(part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 38 minutes)

December 17th

A Very Unlucky Day

Two minions cleared the elk enough for their master to walk through and stand on the ice near the carriage. Their face and body were also obscured by cloak and hood, free of creeping growth but just as tattered as those of their servants. Tavros could see that the person was small, only about half the height of their creations.

“Tavros Celliday?” A woman by her pitch. December pressed her ear against the wooden wall, barely able to hear what was said while her siblings hovered over the giant snowflake they’d found. Their absolute silence was far more important than asking them why it distracted them so.

“I think you already know,” the calendarist said. Gone was their invisible horse, as he assumed he would need to wield both life-relics aggressively.

“No I don’t!” she whined, suddenly reaching up and whipping back her hood, fog flying out of her mouth. As it dissipated Tavros saw a woman no doubt younger than himself with a small face, eyes settled into dark gouges, and a tiny blunt nose like a mole’s. Artificially aged by shaggy ropes of filthy braided hair, far drabber than the backdrop of circling elk fur, she was a sore presence, like a canker in the mouth or a splintered splinter horizontal and fully visible under the skin. “You have no idea how blasted these blasted idiots are!” She flung a hand in the direction of a minion; Tavros caught a flash of a vivid tattoo on the back of her palm: a red arrowhead. “They brought me the wrong person three different times.”

“You get out what you put in,” the calendarist spat. “What did you even make these monstrosities out of?” The woman answered first by snapping her fingers, then marching over to a minion and doing it twice more in its face so it would actually get the message. The creature peeled off its hood and then its upper cloak, revealing a body that was somehow worse than the tooth-shuffling faces at the fairgrounds.

I say this from a human perspective of course, for your benefit. In truth, my actual impartial truth born so early in the universe that it could be said to have occurred at the birth of the universe itself, there is no such thing as ‘disgusting’ or ‘repulsive’ in biology. These sensations are mere artifice to keep you from poisoning yourselves or becoming social pariahs in the evolutionary sense that you consistently misapply to any and all creatures you other.

The minions were no stranger than the sea squirts they were molded from, the most notable difference being the presence of limbs. The stomach bulged far and was very round, splotched with different colors, and wasn’t a stomach at all. Sea squirts, in their elegant intergenerational wisdom, have developed large chambers through which they pass great volumes of me in order to filter out food particles, and one such chamber just happened to look like the bloated gut of a fell man-wretch in that moment.

But again, that body part existed primarily in service to me, often cleaning out particles of plankton that inhibit my purity and grandeur, for which I am ever grateful even when no conscious will is behind the service, seeing as none of my neighbors in the cosmos like diamond, ionizing radiation, and antimatter ever speak, or at least have never chosen to do so to me.

Mr. Celliday, to his credit, at least recognized that the minion came from a sea squirt initially, though to him that information only served one purpose: allowing him to deduce that this person was most comfortable on the coast, and had likely lived much of their life there if sea squirts were the familiar creatures to them.

Most common for minions were things like ants and bees, industrious and obedient in ways that carried over into larger more intelligent forms, but there was something to be said for one’s familiarity with a pest when recruiting it.

“I see,” the calendarist said to encourage the minion to put its clothes back on before he, disrespectfully and rudely, sicked all over me. “Tell me this wasn’t all to seek some sort of refund from services offered by my brother. I told your walking spittoons already that he is dead.”

“Your brother owed me nothing. I was just going to take something from him, as I was going to take it from you as well. So let’s hurry up and do it before something else goes awry.” She glared at the sky, as if accusing it of only ever raining on her individual head. Tavros was stunned to hear that he was somehow involved, well-behaved and mannered as he was. His concern shifted to his reputation despite their lives being more on the line than ever.

“What do we have that you could possibly want? You know I print calendars and sign my name for a living, don’t you?”

“I don’t care what you do,” the woman grumbled. “I only care what Ninefox Celliday did, and then where she put what she did.” The knowledge clicked into place in Tavros’s mind, the sort of click that tells you the drawer you just pulled open would never be closing again without the aid of a hatchet.

“Our inheritance.”

“Now you get it, after making me trudge my frozen bottom out here for days and days. They were supposed to nab you two while I got the elk together, but naturally nothing in my world is allowed to go according to plan. So I have to reroute everything! I turned this herd into a snare once we picked up your trail, and now we can finally, finally, get moving in the right blasted direction.”

“Am I to understand that it’s your intent to force me to sign over the wealth of magic I inherited from my aunt? You come to me guarded by minions, demanding what isn’t yours, and all to simply accrue more raw power? You’re nothing but a common villain. I thought your type choked to death on their own bitter vitriol at the top of some crooked stone tower filled with bats a century ago.”

“Your brother’s share of Ninefox’s power, where is it?” she demanded, ignoring his insults and his largely correct assessment.

“Lost to the winds.”

“I just told you how rough of a time I’ve had… and then you lie to my face? I can sense it. It’s either on you or in that carriage.” Now it was Tavros’s turn to sense, for something was even more off about the woman than her diabolical motives. If she could feel the heady magics vivifying the months of winter then she was actively performing magic, which of course required the use of a life-relic, only he couldn’t see one in either of her hands. Technically magic could be performed as long as there was bodily contact with the item, but wielding it in the hands, with purpose and flourish, was by far the most effective.

“Who are you?” the calendarist asked.

At the same time, inside the carriage, December was pulled away from her spying and forced to gaze upon the giant snowflake tableau resting on the floor between the months. Spinning slowly under its own power, certainly not mine, its image was modified, split into three.

The sculptures watched entranced as two new scenes bookended the image of the carriage, the first an icy rendition of their flight from the lolloping dragons and their belched fireballs. The second was the carriage lifted in the air, suspended by tendrils that all met below, generated from the sleeve of a cruel-faced figure. New to life as they were, they all knew that memories didn’t just slip away without a good excuse. The event the flake showed them hadn’t happened quite yet.

“I am Inko Barbary,” the woman declared, splitting her cloak in a way Tavros couldn’t figure out in the two seconds where it was happening. When it fell away it revealed light clothing made partially of frayed ropes that looked terribly uncomfortable to wear, like she’d been tied to a mast and only recently broken free.

Much of her skin was bare and visible: collarbone, shoulders, forearms, and legs below the knee. The extent of her tattooing became clear; the arrowhead on her hand was just the tip of a stunning artwork and not an arrowhead at all. It was actually the tip of a squid’s tentacle, a serpentine image that wound its way up and around her arm where the animal’s head-body was tattooed bending into her collarbone.

Its other tentacles were intertwined with those of a central yellow squid, with its own pair of longest arms extending down into her shirt only to resurface at the knees and continue on to the tops of her feet. On her other side the yellow squid was entwined with a third blue one, itself terminating on her other hand in much the same fashion as the red.

Never had the man seen such expert work. All three squid looked alive, his eyes darting from one arm to the next as it seemed they were moving whenever his stare didn’t target them specifically. Each squid’s eye was like an opal upon her flesh, shimmering with the dawn’s light but all too capable of shimmering without it as well. Flesh was never so good a canvas as to make such clarity possible, so he wondered at magic when the stuff came into much more brutal effect.

With an inhaling roar Inko took one stomp forward on the ice, cracking it under her feet as she cast her arms toward the carriage. The tattoos sprouted off her skin and into the frigid air as near-flesh manifestations of magic, all the more colorful with the aurorb light passing through them, as if they were stained glass that could expand and contract with earthworm’s fluidity.

Halfway to their target they split, and split again, into a nest of tendrils, lifelike enough to included countless suction cups like a flurry of searching eyes, all looking for the magic hidden in the seams of the carriage. Tavros only barely had a defensive enchantment in mind when the writhing mass struck, lifted the carriage into the air. He managed to keep himself from being thrown off, attempted to aim his antler and cowrie at Barbary, but one of her minions stepped forward.

It took a deep breath and spat, though spat may not be the best term when we’re talking about a body cavity filled with me. Tavros was blasted off the carriage by a jet of pressurized me, separated from both his life-relics in the process. After hitting the ice hard there was nothing he could do but observe as the tentacles turned the carriage over and over in their search for the best place to pry it open, like someone after the tiniest opening on a tight-lipped pistachio.

Capable of subtlety, the villain was too impatient to employ it. I’ve witnessed tentacles such as hers perform the most dexterous of actions, slipping the body they were attached to into tiny glass bottles and pulling the cork back in. I’ve seen them illustrate masterpieces in oceanic sand, which some of you might have also seen if you didn’t disturb the sediment with those silly flippers every time.

My point is that there’s no greater indication of the faults of man than Inko’s refusal to efficiently disassemble the carriage to get at her prize. Instead she risked its destruction by affixing suction cups to both sides of a front corner and exerting great force in opposite directions. The wood screamed and split, pieces sent in all directions, a few even passing through aurorbs and becoming streaks of flame that hissed on the ice until they melted through.

The tentacles shook the shredded carriage and out came a flurry of paper work, writing utensils, one fat snowflake, and four chunks of frightened hail that scrambled to their feet and huddled around each other.

