The landscape of the north is an endless jagged purgatory of stone and snow, with miserable villages few, far between, and huddled around the bases of the grim wizards' towers of the Iron Czars. Bloody-handed tyrants all, whose rule undoubtedly perpetuates the country's empty misery; but in the fact of that empty misery, a necessity for life, their private hoarded power and demand for vital imported goods forming the hot driving heart of Eisgriff's communities, like deep-sea thermal vents.
They do not, will not, cooperate. They do not and will not treat each other as anything other than anathema, rivals to be plotted against and exterminated, and defended against on all sides for the same treatment. And still, without ever quite coordinating, along Eisgriff's southeast edge a line of towers stands, each at a safe distance from its peers, each guarding Eisgriff's vicious internal detente from the nearest outside power, the sullen arcane roar at the heart of the Great Forest.
Where that dotted rampart meets the foothills of the Spine of the World, stands Rubinova Vezha.
Each of the Iron Czars hates all wizards except themself. Their peers in Czardom, they suffer to exist only until they believe they can destroy them. Foreigners strayed within Eisgriff's borders, they will only refrain from assassinating if they believe it will invite more trouble from outside than they can personally weather. Homegrown practitioners of lesser might, they snuff out with insatiable paranoia and cruelty.
The meagre scraps permitted to the exploited tenant farmers of the Duin are an embarrassment of riches against the lives of Eisgriff's peasant class. And yet, with life so hard to cling to, there are few places with greater demand for the healing arts; and so Eisgriff has a special understanding of the world, grudgingly extending even to the Czars, wherein there is a third category alongside magic and mundane: the domain of wisdom. A certain degree of potion-brewing and prognostication is merely wise; and provided the wise remain inconspicuous, and live in no less wretchedness than those they aid, the Czars permit them.
So it is that Hro Long-Finger lives, forever on the edge of a blade. It is a risk to any community, that it suffers one of the wise to dwell there, for the Czars watch them close for signs of rivalry; one must demonstrate that one is wise enough to be worth the risk. And in the other boot, one must never be even the barest sliver too wise, because the Iron Czars watch close and jealously, move swiftly and without remorse. Hro Long-Finger lived further north, before; and did not keep balance on the blade-edge so very well, tumbled and fled, and lives here now, grateful to still breathe.
They do not live in the village that cowers around the base of Rubinova Vezha. They live in the ice-locked wild outside; they visit, trade small wisdoms for food and clothes and tools. Say little, stay inconspicuous, trust nobody. They do not suffer anyone to visit them, in the hidden place they live.
Today, however — this cursed day — they are doomed to receive visitors. They know so, because the foreign fools are audible across miles of snow, voices echoing through the jagged-bladed rocky hills.
Over the course of a meandering journey, skirting the Spine, the White Fastness revenant has plodded after the Mother's paladins like the world's dullest endurance predator, and the elf, cold-eyed, has tested against it the efficacy of drowning, freezing, crushing, and fire, not to mention many variations on impalement.
Her experimentation has, obviously, not lastingly felled it. Even less encouragingly, after a while she has noticed changes.
"Did you see," the elf says sharply, for the fourth or fifth time, as they toil along another barely-there trail, through another icy valley, bundled against the cold. "Did you see it."
"I saw everything you did," Ryssa says easily, her fur-lined hood pushed back and breath smoking in the air.
"I set the same trap for it as the time before, and it recognised it." She bares her teeth. "It doesn't simply pursue — it learns. That makes it unimaginably more dangerous than it first appeared."
"Still very slow," the paladin says, without appreciable concern.
"It's killed me once with arcane fire," the elf says, wasp-sharp. "What if its slowness is something else it learns to overcome? Some wizards can fly."
"That would be a considerable nuisance," Ryssa agrees.
"I would rather not spend eternity trading murders with it in the remotest snow," the elf says. "I appreciate all kinds of things I wouldn't wish its company on; beaches and taverns and theatres—"
"We will do all those things." Ryssa sounds serious for the first time in the conversation. "We walk into the land of the Czars; it wasn't in jest that I said they'll take care of it for us. They spend their lives doing nothing but sending magical terrors against one another; in this land, it's just another. One or other of them will assume it's been sent for them, and dispose of it."
"This implies that the Iron Czars are, all of them, as a matter of course, more terrible than the pinnacle of the White Fastness's art." The elf scowls at her. "How wonderful, that we dart among their feet inviting them to tread on us!"
"You," Ryssa says, "are in a sour mood because you don't like sleeping in the cold." She smiles back into the elf's frown, honeyed with fondness. "We will find some measure of shelter soon, and warm your toes."
"I have concerns," the elf bites out, eyes flashing; and Ryssa finally stops, turns to her, and becomes wholly earnest.
"Perhaps I ought," she says, "but I do not, elf. When you cannot be killed, all troubles become temporary. For the longest time, everything became temporary." Her smile returns, slow and serious, her eyes intense. "But now there is you."
The elf scoffs. "I am hardly a panacea," she mutters, but is unable to keep the paladin's gaze as she does.
"You are a miracle," Ryssa says lightly, and resumes hiking.
"I have concerns!" the elf reiterates to the back of her head. "—For example, what is that?"
The paladin glances back at her, then follows the line of her eyes to the approaching edge of a copse of huddled pines, grown short and cringed from the cold wind.
Among their scant shelter is a mass of rags and furs, so bundled it barely maintains the outline of a person. Beneath a heavy hood protrudes a mask — a beaklike tapering cone of pale, peeled twigs. Ice-bleached sunlight glints off inscrutable eyes of dark glass. The butt of a long, leaf-bladed spear rests slightly in front of the figure's feet, shaft propped casually against a shoulder and jutting up past their neck, point in the air behind them.
Ryssa shades her eyes and hums thoughtfully. "Leviathans wander from the frosty plains in the far north," she says. "Vast and unique, with hearts of blue ice; and there are those who hunt them. But they do not work alone, and this is very far south to meet one...one of the wise, perhaps. I know not, but I know the way to find out."
"If you're set on making friends," the elf says, "we should warn them about the revenant."
"We will definitely warn them to stay clear of it, unless we're set on making enemies," Ryssa says.
The elf heaves a put-upon sigh. "How long until it catches up again, do you think?" she says, as they pick their way betwen the rocks toward the watching stranger.
"Pit," Ryssa muses, "spikes, rocks on top — perhaps another day?"
"Unless it learned something."
"Unless that."
The stupid foreigners approach at a creeping pace, and halt at a politely unthreatening distance.
"Ryssa," the warrior-thewed lady says courteously, pressing a hand to her chest, and gestures questioningly.
"Hro Long-Finger," Hro says, the mask turning it into a hollow croak.
"My companion says you're one of Eisgriff's wise," the elf says, with her killer's knife-eyes trained on Hro. "Perhaps you have some mystic advice for us," and Hro narrows unseen eyes at her, unsure whether she mocks Hro or the lady alongside her.
Well, either way. "The north kills stupid foreigners," Hro says, pressing the pad of their thumb harder against the woodgrain of their spear, and sees the lightning flicker of private amusement around the lady's mouth.
"That's the finest mystic advice I've had in an age," she says sweetly, and the elf huffs a sigh and rolls her eyes.
