Enchanted to life as little more than festival entertainment, a quartet of ice sculptures find themselves abandoned, quickly becoming acquainted with danger as they flee from steaming food carts, fire-spewing domestic dragons, and the looming threat of a rising sun and a short winter.

As luck would have it, or rather as he forced luck to have it, Tavros Celliday, notary sorcerer and luck tracker, arrives to help them journey to the perpetually frozen north.  When he looks away from their luck, just for a moment, evil swoops in and snatches them away.

Oh and just wait until you find out who the narrator is!  (Yes, it’s me… but who am I!?)

(Estimated reading time: 1 hour, 22 minutes)

(estimated reading time for whole novella: 3 hours)

Watery and Grave

by

Blaine arcade

November 17^th

An Overall Unlucky Day

The prevailing sentiment might be that luck doesn’t apply to infants, and that if it does the luck doesn’t take effect until the child is old enough to understand their lot in life. So even if either idea is true, it doesn’t apply here, as the four born that day were born at their full intellectual capacity.

I don’t know about unlucky, but the place they were born was certainly unusual: the fair grounds in the midst of that continent’s biggest annual celebration. It was called the Tiring Week, and it coincided with most large animals settling into their caves and dens for hibernation. On the human side of things they wore themselves out with revelry and craftsmanship, but the best naps they could muster afterward only lasted a day or two.

On day three of the Tiring Week there were many scheduled events including a sledding competition, a magical firework show, and the activity that resulted in the spawning of the four youths that we would call unfortunate if that luck debate was actually settled.

Their birth was far more beautiful than that of any human; there wasn’t a single disgusted sound out of those passersby who observed the process. What they saw was blocks of ice, carved out of a frozen lake and hauled to the fairgrounds before being stood up on their square ends, slowly shrinking and smoothing to form shapes like their own.

Briefly they were to serve as entertainers, so each was born with an obvious talent. The two larger ones were completed first, as there was less to melt away, so we’ll examine them before the two smaller. One was masculine in form, quite so, and was born with one arm outstretched, in the midst of a proclamation.

He was an orator, but since he was gifted a very limited set of lines his existence beyond the next few hours would see him downgraded to merely an odd loud person. His striking beauty could be called ‘chiseled’ if one was a fan of wordplay, but such a jest doesn’t work well here given that a chisel never touched the block of ice he sprang from. It was all done through the casting of a single spell, through a weathered antler that served as the necessary life-relic catalyst.

Verse came out of him before thoughts, and his voice was deep and thrumming like the hammering of a forge echoing from within a natural ice cavern. He approached one of the wowed onlookers and took her hand in both of his. His grip was of course frigid, but his stare deep and warm to such a degree that she didn’t notice.

While she was being wooed, the slightly younger sister, but still an adult in form, emerged from stillness. Sculpted with short hair, the longer stuff never looked quite right in living ice, she had the aura of a winter nymph stepping out of her equivalent of a hot shower, which was a months-long thaw.

With her, but not attached despite how closely she held it, came a harp made of ice: her talent. She played just as quickly as her older brother spoke, and with even more impressive results. It wasn’t in her enchantment to make any mistakes, so the song was perfect, her tempo more accurate than any chronometer that world had yet seen.

But it was the sound that captured their imaginations most, given that they’d never heard plucked ice before. In magically instilling it with some of the physical properties of a typical instrument’s gut strings, the enchanter had made a largely new tone, like silver foil leaves colliding midair as they fell from an ore tree, like ripples in a galaxy agitating inert comets to bring about their endless flights.

For the exact duration of the song the ice sculpture playing it was carefree, enjoying her life more than most ever could. Halfway through it her younger siblings joined her in animation. Like children, one boy and one girl, they tumbled out of the last liquefying corners of their birth blocks and landed on their feet, though the girl’s feet were on the boy’s shoulders.

In fact their entire role was to tumble. The twins tucked, flipped, and rolled to the pooling audience’s delight and applause. For some time the ice sculptures were admired by their creator, who stood well behind them, out of their sight. Distracted as they were by fresh purpose they would not have paid him any mind even if he’d walked over to them and licked their faces.

He did not linger until the end however, distracted by something most distressing, at least to him. There was initially no one to instruct the magical constructs when the harpist’s song ended, when the orator finished belting out his poem, and when the tumblers had completed their routine.

Seeing that the sculptures just stood there, most of the attendees of the festivities clapped their loudest and abruptly departed. The real show would be starting in a few minutes, and they had to get to their seats before all the good ones were taken.

As for the sculptures, as the audience thinned it opened up a view of their surroundings. Tall tents. Steaming stalls of hot food in great pots of black iron and copper. The daylight above interrupted by black fireworks, to slowly be replaced with more colorful ones as the sky faded. It was the Tiring Week, but they didn’t even know what fatigue felt like yet.

Eventually the harpist’s eyes strayed from the straight-ahead they’d held for several minutes. She spied the back of the eldest brother’s neck and recognized his existence for the first time. If he was just as real as she was, then he could hear, and even answer questions, capacities she sensed in herself.

“Psst,” she hissed to him through icy teeth, streams of fog rising in front of her face. “Pssssst!” Flinching, he eventually turned just his head, the rest of his body remaining perfectly rigid with one arm across his chest as if he was about to take a bow. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“We already did it,” he whispered back, clearly confused. Both of them felt tugs on the clothing they couldn’t remove, all ice just as their flesh was. Each had a young tumbler looking up at them expectantly, with questions very similar to the harpist’s sparkling in their eyes.

“Should we just start over?” the little girl asked.

“No,” the harpist said.

“Yes,” the orator said simultaneously. “There are new people walking by; they haven’t seen us yet.”

“They’re not here to see us,” the harpist perceived, saying it before she fully understood it. It couldn’t be denied. The fairgoers, all very warmly dressed in fur coats and cloaks, were rapidly funneling away from their area in the trampled frosty grass and toward rows and rows of vaulted wooden seating on either side of a field cleared of everything but various small ramps, hurdles, and hoops on rods.

“Perhaps we must be louder to draw them back,” the eldest suggested, taking the deepest breath of his life in preparation for shouting a line of poetry much louder than the author ever intended, but before he could unleash the weaponized stanza they were distracted by a shout from behind.

They turned expecting to see their creator instinctively, and without having seen him even when he was present, they knew this man was not he who had artfully wielded the antler that traced their shapes from the blocks. This other man expected something, and he made it very clear very quickly.

“Where’s that… never mind. You, over there with the others, now.” He pointed, back to an area behind some of the field seating: a corral of sorts filled with other animated ice sculptures. He snapped his fingers when they didn’t immediately react. “Go you dummies!” He mimed walking until the orator picked it up. He was headed in the wrong direction, but the man jumped behind him and turned his shoulders to aim him.

The harpist thought it best they stick together as an ensemble, as she didn’t yet have the perspective to call them her family, so she took each of the tumblers by the hand and followed. Another fellow manned the gate to the corral, opened it to let them in, and leaned on it after it closed, satisfied that nothing within would try to escape.

Most of the other sculptures were in the form of animals: pigs, bulls, ostriches, and some smaller birds that sat on larger shoulders not even attempting to fly away. They could fly, in case you were curious. I know it makes little sense to you, given that a bird-shaped block of ice is much heavier than an actual bird, but remember that this is magic.

The clothing of the four sculptures shouldn’t have moved like cloth, and the harpist’s strings should not have been flexible at all, but magic is the force that allows intent to supersede limitations. I know you don’t have it where you’re from, but do try to keep up. I’ll be expecting you to roll with some realities that are even further beyond your ken than ‘but ice no fly’.

The darkness underneath the seating compounded with all the stomping feet over it to make for an oppressive environment that had our sculptures cringing in their first bouts with fear. They huddled together, displaying abilities and intellect that would’ve alarmed any merciful human actually paying attention, but all eyes were on the field, where the show had already begun.

“I don’t think they want to hear my poem,” the orator said of the ice animals around them, which was true, and it was the only thing any of them said for quite some time. Something was amiss. These other sculptures weren’t the same, and not just because they weren’t in the likeness of man. Eyes without sparkle. Fidgetless. Sounds made randomly, not in response to their environment. They were animated, but they were not alive.

The corral was emptying, and it turned into a line as they got closer to an entrance to the field. A door was briefly opened to let one through every other minute. That was followed by several flashes of light and roars from the crowd. Nothing returned through the door. Five sculptures in front of them. Four. Three.

The tumblers broke away from the harpist and pushed their eyes up against one of the slats. Before she could call them back there was a flash and they both recoiled, rubbing their eyes.

“It burns!” the little boy sobbed, face drowned in panic. The door opened again for a frozen pig to bolt out, but another flash came prematurely, in full view of the orator. He saw a concentrated deliberate ball of flame shoot across the field and strike the swine. It collapsed, a circular hole blasted straight through it, Water running into the grass like a flood through the trunks of a dead forest. The door rattled to a close again.

“Fire,” the eldest sputtered, still feeling it across his face and chest like a blast of hot shrapnel grains. He turned to his siblings to see if they also understood that fire was quite bad for them, and that, as it turned out, one or more things in this world could do harm.