“Like I needed any more surprises,” Inko growled. Her forward lean turned into a slither as tentacles projected from her forearms carried her forward. The woman’s feet bobbed up and down, her aloft form circling the months of winter closely. “You’re it. You’re the magic I need. That’s bad luck for you, but should you try to blame me recall that I’m not the one who made the world from such stuff.”

“Leave us alone,” November insisted, puffing out his chest and standing in front of his siblings. “We have somewhere we need to be.” Inko’s only response was a whistle: an order that applied to all the minions in the hopes that one of them would be present enough to comprehend it and act. One was, barely.

It stomped forward on feet like slabs of steak, holding its elk torch disconcertingly close to the fleshy lips that made up more than half of its face. Then came a horrid slurping sound. A stream of the fiery magic was siphoned through a hole in the antler, into the minion’s mouth. With a gargle and swish the creature applied the heat to the full kettle of its stomach.

Instead of a whistle it produced a jet of boiling me that struck November on the chest. Not only was he thrown back, partly bowling over his siblings, but when they ran to him they saw me eating through him like a swarm of ants. His mouth opened and issued steam alongside a pained wheeze.

Inko made no attempt to stop the twins as they raced to the foot of the rock wall and took up armfuls of snow, rushing them back to their brother and dumping them on top of him, to palliative effect. December was paralyzed over him, helplessly falling into the hollow look in his eyes, only partly freed when she recognized that the melting had ceased and he remained alive.

Then she felt something new. Technically her first new emotion was anger, but she blew past it so quickly that it was more like she choked on it, and the resulting pressure in her chest and throat that turned her hands into eagle talons was actually rage. As mentioned I had full access to the thoughts and feelings of the months of winter, which, when compared to my approximation of human sensations, is far more intense.

I allowed myself to feel what she felt, but only briefly, for it was too unpleasant. I suspect she felt it even more intensely than any of you. You there, the one frozen upside down with your head in your pool because I stopped you before you completed your incorrect dive, no, you are not feeling anything like her rage over me simply holding you in place and making you listen. Don’t be rude.

As I was saying, her rage was of the purest stripe, unclouded by the minute biological sensations that eat away at such things like respiration, blinking, and that distracting flutter on thin patches of your skin when you’re upset about something but won’t admit it. One might think that would mean her first and unavoidable instinct would be to charge at Inko Barbary and physically attack her, but not so with December.

Her instincts were those of a statue, so being livid sent her rigid. To perceive her emotionally in those moments would be to see nothing but a column of concentrated flame, as if the sun had been squeezed into the earth and was trying to break free. She could not believe how mad she was, or that she couldn’t figure out how to move with it.

“Stay those monstrosities!” Tavros boomed, putting himself in November’s place though he was only slightly less vulnerable to a hose of boiling me. “These are not mere animated sculptures! They are as alive as you or I!”

“They would have to be with all that magic in them,” Inko acknowledged glibly.

“You’re aware!? Then how can you do this to them!?”

“Your brother did this to them, not me. Death comes for us all inevitably, but not life. That is inflicted by the self-aggrandizing, those who think it moral to pass down risks and suffering in their very blood. The worst I can be accused of is expediting things.”

“Then end yourself and be done with it!” Tavros screamed, but felt a cold wave strike his face after the last word. He saw his brother slumped against the side of a toilet, no longer distraught, but also having never seen any of the other paths just to the side of his brightest artistic tunnel. “Do not inflict your schemes upon us I mean; we would rather meet Death at our scheduled appointments…

You know this is a -3 day for a couple of us. Unlucky as they are, people do not tend to die on such days. They fight harder to cling to life because they don’t want to fall in the midst of a losing streak. This should not be our day.”

“Would you like me to come back tomorrow?” Inko mocked without quite managing to amuse herself.

“We will turn nothing over to you, and if you kill us the magics you seek will simply dissipate. You may have us cornered, but in negotiation we hold the same position against you. You can’t get what you want, no matter what. So let us be on our way.”

Tavros knew the argument wouldn’t work halfway through it. Miss Barbary was listening enough to understand, but not enough to consider. She righted the carriage and then retracted her many tentacles back down to tattoos. If there was a life-relic involved the calendarist still hadn’t located it.

“With everything that’s gone sideways already you think I would give up now?” she asked with a curled lip as she walked away, behind a line of her surly minions. “You will sign Ninefox’s power over to me in a binding fashion, but not here, and there’s plenty of time to come up with ways to convince you. For now you will just follow.”

Tavros tried to argue further, but she sprang off the ice on extending tendrils and disappeared into the herd of elk, leaving her dribbling underlings to the dirty work of getting the prisoners back on their feet and then their wheels. They closed in and bullied the notary until he improvised a solution to their broken carriage. First he was allowed to secure poor November, who was alive but motionless, staring off into the sky as if he might never comprehend words again.

Together they carried him to the carriage and placed him in the intact back corner where Jan and Feeb checked on his wounds frequently. It was no lie to tell Inko that some of their party were experiencing -3 days, but November was not actually among them. One of his strokes of +1 luck was that Vander had imbued them with several properties of life, including the ability to heal over time without the need of a surgeon-sculptor to assist them.

The holes in November’s chest closed over several hours as his body absorbed and integrated moisture from the air. You have my word that I did not help the process along in any way. If I was going to do such things I would’ve bent the sea squirt’s blast out of the way and prevented it from hitting November in the first place.

Or I might’ve frozen myself inside the squirt and extended crystallized daggers, killing it instantly. Or simply frozen its brain solid before it could process Inko’s whistle. Or frozen Inko’s lips and cut off the whistle. Or melted the whole lake. You see, this is precisely why I choose not to intervene in such things. As an author I would be terrible, cutting off risks, perils, and experiences constantly, pruning them down to infertile nubs until all the universe was just empty space and a crystal of me housing ingots of all other roguish types of matter.

I’m much more skilled as a narrator, as you can now tell.

Ah yes, the busted carriage. Tavros was a smart man, and he did solve the issue, but not smartly. They were all too traumatized to apply their whole intellect. When Inko departed she did not bother to confiscate either of the man’s life-relics, so he reclaimed them. Combining their power he conjured up a fresh invisible horse.

One of the wheels was beyond repair even with magic, several of its pieces having bored burning through the lake’s skin and then sunk to its bottom. Instead of fabricating a new one an exhausted and sore Tavros just performed the horse spell again, but less so. This produced an invisible… something or other… that squeezed its pathetic form under the missing wheel and held that corner of the carriage aloft, strong enough to keep pace with its intangible better.

The minions got it in their heads that they were ready to move, and so gave the carriage a push. Swiftly the herd left the lake behind and continued through the forest, to somewhere that was not Fimbultoe and the guaranteed cold that would keep the sculptures safe. The prisoners were kept in a bubble inside the elk, from which Tavros could not see any means of escape. Even with his aunt’s powers at his disposal he was not versed in magical combat, as evidenced by Inko, despite her paranoia, not finding him intimidating enough to keep his relics from him.

“Where do you think she’s taking us?” December asked the calendarist. Without much of a coachman’s seat left, they were all huddled in the back with a resting November, staring out the gaping hole in the carriage and into the bobbing orange lamps of the herd and their rising breath.

“I haven’t a clue,” he muttered, hands running over the giant salvaged snowflake. The sculptures informed him that it had predicted Inko’s assault moments before it occurred, with the scene still emblazoned across its face. “She’s single-minded, that’s for sure. She paid no mind to this item either.”

“She wants our signatures?” December asked to draw him back, her icy hand wrapping around his bicep. The sharpness of her touch brought everything into focus.

“Yes, on some contract she has authored no doubt. Something that will transfer everything my brother inherited from you four and into her.”

“Can we survive that?”

“I’m sorry, no. With you magic is your very life force, and you are made from it. Even if I could slowly swap out what Vander gave you with energies I’ve generated, the end result would be a different person. You would still die, just in pieces instead of all at once, which is far worse, trust me.

And beyond that… Inko plans to take my inheritance as well, so I wouldn’t even have the resources to attempt such a thing.”

“What will she do with us?”

“I don’t know… but it could be almost anything.” He looked out the hole at the orange doldrums of the hoofed march. “Something that also involves these aurorb elk…” He tried to puzzle it out, but couldn’t get anywhere, not with December’s frightened grip getting tighter and colder.

“Why don’t you try holding this,” Tavros suggested, handing her Vander’s antler. She took it, freeing his arm, then enjoyed a moment of awe with it while Tavros quickly composed himself so his teeth wouldn’t chatter when he explained. First he handed the snowflake off to the eager tumblers, who wanted to prop it up in front of November and talk to him to see if they could coax him out of his catatonia.

“We could use these against Inko,” December said, feeling a plume of her earlier rage. I don’t need to tell you exactly how many times she had imagined the tattooed woman taking the place of a sculpted hog in the midst of the domestic dragons’ target practice in between her attacking them and now, suffice to say it was more than one and by more than one.

“Not if you don’t know how to use it. Are you ready for your first lesson?” He smiled, and she returned it with even greater force, briefly embracing him. Now there was no stopping his teeth from chattering short of casting a spell on himself, so he allowed it to happen. “F-first you m-must adjust to the proportions of the l-life-relic you’re wielding.”

