“Those might be a problem,” Melia said as her team woke up in the morning. Alastair rubbed his bleary eyes and followed Melia’s pointing finger into the distance.

  The sun was rising over the eastern mountains, already spreading the warmth of summer like a preheating oven, but to the north, the white-capped peaks of the Frostrim range were darkened beneath a growing cloud. Black, swirling lines funneled upward from the mountaintop like a drain working in reverse, building a dark grey head that occasionally crackled with lightning.

  “Not natural,” Ellesea said, though nobody needed to be an expert to agree with her.

  “Storm brewing?” Y’cennia asked.

  “More like storm-making,” Jessica grumped, before going still as her eyes narrowed. “Or was that an [Alchemy] joke?”

  Y’cennia blinked in confusion as the last several seconds rewound in her head. Eventually, a wide smile broke out and she opened her mouth, but Jessica stuffed it full of a hunk of bread with a slice of bacon.

  “No,” she denied. “No puns.”

  “What do you think is making that?” Alastair referenced the clearly unnatural maelstrom behind them as he received his own breakfast.

  The group shared a look and seemed to shudder.

  “[Froljnar the Frozen],” Ellesea eventually whispered, drawing her robes closer to her shoulders. Speaking the name aloud seemed to drain some of the heat from the air around them; the fire seemed to flicker.

  Melia nodded. The Titan was a [World Boss] back in the game. A creature so powerful it needed more players to defeat it than would normally be allowed inside of a raid.

  Dungeons were capped at specific player counts per type of instance.

  “Regular” dungeons were designed for 5 players. A select few regular dungeons could hold up to 10, two full parties. Raids were massive groups made up of multiple parties. Difficulties were listed in party size, ranging from 10-man, 20-man, or the rare 40-man group limit.

  Internal game mechanics weren’t designed to house more people than that in a single instance.

  Outside of instances was a different story. There were no limits to how many people could be present in a single zone, outside of server limitations (which could comfortably house a player count in the tens of thousands concurrently). Outside, people didn’t even need to technically be in the same group to participate in a boss kill.

  That allowed the developers to create larger, extra challenges for players, on top of giving the world a feeling of depth and scope. Surely there were powers out there that mortals simply couldn’t comprehend? [World Bosses] help explore that train of thought.

  In real life? It seemed they were treated the same as one might treat a demigod. Or perhaps an actual god, one of a more nature-based pantheon. [Froljnar the Frozen] was the embodiment of winter. Long before the game had multiple expansions, the Titan was placed above the mountain dwelling of the dwarves. Dwarves seemed to be at home in a cold, frigid environment deep underground.

  But the location of Deepholme didn’t exactly mesh with two clashing ideologies. Normally, a perpetually snowy winterland would not be found next to a scorching, blazing inferno filled with lava plains and active volcanoes.

  So after the Titanic Tundra expansion was released, alongside some slightly tweaked Norse mythology, Froljnar’s lore was shifted into something of an exile. Shunned from his homeland, made to wander the southern lands where the sun shone down and the ice melted.

  He, of course, was having none of that.

  Those building clouds represented his centuries of rage against his brothers, the family that didn’t accept him, as powerful as the changing of the seasons themselves.

  Which did not bode well for Lakeridge.

  The height of summer didn’t mean a thing in the face of the fury of a god scorned.

  “We need to pick up the pace,” Alastair said. “No more slowing down to hunt [Wild Boars].”

  The group stared longingly at the crude bacon sandwiches in their hands. While technically they had enough bacon to last weeks, could anybody really have “enough” bacon?

  Packing up camp was a somber affair, the tents put away and the bedrolls stowed in contemplative silence. They had time, so [Sunrise] wasn’t overly worried.

  ?

  They thought they had time.

  Going was slow despite not stopping to pick herbs, kill monsters, or explore interesting sights. Yesterday, the group had unknowingly traveled too far north. Lakeridge itself was further to the east, and now they needed to head a little south to correct their bearings. Despite the hours walked yesterday, they were only slightly closer to reaching their goal. What should have seen them arriving sometime this evening now required at least another day and a half of travel.

  Normally, that wouldn’t be an issue, especially with the region’s usually calm (if hot in the summer) climate.

  Now they were stumbling across rocks that crackled with a thin layer of frost, watching their treacherous footing to keep themselves from slipping. Temperatures plummeted. While just earlier that day they would have taken refuge in the shade of a tree or the underhang of a boulder, sheltering them from the blistering sun, stepping into a shadow now meant an instant dip of multiple degrees.