“Excuse me,” the harpist called out to the fellow manning the door, on the other side of the slats. She smacked the wood until she saw his eyes. “Yes, we’re not supposed to go where the fire is. I’m supposed to play my-” she held up her instrument and plucked a few strings “-my harp, see? And the others also-”

“Shut up,” he grumbled, turning away. Now there was nothing but one cow between them and portholes in their bodies through which every horror imaginable could be seen.

“I don’t want to go out there!” the girl tumbler cried, clutching the harpist’s legs. The boy latched on a second later.

“Too bad, you’re up next,” the man barked from the other side, yanking the door open again. The cow didn’t hesitate, and it easily overpowered the orator who tried to drag it by the tail, only to be thrown back when the door shut once more and snapped it off the animal. The sculptures behind them started to nudge and push them forward. The things did not desire death; it was just how a thing with feet that wasn’t alive responded to the motion around it, like a branch floating with the current.

One of the birds fell off a creature behind them, utterly inert, its weak enchantment having already worn off. That was another fear that found them, and those had multiplied so quickly that the sculptures were paralyzed with indecision. Only instinct moved them when the door started to lift again.

The harpist jumped on it, dropping her instrument to jam her fingers in the slats and pull down. Unable to overpower him on her own, her siblings quickly joined in and quadrupled her efforts.

“What are you- you’re ruining the show!” the man growled, shaking the door back and forth. The crowd grew louder, impatient. Other hands rushed in and blocked the light from beyond. More fingers invaded the slats and lifted. The sculptures were losing ground, forcing the harpist to reassert her footing and accidentally snap all the snow strings of her harp at once.

Their tragic twang was quite loud, and caught the attention of someone who had just jumped the fence of the corral’s entrance. He was pursued by fair staff, but he kept a death grip on the stack of papers clutched against his chest the whole way, brandishing one crumpled sheet the way he might a torch as he delved into a treacherous cavern.

“This is a legal transfer!” he shouted at those in pursuit, over and over again. There was an ice pig in his way, so he tried stepping on it, only to slip and get cold mud all over his leg. Still he kept the many loose papers in a vice. The dull-eyed animals wouldn’t let him through, and his cowrie catalyst was inaccessible in his pocket at the moment, forcing him to try using the beasts as stepping stones yet again.

This time he succeeded, with much awkward slipping, but it got him all the way to the door and even slammed him against it in a way that tore open the skin on his chin. Admirably, he kept upright, and successfully slipped a note through the slats at about eye height without letting go of the other end.

The harpist’s eyes found his as he caught his breath. Amazement doesn’t begin to describe her torrent of feelings. What she saw in his expression was thousandfold, was the stones forming the banks of the river that now defined her individual self. Not only did she see that the parts of their audience were alive, but that none of them, until this man, had looked at her like she was alive.

“Hello,” he puffed, smiling with teeth cleaner than the age in which he lived, “I’m here on your behalf.”

“Yes, I have a behalf!” she blurted, with no idea if she was lying. That confused him, but he had to turn away and deal with the rough people on the other side of the slats.

“Take a moment to look you fools! This is a notice of legal transfer! All products and vessels of Ninefox Celliday’s magic are my property. You see the seal, yes?” There were grunts of acknowledgment. “The waxen fox upon it moves, does it not?” Gruntier grunts. “Then I cannot be lying.”

“Then take what are yours and get’em out of the way!” one of them barked before the others could devolve into the gruntiest grunts. Perceptive to a fault, the man only needed a few glances around to differentiate between the ensemble and every other animated ice sculpture around them. After taking one hand of the harpist and one of the orator, and making sure each of them took a hand of a little one, he waded through the frozen livestock until they could jump the fence and escape from under the seating.

“That was too close!” he told no one in particular when they had the space to relax. “Damn days with a -1 rating. I tell you they’re the worst.” He filed the notice back into his other papers and went to work organizing the rest of them as if there was some sort of meeting he was late for. “Others will say -3 are the worst, but on those days you’re ready for whatever tragedy comes! On a -1 you have all that foolish hope that you could, technically, still win the roll of the dice.”

“-1 day?” the orator asked, only intending to repeat, as he looked around, confused as to why they had so eagerly come to a spot without an audience.

“A day where your luck is consistently bad, but not as bad as it could be,” their savior explained. “These are the days where you fall down stairs, undercook meat, and forget the words to your favorite songs. Dreadful. Normally I don’t even leave the house on a -1, but extraordinary circumstances and all that. And you four…” He could straighten out now that he’d caught his breath, and in so doing saw them in the waning daylight. Alive? Yes, they were, but he saw even more in them right then. Circumstances were more extraordinary than he’d hoped. “You four are a special case indeed!”

“Thank you,” the tumblers said together, but numbly, as their first traumatizing event was having trouble processing in their fresh minds, like a bone caught in the grinder. To keep them from diving too deep too early, the fellow crouched down and shook their little hands, then got up and did the same with the elder sculptures.

“Introductions are in order. My name is Tavros Celliday: calendarist and notary sorcerer. Did my brother give you four names yet?”

“Do we need them?” the orator asked, instinctively wary of being upsold on the decorative fixtures of existence.

“They do help if you ever want to get written down. Where is he?” Tavros craned his neck and looked in every direction, but his sibling was nowhere in sight. “I’ll give you some temporary ones and you can change them later if you’d like.”

“We don’t need anything fancy,” the orator insisted.

“Alright… well, there are four of you, and four months in winter. So,” he pointed at the eldest, “November,” the harpist, “December”, the boy tumbler, “January”, and the girl, “and February.” He held his arms wide as if to hug them, but it was actually just to get them to huddle closer to each other. “I need you to do me a favor and stand right here. Don’t move. I’m going to find my brother and get this mess sorted out. I’ll be back.”

“What if they try to put us back in there with the animals?” December asked, and it was a desperate ask considering that she hadn’t figured out how to disguise such emotions yet. Tavros dug the notice of transfer back out, without having to look to find it, and handed it to her.

“If anyone bothers you just show them that and tell them they have no legal right to interfere with you. I’ll be along as soon as I can.” And with that he was off, gone as quickly as he had appeared. It was difficult for our sculptures to calm themselves, as the crowds didn’t let any quiet settle in. January and February, who would quickly take to calling each other Jan and Feeb to simplify matters, were too frightened to break contact with their elder siblings.

“I don’t like him,” November said out of the blue. “He’s making this much more complicated than it needs to be. What do you think December?” He rolled his eyes after asking. “Great. I’m using these names already. Now we’ll never get them off.”

“I don’t know what to think,” she answered. All the elaboration occurred silently, between her frosted crystal ears. Most of it took the form of Tavros’s face, which she found she could reconstruct perfectly from memory. She tried to do that with any person from their initial audience, finding it impossible.

Tavros was a man at war with his own body, at least by her analysis. His skin was deeply caramel, but his flighty focused eyes suggested he spent his time indoors, poring over documents and letters by flickering candlelight, catching errors between the shadows caused by his own breath.

He looked strong and tall, only the tiniest bit shorter than the orator, who was constructed to be a paragon of masculine beauty. Some of that height was lost in weak posture however; he was always leaning forward, running around, trying to get something done so he could reach a state of relaxation that he wouldn’t realize, until too late, was more traditionally called death.

His hair was long, dark, and glossy, but tamed in the back with a tie that hadn’t been removed, even during bathing, for nearly a year. Couldn’t have it getting in his eyes. His eyes that she already enjoyed remembering.

Something she could not yet identify as inspiration struck. Her imagination composed a song about him, his face, and his daring rescue of them from the corral of doomed frostbiters, but when her hand moved to play it her finger plucked the corner of the legal notice. There were no strings, as she’d stepped on her harp back under the seats, and ground its frame into the stiff muck.

“Oh no!” she cried, dancing in place, holding out the notice and shaking it. Despite her efforts it did not turn into a harp. “My harp! It’s gone! I can’t play!”

“Don’t be silly,” November said with a snort that was dangerously close to being a grunt like those on the other side of the slats. “If you can lose your harp then I can lose my voice.” He belted out a long loud note, arms rising as it hit a crescendo. Any louder and a hundred people would’ve twisted in their seats to look for the source. “See? It’s never going anywhere. Just try harder.”

December followed his advice, folding the notice and tucking it under one arm so she could pretend it wasn’t there. Then she held her arms and hands like the harp was present and plucked at the relevant threads of air. It turned out November was closer to correct than he would be at most other moments in his life, for she was able to produce something.

The magic of her soul, planted in her icy core, pulled Water out of the surrounding air and crystallized it into a new frame just like the old. Tiny snowy twisters appeared and concentrated down to strings that lodged their ends in exactly the right spaces. Her fingers found the song, right in the middle. All four listened.

“That’s not what you were playing before,” November noted.

“No,” she acknowledged as she finished her first rendition of it. “I just made it up.”

“Wow,” Feeb whispered in awe.

Some distance away, Tavros was about to find his brother, who had the answers to all his questions. He had been pointed in the right direction by one of the directors of the Tiring Week festivities, who had a contract with the elder Celliday, who was so by five years and named Vander.