He demonstrated by holding out his cowrie and turning it over in his hand several times. But not just that, December noticed. His movements were almost hypnotizing, giving her the distinct sense that were she one of the two parties involved, man and mystical object, she truly would be so engrossed as to be incapable of stopping.

His fingers glided perfectly along its curves, leaving no room between skin and silky surface. His little finger traced every bump on its lip flawlessly and with unnatural speed. All the while there were moments where it should have fallen because his hand was no longer cupping it, but it adhered to him without becoming stationary.

“This is the kind of familiarity that comes from years of practice with the same life-relic. The ghost inside is comfortable with me now, like when you acclimatize an animal to your presence with closer and closer feedings until it can only sleep peacefully in your lap. You try.”

December didn’t hesitate, flicking her wrist in an attempt to spin the antler without dropping it. A moment later it was lodged in the ceiling. Tavros laughed, so she quickly reclaimed it, hiding her face in embarrassment.

“No, no, that was rude of me,” the sorcerer assured her, straightening out his face. “You do not need to imitate me. Get to know the item your own way.”

“What is my way?”

“I can’t tell you; it’s yours!” He hoped she wouldn’t need more encouragement than that, and he was right to hope. All she needed was the ensuing quiet to examine the thing.

At first all she saw was a stick. In twisting it she was searching for the ghost, the spirit of whatever deer-like creature shed it, expecting to see its face on one side like a skittish forest guardian about to vanish behind a tree.

She had no such vision. There was instead a stirring in her mind and soul. It coaxed her to leap to a new perspective in a fleeting moment of exhilarated terror, like from one floating island to another. If there was a forest, and the ghost lived in it, December had to visit it as well. She sought to see herself in the object, to make her way around the tree she pretended it was and walk through its undisturbed snow.

The first few forests were purely of her imagination, which she sensed, so she kept circling the antler-tree in her mind until she was out of ideas, giving the timid ghost an opportunity to slip something to her tentatively. Only then did she realize that her trees were mere illustrations and cutouts, made to populate books but kept in flat stacks in the warehouse of her mind.

Trees placed by the ghost were memories, limbs rearranged by time but still of a substance that blew hers away. A memory of an actual snowfall. Of hoof prints through the snow. Once upon the ghost’s time, there was a flash of teeth when it turned around, a splash of red, and then nothing but recollections shared with Vander.

The wolf’s jaws and its snarl startled December; she flinched and nearly stuck the life-relic in the ceiling again. Tavros grabbed her by the shoulders to steady her, which brought forth a nervous laugh oddly paired with a cocksure smile.

“I saw its home,” she attested.

“So it invited you in. That’s progress. Here, try this.” His hands moved to hers, fingers pink and swollen from the cold, but he acted as if he didn’t feel it. He did though. You don’t need to be seventy percent of his being to know that. With all the finesse he could numbly muster he guided her index and middle finger to the uppermost prongs of the antler, hooking them over. Then he pulled away.

“Now what?”

“Move the antler so you’re holding it by the base, but only use those two fingers to get there, nothing else.” The calendarist watched as intently as he did whenever a breeze passed through the spokes of his pinwheel bookmark crafted from a farmed four leaf clover. Energized rather than intimidated by his attention, December tucked her tongue into her cheek, cocked her head, and approached the attempt at a slant, as if leaned around a frosty trunk to watch the ghost sip from a brook.

Motioning as if petting a fawn, the wave of her digits slipped to the lower prongs silently. Once more and she was at the base, where the rest of her hand curled around and raised the whole thing as a wand. She let out an excited yip.

“You did it,” November groaned; they all turned to see him smiling faintly, attempting to applaud with his tented fingertips. Her younger siblings congratulated her as well.

“Yes she did,” Tavros confirmed, but his enthusiasm was dampened by the ease with which she had done so. Such a trick required much more practice out of a flesh and blood person. What he sensed was the fact I’ve already brought up, that nothing done by the months of winter emotionally or intellectually was bogged down by the minutia of biological processes. They were superior beings: a full thirty percent better.

Any time it seems, from your perspective, that they might be rushing their lives, do remember that. You humans have to do a tiny amount of thinking just to remember to blink. At this very moment I sense some of you judging December as dull because she isn’t struggling enough, but that’s just envy on your part. Whenever you experience these negative emotions just tell yourself this: thinky-blinky. That should remind you why I’ve never bothered talking about anything you’ve done, or not done, as is the case with the woman standing on her deck in Chihuahua right now, attempting to pour too much of me on her monstera plant. That’s the most significant activity in her life in the last seven years.

“That’s very impressive,” Tavros told his protege, almost grave, “but it creates a danger. Magic is powerful, and it can lead you to believe it can solve all your problems as long as you wave a relic at them, but remember to not get ahead of yourself… and that sometimes problems are upon you before you’ve recognized them.”

Suddenly Feeb tumbled backward and uncurled to stand at the edge of the ragged hole. She stared out at the shuffling elk and their bobbing lamps.

“Oh no I think we’re surrounded,” she joked with her widest smile yet. The others laughed. Tavros merely sighed. They were getting stronger senses of humor as well; before long they might notice that he wasn’t much fun at all.

December 29^th

An Overall Lucky Day

In the intervening days December did happen to try the exercise again, not with either of the life-relics, but with her own hands, clasping them together and examining the details closely. Vander had given her something like decorative molding on her nail beds, and patterns inlaid in palm seams and taking the place of obvious veins on her underarm.

December’s eyes followed those trails as if they were actual paths on the ground as she wondered whether or not she counted as a life-relic. They needed a death, and Vander had provided one. They needed to be a part of an animal, but she was me, and all animals had fluids within. Surely every part of her had been in an organ, or a bone, or some blood at one point or another.

For accuracy’s sake I need to mention that only ninety-seven percent, with a pointless-to-you decimal afterthought several digits long, of her composition had ever been part of an animal before. Some of myself I keep ‘pure’ in this way intentionally, just to circumvent any long term effects I may not yet be aware of; the last thing I want is to inadvertently teach myself how to catch one of those plagues you keep iterating upon.

That said, some of it just happens to remain free of you animals as well, through sheer coincidence. I’m sure Mr. Celliday would’ve been fascinated to interview a single drop of me to see whether or not that counted as a stroke of luck.

I digress, which is very easy to do when you’re all the branching tributaries in all the world’s rivers as well as all the rainy streaks down windowpanes. Was December a life-relic? Whether or not she was is not actually relevant to her emotional journey. What matters is what she saw when she tried to follow her own paths and find ‘the deer in the forest’.

There was no ghost to find, no Vander, having finally collected himself in the afterlife, to tell her her true purpose. Nor was there a home to visit in memory as with the antler’s spirit. But there wasn’t nothing, which I found most curious seeing as I had a complete record of what every molecule of her had ever done.

Towering castles of ice. Connected to each other by bridges that cascaded into walls like frozen falls. Homes cut into a glacier with exterior decoration more impressive than the strands on her surface that led her there. Whatever that place was, she’d never been there, so how was she seeing it?

Further investigation was denied when she tried to mentally enter one of the dwellings only to find herself assailed by a backward sensation as if pulled by harness. As the distance grew the wondrous winter city shrank, not to small shapes on a map, but to glitter on the surface of one spoke of a snowflake. Just before she was freed from the illusion she recognized its images, seeing the shifting pictogram that had been in their care ever since it nearly took a head off.

December was going to look at it as soon as she opened her eyes, to see if its pictures were changing again, but something else throttled her attention, refused to relinquish it more stubbornly than the Earth holds onto me.

“This has to mean we’ve arrived,” Tavros rasped, peeling a blanket from his body and leaning forward for a better look despite being thoroughly awestruck already. Unsteady on his feet thanks to hunger and the far worse horror of dehydration, December reached out and steadied his waist as he rose. Half the joints in his body seemed to pop.

The rations he kept had dwindled to nothing two days prior, and Inko had not afforded them a chance to forage or supplied them with anything, probably to weaken Tavros when it came time to negotiate. Even the aurorbs had been allowed to take Water and grass during brief stops to rest, but not those trapped at their center.

Normally December would have suggested he try to sleep the malnutrition away, but was likewise enthralled at the sight as the elk herd hit a line of stones and then a gentle descent into white sand. Beyond that was a calm ocean of me, but what they stared at was firmly anchored between the two.

Grander than the icy illusion December had just toured, standing taller than any building Tavros had ever seen, and some of the mountains too, was the discarded shell of their world’s largest invertebrate: the roseate magnificity ultraconch. Not to be confused with the slightly smaller and much purpler lilac magnificity ultraconch.

Neither name, nor the names of any close relatives, were known to the party on the beach, and Miss Barbary herself is included in that statement. Only the most cloistered oysters of the marine biology community in their world knew such names, and they were highly speculative, as no specimen had ever been confirmed save for shell fragments large enough to serve dinner to a family reunion of fifty people.