  The storm above them no longer brewed; it boiled over and spilled forth across the land like a broken dam holding back an ice floe.

  Jackets needed to be retrieved from storage, and even with multiple layers added, nobody (except Melia) could stop their chattering teeth or the need to constantly rub their arms.

  Before the sun reached its apex in midday, they needed to stop for camp.

  Fingers and extremities were already stinging from the cold, and the group began to worry about frostbite. A fire was made, thanks in part to Melia’s excess of wood in her inventory and Ellesea casting a fireball into it, which gave them enough light and warmth to hastily set up an emergency shelter. Dinner was cold, even fresh from the fire, and the four adventurers quickly hunkered down, huddled closely together, with one thing on their mind and one thing only.

  Survive the storm.

  This whole time, Melia was a storm of emotions. A little bit of cold was nothing to her. From the very first moment she woke up in this world, she had always felt warm. Not hot, not cold, not uncomfortable. Oh, it was nice now and again to soak in water, feel something hot or cold that would have been considered extreme to her before, but she could take any number of ice bucket challenges on the chin and never even flinch.

  The same could not be said for her companions. Flesh and blood, even with the extra protection levels and stats offered, was fragile. Melia often wondered how that worked when she was playing the game: sometimes she would come across an npc that died in a somewhat…unexpected way. Unreal? Unlikely?

  The manner of death did not match how supposedly strong or tough they were.

  Such as during the Titanic Tundra expansion, where max-level npcs were found frozen in blocks of ice.

  As Melia found out since coming to this world, stats bolstered a person, but they did not define them. That’s why she could move [Moai] heads weighing several tons, but she had to put serious effort into it first. It’s why her body could still be picked up and flung around, she was still a gnome in the flesh despite her impossible levels.

  A king, no matter how invincible, could be laid low if they were not prepared.

  Her team was not prepared for a sudden, out-of-the-blue, terrible cliche-plot worthy snowstorm. Was this an act of the gods? Was this yet another consequence of her poorly thought-out actions? Why would frozen winter interrupt the world in the middle of midsummer?

  But none of that really mattered to Melia, who only had eyes for her teammates. That creeping feeling she worked so hard to suppress, which told the dragon inside her that she needed to protect her hoard, was overwhelming. She stared at the tents, fragile, frail, and thin, offering no protection against the elements. They were meant to be light and breathable for the sweltering summer months, not sudden below-freezing temperatures.

  Her friends were dying.

  Or at least that’s what her panicking mind told her. Perhaps they would be fine. Surely they took precautions to protect themselves? Y’cennia had whipped up a very basic “elemental resistance potion,” which they all quickly downed despite the horrid stench. It wouldn’t be as effective as a dedicated frost resistance potion, but it would do something. Better than nothing.

  They had blankets. They grouped together for warmth. They had their fire, but they wouldn’t be able to maintain it for long, not when they needed to seek shelter inside.

  They didn’t even bother to set a guard, though no monster in this zone would be able to contend with the unexpected cold.

  Melia was, in the moment, forgotten.

  Perhaps that worked both for and against her. She didn’t need to try to hide, and she wasn’t exactly capable of hiding.

  She needed to protect her treasures with every fiber of her being, and her draconic senses were screaming for her to curl up into an impenetrable ball and hug them tight. To shield them from the world and all its terrors, its problems, and its pains. To make sure nothing ever, ever bothered them.

  But Melia also knew this was wrong. This wasn’t her thinking rationally. Her desire for companionship had melted into the draconic need for hoarding, and this was not her.

  No, she supposed it was her now, but she knew it was a feral, base desire she had to overcome. Like an animal’s drive to eat, sleep, and reproduce.

  Her ability to recognize it, understand it, and rise above it made her more than her base instincts. They were her friends: her equals in some ways, her betters in others. They were so much more than a shiny pile of coins.

  As such, she would save them.

  But she would not force anything on them.

  The pitiful fire they made had long since gone out. The night was nearly pitch black, the raging storm blocking out the moon and stars.

  Melia transformed.

  She stretched her wings with great relish; it felt so liberating letting them free. Was this the smartest decision she could have made?

  Most likely not.

  Could she have intervened in any other way to keep her identity hidden?

  Most certainly.

  She was familiar enough with the bank square in Horizon, or even the garden courtyard at the abbey, that she could have opened a portal to either location and stuffed her friends through.

  She could have built a larger shelter in an instant. The walls would have been thick and insulated, their fire would have been large and kept them all warm and comfortable. Maybe that would have been smarter. If she had done that in the first place, the team could have taken part in building it.