Apparently Vander had been commissioned to magically create and animate ten ice sculptures for use in the main event, but had only produced four in the allotted time. Vander had been pulled away from his creations’ performance by the agitated employer and then roundly and aggressively criticized.

“What exactly did you say to him?” Tavros had asked, careful not to let his own anger spill into the questions. As they walked he was running his cowrie over a sheet of parchment, magically copying the contract his brother had set with the man for later analysis as well as for his records.

“I told him he was a miserable failure of a conjurer! Where does he get off breaking terms on Tiring Week! I had to pay one of the others to make up for him, and he wasn’t returning the money I gave him! You know it wasn’t mine in the first place right? I expect compensation from one of you two!”

“Alright, I’ll get it sorted, just tell me where you sent him! He’s very sensitive about his sculpture. And with today being one of his neutral days I shudder to think what he might-”

“-Over there. He went in the latrine and then refused to come out! It’s the right place for him, ‘cause he’s in it deep!” With a wave of his hand the man had excused himself, storming off to watch how badly the inconvenience had affected the show.

“Vander,” Tavros addressed his brother from the side of the wooden outhouse. He knocked on it, but there was no answer. “Vander it’s me. Listen… I wish you hadn’t done anything with what Aunt Fox left us without consulting me first. It’s very strong stuff.” He recalled the months of winter. “Which you know of course. You saw them.” Still no answer. “Vander?”

Having had more than enough of the cold for one day, a -1 day no less, Tavros held up his cowrie, pointing its curled inner side at the outhouse wall. Then he concentrated his ability and muttered the relevant magic words under his breath. The structure groaned, unleashing unpleasant odors along with puffs of dust from various places.

The seams between its boards widened as the wood compressed, giving Tavros several slits through which he could spy the interior. The view was even worse than expected, comprised of a body slumped on the seat. The calendarist pulled back in shock, causing the seams to snap shut once more with an awful clap.

Two steps got him around to the front, where he nearly ripped the door off its hinges, a pointless effort since he already knew it was too late. Vander was too sensitive for public work, always had been, and a day of neutral luck was the worst day to be an artist.

“Why test yourself when disaster was so likely?” Tavros asked, in tears, in grieving snot. His brother must have chosen the time and place on purpose. Neutral luck meant there were no universal forces helping or hindering him in his artistic endeavors. Whatever he produced would be the raw product of his talent, for better or worse. No excuses. That kind of clarity into one’s own worth was dangerous.

It was probably his employer’s criticism that had driven him over the edge. The sculptor saw his creations for what they were, but the other man saw only a lacking number. Incapable of holding his own in an argument, despite the mighty magic at his disposal, the elder Celliday had retreated to the first secluded spot he could find and, in a fit of self-pity and shame, taken his own life. Sent the magic he had cultivated elsewhere. Where? He might’ve specified, so Tavros looked for that specification.

His brother’s neck was broken, but every bit of bruise was visible thanks to the invisible nature of the noose he’d used. It was suspended from his life-relic, which was itself holding to the highest spot of the outhouse’s back wall by lingering magic alone. Tavros pulled it free and then stepped down to catch his brother’s collapsing body.

At that point his relic was a better representation of him than the broken shell he left behind. It was a small deer antler, every tip polished to an ivory point. There was no trace of its original velvet, as he had used it exclusively for many years, imbuing it with an otherworldly quality that suggested it no longer had any matter in it that had actually been attached to a stag.

After stashing the relic away Tavros was forced to pass his own over his brother’s body repeatedly, the morbid gesture having the purpose of detecting any magical paperwork or promises on his posthumous person. The shell vibrated over his heart; there was something. Tavros reached into his brother’s heavy coat and pulled out a note onto which a single sentence had been magically inked:

I, Vander Celliday, of sound body and mind, do hereby bequeath the entirety of my magical power to my final creations, so that they may find the beauty I failed to properly instill.

“Oh Vander! Why them! You’ve pushed your luck all the way into mine! You weren’t thinking… You were never thinking! Always feeling…” That one sentence still constituted a binding oath, one the world would fulfill for him, and that meant Tavros suddenly had responsibilities that could not wait for times of better fortune.

Having bailed his brother out of difficult situations before, Tavros had plenty of coin on him to facilitate at least some of his duties. He paid a few loiterers to wrap up his brother’s body and deliver it to his carriage outside the fairgrounds. Filthy and grease-mouthed, they didn’t look to be trustworthy sorts, but they were smart enough to see that Tavros was an experienced sorcerer, and to know that you do not take the money of such a man and run unless you’d like to wake up to the coins having vanished along with the hands that accepted them.

Once they were off he returned to the four ice sculptures, relieved to find them exactly where he’d left them, having largely returned to their built-in activities. He asked them to stop and listen, though everything he needed to say to them wasn’t laid out in neat paragraphs the way he wanted it.

“The… the four of you are alive.”

“Are we not supposed to be?” December asked, clutching her harp close to her chest. Tavros snatched the notice out from her underarm when he noticed it, a thing much easier to focus on than his answer, but it was filed away in half a moment and they were still waiting.

“Do you four understand anything about magic?” In their answers he discerned that they were aware that magic powered them, gave them their talents, and set them to their initial performance, but not much else. “Right, well I’ll make this as quick as I can. We really should get you out of here before the show ends and they let those vermin loose.

Magic is life force, separate from the spirit, but this separation only becomes obvious when the two go their own way at death. The spirit heads to the beyond, to an unknown fate, while the magic remains in the… well, the remains.

With practice, anyone can wield the magic stored in a life-relic, which is any piece of something once living. Like this,” he held up his sea shell, “or this,” and then his brother’s antler. “Magic allows one to change anything they want, to a degree, and that degree increases with practice.

Most who make magic their profession focus on one school to increase their abilities in it most dramatically. I work with documents and luck, while your creator worked with sculpture.”

“So we’re alive because he practiced a lot?” Feeb asked.

“An excellent guess,” Tavros emphatically assured her so as not to kill her curiosity with his correction, “but not exactly. To bring something inanimate to full life is an incredible feat that can only be done by the most accomplished sorcerers in the world.” November pointed at the last of the icy pigs, cows, and birds that were being fed through the gate under the seating.

“How many of those sorcerers are here right now? Is the world much smaller than I thought?” November was giddy at the idea that everyone in existence might fit into an amphitheater with him at the center.

“Those are not truly alive,” Tavros explained. “They are animated, yes, but that’s just magic following a pattern established by animals that came before. You four were given spirits, new ones, as well as magic.”

“Why?” they all asked together, though half of them only did so with their eyes and the concern knotted on their transparent brows.

“Brace yourselves,” he said, noticing how absurd it was to expect beings as cold as them to brace for anything. “My brother Vander, I’m sure, meant to bring you to life, but he never… never fully grasped what it was to be responsible.

He never could have made you with his artistic intent alone. The magic that allowed it was inherited, from our Aunt Ninefox who passed away not four days ago. She was a specialist in magic heritability, and had consulted with me in years past in order to draft a will.

At the time I had no idea her intention was to pass the magic cultivated across her entire life to my brother and I. She had grown children of her own you see, but there was a falling out. At the exact moment her spirit left this world that will took effect, and your creator, as well as I, suddenly found ourselves with more than three times the power we’ve ever had. Vander was too eager to- Oh dear!”

He’d babbled too long despite the effort to rush, and the show had ended. It wasn’t the spectators emerging first however, as they’d been asked to remain in their seats until all the potentially-dangerous animals were escorted out by their owners.

What emerged was two lines of creatures on leashes, all of them immaculately groomed like the heavy dress coats of their owners, luscious scaly hides polished to a shine that more than rivaled the smooth crystal skins of the ice sculptures.

Winter was never kind to the cold-blooded snakes and lizards, but Tavros hadn’t yet described the many ways that animals might use the magic running in their blood. Dragons, for example, used it to create an internal flame, which granted plentiful energy even during the coldest moments in addition to a breath that could roast a rabbit dead before it reached the entrance to its burrow.

In the wild dragons were fearsome beasts, bigger and longer than crocodiles, with higher metabolisms and more ferocious appetites as well. All of these traits provided a good deal of utility for humanity, thus ending up as their partial downfall.

Starting several centuries prior, the solitary wild dragon species had been captured, bred, and raised with vigor, progress hastened even more by sorcerers that made breeding their trade. By Tavros’s time there were scores of breeds of domestic dragon, most of them robbed of their immense bulk in favor of something more hound-shaped.

Tracking dragons with long snouts and pronounced snorkel-like nostrils. Hunting dragons that stood tall on thin legs. Guard dragons with brawny shoulders, wide jaws, and horns all about the head. Decorative toy dragons with squished features, barely the size of a handbag, clad in tropical stripes and splotches of pink, green, and orange.

None would disagree that the domestic dragon show was the highlight of the Tiring Week, and within it, once the prancing of the presentation phase and leaping of the obstacle phase were complete, was its own highlight: target incineration.

Exactly how far, how fast, how powerfully, and how accurately a dragon could spit a fireball was a fantastic and flashy way to judge both breeding and training. In more barbaric days live animals were used, and the crowd’s bloodlust would have been a stroke of luck for our sculptures in this case, but alas, the Tiring Week thought it was being kind to the world and the children in the audience by using only animated non-living ice sculptures.