This was the first intact shell to ever be seen by man, and no ordinary event could wash it ashore. It took a tsunami generated by an earthquake, which had occurred more than a year prior, but this beach was at the edge of a wilderness rarely visited, devoid as it was of fertile soil and outside the most bountiful fishing currents. Inko had found it, at the end of a long pilgrimage, though it was more of a self-imposed banishment.

Even the mightiest sorcerers in their world did not have the ability to descend to the ocean floor and explore it. Perhaps their magic could resist the pressure, or light the way, but definitely not both. If they could they would’ve used the ultraconch shells as landmarks for navigation. It was getting to the point where, were there sufficient light, there were few spots in the basement of their world where they wouldn’t spy at least one in the distance.

And before you accuse me of tossing that one up into a population that might collectively break its own neck trying to look at all of it, know that was purely the result of a seismic event, not a temper tantrum on my part. No violent watery event you have ever encountered has been the result of an immature reaction of mine.

After all, when I say ‘before you accuse me’ I mean it collectively, because several of you already have, and brought up some of your past traumatic experiences with me. For example, Malcolm Barton of Tacoma, Washington is accusing me of making him slip on the edge of a pool when he was thirteen, which resulted in a cranial injury that permanently altered the shape of his head just enough to make all hats look lopsided on him.

Really Malcolm? That’s what I did with my spare time, which to remind you is all of time itself? Clearly that thirty percent difference is causing a miscommunication here and you need to tell me, out loud, what my motivation could have possibly been. Then I’ll inform everyone else of your reasoning. Go on. Every moment you wait is another moment your world’s population is stuck in our storytelling session.

He says he thought that because he was very light on his feet as a child and never slipped on any other occasion. Well I have some news for you Malcolm; your memory is incorrect. You slipped on slick surfaces no more and no less than twenty-eight times between the ages of six and thirteen. Perhaps your recollection was impacted when you dented your skull in the commission of the universally foolish act of running around the pool.

Any of you others wish to have your accusations audited? Sanjit the automotive researcher? Abby? No? Good.

As I was saying, the spectacle of the magnificity ultraconch was a once in ten lifetimes experience, and young as they were the months of winter still got to enjoy it. The herd turned toward it; Inko didn’t just want to threaten them in its proximity. They would get to fight for their lives in its shade.

Only when it darkened the sky did Tavros get a more accurate estimate of its size. If one rolled up all the fairgrounds for the Tiring Week and tucked them inside they would fit snugly on its surfaces. The ceiling was too high and cavernous to even return an echo properly. The man innately understood his luck that the original occupant was long deceased, for if not he would’ve been subject to the whim of a slug that surely produced monsoons of slime.

“Let’s get out and walk,” Jan suggested, doing so before waiting for an elder to respond. By walk he meant perform a series of flips and cartwheels, in which his small sister joined him. November was the most likely to object to their giggling antics, but he was too distracted by his own careful departure, one hand glued over his broad chest as if holding in his heart, despite his injury being long healed.

“It must have unrivaled acoustics,” he whispered to himself as he walked on, head at the angle I warned you about which would certainly fracture bone in a human. Last to disembark were Tavros and December, each armed with a life-relic. The ice sculpture was now confident in her use of several spells thanks to the calendarist’s tutelage, but there was little point in wielding it as she did, like a weapon.

Mr. Celliday’s skill was great, but officiating and fastidious rather than bombastic. He could no sooner best Inko in a sorcerer’s duel than he could willingly sign a marriage certificate on a -2 day. Neither of them had a working plan for escape, though it had been discussed endlessly during their compulsory journey. To make matters worse, they were about to understand the actual extent of the grungy little woman’s power.

Without realizing it, their bubble within the herd changed position, drifting to the side of the cervid mass as it compressed against the bottom of the gargantuan seashell. When the elk broke away they found Inko standing near its salmon-colored expanse, which only turned deeper and rosier as it extended up. She was turned away, running her hands across its smooth gloss in some sort of ecstasy, trusting the many bumbling minions at her sides to protect her.

“Ahem,” Tavros coughed, not to draw her attention, just to cough, but it had that effect. When she turned the calendarist tried to decide if she’d bathed at any point in their travels, and her rat nest hair evidenced that she had not and might have even tried to compensate by using chunks of permafrost as soap.

What was different, and fresher, was her demeanor. On her face could be seen a great and grasping desire, like the lust for chocolate or the perverse and potent urge to leap off a cliff with nothing but a parasol to keep safe from gravity. She didn’t look happy, not yet, but she was the hungry hollow ready for jugs of joy to be poured.

“Ahh my party supplies,” she said with crinkled nose, rubbing her hands together after they separated from the shell. “What do you think? You can see how I can’t let something like this go to waste. It’s the only stroke of luck I’ve ever had.”

“Highly unlikely,” Tavros contradicted, mouth agape as his head drifted from one great bump far above them to another. The statement did get him wondering about a hypothetical being that could store up its luck and unleash it all at once, and the curious amalgamation in his mind at that moment was not too dissimilar to myself, except that luck does not apply to me at all.

“I’ve planted my flag and claimed it as my own in the age old doctrine of finders keepers,” Inko explained unnecessarily, as that was how she seemed to handle everything from sea squirts to carriages to human beings.

“What’s it like inside?” Jan asked, doing a handstand to see if the view was even better upside down.

“A better question is what I’m like inside,” Inko answered, “and I’ll be tickled pink to show you.” No woman as filthy as that should skip anywhere, but she did, dropping dirt clods as she followed the curl of the shell to what her captives now recognized as a set of inlaid stairs. No creature would form such a structure naturally, so Miss Barbary must have shaped it herself with slaps of her magical tentacles.

Those tentacles of hers made another appearance, but only once she had stepped off the sand and onto the first outcropping of shell. With each rising motion they extended, manifested more physically, intensified their rich color. By the seventeenth step Tavros got a sinking feeling; his enemy’s tendrils were now taking up more space and moving more organically than at any point in their brief battle on the frozen pond.

In their first encounter they rose off her arm, like the tattoos had come to life, but now they seemed to be her arms, the effect strengthening the further she climbed. Nor was the transformation contained to those features alone. Inko’s nasty locks were transformed into translucent fins on the side of an extending skull, or should I say mantle, that now looked soft and flexible to the touch.

What were the set colors of ink before now fluctuated as if on the skin of a live octopus: a fireworks show rather than any attempt at camouflage. Grime sloughed off her clothing and skin by magic and perspiration alike. Two tentacles extended from her legs coiled as springs and propelled her off the stairs, high into the open air of the shell’s overhang.

Then she was flying. With her many new appendages she did so as elegantly as any cuttlefish jetted through my calmer shallows. And let me tell you, which you don’t have to worry about since I’ve removed that particular capacity of yours for the time being, that rarely have I seen a creature enjoy something quite so much.

Odder still that it was an animal so tainted with evil experiencing such innocent pleasure, but Tavros and the months of winter heard it just as I did when she laughed like a child bounding through a flowering meadow, the sound swelling so in each dramatic swoop that even her dull-witted minions watched. Several of them clapped, like two flounders attempting to massage the skin of a drum, probably the result of being instructed to do so whenever their master was having fun.

“Not only does she not need a relic… but she can fly without one?” December voiced to her instructor in all things magical and some things practical.

“That shouldn’t… none of this should…” was all the calendarist had to say at first, but he watched her display a while longer. Finally the creative part of his mind shook off some dust and sneezed out a conclusion. “Ah! I see now. The tattoos were a clue all along. Inko does in fact use a life-relic, and she never has to worry about misplacing it.

Those tattoos must be at least partly made of squid ink. The ghosts of the little devils are swimming in her very blood. That’s why those magical projections appear to be entirely part of her anatomy now. This is an enhancement of what she first used on us, utilizing the magic of this gargantuan shell. It’s the biggest life-relic there’s ever been!”

“So she has one inside her and she’s inside one!?” December blurted before nervously biting one of her little fingers. “Does the shell belong to her? Can we not use its magic as well?”

“It’s highly doubtful she would bring us here if we could. The same way I can use my cowrie better than anyone who does not have experience with it, she is the one most attuned to this shell. I imagine she already has spells in place acting as safeguards, keeping us from accessing its magic. But… if she has all this power… what on Earth could she need us for?”

They would have their answer soon enough. Inko jetted deeper into the ultraconch and disappeared, leaving her minions to escort them, which they started doing by delivering a few rough shoves. Warty wet fingers pointed them toward the shell stairs. The precious little tumblers tried to lead the way, but November held them back and made sure he was first. He was experiencing a rather dramatic swing from a mentality of frailty to one of valor, not unexpected for an orator. Once he understood an injury did not automatically mean death he thought himself so righteous as to be armored by it.

“Everything she does is deliberate,” Tavros whispered to December, though his volume quickly recovered when he realized the minions were too empty-headed to process anything they overheard. “So whatever she wants must involve the shell, the aurorb elk, and the magic she wishes to take from us. That is why all three are here now.”

“Could she be storing magic in this place?” December guessed. “Like a rain barrel? It has magic of its own, but perhaps it’s so large it can hold much more.”