  She could have [Stealthed] and taken off, found the creature responsible for the shift in climate, and…taken care of it. Most likely killing it, sure, but maybe not.

  A whole host of options was theoretically open to her; very few things were not possible in her hands.

  But she was tired.

  Tired of running, tired of hiding.

  And quite literally tired. Her fears, insecurities, and anxieties kept her awake, and for a creature designed to laze about, eating and sleeping, she was not taking proper care of her body.

  Her stomach groaned in protest. When would it finally be filled?

  She took a claw and dragged it in a circle around both tents and the fire pit, large enough to cover everything and still small enough for her to curl her body around.

  Her instincts told her to simply lie down on everything, but that wouldn’t be helpful to her friends. They’d get squished.

  From there, she spoke some runes into existence. They would not last as long as if she had etched them into the ground, but her words alone were powerful enough to bend the world to her will.

  She infused the area with an aura of protectiveness to ward off monsters and keep enemies out. She imparted her desire to keep them warm, keep them safe…and the world acted accordingly. The snow weighing down the tents melted, and the ground steamed. Several nearby critters fled. For all intents and purposes, this small chunk of the world was hers. For now.

  Lastly, as a great yawn escaped her, she brought her snout close to the tiny remnants of the fire and blew out a few errant sparks. A small fire bloomed, and Melia smiled. That should keep. She settled her body down gently, careful not to step on anything with her considerable bulk, and shut her eyes. She felt the small, precious life signs cradled next to her belly ease, and she smiled.

  ?

  ?

  Something woke Jessica up in the middle of the night. She rubbed her arms together, but the expected feeling of frozen extremities or frostbite never came.

  Her arms didn’t even sting with the tingle of a chill. In fact, she was quite warm.

  She sat up in her tent, glancing to the side where Al was resting peacefully. He wasn’t shivering or chattering, and his chest rose and fell with the steady rhythm of dreamless sleep.

  Her simple bedroll and thin blanket should not have been enough to shelter her from the storm.

  She crawled quietly to the flap of the tent, careful not to disturb her teammate, and peered outside. What she saw made her gasp.

  In the center of a clearing devoid of snow was their fire pit, glowing with the warmth of a strong, small fire.

  The ground around them was completely dry and naked, as if the blizzard they found themselves buried beneath was nothing but a dream. Jessica crawled out from under the tent and carefully walked around.

  The crunch of dirt and small stones underneath her feet melted into the crackle of the fire, the only thing to break the eerie silence. Jessica had never heard the world so silent, felt the world so still. Strange, she thought, she could almost feel the winds howling just beyond the circle of light projected by the bonfire, echoes of it wailing across the great open spaces tickled her ears.

  It was as if she were in a bubble of protected space.

  A slight rustle from behind her had her tensing, but she was too weary to be wary. Nothing could approach her from behind unless it came out of her tent, and besides, nothing was going to be doing much moving out in that storm.

  “You’re awake too, I see.”

  Alastair slid next to Jessica, standing by the fire, also rubbing his limbs for a lack of something better to do. Their minds told them it should be cold, but their bodies begged to differ.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Jessica said. “I don’t know why, but something woke me up.”

  “Might be the shock,” Alastair reckoned. Jessica raised an eyebrow.

  “Your body expects one thing and gets another. You wake up because your mind needs to figure out what’s going on.”

  “And what is going on right now, Al?”

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It’s disturbing.”

  “You mean how quiet it is?”

  “That’s one thing. I know for a fact there are monsters out there that don’t care what the temperature is. A little snow isn’t going to stop them from howling.”

  “You think something shut them up?”

  “I think they’re scared silent.”

  Jessica processed those words. The goosebumps rising on her arms weren’t due to the cold. This whole time, she had that feeling of somebody or something watching her. The little hairs on the back of her neck were standing straight as could be and she had to fight the urge not to reach for her bow.

  …or [Feign Death]. Maybe that would get them to go away and stop looking at her if they thought she had died.

  “Also, see how it’s snowing out there but not in here?”

  Alastair pointed to the edge of their little clearing. Indeed, as Jessica quickly discovered, their little bubble was only about 20 feet in diameter. Large enough for both of their tents and a little room to stretch their legs. As soon as that invisible barrier ended, though, the ground was piled thick with snow. She could see huge flurries of dark grey snow bursts blowing in what must have been gale-force winds. No stars were visible, and only a fraction of the moon peeked through the impenetrable clouds.

  Suddenly, a thought struck Jessica.

  “Where’s Melia?”

