’s pretty impressive that you noticed it from so far away,” Rei said, finding her footing and taking another step down.

“I had a lot of practice,” Hal smiled, hopping down a bit too easily. “Back when I lived with Mom, every time we went down to the earth, I looked very hard at the sky, trying to find anything to show me that something was there.”

Nimbly, her feet reached ground level, and her hands reached up to Rei’s waist, helping her climb down a little bit easier.

“Most of the time,” Hal continued, letting Rei go and pulling down her own rope, the spell embedded on it unfurling it without issue, “It was the very tip of the tower that gave it away. Not really its shape, since they are usually made so that you can’t see anything from below, but its shadow.”

“I would have never thought of that,” Rei smiled as she let go of her rope, yanking it down and looking all around them as she wound it back up. On their side of the building, the grass on which they stood grew unchecked. Past the unmanaged yard, a large portion of the main road was missing, with only a gaping hole in its place, most likely having fallen out along the way. That said, there were still parts of it that they could walk on.

“Do you ever know when one of them might fall?” Hrim asked Hal, unusually hesitant about where to step.

“Not really, but they should be floating down if they do, so you shouldn’t get hurt,” Hal answered, stepping ahead of the group. “Usually,” She looked around, one hand on her hip and the other scratching her head, trying to find a route that they could take.

“‘Usually,’ huh?” Hrim’s voice, still low and steady, had an uncharacteristically anxious edge to it. He looked carefully, deliberate in where he placed his feet, unsure of his steps.

“Don’t worry, I’ll catch you on the way down.” Orm smiled with a wink, teasing. “Just like you did for me.”

She elbowed him a little in the side. “Just remember to scream so that I can hear you.”

“Oh, I will scream alright,” Hrim replied, the others wondering if his armor was perhaps somehow a little paler than usual, “People are meant to be firmly set on the ground.”

“Aw, Hrim, it’s not that bad,” Hal tried to reassure him. “Very technically, this is ground.”

This only made Hrim more anxious.

“No, ground is ‘ground.’ This is… Something else.” The anxiety strangled his voice now, just a little. “This is a thin sheet of ice that can set you down on the ocean floor if you are not careful.”

“Oh, nice one.” Fin nodded approvingly at the description. “Still, disregarding Hrim’s fear of heights…”

“Do not.”

“...Then, acknowledging Hrim’s fear of heights,” Fin corrected, “And not focusing on it for the moment, the architecture here is very different from any that I’ve seen on the continent.”

Fin continued thinking, looking over to the petite dragon. “I don’t know if you have seen anything like it on Perendur’s people’s side, Orm.”

“I haven’t. This is entirely new for me, too.”

Orm looked all around her, twirling on light feet, taking in the sights. The buildings were in disrepair, some of them rendered to nothing but rubble, but those that stood gave the impression of a rather soulless society. The white stone, unadorned with any paint, and a distinct lack of wood used for these structures stood out in particular to Orm, and she pointed it out to the rest.

With as bleached out as it all was, it was almost hard to look at things at all with as bright as it was in the sunshine.

But as bright as it was, they could tell that everything seemed to be made for a specific use. There were hardly any trees standing, and those that were seemed old enough that they could have been there since the earth used for the construction of the island itself was plucked from the ground.

* * *

From the tallest spire, unseen eyes watched.