“An intriguing thought,” he said with a false smile meant to keep her flexing her intellect, “but she can’t take the elk’s magic. They’re not smart enough to sign it over like we are, so there’s no method of transference… not that I know of anyway. I wonder if… by the hanging horseshoe!”

Suddenly, as they reached the top step and looked down into the first valley of the shell’s interior, he was forced to wonder something else entirely, namely if he would ever see so fantastic a sight in the rest of his days.

Inko Barbary had been hard at work over the past year, sculpting more than stairs from the luxurious raw material of the ultraconch interior. An entire city awaited just behind that first wall of rough craggy exterior. Towers with hundreds of open windows and spacious balconies stood in clusters like trees, only getting shorter as the shell’s ceiling tapered down into the dark spiral backdrop.

Bells sculpted from shell belted out glorious notes from high in those towers as Inko swam-soared by them, colorful tentacles trailing like ribbons. Shorebirds that now fancied themselves sea cave birds roosted on many of the lower roofs, out of reach of what they assumed to be a tentacled apex predator. Yet not a spot was sullied by their droppings, no doubt another incantation on Inko’s part.

The creamy reds, pinks, and oranges of the shell cooperated with the organic architecture so much so that there was not a painter in the world who would change the color scheme to improve their rendition of it on canvas. Foul as she was, the woman of the shell had earnestly wielded a wild inspiration in designing her citadel and its outlying structures.

Even the sea squirt minions liked to look, and just then one of them experienced a sudden lapse in its perpetual effort to stay a balanced biped, leaning too far forward. Its thick stubby arms flailed as it slipped and fell, bouncing down the shell toward the city. It blubbered the whole way, leaving the visitors to wonder if it could possibly survive such a long tumble thanks to its spongy tissues.

Whether by survival or by Inko’s bird waste removal spell, they did not find its smeared remains down in the streets as the other minions took them to the city’s ground level. Aside from them, their master, and the birds, it was a ghost town, its warm colors contrasting with the constant cool of an ocean breeze.

“Many a person would choose to live in such a magnificent place,” Tavros commented idly as they passed under an archway and into a cathedral for an unknown religion, “if not for its current occupant and administrator. There is shelter from even the most extreme weather and the bounty of the sea just outside.”

“But nothing compared to Fimbultoe, right?” Feeb asked. The notary hesitated until he received a cold elbow in the rib from December. “No, nothing in comparison child. In fact I think I’m growing bored already.”

“You lie,” Inko’s voice echoed through the cathedral, apparently the only voice that could do so. Her shadow appeared in the tall steeple-shaped windows, not through glass but a layer of shell so thin as to be nearly transparent. The fiend’s shape was like some noodle-limbed spider crawling along, so repulsive that the wall opened up like retreating sap to hide her away inside.

The cephalopod woman descended to them, suction cups popping across the floor, acting as legs while the pair she was born with dangled barefoot and lazy. Were her excess appendages not holding her up she still would’ve been taller than Tavros, flesh stretched in temporary transformation. A table rose out of the floor, along with seats, right under the notary and the ice sculptures in such a fashion as to force them to be seated.

“This is the most thrilling place there has ever been,” Miss Barbary claimed, with fair reason if judging by human standards. There are a few I’ve been witness to that have it beat, mostly far out in the distant cosmos, like the nebula of golden silk and the phantom pulsar. Sights get even more hypnotizing near black holes, but even I avoid those, as I have no idea what happens to the parts of me that they capture. Anyway, yes, the shell city was pretty.

“It is an incredible bounty, one highly inappropriate for a single person to keep entirely to themselves,” Tavros criticized, which he felt safe to do seeing as she was threatening their lives already. His stomach ached from being nearly as hollow as the ultraconch. “Do you mean to populate any of the empty buildings?”

“I may one day invite people to be my subjects,” Inko speculated smugly, clicking her tongue, running her hands over the ear-fins that had been her matted and tangled hair, “but I built this city for fun, just to see if I could. I call it Zottovoir: the city of one and of one’s luck.”

She popped a few of her suction cups, equivalent to snapping her fingers. It was an order one of her minions managed to understand. It waddled away.

“We know your tattoos are squid ink,” December said to assert herself, something November advised her against with an intense stare and tight lips. His bravery had gone once their abductor had slithered back to close quarters.

“So you figured that out,” Inko said, slightly amused. “It was the best thing I could come up with to keep myself safe out in that harsh world, before I found and founded Zottovoir. In a joyous coincidence it makes a perfect conduit for the magic of the shell. I’m a god in here, and so cannot be oppressed by any of you out there. Only here, away from your cruelty, away from the world’s indifference, am I safe enough to be myself, to be free.”

“The world is not something you can control,” Tavros insisted. “This shell is a world within a world, but there’s always something bigger that could come crashing through. A falling star perhaps. Or one of those birds we saw could bring a disease with them.” Briefly Inko considered what he said, then threw up a red tentacle and a yellow one in a thunderous popping clap.

From within the cathedral they heard what had to be every last bird in Zottovoir squawk and take flight, presumably headed for the exit rather than the dark narrowing curl of its recesses.

“Consider it under control,” she said.

“There will always be something you miss,” the notary argued, trying to assure himself as well as his enemy. “The world can’t be leashed, but it can be managed if you’re careful, if you have an eye for detail. What you’re doing is bludgeoning the idea of living life reasonably, of managing risk responsibly. Furthermore if…”

He was stalled by the return of the minion, which carried with it two massive platters of food: a shrimp cocktail ringing a crystal punch bowl, fried fish nested in green herbs, biscuits topped with flaky salt, and various tropical fruits sliced up among crushed ice without a spot of brown to be found.

“You were saying,” Inko teased as it was served to her, tucking in immediately. Her transformation into a sick optimist did little for her manners. Each bite was shoved into her mouth by two to four tentacles, often mixing fish with fruit in a defiant statement against the value of considering the details. Tavros grabbed his stomach with a gargoyle claw of a hand to keep it quiet, but it was another thing he failed to manage.

“Why must you take our lives?” December asked, more emotion escaping into her words than she would’ve liked. Pellet tears fell from her face and tinkled against the table. “You have all this! Anything anyone could ever want! You said you are like a god! All we want is to live ordinary lives. I want to be happy, and find love, and play music for my siblings. Why won’t you just let us go?”

“Seconded,” November managed to whimper, fear so intense it was more like nausea. “It is inappropriate to subject children to this.” He placed each hand on Jan’s and Feeb’s shoulders.

“If I let you go I’m stuck here,” Inko said plainly between bites, not bothering to wipe her mouth despite having several unoccupied tendrils. “I know that sounds like a contradiction, but this shell is still a cage no matter how free I am to decorate it. I shouldn’t have to live in a cage or live out there, where any random event could kill me as easily as lightning strikes a tree.”

“The magic my aunt passed down to us is nowhere near what’s stored in this shell,” Tavros reasoned, looking anywhere but the food that was already a third gone or splattered on the floor. “We should be inconsequential.”

“I need a mound of magic, and I need it to be separate from Zottovoir.” She didn’t explain further, opting to eat instead, fully aware that it was torture for the calendarist to think while smelling the feast.

“The aurorb elk… what are they for? You can’t take their magic by force.”

“No, but I can alter it,” she said, smacking her lips, “with a sufficient catalyst.”

“Alter it to what!?”

“Into canvas!” Rather than elaborate she ate more, tossing empty shrimp tails at her prisoners to interrupt their pondering. Jan and Feeb managed to catch all the ones that came their way, but they didn’t manage to figure her plan out. That was, surprisingly, November. All he had to do was recall how he’d seen magic used so far, being careful not to get caught up in its form over its function.

“You’re going to make Zottovoir bigger,” he said, picturing the shell growing, and growing, and growing until there were thunderclouds and cyclones forming inside. That had to be it. All humans did with magic was control their environments more, be it fairgrounds where all the rules of nature were broken or a lonely outhouse with an enchanted noose. The best way to achieve that was to simply expand the roof that was already allowing immense control.

“Ahh, I see,” Tavros said, almost painfully, the realization coming so close to being nourishing that it worsened the empty confusion in his guts. “You don’t want the hot and cold magics of the elk, just their ability to conduct and transmit magic across a large distance. With your stolen property you will cast the magic of the shell out to one deer, which will send it off to another, so on and so forth until you’ve stretched a web of coverage across their entire range.”

“You do see,” she complimented, perhaps the only one she would give, her smile full of orange-pink flecks of shrimp shell. Dashing her hands across each other, she shot back into the air, swam through it in a circle, tentacles as multicolored streamers. “I can have this form out in the world. No one will be able to interfere in my life.”

“And for that you will murder us, because the relic can’t extend itself. A wand can’t cast a spell on its own handle. There has to be a degree of separation for the magic to recognize.”

“Murder he calls it,” Inko shouted into the upper reaches of the cathedral. The words bounced back to her, like a laugh. “Your brother created them, gave them the ability to suffer when all he needed was for them to move. He was cruel. I know how hard it is to live; every second is a struggle. Every beat of the heart is the hammer of fear striking your soul.