  Alastair jolted, as if also realizing for the first time the gnome wasn’t striding somewhere around their ankles.

  “She wasn’t in the tent,” he said as he looked back to where he and Jessica had just come from. “Maybe she’s with the other girls?”

  Jessica crept closer and lifted the flap, finding a sleeping [Mage] and [Alchemist], but no gnome.

  “Wuzzamattah?” Ellesea grumbled, opening a bleary eye.

  “Nothing,” Jessica replied softly. “Just looking for Melia. Go back to sleep.”

  “Gnooooo…wait.”

  Ellesea shot up. Her hands started patting herself down, as if checking that everything was still there. Arms, chest, legs, hair…all still attached.

  “Why aren’t we frozen?”

  “That’s-“

  “Loud,” Y’cennia grumped, rolling over. As soon as she rolled over, she rolled right back and sat up. “Awake?”

  “Great,” Jessica sighed, “Looks like we’re all up now. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you guys.”

  “No, now that I’m not freezing to death and getting shut down by cold, I’m surprised I didn’t wake up earlier. Can you feel that? That…that…”

  “Power?” Jessica asked, running her arms. “Like electricity shooting up your spine?”

  “Like the biggest ritual spell ever conceived by man is about to go off,” Ellesea nodded grimly. The air was suffocating with magic, and as a [Mage], she was sensitive to it.

  “Why are you looking for Melia?” Y’cennia eventually asked. “I thought she was outside. Doesn’t she always sleep outside? Now that I think about it, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her sleep.

  “Oh, she sleeps,” Jessica chuckled. “I’ve seen her turn back into that ‘dragon form’ she has. She clings to her tail tightly and drools.”

  “But she’s not outside?”

  “Nothing is outside,” Ellesea said, having squeezed out of the tent and walked into the clearing. “This is bizarre. Are we in the eye of the storm or something?”

  “I hope Melia’s okay,” Y’cennia mumbled. Jessica shook her head. “She can take care of herself.”

  Now that everyone was awake, they gathered around the fire to gather their wits and survey their surroundings.

  Visibility was nonexistent. Outside the little bubble of safety they found themselves in, everything was either white or black: heavy snow piling higher and higher, or the empty expanse of a starless sky.

  The strange thing was that the snow was not piled in even, logical arrangements. On the far side of the clearing, away from the tents, the snow was at its lowest, barely coming up to Jessica’s calves. That was still concerning; a foot and a half of snow built up over only a handful of hours. Behind the tents was even more alarming.

  A white wall rose from the ground to high above their heads, 20, 30 feet, maybe more. It was hard to tell. But it didn’t build up like a normal snow bank. On the side closer toward Ellesea and Y’cennia’s tent, the wall sloped gently from the ground up into the massive hill. But closer to Jessica’s side, the wall did not slope back down. It sort of ended abruptly as if the wall was cut by a giant knife. This was on top of how the wall rose suddenly at the edge of their clearing like a sheer cliff, a nearly vertical climb.

  Perhaps that was the nature of whatever protective bubble they were sheltered by, but Jessica didn’t think so. Everything was too weird, too strange, and being rescued like this in the middle of a freak storm was too far outside her expectations.

  And the longer she stared at the wall of snow, the stranger it looked. For one, it wasn’t actually snow.

  Jessica walked up to the wall, craning her neck up to see if she could see the top of it. At some point the white stopped abruptly. But the blackness of the night revealed no other secrets, except now that she looked at it, she thought she could see a thin pink line that ran across the top edge. It was hard to tell because it had to be 30 or so feet off the ground.

  She placed her hand onto the wall and sucked in a sharp breath.

  The wall was hot.

  It did not burn her, though she instinctively pulled her hand away. She tentatively inched it closer, letting the heat wash over her. Now that she was aware of it, she could feel the heat radiating off the entire wall. No wonder no snow could stick to the ground around them.

  She brought her fingers back up to the wall and pressed her palm flat against the bizarrely smooth surface. Jessica had never felt anything like this in her entire life. She’d never heard of anything like this either. The wall was soft and pliable, yet incredibly dense and tough. When she pressed against it with all her might, her fingers sank partially into the wall, creating a handprint, but no matter what she tried, she could go no further. And when she brought her hand back, the wall returned to normal, as if her hand had never touched it in the first place.

  Jessica took a step back and scratched her head. Soft yet hard, pliable yet unmoving. Like there was a squishy protective layer above something much more dense and durable.

  That was when she noticed the lines.