A target was scored once it was immobilized, three or four limbs, or the head, completely melted away by blasts of red, blue, green, and white, thanks to the color of the flame also being a delightfully varied trait across the breeds.

Competition was as fierce as a wild dragon, instincts rekindled carefully for one sort of target alone to make sure breeders, who already paid through the nose for fire insurance, didn’t have their kennels burned down once a season.

The ice was only supposed to be moving in the arena, with none bothering to communicate that to the dragons themselves, who were just trying to be good boys and girls and earn a cubed salmon treat when they spotted the four months of winter and ripped their leashes out of their owners’ unsuspecting hands.

“Dearest devils!” Tavros cursed, and then cursed himself silently for wasting time on the utterance when he could’ve been lining up the magic words that would save the months’ lives on his tongue. “All of you run! Now!”

Jan and Feeb obeyed reflexively, as running was fully within their repertoire. They took off like bolts from a crossbow, but in the wrong direction if their goal was to escape the fairgrounds and end up next to Tavros’s mode of transportation.

“No, that way!” the sorcerer shouted after glancing backward; he threw the arm holding his cowrie behind his back. Magic launched by the gesture tossed some objects in front of the twins, rerouting them. The first dragon reached the calendarist and tried to blow past him, its grooved, forked, and purple tongue lolling out one side, but it was caught by a second leash, this one invisible and extended from Vander’s antler. With both his hands occupied by life-relics, all of Tavros’s paperwork dropped into the crunchy grass.

Even though it was held back, the beast, a small-brained and affably relentless breed called the Smoky Chimney, still tried to launch flaming projectiles at our poor defenseless icicles. Sufficiently choked, its efforts sputtered and died in its throat with only molten flecks of glowing spittle escaping, hissing and producing wisps of steam as they hit the frost below.

As a notary, perhaps the exact cosmic opposite of a combat sorcerer, Tavros was using all his focus and strength to hold back but one of the five escapees, and he knew not the spells that could perhaps make use of his new inherited powers to wrangle the rest. His frozen charges needed to be running, but November and December had only gotten one stumble away since the start of it all.

Running was the twins’ specialty, and the elder siblings had no idea where to start, basing their efforts entirely on what they observed from Jan and Feeb in the seconds before they were too far away to see.

November’s attempt had all the necessary energy, but he couldn’t figure out how to direct it, resulting in him marching in place, stomping holes into the earth. Meanwhile December was too unsure of herself, and every time she lifted a leg she nearly fell in a completely random direction.

“Get moving!” Tavros shouted at them.

“Aren’t we?” December yipped back. The process of running was surprisingly complex, but not so the process of fear. She already knew what was coming, and that it meant she would never play another song again, so the icy paths of her mind made use of her cool intellect. Footprints. Jan and Feeb had left them behind. So… in order to run she had only to put one of her feet into one of their footprints, and then the next one, and the next one… as swiftly as could be managed.

It worked, so well that it made her gasp and laugh. After the first fifteen steps, with each one logged as a successful ‘run’ in her mind, she remembered her brother behind her and shouted the instructions to him.

“You have to make footprints in their footprints, but fast!”

“Why didn’t he say so!?” November barked, able to pick up the idea as swiftly as it was put down. Now they were all properly on the move, but the other dragons were hot on their heels. One of them, a purebred Royal Ember no less, launched a violet fireball at December, and it would have hit its mark if Tavros didn’t release his magical leash and switch strategies.

Magic words as a concept might conjure the idea of eloquent incantations, but that wasn’t the down-in-the-ditches truth in their world. A magic word was nothing like a regular word, because it wasn’t a language originally meant for humans. Its true inventors, despite having invented most of Tavros’s reality, had gotten themselves lost to time and ruin, leaving behind their fingerprints in magic with words that people eventually rediscovered.

So when Tavros said one with full-throated commitment it was less a god’s declaration and more a goose clearing its throat after it had been publicly embarrassed. I won’t attempt to recreate the word in lettering here, but if I did it would involve an absurd overuse of the letter ‘w’.

He knew that one only from interactions with his brother, long conversations where they discussed their passions with each other. Tavros had in fact never had occasion to use it before, and hoped some of his aunt’s power would allow the experimental use to work a little better.

The word was used to carve, to peel away material from a mass without obliterating it entirely, and while it could be used on everything from soap to stone, Tavros’s target was a great block of ice off to the side of the dragons’ path, leftover from the supplies given to the sculptors. The blast, concentrated through both the cowrie and antler as he crossed his arms, chipped and buckled the bottom of the block, causing it to fall as a wall and cut the animals off from their prey.

Such lithe pets would only be momentarily stalled, fully capable of leaping onto such a block and off the other side, so Tavros rotated to a new magical word, the one that was supposed to lend animation to inanimate material.

Used in combination with the first word, he succeeded in giving the block four vague stumps that could be seen as limbs, especially when they wiggled about and took a few lumbering steps back and forth. It was a good enough effort to convince the dragons, who quickly assailed it with bursts and streams of fire: a veritable rainbow of destruction.

One breed, the Mountain Bellpeel, had large curving horns like a ram and instead chose to headbutt and crack the struggling block. One hit broke it in twain, but before it could back up and strike a second time its owner’s hand found its collar and held it back. The breeders were out of breath, but they were all there now to get control of the animals, and Tavros didn’t linger to catch their complaints or explain himself.

“Only just born and they’ve been snatched from the jaws of death twice!” he uttered as he pushed through the steam of his ungainly creation and followed in their footsteps despite already knowing how to run perfectly well on his own.

It was simple enough to blame it all on the indisputably -1 day he was having, but as he emerged from the fairgrounds exit into the trampled fields where carriages rested and horses grazed he caught sight of his own transport and wondered if it was actually a -2 day after all.

At least this time it wasn’t the sculptures causing trouble. They were all huddled together under a tree nearby, smiling and waving at the sight of him, but he held up his hand to get them to stay put for the moment, while he dealt with the rabble.

“Excuse me gentlemen, can I help you with something?” Tavros boomed as he approached the back of his own carriage. Two hulking figures, wrapped in putrid and patchy leather cloaks that smelled like low tide poured into a mead barrel, were fussing over the boots of Vander Celliday, which stuck out of the carriage’s open back door.

The louts he had paid to store the body had the surprising decency to wrap him up in one of the large blankets Tavros had brought with him, but now these different louts looked about to unwrap him like he was nothing more than fresh market fish ready for the fry!

Hulking shoulders turned, and the calendarist was taken aback by what he saw under their heavy hoods. Only the lower half of their faces, it was nonetheless plenty to tell they were not human. Misshapen heavy jowls wrapped in warty purple skin. Only the occasional tooth visible, and when they spoke the teeth tried to make up for their lacking number by shooting down into the gums and popping up somewhere else. Giant striated lips, thick as a human palm, cracked badly in the cold, their constant licking doing little to soothe the condition, possibly making it worse.

“Oh, you’re minions. Go on, whose are you then? And why are you fondling the phalanges of my dearly departed brother?” The brutes were not used to shorter humans being unafraid, but they did not know that Tavros had mastery of more than one magic word that could undo the very being of things such as them.

They spoke to each other frequently, and their gargled grumbling was always mutually intelligible, so to straighten out their speech enough for a person to understand them they each had to pull on their tongue, limber it up, and let it furl all the way back into their cavernous mouths.

“A’right en. This one,” the slightly taller one pointed at Vander’s feet, “is called Vander, in he?”

“Give me your master’s name and I will give you his.” The creatures thought it over, but Tavros could see the thought got stuck in the muck of their minds and couldn’t be brought to completion. The shorter one spoke anyway.

“Can’t say.” Exactly what they couldn’t say was unclear.

“Vander Celliday is dead,” the sorcerer offered. “Whatever business your master had with him is void. Now back away from my property.” The minions obeyed, shuffling away, mumbling to each other. Formulating a plan might’ve taken the pair hours, but Tavros still thought it best to leave the Tiring Week behind as swiftly as possible. The months of winter came at his wave, and he helped them all into the carriage.

“Where are we going?” Jan asked him, refusing to hide his head away inside with the others.

“Somewhere with more agreeable weather,” the sorcerer assured him, taking up the reins, which were actually just the pair of life-relics. Another muttered magic word pulled the carriage out of its frozen ruts in the ground, as if by invisible steed.

November 21^st

A Very Lucky Day

Tavros was quick to explain his plan to them, but I’ll take my time explaining it to you, as there is some truly stupendous framing that he would never be aware of that you get to have in his stead. It is a very lucky break for all of you, which is why I’ve chosen to reveal it at this point in the narrative, where the majority of our friends in the carriage were having a day of positive luck.

But first, their heading. The day after they left the fairgrounds saw Vander’s body respectfully put to rest in a Celliday mausoleum. The place was enchanted, so the moment he was slotted onto his cool shelf of rock the pillar next to him sculpted itself into his likeness, though the face was displeased, perhaps because he didn’t get to carve it himself or wasn’t a fan of the magic’s stylistic leanings.

