The warehouse had been a salt storage facility once, back when the lava canals made Ashfall’s lower district a viable trade route. Someone thought the combination of volcanic heat and stored salt was a sensible commercial arrangement. That person was wrong.

  Lyra pointed out that the facility was not on any Spiritward registry of monitored locations, it was accessible via three different exits, and it was far enough from the canal district that the hunters they encountered on the bridge would need significant time to expand their search perimeter to reach it.

  Kaelen pointed out that it was extremely cold, but that was because the ice was spreading.

  It had started before they arrived, or rather it had arrived slightly preceding Kaelen. It was the bond doing what it apparently did when he wasn’t concentrating, bleeding Lumi’s presence outward into whatever space he occupied. The puddles on the warehouse floor, remnants of past rain leaking through the damaged roof, had frozen into flat, cloudy discs of ice. The lower sections of the walls had developed a thin crystalline coating that caught the light entering the gaps in the roof and walls. In the far corner, where water had been dripping, a cluster of icicles had formed.

  Lumi stood in the center of the warehouse floor, pondering the situation.

  “Comfortable?” Lyra asked, pulling her jacket tighter. She produced a small heat-stone from her pack, a common travel item, enchanted to produce steady warmth without requiring a mage’s active attention, and held it snugly in her hands.

  “It’s fine,” Kaelen said.

  “You have ice on your boots.”

  He looked down and saw a thin layer of frost had formed across the toe of each boot. He felt none of it. The fire underneath his skin kept him from noticing temperatures that would have been uncomfortable for anyone else. He simply shook his feet, and the frost cracked and fell away. Then it immediately reformed.

  “Right,” he said, his tone gloomy. “Let’s figure out what I’m doing wrong.”

  Lyra found a collection of old tin cups stacked on a rotting shelf in the building’s break room. There were six of them in varying sizes. She arranged them in a line on the least compromised section of floor, filling them with water. Then she returned to where Kaelen was standing.

  “Small,” she said. “That’s the principle here. You’ve been working in the scale of dueling and combat ― large outputs, fast release. That’s why the conflict with the spirit is so violent when it happens. You’re asking two opposing forces to share space at high volume.”

  “It’s not a conflict,” Kaelen replied. “I’m not trying to fight it.”

  “The intention doesn’t change the physics.” She nodded at the cups. “Small flame. Controlled. Hold it at the surface of the water in that first cup and don’t push.”

  He gazed at the line of cups, then he looked over at Lumi, who had relocated to the interior shadows of the warehouse as if trying to get out of harm’s way. It was a humorous move by the spirit that Kaelen didn’t find amusing, made evident by the scowl on his face.

  Kaelen reached inward, slowly. Not with the full-bodied reach of a combat summons but with the careful attention of asking rather than taking. A small flame ignited in his palm that might be found on a candle. It wavered slightly in the drafts that moved through the warehouse’s damaged structure.

  He aimed at the first cup, lining his sight through the flame, which then appeared over the cup.

  Lumi’s cold stirred. Kaelen felt it in a way he was learning to, not as an attack but as a presence asserting itself. It was the bond’s one half responding to the activation of its other half.

  At first, nothing happened. Then a thin disc of ice formed across the top of the water, but the flame kept burning above it. A thin ribbon of steam rose from the point where the energies of cold and hot converged. Kaelen stared at the whisp of steam. It was extremely thin, and it lasted approximately four seconds before the ice grew thick enough to smother the heat differential, snuffing it out.

  Lyra laid a hand on his shoulder. “That was controlled.”

  “That was only four seconds.”

  “Maybe. But it was four seconds of opposing forces not destroying each other or the surrounding architecture. And it was four seconds more than you managed yesterday.” She pointed to the second cup. “Again.”

  He managed the second cup, but failed the third. The flame spiked without warning, some fluctuation in his attention, and Lumi’s cold responded proportionally. The cup slingshot from the floor, hitting the wall with a sharp crack that scattered shards of ice across twelve feet. The fourth cup went better. The fifth cup produced a burst of steam so dense it momentarily whited out the surrounding area. When it cleared, Lyra stood with a scowl on her face and ice crystals in her hair.

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  “Sorry,” he said.

  She shrugged it off. “Don’t be sorry. Understand what happened,” she said, picking an ice crystal from her off the tip of her nose. “What changed between cup four and five?”

  “I was thinking about the sixth cup instead of the fifth.”

  She pointed at him. “Exactly! You were managing ahead instead of managing on the moment. It’s a fire mage’s particular action pattern. You’re always projecting forward, thinking about the next strike, the next position, the next escape route. It’s why you’re good at duels, but it’s also why you’re terrible at this.”

  He wanted to argue, but he knew she was right.

  She continued, “The spirit responds to your present state, not your intended state. When you were focusing on the fourth cup, your attention was on the fourth cup. When you got to the fifth you were already thinking about the next and whether this was actually working. Your fire reflected that and scattered like your attention. And the result―” She gestured a sweeping arm at the ice covering the wall.