I would never do that to anyone. These sculptures will cease their suffering, and in the process, mine as well.” She remembered her plan was working, and thus she should have been rapturously happy. A few spins and smiles while she hummed.

“But you’re trying to take the world away from everyone else!” December argued, standing despite the slowly closing grip of the shell’s material around her thighs. It wouldn’t let her walk, so she put her hands on her hips.

“Another obligation of life,” their captor snapped, anatomy flaring out like the hood of a cobra, like some aposematic angel from the wrong heaven. “Tell me, when did all the kings and counselors ask my permission before they walled off lands? Dammed up rivers? Mined gold and gemstones? By birthright all of those things are just as much mine as theirs, yet I would be imprisoned or killed if I so much as stepped on the wrong grass.”

“To copy injustice is not to correct it,” Tavros advised.

“Says the notary.” Inko scowled like her lowlier dirtier self. “All you do is make it look more legitimate by writing it down. Oh, there’s a record, that must make it a fact! Look where you are now! All facts belong to me.”

“They do not!” December boomed before Tavros could provide a rebuttal. Her clenched fists ground like millstones, producing tangled strings of ice because they had to produce something. It was her life. “You actually have no power at all, because you cannot have what you want! Tavros will never, ever write or sign anything for you. And neither will we!”

“There is a fact,” the calendarist agreed heartily, his voice deep and throaty because he needed a powerful note the way December needed her fingers knotted together just then. It was determination, whether or not it could last.

“You get no food and no Water until you change your mind,” Inko told the only other human present, the very deliberate nature of her sloppy meal fully revealed.

“Then he’ll starve to death for us!” December declared, only realizing what she’d said a moment later.

“I’m not looking forward to it… but that is what will happen,” he said, timbre gone. “Then you will be down half the magic you want, and all that remains will be in prisoners you can’t starve.”

“I can perhaps do it with half; it’ll just take longer,” Inko theorized, still lazily swimming overhead. “Anyway, you deserve a spectacular view while you’re waiting. Let me show you to your quarters.”

December 31st

A Day of Neutral Luck

Miss Barbary had not lied about the view. Sea squirt minions couldn’t fly, perhaps less so than all other creatures, if their rather high bounce was discounted, so she had personally escorted her prisoners, taking them two by two gripped in her empowered tentacles, up past the tallest tower of Zottovoir, slapping its shell bell along the way in a declaration of victory.

Hanging from the roof by a chain formed from the roseate shell was a capsule shaped cage, its grid floor made intentionally uncomfortable with small blunt pyramids, like the tread of a good boot. The only way it could fit all five of the prisoners was if they sat in a circle back to back, legs dangling out between the bars like the petals of a wilting flower.

From there all of Zottovoir and most of the shell was visible, even a strip of sand and me out the exit where they could barely make out the waves thinning on the beach. That was where they chose to look, they being the only ones lucky enough to face that direction, which were Tavros and December.

For them I made my waves extra elegant, to lift their spirits some, a minor indulgence I sometimes allowed creatures since it could never be demonstrated as anything other than their own imagination. I’m sorry to say it had little effect, especially on the man, who was now many days without food, and just as many without a drop of me to drink.

As he dehydrated I lost some clarity into his thoughts, and so it is that death by drought is a sensation I cannot relate to, and have difficulty understanding. Nature dictates an automatic revulsion on my part. Of course an absence of me is the worst thing that could possibly happen, but I still do not know what it feels like.

I have, under similar circumstances with other organisms, planted ‘devices’ to try and discern something of it: crystallized beads of me in various regions of the brain. Proximity to the centers of suffering was no help though. I was still across a gulf, regardless of sharing a body. I just cannot be where I am not, and making myself more present would only alleviate the phenomenon I attempted to study.

This is where you accuse me of cruelty for standing by while Tavros Celliday slowly died missing me, and then further label me a sick comedian for prettying up the waves while he did so as if to taunt the man, just as, to provide a random sampling, Lippy Hurlitzer of Little Rock, Yuri in Stockholm, and a vacationing Havina in New Zealand are doing right now.

They’re all wrong. To float him a full canteen bubble or infuse his flesh with the latent atmospheric moisture would betray a policy so longstanding that it predates life itself. Everything you have ever done you have done with me, but you have received no aid. Life makes its own way, and were I to become its servant I would never know peace and you would never know strength. We would come to resent each other, and I liked Mr. Celliday too much to do him the disservice of thinking him less capable of following life’s currents than the countless creatures that had come before. That’s why Havina.

December felt his pain more than any of you, despite not being of flesh and blood. Keenly she was aware that the touch of her shoulder on his harmed him further, robbed him of precious heat. Inko had left no room to adjust, leaving Tavros in a freezing vice as his core hollowed and dried.

This the ice sculpture would not accept. The possibility of breaking off a piece of herself, letting him melt it in his hands so that he might drink it, had already occurred, but he had told her previously that the energy his body spent in the melting would exceed the value of what was taken in. Besides, that would serve only to extend their imprisonment.

What they needed was magic, and without their now-confiscated life-relics December was the only one who could provide it. Thinking back to his advice for handling Vander’s antler, she recalled the leap to a new perspective that put her on the same plane as the ghost residing within it. Also, there was her vision of a home she’d never held to consider: the metropolis of flowing ice.

My very life is magic, she thought correctly, so anything I can do can be done differently, just as a life-relic can produce countless unique spells. But what was it that she did? With hands forced through the shell bars of the cage, she let instinct take over, produced a harp, but stopped herself from playing anything on the icy instrument so as not to draw anyone’s attention.

Like a life-relic she turned it over in her hands, silently juggled it without ever letting it off her skin. On its fifth skate around the globe of her fist she found the idea: the ghost that might save them.

Tavros had told her the strings of the harp were quite magical, as ice was not meant to have the properties of gut string. But her will superseded the world’s opinion on that. Even my opinion. I let her self-satisfied cheek slide, interested as I was in the whole process. It’s always fun to watch something that can’t willfully melt or evaporate try to squeeze its way out of a box.

December threw her harp away, and at the distance where the magic of her body no longer influenced it the item vaporized into the air. Then she went about producing another, without a frame this time. No internal law told her she had to make all of it. Just the strings. And since they weren’t connected to anything they kept going, down, down, down.

They could do better than down. If her hands could play such beautiful music they could weave as complex a melody into the free strings themselves, so she tried. Like my waves on the shore just beyond her, her hands layered over each other, taking with them the icy strands, again and again, until a braid was formed.

Her determination brought every piece closer, tighter, until the strain of its strength was audible: between the tension of a rope and the song of a wine glass. This brought the attention of the others, who had a difficult time turning to look but could now just glance down instead, see the swinging frayed end of their escape line as December crafted it.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Tavros said with a weak chuckle. “You’re brilliant December.” The compliment broke through several flimsy dams in her emotional core, flooding her with love for the man, which only served to further purify her invention. It was to be the greatest escape rope in the history of the world, for she wanted it to help him flee every problem he would ever have, from interrogation and starvation down to stubbed toes and a loose hair in his mouth.

“You were too busy thinking of us,” she said. The calendarist had delayed his whole life, and now risked it, just to escort them safely to Fimbultoe, just so they could live. The various technical and legal aspects of his work trained him to see the months of winter as nothing but objects, but not once had he attempted to consign them to some contract, leave them alone to subsist on fine print in a callous warehouse of a world.

Her siblings cheered her on in whispers as she tirelessly produced the harp-rope, all of them innately understanding the rush. As it lengthened it became more and more visible from almost any high place of Zottovoir. If Inko roused, took a casual flight around her grounds, she would spot it.

There was nothing to be done about the problem of her minions, but their nature took care of it as a matter of course. Dimwitted, more concerned with the ground thanks to their sessile origins, and really not particularly interested in using their fancy new eyes, the former sea squirts neither looked up very often nor cared about a blue-white string that was suddenly there. Perhaps their master was hanging ribbons for a party. Zottovoir hadn’t hadn’t had any parties yet, so it was about time.

“I think it’s far enough,” December said when she felt slack in the rope. “Now we just have to climb down. I’ll go first. November you need to put Tavros on your back; he’s not strong enough to do it.”

“Right,” the most robust sculpture said, no objection from either party. December was the one producing a string of solutions at the moment, so no one was in the mood to interrupt her momentum.

All the threat came from the fall, so the bars had not been made too narrow to slip through. December twisted, freed one shoulder, then the next. In seconds she was sliding down her creation, creamy red, gold, and orange towers rushing toward her. With palms and rope of ice there was no danger of rope burn, so she could build all the speed she wanted.

But halfway she stopped, squeezing their lifeline in sudden terror. November’s foot struck her head, so Tavros bounced on his shoulders as Jan also hit the knot, then Feeb. Before they could ask about the holdup they too spotted it. Eyes.

Great round eyes, lidless, curious, full of drifting sparkles like snow that had forgotten which way was down. They were being watched. Closely, December recognized, dumbfounded by the presence now idling in what had been a gaping chasm seconds before.