After that they headed north, into country sparse of civilization that was getting tucked in each night with a fresh thick blanket of snow. The terrain would have been very difficult for horses, but they were pulled by magic alone, so it only required Tavros to be awake, see their path, and clasp one of the life-relics.

The interior of his carriage was exceedingly cozy, the walls lined with enough shelves, books, and papers to serve as insulation, a glass lamp in the ceiling that automatically brightened when the sun dimmed, and creaky floorboards that produced only charming melodies when weights within shifted.

The months of winter didn’t like cozy though, not at first anyway. Most of the time they were all outside, walking through the snow with one hand on the dark jade paint of the carriage’s paneling, hanging off the back by one hand and one foot, or squeezing on either side of Tavros as he controlled the horse-shaped magic emptiness that propelled them.

The snow was plentiful, attracted to their icy skin by slightly magical magnetism, which protected Tavros from getting it in his hair but did not protect him from the cold of two or three ice sculptures pouring foggy questions down his ears. The calendarist kept himself wrapped up tight in a blanket the entire time, teeth chattering, the sculptures too oblivious to social cues to understand they were rudely transmitting hypothermia.

One of their questions was, naturally, what was to happen to them.

“You are my brother’s children, in a sense, and thus my responsibility,” he told them. “My work keeps me quite busy, but I can’t go back to it until I know you’re safe. If we’re lucky, which we will be approximately thirty-five percent of the way on this journey, we should be finished by January the tenth.

I can be back in my office in February. Many of my clients have had their calendars filled out through March, so they won’t even know I’ve gone anywhere.”

“I’m confused about this calendar business,” November admitted, though with his bluster it just sounded like criticism. “They come with the numbers on them already, and the months don’t sneak days to each other, except for that little bit of leaping February does.” His little sister looked up from her cartwheels alongside the invisible horse. “Sorry, not you.”

“I don’t change the calendars,” Celliday described, “just prognosticate a few things they’ll want to write down on certain days as reminders. While my foresight for events is as weak as most, I have an eye and ear that look ahead in regards to luck. Everyone, and their future, is different, but with a little work I can, to a degree, tell you how much good or bad luck you will have on a set day.”

“All that stuff you said to us about -1 and -3?” December inquired.

“Yes, that’s part of the standardized luck scale. The luckiest days are +3 and it goes down to neutral luck at 0, then into negative misfortune down to -3. Someone brings me a calendar, I ask a few questions while holding their hand and concentrating, then I write their predicted luck level for each day.

Sometimes you need more than a number, so there are many modification symbols. Luck actually has fifty-two recognized flavors. The more a client pays me the more precisely I will divine their luck for them. Splitting the hairs of luck in gambling, luck in love, and luck in not getting trampled by a runaway steer can get very difficult.”

December made one of her first correct assumptions when she leaned back to stick her head inside the carriage and found a calendar hanging on the wall by a copper nail, every square filled with what looked to her like intentionally unsolvable mathematics equations. Tavros’s luck for the month, all laid out like silverware. She was able to discern that today was +3, which made her giddy on his behalf.

“Back to our destination,” he said, unaware of the ice sculpture reading the closest thing he had to a personal diary. “While you four are alive you are not without vulnerability. From what I know of past creations such as yourselves, if you were to shatter or melt you would die the way all living things eventually do.

I can’t protect you from shattering forever; that’s something you’ll have to handle yourselves. But it would be cruel to count on you to find your own way in a world that won’t be this cold for long. Once winter has gone you’ll be at risk of melting nearly everywhere you go. A terrible fate that would be.

Together we will go north, to the rocky shores and hills of Fimbultoe. There is snowpack there that lasts year-round and caves to protect you from harsh sun. You can make a permanent home there, and then decide on your own what you’ll do with your lives.”

“Will you visit us?” Jan asked.

“If… if that would be something you all desired… I suppose I could swing by every other year or so. It is a long journey though, and my clientele need me to be as reliable as the passing of the months.”

So there you have it. Tavros Celliday is a very nice man, doing a nice thing for pretty snowballs packed by his brother. We have to take his word for it that he was doing it out of the kindness of his heart of course. There is no way to truly know his motivation. My own insight is tremendous; I can see to the heart of planets and know their character perfectly. Yet the sincerest thoughts of man are partly obscured to me.

Not those of December and her siblings however. Would you believe that I know their thoughts, desires, and motivations perfectly? It’s true. Need convincing?

Right then, when December heard that they would eventually separate from Tavros, she felt a bouquet of different emotions, where all previous incidences were two or three bundled blossoms at most. She was concerned about death, only slightly about shattering since that sounded instantaneous and couldn’t possibly be any more painful than birth in her eyes, but much more about melting.

That sounded slow, vicious, like the sun was a giant that was going to laboriously lick her to death with its weathering tongue. Already she knew that she didn’t feel pain the way a human did, as she never recoiled at physical sensations like a cold poke the way Tavros might. Melting would be felt though, and the dread of that feeling, of figuring it out as it happened, was almost enough to make ice shiver.

Two black roses of fear does not a bouquet make, so some of her other feelings were more positive. Fimbultoe sounded nice, safe. It sounded like her first feelings, when she was just plucking her harp for the delight of her surroundings. She could do that again, she was confident, even if there were only echoing ravines to hear it in place of people.

Despite this complex medley, one feeling stuck out and overpowered all the others. It was sorrow at the thought that Tavros would leave them. He wasn’t family, not like the other sculptures, but the bond was already as strong. You might not think that sounds like such a terrible sorrow, especially since he broached the subject of visiting, but when something is the greatest sorrow you’ve ever felt it really doesn’t matter how small it is in the moment.

She almost fell off the carriage at the idea of saying goodbye. A farewell was just as foreign to her as her first sprint away from the dragons. Her broken harp returned to her with just a thought, with just the strumming of the air, so couldn’t Tavros? Could she pluck an empty space and create ripples in which he could be seen?

Magic could do that, she wagered. The quartet had some, and spirits too, so there was no reason she couldn’t take up a life-relic and learn an enchanting trade. She considered asking him for some lessons, but there wasn’t a time where he wasn’t too busy driving the carriage or sleeping.

There, how could something that detailed be mere speculation? Do you accept that my knowledge is perfect? Some of you do, and I don’t want to slow this down anymore, so that will have to do for now. It’s time for the big reveal. Oh this is exciting; I’ve never done this before. These sculptures inspired me to try new lifelike things; that’s part of why I’m sharing this story in particular when I know such a high percentage of all the stories that have ever occurred.

Okay, alright, I hear you. The anticipation is too much. Your humble narrator is none other than… Water! Yes, you heard right. You couldn’t hear it wrong since you heard it with your mind rather than those waxy ears of yours. I am Water. Which Water? Why, all of it. Every last drop, every last molecule, is completely me. I am the oceans, the rivers, the lakes, ponds, and puddles, the tears in your eyes, the best part of the urine in your bladder and the blood in your veins, the rain, the snow, the frozen poles, the effluence of your watering cans, I love riding those by the way, and the comets in distant galaxies, and the rings around distant worlds, and the spit in the spittoon.

I am key to life, inextricable from the universe, and I’m the closest thing to god as you think of it that has ever been. Please don’t pray to me. Not only is it irritating, but I will not answer. I’m so good at not answering that few of you have even considered that I might be alive up to this point.

Occasionally I have been tempted, usually in response to some of the beautiful, but hardly extravagant, depictions of me in your poetry and prose, but I’ve kept my figurative mouth shut until now. Please note this is not a conversation, nor the start to one. I’m simply telling you a story because I want to tell it, and like December I don’t really care if there’s someone there to hear it.

How am I alive? A pointless question, for how is anything? The intelligent among you might try to define it as a combination of tissue, chemistry, and electricity, entirely experiential, but they will never be able to pinpoint a moment or material that is life. Everything looks dead if you look close enough, so conversely, the further away something is the more likely it is to appear teeming with life.

Galaxies swarming in the Petri dish, if you will. If you’re looking for life try starting with experience… and stopping there too.

Besides, if you are in need of further proof that I am who I say I am, consider what I’ve done to have your focus for this retelling. What else could freeze you in place? Since I started you haven’t been able to do so much as dilate a pupil. As every last bit of Water in your body I’ve made sure I’m not moving, anymore than is necessary to maintain your biological processes, until we reach the finale.

Some of you are frozen in your showers, wrapped in a robe of me that refuses to go down the drain. Some are swimming face down in pools, stuck mid-stroke, breathing only the bubble I’m providing. Yes, this is a fantastic story, so I’m making sure every single living thing that can understand it, across all the worlds where I am relevant, is paying full attention. Don’t worry; none of you are the only one.

You’ll be free to return to your daily drudgery, and die in your pitiful handful of years, as soon as you’ve learned the fates of the months of winter. This is just to try out this whole omniscient narrator deal, which you should understand, having used it frequently yourselves.

As I said, my omniscience is part of this story. A human being, like Tavros, like many of you, is roughly seventy percent Water. While I am the most powerful being that has ever lived, I am not all the material in the universe. There are minerals, there is light, and the inter-temporal chronogarlic you don’t even know about, and none of these things are talkative.