  Kaelen sighed. “I get it. Lumi’s presence responded to my scattered attention.”

  “Is that my name in your mouth, fire mage?” Lumi asked from the shadows. “I wasn’t aware we’d reached that level of familiarity.”

  “I’ve been calling you that for days,” Kaelen said.

  “In your head. There’s a difference. It sounds almost vulgar coming from your lips.”

  Lyra looked at Lumi. “Does it bother you? Speaking your name?”

  Lumi considered the question. “No. It is a name I chose in the age before names became administrative. I chose it because it meant something in the old language that no longer exists.” Its layered voice became wistful. “It means enlightened snow. Captures my character, don’t you think?”

  “I think it fits you fine,” Lyra said with a smile of respect.

  “Blah blah blah,” Kaelen muttered, turning to the sixth cup. He reached inside, produced a flame above it, and held it there. The ribbon of steam rose and lasted eleven seconds before he released it.

  “Oh, that’s better!” Lyra shrieked, offering him a golf clap.

  Lyra refilled the cups, and Kaelen continued practicing holding a controlled flame over them. He was improving, although he wasn’t sure what had triggered it. The flame was steady now, and the cold from Lumi remained present, but settled.

  As Kaelem reached for the next attempt, he noticed something that caught his attention. The frost splash on the wall he’d created moved. It didn’t melt. It moved. The crystalline coating rearranged itself in the span of three seconds, and what had been a random pattern of ice took on structure, and then it became something specific.

  The flame Kaelen was holding went out because his attention was drawn to what he was beholding. It was an image of a city in the frost, but it wasn’t the architecture of Ashfall, the fire kingdom. The buildings he beheld were built of glass and pale stone, and towers rose to cut angles against the sky. It was a city built on a mountain of ice with bridges spanning chasms of frozen air. It was stunningly beautiful.

  Then suddenly, the city ignited, not with fire but with an energy that consumed the ice towers and the glass bridges and the pale stone streets. It consumed them completely, leaving nothing. The beautiful city that stood as a jewel had become empty space in the span of mere moments.

  The image dissolved back into the random ice pattern. Kaelen looked over and realized Lyra was staring at the wall as well. Lumi, too, had moved from the shadows and was standing with them.

  “Was that the ice kingdom?” Kaelen asked.

  “What remains of it,” Lumi said, its layered voice flat. “A memory the bond carries. These echoes happen when the connection between us is active and unguarded. They are not under my control.”

  “The fire kingdom destroyed it,” Lyra said, quietly. She was standing motionless, holding the water skin she’d been using to fill the cups. “The history records say it was a military action. Strategic. They say the Ice Kingdom had been accumulating―”

  “The history records,” Lumi interrupted harshly, “we’re written by the people who won.”

  Silence consumed the warehouse.

  Kaelen sat down on the floor. He’d heard that the war between the elemental kingdoms had been fierce, eliminating entire magical lineages, that the post-war regulatory structure existed because of what unchecked elemental power had done to their world. But it had all been abstract to him, like a story of truth told as a fairytale.

  The burning glass towers, he discovered, were not abstract.

  “You survived, didn’t you?” he asked Lumi.

  “Spirits do not die the way material things die. We diminish. We sleep.” It became silent, the pause holding the weight of three hundred years in it. Then it continued, “I have been sleeping for a very long time. The bond you created between us is the first sustained contact I have had with a living consciousness since before your kingdom existed in its current form.”

  Kaelen looked at his hands, his palms still slightly red. Past them, his boots still held the frost clinging to them. He pondered the double elements residing within him.

  “I didn’t understand what I was doing,” he said.

  “No,” Lumi agreed. “But you did it completely. And here we are.”

  A loose shard of ice lying on the floor shifted and stood erect. Then it began moving on its own, rotating slowly. It rose and began changing form, becoming a figure. It was spectral, barely there, like an echo but slightly more focused. The figure extended an arm and pointed at the warehouse’s north wall. Its face held an expression that didn’t translate easily into human terms.

  A voice spoke. It wasn’t like Lumi’s voice, with layered tones, but something older, rougher, a different quality entirely. The voice was ancient. “He is coming, and you cannot hide from him forever.”

  The shard fell back to the concrete floor and shattered.

  The three companions looked at one another, holding their words.

  Finally, Kaelen asked Lumi. “Who is coming?”

  Lumi said nothing.

  Outside, the wind moved through Ashfall’s outskirts, and the abandoned warehouse creaked like old bones, sending an unfamiliar shiver racing down the spine of Kaelen.

  Someone powerful had been angered by the bond he’d inadvertently created with the ice spirit ― and they were coming for him.

  End of Episode 4

  Episode 5: “Smoke and Mirrors” coming soon!