This new creature was inches from her face, despite the shape and glimmer of its eyes suggesting it could spot a twitch in a fly’s knee from across the entire ultraconch. Yet it scrutinized her, eyes trying to swallow her up, because there was something about her it just could not grasp.

Behind the eyes were two stalks that attached to a billowing, somewhat flat, serpentine body, coiling idly in the air, fully in flight that required no movement to sustain itself. Silken, with rayless undulating fins, this body was made of many bright colors, primary among them cerulean and duckweed green.

Beyond that, and the overall observation that it looked like a gargantuan stretched sea slug, I couldn’t tell you a thing about it. From that you should be able to deduce its nature, but since my audience includes an idiot named Gavin Brill in Alaska, who has been kicked out of movie theaters no fewer than five times for trying to drink artificial butter directly from its spigot, I’ll explain it fully.

The mind of no living thing is fully beyond my partial comprehension. I know what humans think, what birds dream, what fish philosophize, and what caterpillars plan as vengeance while they pupate. Even the magically altered sea squirts patrolling below, without looking up at this firework slug, were not immune. I can tell you they were, all of them, concerned at that moment with whether or not their own lips would regenerate if they accidentally chewed them off, to which the answer is yes by the by.

So the staring slug was not a living thing. It was a dead thing, purely spirit, outside the realm of your humble and unfathomably powerful narrator.

“Hello,” was all December could think to say to it, so softly that you would be forgiven for thinking she had warm flesh in her throat just then. The spirit didn’t respond directly, but its eyes followed something invisible, perhaps her word as it drifted out of her mouth toward it. I can’t tell you if ghosts can see words, but it seems like the sort of frivolous thing beings outside of my more reasonable realm would do.

It circled the rope, examining each of them, and its enchanting gaze brought the younger sculptures to laughter. They reached out to touch it, strokes the creature accepted, and through the young months’ sensation of it I now know that ghosts feel like chilled smoke moving through your very substance.

“What is it?” Feeb asked, not particularly concerned with the answer.

“Not a m-minion, that’s for sure,” Tavros said, teeth chattering. Getting off the rope and November’s freezing back was paramount, but his own curiosity mirrored the slug’s, especially when he was so close to an explanation. “Ah! Yes! There is one p-possibility only. This is the homeowner. B-barbary is living in a g-giant life-relic, remember? Every relic has a ghost, and we’re meeting the mighty s-snail who passed on before our n-nefarious hermit crab moved in to squat.”

“Can you help us?” December asked as the spirit circled back to listen to her. Replete with the sparkling silt of thought, its eyes nonetheless did not carry notes of comprehension. The gulf between them seemed too large.

“It could if it understood,” Tavros said, trying to hide his dismay. “All the magic Inko has used to empower h-herself really belongs to this snail. It could take it all back, but how can an animal understand when it is b-being misused? A warhorse knows a battle only as a bramble of metal.”

The creature’s eyes moved to the shivering man. Normally I don’t use eyes; they’re less accurate than the innate understanding I can glean from direct sensation and networks of minds, but in this case I put myself in the fluid of Tavros’s eyes, using him as telescope to see how far I could penetrate into the intent of the enigmatic ghost.

You’ll forgive me for a novice’s interpretation of visual signals, you’d better anyway, as I’ll probably know if you don’t. But I do think I caught something. The ultraconch ghost remembered how it got where it was, saw the path into the afterlife. And it saw Tavros had taken the first few steps. I would bet one of the seven seas on it. It did not know how to help them, or if it needed to, but what the man currently endured was clear.

So too was the approach of their foe. The ghost’s head twitched, looked past them to a new firework, tentacles bursting in air. Frightened, I think, the ghost wound itself into a knot and vanished down it, returning to the incorporeal state it held whenever the bossy squatter was around.

Tavros and the months of winter couldn’t turn to look, but December willed the rope itself to twist. Dread flowed down it and over them like blackest tar. They were caught.

“No one defies me here!” her voice boomed magically across all of Zottovoir. Her prisoners decided to give it their best shot anyhow. December resumed her slide down, loosening her grip so much it was barely less than a fall. Only one glance was spared to make sure the others followed her lead, the rest spent on trying to find the ideal patch of hostile city on which to land.

Worse still, there was no ideal patch, or if there was it existed only fleetingly. The rocketing squid-woman who strongly wished to make her problems theirs recognized her speed was insufficient to reach them before they found their footing.

She’d caught only a glimpse of the vanishing entity, knew not its nature or whether it played some part in an escape and retaliation plan she’d overlooked. The paranoia that was meant to remain permanently outside the shade of her city twinged in her heart, brought great anxious pain. If things could go wrong there then she could never be free, no matter how hard she fought or how much magic she claimed as her own. The entire future she’d planned now seemed to hinge on the months of winter not escaping.

Inko came to a halt midair, spread her tentacles wide, every suction cup individually aimed at a different empty building. Channeling focus and rage into an ice pick, she bombarded her city with new architectural designs, and they began to rapidly reshape.

The safely fenced-in balcony where December was going to land dropped out from under, replaced by a wall her feet couldn’t avoid. A crack traveled up her left leg as she made contact; a chip of her knee was lost to an urban pocket that immediately sealed itself as walls and windows continued to shift and shuffle.

What she stood on was moving as well, as the rope was pulled away. She ran to catch up to it, watched her siblings drop off, but her outreached hand couldn’t quite touch Tavros’s. An expanse of golden shell shot between, denied them. Their shouts were drowned out by the whoosh of restructuring.

Barbary repositioned over them, slapping the ice rope with a backhanded tentacle. Rather than bending it shattered under her blow, raining hail on her prisoners. Every other tendril of hers was still hard at work, pushing one street into another, bringing a tower low, pinching fresh dead ends to cut them off, to keep them from getting closer to the lip of the city.

Had she unleashed only her wildest impulses she could have obliterated them in moments, reveled in blows of glittering ice as the sculptures were smashed between walls, but each death would free a large portion of the magic she needed to claim to establish her elk network, and by extension the borders of Zottovoir.

None of them had signed it over, so restraint was vital, though painful to use. Like someone trying to catch roaches by dropping a house of playing cards on them, she split her attention between them, looking to isolate and restrict, form a cell around each or trap them at a height where they could not fall and stay in one piece.

Jan and Feeb were already cut off from the others, but dividing them from each other proved frustrating. Somehow they always knew which direction the other tumbler would choose, and they laughed about it each time they evaded her.

“If you don’t sit still I’ll-” The threat would remain incomplete, as she’d lost sight of the two youngest. She descended closer to their last known location, next to a tenth story that was featureless, until a few windows opened up. Behind them were the tumblers, who cartwheeled into the open air, grappled onto Inko, and started battering her head with their tiny packed-snowball fists.

“Damnable goblins!” she cried out, having to use a few of her extra limbs to peel them off, but they couldn’t just be tossed away without breaking them, so she had to make enough of a concerted effort to bring up a deep box of shell and place them inside.

All the time and effort it took slowed the city’s shifting, gave December an opportunity to fight back. With what you ask? Yes, some of you asked it. Getting impatient are we? I already addressed the muscle stiffness you’ve been complaining about so you don’t have any valid excuses for what has shifted into the psychosomatic. Anyway, she fought back with the same material she made rope from.

If a long rope was possible, why not a short one, knotted at the end into a cudgel that could strike with impressive force when spun around the arm just twice. December had her weapon, but she needed to get close enough to use it. Climbing some divots in a wall got her there, but before she could strike she was spotted.

Two of Inko’s tentacle spearheads slapped together, and the wall behind December’s climb closed in. She would be sandwiched and stuck if she didn’t drop, and it was better for gravity to have her than Barbary.

Luckily the floor was near enough to not worsen the crack in her leg, but as she looked around she saw her hopeless predicament. Everything changed so rapidly she couldn’t even get her bearings. Worse, her whole family was lost in bubbles of their own, out of sight, voices suppressed by the hustle of the ghost city.

Inko grew frustrated as well, by her own strategy. There had never been reason to use it before, so for all she knew she might lose one of them after pushing too far down into the ultraconch, perhaps even drop them out the bottom and allow them to flee. She needed the situation back under her control, and that meant one entire month wrapped up in each tentacle, where they couldn’t scheme out of sight.

She dove down into the shifting labyrinth, opening up circular holes to pass through any wall that got in her way, searching for December. None of them had life-relics, and the calendarist couldn’t even get to his feet, so the musician with her endless supply of string seemed the greatest threat.

Slow her down, the villain thought so clearly that I couldn’t mistake it for any other similar idea. Tentacles crumpled against themselves, contracted as if in death, crimping much of the shell’s floor in a radiating circle, forming staircases all over the place. Climbing stairs was always slower.

Scanning below, she hoped to see a startled December climbing on hands and knees, but each set of stairs was empty. The melodious sculpture wasn’t climbing at all in fact! She was falling, having detached from a ceiling that rose over Inko’s head to make more room for hazardous stairs. With her fell her spinning knot of frost, and she was able to strike a heavy hit on Barbary’s crown.