As such, I can only discern around seventy percent of a human being’s thought. It isn’t like a film where three of every ten frames are snipped out, more like watching that film from the bottom of a muddy puddle. Much as I hate to admit it, things in your minds and souls slip by me, and I can even occasionally misinterpret them, as I have no doubt done with Tavros Celliday so far.

Terrible conditions these are for an omniscient narrator. Yet, not all lifeforms have the same ratio of Water to impurities. As an admirable example, take the delightful dancing jellyfish. They are over ninety percent Water by weight! They are about as close to me as an animal can come by natural means, and look at how they have flourished. I love them dearly, and will protect them always, long before I would ever lift a figurative finger for you lot, but they are without brains. My near-omniscience can’t be used for much with them as all their stories are identical: once I flexed my motility cells and I will do so again. The only plot twist is that eventually they will not actually flex their motility cells an additional time.

Magic is the only thing that has bridged that final ten percent and resulted in the perfect life form. The months of winter were both truly alive and composed entirely of me. They are open books, and though I am not the author, I am the logger who felled the trees, the printer who arranged it all, and the bookbinder who stitched them together.

It is only Water that could’ve told you this story with this level of accuracy, and, not to brag, but I’m something of a theme running through the whole thing, as well as an ever-present visual motif. Tavros and company will be traveling along the shore, in a snow-covered region, and even barely miss decapitation by a chunk of me.

That was what happened on that lucky day, by the way. The months of winter were contemplating lives of their own, still just fumbling with the concept like a child trying to compact loose mud into a ball, when Feeb spotted a single snowflake in the sky of a decidedly different character than all the others.

The thing was darker, more transparent, and zipping across the sky rather than drifting. As she watched it the flake grew, concerning her little as it reached the size of a domestic dragon. Constructs of ice reaching that size didn’t alarm her, as it was the basis of her entire reality.

“Hey look, that one’s fast,” she alerted the others, mentioning what was to her its only relevant quality. The other travelers looked up in time to see the giant snowflake shift onto its side, speeding up and spinning.

“Duck!” Tavros yelped, leaving barely enough time to do so himself. When he did he accidentally threw both arms up over his face, with a life-relic held in each still acting as reins. The magic interpreted this gesture as an order for the false horse of air leading them to buck in panic. The entire carriage ground to a halt and shook, but the snowflake still took a bite out of its top, gouging the wood like a powerful saw.

The contact changed its course. It spun vertical once more, circled around and finally planted itself in the snow a short distance from Jan.

“Is that normal?” the boy asked, pointing to it as if it wasn’t the only thing of note in their immediate surroundings.

“I wouldn’t include that anywhere in my normal, no,” Tavros said, gently setting down his life-relics to not disturb his cart further. After that he dismounted and cautiously approached the object, the other sculptures following in his footsteps quite literally.

“What is it?” Feeb asked, placing her hands on her knees and squinting to parse its details, which was absolutely necessary, as the object was the most ornate thing they’d ever seen, including the man whose life so far was significantly longer than a week.

They all knew it was a snowflake, but they questioned the label thanks to its immense size and the artful way in which its ice crystals were arranged, with outer spokes like towers and trees jumbled together, rich with windows and branches that didn’t interrupt each other. Veins of deep blue existed in a structural web at its core, and atop them sat light-catching layers in the hundreds, each one a unique but symmetrical maze.

It took several moments for any eyes to make sense of it, but when they did they all came to the same conclusion: there was an image at the center of the flake. When seen from the best angle, which was the one you would hold the flake at if you were attempting to read it, a carriage could be seen with two figures walking in front of it while another two followed behind.

“We’re being watched,” Tavros concluded, bundling himself up more tightly in the blanket as he scanned the sky for any more rogue projectiles. I can confirm for you there were no more anywhere nearby. Another one wouldn’t even exist for a few years. “How does this shake out with our luck?”

The question was aimed at himself, and in order to answer it he marched back to the carriage and returned with his cowrie, waving it over the snowflake as he muttered magic. Jan reached out to do some probing of his own.

“No don’t!” Tavros tried to warn, but the child had already made contact, to no effect. “That’s a relief. Since you’re both magical ice I thought touching it might forcefully integrate the two of you into a lesser amalgamation…” He saw Jan’s wide eyes, almost as aware of his sudden terror as I was. “…but that didn’t happen!” He lightly smacked the boy on his cold shoulder. “You’re fine; everything’s fine.”

“So is this thing showing up lucky or not?” November asked, still standing directly behind Tavros in his most recent set of footprints. Twisting to face him would’ve been somewhat awkward, so the calendarist just spoke as he continued his assessment.

“It’s not as simple as that, especially when there’s magic involved. It’s safe to assume that when we avoided having it cut our heads off good luck was being expressed, but is it finding us positive or negative? How likely was that on a neutral day? The image more than suggests it was sent to us by someone with intent, and intent often overpowers happenstance.”

“How would they know how to find us?” December asked, also taking a moment to look around for spies. The trees were empty of foliage and spots to hide. Not so much as an owl could be seen anywhere.

“I don’t know,” the sorcerer admitted, but his mind wandered back to the minions that had accosted his brother’s body with their foul forms. Just to put his mind at ease, he returned to the carriage and employed his cowrie as a magical sensor once more, searching for any kind of tracking spell that might be clinging to their backside like a parasitic worm. Nothing turned up. When he turned back all the sculptures were lined up, waiting for his next decision. Jan had hefted the odd snowflake out of its resting place and now held it in front of him like a large dinner plate.

“Can I keep it?” he asked.

“If it was a weapon it was remarkably ineffective,” the man thought aloud. “It does retain a great deal of magic, but the enchantment looks passive. It’s not communicating information with any distant entity. Normally I’d recommend against it… but… +3 and all…”

“Okay thanks,” Jan said, without actually waiting for permission. He waddled over to the carriage and threw the item inside, then himself. His siblings quickly got back into position to continue their journey. December smiled, patting the empty spot between herself and November, urging Tavros to come back and get cold with them.

“I could use +3 degrees more than luck right now,” he mumbled, quickly acquiescing.

December 16^th

An Unlucky Day

Over the following weeks the sculptures grew much, thanks in no small part to Tavros carting a miniature library with him everywhere he went. In a testament to both his brother’s skill and their aunt’s passed-down power, all four months of winter had been created literate, and were able to adventure solo into the depths of any book the calendarist provided. They even had absurdly high reading speeds, as their blinking was merely cosmetic and could be halted when they wanted to focus.

Typical human weaknesses like split focus were nowhere to be found either, so the tumbling twins could glue novels to their faces while performing acrobatics astride the carriage and never falter. Despite the talent being universal, December still preferred to get her information from the man Celliday, keeping him up well into the darkness just to listen to him speak.

“Are you alright?” she would ask, grabbing his arm, when he started to lose his voice to the strain, the cold doing him no favors by throwing coughs down his throat every chance it got. Despite the hardship, he quite enjoyed sharing with her the tales of his life, for she didn’t seem put off by the bureaucratic details that Tavros considered to be dramatic flourishes.

There was his harrowing account of the recertification of the Hollinsburg clock tower, which had a display including the day and a dial indicating the general luck of the whole village. Some thought it needed to be removed, for people weren’t bothering to shop on days of bad luck, fearing their purchases would wind up faulty, broken, or spoiled.

The day was saved, and some thrown rotten produce narrowly avoided, when Mr. Celliday offered to not just notarize the certificate, but to recalibrate the clock’s luck assessment mechanism so that it only took the streets, and not any residences or commercial stalls, into account.

“You’ll have to teach me that one,” December said, gently lifting his cowrie from out of his lap while he used his brother’s antler as the reins. The sun had gone, with only blue pools of light remaining on the horizon. There was a warm glow from the carriage, but it was sealed up tight as could be so that November’s voice would be muffled. He’d taken to reading books aloud, as grandly as possible, including the publisher information on the inside cover.

He was locked up inside with the twins, entertaining them, and the magical seal Tavros had placed on every seam in the carriage to keep sound from leaking out allowed the two driving to bask in their joy while still feeling alone with the stoic invisible horse taking them uphill, into a forest of empty black trees that had more knotholes than branches.

“You say that every time I mention a spell,” Tavros noted, keeping one eye on her as she played with the sea shell to make sure she didn’t hurt herself.

“Is it hard to find a life-relic?” she asked as if she hadn’t heard his last comment. At that moment she was thinking about bodies, specifically ones with bones and blood, and how humans left behind an entire armature of life-relics when they died. Something she couldn’t do. If the sun took her in its arms, let her seep out as a puddle, there would be nothing at all of her left behind. Her songs couldn’t be permanent either, as no echo bounced infinitely.

“Not really. They’re everywhere, but there’s something to be said for quality. A creature that dies… in a state of distress leaves behind a more inflamed magic, one that was clinging to the spirit as it was torn away.”

“Doesn’t everything die in distress?”

“No actually. I very much doubt Aunt Ninefox did. She prepared for it like a birthday party. Often age and happiness go hand in hand with a peaceful death, especially so for animals who do not try to hoard the future like a stack of silver. Their pieces and parts make better magical catalysts, for the magic is more willing to work with a different spirit, to cycle back into nature.”