  She couldn’t call them cracks, because they were too straight, too symmetrical, and too perfect. But embedded into the wall, or perhaps etched, were long, thin lines creating a sort of grid. She tilted her head from side to side, trying to view it from a different angle. They were… wonky-shaped rectangles? Skewed squares?

  Diamonds. Four-point diamonds, much wider than they were tall, cleanly interlocking, stacked one on top of another to create this…wall.

  “Al?” Jessica asked shakily. She was getting a very bad feeling about the wall, though she had no idea why. “What do you make of this?”

  Not just Alastair, but the entire group walked over. Each one of them listened as Jessica talked about the wall, intrigued by the warmth, each one reaching out their own hand.

  At one point, all four of them were squishing their hands into one of the diamonds, testing the flexibility, when the power in the air, which had faded into the background, thrummed. Perhaps she imagined it, but Jessica swore she saw the wall shudder. All four hands were quickly drawn away.

  “No clue,” Alastair eventually said. He’d taken a few steps back and tried staring at the wall with a greater perspective. It didn’t offer him much. It was just as tall, just as long, and just as incomprehensible.

  “Can anybody else [Inspect] it?” Ellesea asked. She was answered by a round of shaking heads. Appraisal skills did not work on everything in the world, and even things that they did work on only gave such information as the system deemed appropriate to share with a user.

  People who didn’t know what they were looking at were not simply given information they didn’t have. They still needed to figure things out for themselves. That’s why traps in dungeons didn’t instantly pop out at people who were skilled in searching for traps, or why somebody who was clearly hiding their nature would appear as something different to people they were hiding it from. Mundane things also did not often have system identifiers. Rocks and boulders on the side of the road were not given status such as [Rocks] or [Boulders].

  This wall was anything but mundane or ordinary.

  It was clearly magical and clearly wrong, in the sense that it was there now and wasn’t before, so it wasn’t a natural part of the landscape.

  Y’cennia was the first to discover something about the wall, as she was standing up close to it, staring at one of the diamonds, when eventually one of her [Inspects] didn’t fail.

  ?

  [White Wall?]

  ?

  ???

  ?

  No information was given, other than the fact that the system recognized the wall as a thing worth investigating.

  She let out a gasp and stumbled backwards. Alastair quickly caught her while Jessica scanned the area. Once she explained what she saw, Ellesea began staring at the wall once more.

  She stepped back, standing next to the fire pit, and stared at the gridwork. Soon, she too got the feeling of wrongness when looking at individual…panels? Plates?

  Like some sort of interconnecting…scales….

  Ellesea’s eyes rapidly scanned the entire “wall” from top to bottom, side to side. At first, her brain refused to see anything other than a wall of white, oddly shaped diamond panels stacked perfectly atop one another. But the further back she stood, the more of the object she was able to view, the more strange features came up.

  Such as the fact that at the top of the white wall was a foot-thick pink border that ran along the entire outline of white.

  Or how the blackness above the pink line wasn’t the inky night sky or the tumultuous clouds. There existed a vague and hazy form, nearly impossible to see, stretching even further up, further out.

  Nearest to her, on the left where the wall ended abruptly like the face of a cliff, she could see the blackness reflecting the faintest light from the campfire. It, too, seemed to be made of a gridwork of shapes…but these ones were five-sided instead of four.

  Ellesea’s mind reeled as it made a connection to something she’d seen recently, though it seemed like years ago now when Melia gifted them the scale.

  Ellesea took another step back. She was almost at the edge of the clearing, but she couldn’t get the massive…object…entirely in view. Perhaps if she could, her [Identify] would give her more helpful information.

  It both did and did not.

  She cast the spell and watched, horrified, as it formed into something readable. Her knees felt weak, but she mustered every ounce of courage she had to fling herself as far away from the creature as possible. Even if it meant freezing to death out in the storm, she needed to escape!

  ?

  [Obsidian Dragon???]

  Level: ???

  ?

  She tripped, likely on a rock or a log or anything inconsequential, but she scuttled away as quickly as her awkward crab walk could take her. For all the good it would do against a dragon the size of a mountain.

  Her back slammed against something, something hard and immovable, and she knew she was trapped. Mere paces away, from what everybody had thought was impenetrable darkness, an eyelid slowly opened.

  A gigantic, amethyst eye, at least 8 feet tall, glowing with an unreal light. The pupil was slit from top to bottom, and Ellesea could see every minute twitch as it expanded and contracted, coming into focus and boring into her.

  Through her, like it could see into her very soul.

  A deep, feminine voice, coming from both nowhere and everywhere, filled the entire clearing.

  “Stay,” it commanded. “It’s dangerous out there.”

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