“So the best relics come from animals that died violently? Things that were hunted?”

“Yes, but not by us. They’re best acquired by scavenging the kills of apex predators. I found my cowrie on a beach not too far from here, and I don’t doubt that a very fearsome shorebird ripped its original resident right out and swallowed them whole.”

“Oh my,” December said with a shudder, but she didn’t drop the shell. She already had a strong sense for magic, an innate understanding that she could harness the residual lessons that the snail had failed to learn. Every relic was a reminder of how not to find yourself dead, and she might need a whole suit of them to protect her from something as ever-present as the sun. “What should I be on the lookout for?”

Tavros laughed a little, but then glanced at her and saw that she hadn’t spotted a joke fluttering around anywhere. He considered his next words carefully, and still bungled them.

“You know once we get you four to Fimbultoe you won’t need to worry about that. It’s a peaceful place.”

“Won’t life without magic be dull?”

“It didn’t do Vander any favors in the long run.”

“But he wouldn’t have created us without it.”

“Well, that’s…”

“We’re good,” December insisted, meaning a thousand different things with that small word. Obviously each of its dimensions was an opinion, but by estimation, which is the most valuable estimation of all since I have more information than anybody else has ever had, she was wholly right. After all, the months of winter compelled me to break my silent streak.

“Of course,” the man fumbled, accidentally tugging the antler right and throwing them slightly off the path. “I just meant that magic, especially when used aggressively, can bring lots of trouble down on you. I try to use it passively, to observe luck, to cement agreements that are already made, not alter those things.”

“I’ll have to live in a place where the season never changes, while my body has no ebbs of its own, and now you would advise me not to overturn any of the nearby rocks in case something might happen to me?”

“You’re right December. Your life is your own; I shouldn’t push anybody to sit quietly in an office because that’s what I like to do. In answer to your earlier question though, you still may not need a life-relic. You and the others are magical constructs, so you are capable of a degree of magic without wielding one.”

“We are?”

“Don’t you remember that you can weave a harp out of thin air? And that you can somehow give ice the qualities of gut-string so that it can produce the correct notes? Those are spells, and you didn’t have to root around in a badger carcass to cast them.”

“Can I grow this magic? Do all the sorts of things you do?”

“Perhaps. All of that power passed to my brother has been bequeathed to you. I don’t really know what its limits are. Aunt Ninefox deliberately did not include an itemized list of her abilities in the will. She said she wanted it to be a journey of inner discovery, like she was still there helping the recipient along. At the time I didn’t know either of us would be those recipients.”

“Then I will get a life-relic. She probably hid some of those secrets in the use of one,” December argued, and despite her lack of technical knowledge she had actually guessed correctly. Tavros had no counterargument. In that moment she felt respected, and decided to press her luck despite being fully aware of what the calendar had to say. “I would like to get caught up with a lot of things in life. I feel I’m dragging behind myself at the moment, like an anchor.”

“What sort of things?”

“Love for one.” There went the wind, throwing more coughs down his throat, several at once this time. “Are you alright? Do you need sleep?” With plenty of supplies in the carriage pantry below its floorboards, she had not seen him struggle with any of the requirements of the human body save warmth and sleep. Subconsciously, but as apparent to me as the forewords that November belted out like climaxes, she saw herself as providing warmth to the man and did not understand that warmth was only figurative in nature.

So it was that any time he appeared unwell she assumed it was because his body was in desperate need of sleep. When he turned in each night it distressed her, like he simply accepted that he had to be dead for a short while and trusted nature to pull him out of the dirt every morning when it was perfectly happy to keep much of what was buried.

She wished he would fight it more. Peppering death throughout his life surely wasn’t necessary, since there would be endless dunes of the stuff when his life was over. Each time she asked the question it was an attempt to force understanding of the process, to break through and know how fatigue felt. She asked if he needed sleep when he stubbed his toe, when he squinted against the sun, but not when he yawned, which she saw as the only physical sign the man could be trusted to figure it out on his own.

“No, I’m suddenly wide awake,” he rasped as he shooed the pack of coughs out of the shelter of his mouth. “What… what do you think it means to get caught up on love?”

“The books know more about it than I do, and they’re not even alive!” she reasoned. “I don’t sing them, but the songs for my harp have lyrics, and they speak of loves both fleeting and bottomless. You talk of spirits and magic, but there is a third yes? Love has to be their equal. Most things that I know have to be learned and understood, but that I know on instinct. That knowledge requires no evidence, a notion that excites me beyond my measure.”

“That’s a… robust idea,” Tavros said mostly because something had to be said. To not respond to her explosive earnestness would have been the sort of rude gesture that made him sometimes contemplate suicide as an apology. “I agree there is, at the very least, some truth to that notion. Love is powerful, in all its forms.”

“Yes, but I’m talking about romantic love,” she said, obliviously obliterating what remained of his composure. If I’d had eyes I would’ve been rolling them. With a little less composure of my own I might’ve accidentally used December’s eyes to express myself, and awkward as this conversation was it still would’ve been a shame to interrupt. The sculpture knew what she wanted, and that is always a trait to be admired.

“In an empty world two lives appear, far apart,” she continued, spinning a hypothetical like one of her instrument’s strings. “They have no idea the other is there, but they would still be drawn magnetically. This I believe. And when they meet there is a blast, and suddenly the world is full. Full of sights and sounds and sensations. First there is nothing, then they meet, and their minds expand to fit a rainbow of ideas that bleed in color by color.

First they’re alone, and next they’re playing an instrument in a festival crowd while fire-breathing animals perform tricks and a luck-counter approaches to whisk them away. I know the love of my family, of my sister and brothers, and of life itself. They came instantly because they did not require the participation of anyone but me.

For romantic love I need another.”

She looked at him like she was reading a book, without blinking. Tavros’s eyes suddenly lost the ability to swivel and meet hers, rusted out of that specific range. Unsure if it was boon or bane, his power of speech remained.

“I see.” Under their wheels and intangible horse hooves, under the blanket of snow so as to remain invisible, I rearranged much of myself to form hundreds of eyeball shapes and rolled them. Telling an omniscient narrator to not slip into omnipotence is an act of cruelty, and though I haven’t acted substantively until now I’m not convinced you all wouldn’t have been better off if I just tugged the precious fluids in your bodies toward each other when you were inches from all the infatuated embraces that never came to pass.

“Will you help me?” December asked, plowing forward with the force of an avalanche. Tavros now felt hot under the collar, despite the woman of ice leaning uncomfortably close. If he’d been willing to look at her he would’ve seen a faint white vapor rising off her, of the sort that flows off items quickly pulled from cold storage. Most men would swear that women had such an aura, even if it couldn’t be seen, and Tavros passed up a perfect opportunity to prove it.

“I’m not sure I follow, Lady December.”

“There’s too much to love to learn it all in one night,” she said. The wood under her squeaked as she leaned closer. The calendarist had enchanted his vehicle to reduce such sounds, but given how it echoed in the halls of his ears just then he was forced to accept that the sculpture had just proven her theory that love at least rivaled magic in strength. “And I’m sure we can’t do it all while driving a carriage… but I thought a kiss might be a nice step forward.”

“You would like us to kiss?” the man asked, though it felt like a separate and much smaller man living inside him had actually asked it.

“Yes, if that would be alright.”

“It… could be educational I suppose. After all it doesn’t have to be meaningful. In some lands it’s simply polite to give a peck on one side and the other. We could, informally, for the purposes of instruction, kiss.”

“Oh but I would like it to be meaningful,” December insisted. “I don’t think it’s the physical act that matters so much as what it’s emotionally sopping with. I’d like us to kiss and feel things, as long as they’re all good. I’m confident I can get that far on my own, but will you meet me there Mr. Celliday?” She could use formal names as well, and more effectively than the notary it seemed.

“I really should keep my eyes on the road.”

“The road’s clear, and you’re not even driving anymore.” He glanced down to see that she had slipped the antler from his hands and held it perfectly still. There was no swerve to the carriage at all.

“Very well. All we have to do is-” Interrupted by her lips on his, Tavros adjusted as quickly as he could. Foolish though it was, part of him expected the press of her to be warm, but their meeting followed reason; she was shockingly cold. A taste of spring Water broke through, like a mountain hatching and disgorging a river.

He tasted melting snow and ancient weathering, bubbles trapped under a frozen surface for eons, and rain that struck rain midair. Somehow she was Water in a thousand different ways, and he incorrectly assumed it was her soul that brought out the myriad possibilities. I’ve always had those variations of course, he just didn’t see any reason to explore them until something hourglass-shaped sidled up to him and said it with a giggle.

Not to denigrate her or her experience of course; she really was a charismatic creature. She felt things genuinely enough to almost create cracks in her core, and she kissed him with everything she thought he deserved, which was also all she had to offer.

She felt the kiss mightily too, and was sure she was learning things, though they would have to be assembled into coherent lessons at a later date. Every moment that passed in her passion she was filling up with new emotional baubles, less a collection and more a gigantic pile of irregular shapes, colors, and textures. Together with Tavros she created something indecipherable inside herself, something she could dive into whenever she wanted and discover new things in memory despite them being stored away.

But it was not a kiss between two flesh and blood people. An instinct cut through her joy and curiosity, one that flooded her mind with images of, well, a flood. A flood that used to be a glacier. Tavros had body heat. There was a second sun, and this one was swallowed somewhere in his breast, hiding there to ambush her rather than intimidating her from the sky like its menacing sibling.

They couldn’t embrace for any duration without harming one another, her partly melted and him frostbitten. This first kiss could not be the kiss eternal, and when they both knew it they tried to pull back…

Only to find that Tavros’s lips were stuck to hers. Many of the dumb and disrespectful among you will remember this phenomenon well from the times in your childhood, adolescence, and shameful adulthood where you accepted some sort of dare to lick an icy object, be it icebox, metal pole, or in one instance that will never be far from my mind, the metal blades of an industrial fan on the exterior of a Siberian factory.

December was immediately concerned that she had done something wrong, injured him in the course of their lovemaking, which was exactly what she would name it until he later corrected her. She tried to stay still, and kept herself from speaking, but that meant once Tavros opened his eyes all he saw was her unblinking anxiety, as if he’d sucked the magical life out of her completely.

Yet a slight obsession with propriety was not ego, and the man was not so full of himself that the humor escaped him. It only worsened his predicament to laugh, but he couldn’t help it. The sound was a relief to December, who joined in. To spare them the further awkwardness of having to use his hot breath to undo the adhesion, Tavros’s hand probed around her thighs until he found where she held the cowrie.

He lifted the item, now as cold as her grip, over their heads and assembled the magic words to the best of his parted lips’ ability. A trickle of warm Water effused from its crease, babbling into their babble until it gently undid their bind. When they split each put a hand over their mouths to feel for any damage and were again relieved to find nothing of consequence. All Tavros had to deal with was a raw sensation when he spoke.

“I hope you learned something,” he said with a chuckle.

“Utterly enlightening,” she answered in matching mirth. The hand over mouth moved away, as she felt compelled to clasp both of them in her lap and kick her feet out a little. All the energy had to go somewhere. The sculpture sensed there was at least a twinge of pain for him, so there was only one question she could ask. “Do you need to sleep?”

He wanted to keep up the banter, tell her that she wasn’t nearly as good at wearing him out as she thought, and also that he should’ve known better than to lock lips on a -2 day, but he was distracted by two sensations slight: one of light and one of heat. The heat had contributed slightly to their separation, but not until combined with the distant glow was it noticed.

“What is that?” the sorcerer asked, slowing their carriage with a twist of the antler once he’d taken it back from December.

“I don’t know,” she answered the question that wasn’t meant for her, “but I can hear it.” Tavros needed another minute to hear it over his own breath, but when he did it gave him an idea of what they were about to see: dainty hooves, velvet coats, and antler crowns with radiant jewels.

He reached back and rapped on the wood of the carriage, prompting the other months of winter to open all the windows and look out into the dead forest that was quickly resurrecting in some fashion.

“Stay where you are, but be sure to look,” Tavros told the four of them. “You’re about to get a rare treat.” The soft sounds of cloven toes in snow multiplied into a warm foam of noise. The occasional titter of a bird enriched it, even though those titters were typically relegated to the rays of dawn, an imitation of which came striding out of the nearest gully.

A magnificent creature it was, and I don’t say this just because it was another animal that had found a brilliant way of integrating me into its biological adaptations beyond presence in the tissues. It was no jellyfish, but still…

The months of winter recognized it as a variety of deer, stout of breast and with legs so finely muscled they looked more suited to chasing down prey than idle grazing. Its fur was a soft brown with gray in the collar and dappled with gray speckles across the rest. Atop its head sat a pair of white antlers, but rather than going their separate ways they had grown toward each other like December’s theorized lovers in the emptiness, weaving together like the splashes of two fish tails that met midair.

That meeting formed a holey orb, and within that orb was the source of the glow: a ball of magical threads slowly chasing each other in circles, made of and wreathed in firelight that could not burn, as if all the throat-mending warmth of a bowl of soup had been pulled out of it and compressed just enough to hold a shape.

The closer the animal got the more it illuminated their surroundings, casting small shadows through the antler horns that would’ve been very fun to chase. The younger months considered it, but both remembered Tavros’s advice and felt why it was sound, for the temperature rose with the deer’s approach as well.

“Behold,” the sorcerer said when it was near enough to walk alongside their invisible horse, even casting the steed’s shadow with its orange light, “the aurorb elk. One of only three species of deer known to have magical adaptations. It channels ambient magic into the cavity between its antlers, sparks them to lasting heat to keep themselves warm in the cold seasons.

Come spring the orb will dissipate, but be renewed in summer, except this time it will be composed of an icy vapor that helps cool them down.”

“Really?” December asked, leaning closer to the animal despite the uncomfortable heat. Already her surface glistened. “If they can do that why do we need to go to Fimbultoe? Can’t we cast spells to always have cooling orbs at hand? We could wear them as capes and hoods.”

“Capes you say? I like the sound of that,” November opined as he leaned out a window.

“That would certainly be useful, but it isn’t reliable,” Tavros explained, trying to see past her obvious disappointment and only slightly less obvious irritation. “The aurorb elk’s magic is second nature to them and requires no effort or thought. If you were to live their way, but suddenly find yourself incapacitated or unconscious, your magics would dissipate and the true temperature would come rushing in. You’d be living on a precipice perpetually.”

That precipice got a little closer as the elk was joined by its family. More of the animals came up from the gully, and yet more passed them from behind on the other side of the trail. Their merging lights did battle with the deep blue of the night sky, creating the sensation they were all trudging their way deeper and deeper into a fire pit.

“Odd, this is…” Tavros muttered, adjusting their course to the center of the shrinking bubble that did not contain elk. “They shouldn’t be moving like this at this time of year. There’s no green field for them to march to for grazing.” One of the creatures bellowed, causing a minor panic.

Tavros understood that one of the downsides of an invisible horse that didn’t have to be fed or watered was that it lacked the substance those resources would fuel, and so was wholly incapable of shoving its way through the clustered elk. The travelers and their carriage were merely one of the herd now, and subject to its whim.

A whim that forced them off their trail and into sparse woods, their wheels rattling under them violently until Tavros leaned back and reinforced them with a spell from his cowrie. It was then that he advised the months of winter to seal themselves inside so the encroaching heat of the elk’s magic couldn’t pour in through the windows.

Wood snapped shut as the three inside obeyed, but December stayed where she was, which the notary allowed without further protest, trusting that she knew what she wanted to do after having doubted her with the kiss.

“I can take the cowrie while you drive,” she suggested. “Show me a spell that will scare them off.”

“I’m afraid you’d need quite some practice for that,” he said, his own dismay in her plan’s low chance of success obvious. “I can do it, but I suspect… Shh!” After shushing himself and ducking his head December saw what frightened him over the standing hair on his neck: a marching hulking lump kicking snow at the edge of the herd, carrying a torch.

No, the sculpture realized, not a torch. It was a fused antler from one of the elk, ripped free so recently that its illuminating magic remained and thick blood dripped from a crimson icicle at its base. Our dear harpist recalled two very similar figures: the minions examining the dead toes of Vander back at the fairgrounds.

“Has it seen us?” the calendarist hissed at her since she hadn’t bothered to duck and make herself more difficult to detect.

“I don’t think so… but it will,” December guessed. “What are these things?”

“Minions. Minor lives enhanced by magic, though I’d hardly call these creatures enhanced in any way. It’s essentially the same spell that animated the ice back at the dragon show, but applied to something that was already alive… most often something spineless like an insect.”

“What’s it after?”

“That depends on what its master is after, and it’s starting to look like that’s you, so please put your head down!” She finally listened despite being correct about their eventual detection, since the carriage was easily taller than all of the elks’ antlers. Still he held out hope that this was some kind of coincidence, that the minions were merely herding the elk to some kind of illegal slaughter and harvest of their bodies.

Except hunters and ranchers didn’t use minions. Most reputable businesses refused to deal with any individual that created such things, likely as they were to have flashes of their animal instincts and attack people mid-conversation. Only a very particular sort of sorcerer bred them up from the vermin of the earth, and if they notarized anything they tended to do it in blood.

Eventually, after several quiet hours of travel with the herd that took them further and further from their goal, the magic in the aurorb antlers bested the back-stepping blue of night and brought forth the dawn. The animals were corralled onto a frozen lake, their progress halted by a craggy wall of solemn rock infested with frozen roots that reached for a Water level that hadn’t been high enough for them to touch in an age. I don’t care how much they begged, I don’t go changing my tables just to give such things a sip.

More minions appeared, their monstrous forms buried under leather cloaks splotched with scum and mold, forcing the animals to circle into a tighter and tighter knot about the carriage. Finally December had to retreat inside, but her hand swept up Tavros’s arm and shoulder on the way to bolster him.

They were trapped, and the day had changed over to the next. Already he felt their -3 luck as over a snowy hill came the minions’ master, haggard but resolute.

(continued in the finale)