Any normal human would’ve suffered a cracked skull and lost a few marbles out the nose, but Barbary’s bully of a brain was housed in an altered squid-like head, the crest of which cushioned her against much of the force. It still stung though, damaging enough that whenever she remembered it she would feel the pain all over again.

December had to keep falling, and there was nowhere to land but whatever steps were on offer. One accepted her, gave her the vantage she needed. The various stairs had been raised so quickly that the space underneath them was hollow: a series of hallways flatter than any clam’s dream bedding.

Seizing the opportunity, December ran into the nearest one, counting on the stairs to act as ceiling and hide her once more from Inko’s pursuit. Electric, alive, dancing and breathing were her thoughts. If she could keep moving she could keep living, forever freeing her family from the chasing evil that wanted to tie them down, extract from them signature and soul. Understanding fueled her further, seemed to widen her field of view.

This was life. Mazes. Clever solutions. Love hiding somewhere in the former and pining for the aid of the latter. She could feel it all, every emotion from pebble-in-the-shoe boredom to free-fall infatuation to the gravity wisdom that held up and championed the stars, even here and now, with all of it on the line like so much clothing clinging to where it was hung, trying to only dry in hurricane winds.

What a gift it was to be able to try so hard, found not by luck, crafted not by Vander Celliday, but plucked from the world by desire. Never have I seen such verve for life, except in myself, one of many explanations for my longevity and variance. December could instruct you all in what you’ve been doing much longer, and that is why her story is special enough to break my silence.

Steadfast as any mountain of ice drifting in the sea, refusing to melt into it and conform, the sculpture fought valiantly, striking at Inko each time they found themselves occupying the same space. Five times more the kidnapping squid suffered under her knot. A bruised shoulder. A cracked rib. The child of Water was winning.

But the slippery Inko Barbary never wanted anything more than for the fortune telling deck of the gods to be stacked in her favor. There was no security but an unfair advantage. No peace without dominion. No joy while dissent stuck up through the grass like an old rusty nail, informing you with pain and injury that other designs have come before yours, and even if they’ve gone they can still strike.

When she took her final cold injury every tentacle on her coiled into clock springs. Out they shot, and with them went a flattening wave of the ultraconch’s magic. Where it passed the city of Zottovoir was erased, returned to its natural uniform curl. December was robbed of all hiding places, all structures to explore and master.

The crater of tranquility also dropped the others into sight. Tavros was still carried on November’s back. The tumblers were still together. All nearby, but not enough. Inko burned with fear, incinerating the last barriers between her threats and intent. She had said that she could make do with most of the magic, that if a point had be made she possessed the power to sharpen it from any material.

“Enough!” she screamed, eyes bulging unnaturally, draining of human emotion until they resembled the portholes of a squid that had seen only darkness and falling death in my utmost depths. “You don’t belong in my world!”

Pinpricks of hot light ignited at the center of her thousand suction cups. The dragon of her spell inhaled, swallowed heavy and dry. All of me was suddenly gone from the air around them, like the death rattle of a desert.

Pinpricks became jets, streams, perverse versions of my mighty cutting rivers, insulting me, taking what I grant. These spewing flames converged on brave December, engulfed her, converged further, until they became a drill of light and heat that bored straight through her, striking at a heart that wasn’t there, infused as it was into her every molecule.

The sculpture cried out, and the cry did die before the lethal fire, as did the hopes of Tavros and the others. The calendarist dropped off November’s back, surging not with strength, but an outright rejection of physical reality. He ran for her, spirit spiny as an urchin, delicate as weathered paper-thin shell.

Once the fires plumed behind her target, indicating they had started striking her city instead of ice, Inko relented. She drifted higher and away, trailing smug smoke. As the haze cleared she saw her success, confirmed her plan was still going to work. Nothing could stop her when she held all the chisels, hammers, torches…

December was on her back, the full extent of the damage unclear to Inko, so she raised one tentacle, forced up a bulge in the shell that lifted the sculpture into a lounging position. There now. Clear as crystal. A gaping hole and a half through the icy blue woman’s chest, bleeding spring Water copiously.

Bleeding more. Bleeding down. A spreading dripping curtain. The residual heat still grew the chasm, and the magic animating her could not resist the greater expression of raw power. December was melting… thawing to the afterlife where I cannot follow.

She was too shocked to respond, as if she’d sprinted right into a tree and had the wind knocked out. The squirming beast lording over her was ready to gloat, but all her conflagration had succeeded in doing was rousing understanding in the true resident of the mammoth shell. From out of the cavern’s orange sky came the spiraling ghost of the ultraconch, globe eyes dazzled by memory, by recognition of death it hadn’t known the first time around.

From its brief visitation it had gleaned that the months of winter and their human companion meant no harm. They shaped only me, wielded magic politely, respectfully. Tavros even strolled toward death without trying to use what was the snail’s.

Inko was the opposite. All of the conch’s experience had been turned cruel and belligerent in her grasp. Reshaping the shell it had worked so hard on was one thing, but extinguishing a life? Most animals understood legacy only as procreation, but the ultraconch was so far inside itself that introspection was unavoidable fact. She had tried to burn away both innocence and experience. She was unwelcome.

“What is this!?” Inko snarled at the snaking specter of sea foam and slime. “How did you conjure this thing Tavros? It will do you no good! Minions! Att-” They would not obey, as she hadn’t completed the order and they were too dimwitted to fill in the rest. Inko Barbary was given a shock of her own as the ghost of the conch wrapped about her, confining all her tentacles to her sides, and constricting the bravado from tissues nervous with sweat and magic.

“No!” she protested once, before there was no air left. Rocketing up, the ghost carried her to the center of the sky, not far from the empty dangling cage, to the exact point where it had first traversed the veil between life and death. And it traversed again, with a passenger most unwilling.

Away it went, out of the world of measured luck and enchanting inheritance, disappearing into a knot of itself like a twisted whirlpool. Last to vanish, sucked down an inescapable drain of the immutable forces that scour the universe and keep life from spreading to every corner like mold, was the execrable Inko Barbary and her many sullen crimes.

In the ensuing quiet all of December’s family made it to her side. Tavros dropped down beside her, forgetting his hunger, shedding all pain that wasn’t felt for her. Tears dropped from his eyes, joined the flow of her growing wound. It was about to eat her left side entirely, and soon after it would split her from her legs.

But in her eyes was nothing except full moons of wonder. She was in awe of the concern poured out for her, much greater in volume than the flow of her diamond-pure blood.

“Can we do something!?” November fretted, head swerving back and forth, looking for anything, but there was only shell. There were no life-relics in reach, and the magic of the conch had gone wherever the ghost had.

Tavros stared at her, thought over the question like a badger flinging mud out of his burrow even as it was inundated by floodwaters. He searched the whole library of his fastidious skill as it sunk into sorrow. No solution came, only cold reality.

“No,” he uttered, breath chilled enough to see around the huddled sculptures. December grabbed at it as if it were a butterfly, but it, of course, escaped through her fingers. An escape she marveled at. White moon eyes swelled further. She had tears too. “She’s fading. I’m so sorry December.”

“Sister,” Feeb mewled, taking her sibling’s still hand and placing it on her cheek. Jan touched shoulder, November waist.

“It’s alright everyone,” December said softly, vibrantly. Her full moons swept away the red of the ceiling, left only the glorious gold, billowing like cloth. “Tavros, what sort of day is it?” She split into a smile as he recalled the general calendar.

“Neutral luck,” he answered. “All is calm.”

“No silly,” she laughed, stroking his arm. Water pooled at the base of her neck, rippled with her mirth. “It’s a good day. Luck keeps changing because it wants you to pay attention. It wants you to think it’s a constant… but it isn’t.

We’re alive. We’re the constant. Luck’s got nothing to do without us. I’ve known only good days. No luck stopped me from doing everything! Escaping dragons. Hide and seek with ghosts. Magic lessons. I love it when you teach me Tavros, and I love teaching you things.

I love learning to love. I love you brothers, I love you sister. And I love you Tavros. I get to love… but now I think I need sleep.”

Her eyes closed, but their lids were transparent, so they still saw her white moons as they emptied of awareness.

“I love you too December,” Tavros choked, squeezing a freezing hand, a skin of melt between her flesh and his. The other months said so too, tried to get closer, but she was the one getting closer as her form gave way and the puddle explored the borders of their feet.

When beings like December die I know the most I will ever know of it. Yet hers wasn’t particularly informative to me. There was too much joy to see past. I assume whatever lurked on the other side had to throw up its talons to keep from being blinded as well.

Once I was all that remained the surviving months of winter remembered what she would have wanted. Tavros needed help, and would sit there, drenched, until death if they did not act while he was overcome with grief. Food. Fresh Water. His cowrie and his brother’s antler back in his hands.

As they searched Zottovoir sank into itself, all of it becoming like the smooth crater Inko had made. In the great slide down the conch’s natural shape Jan found a divot full of sea squirts. They were not giant, not forced onto ungainly feet, not made to talk. They too were freed.

Outside the elk were drifting away from the beach, taking their caged spheres of magic with them. What had driven them there in the first place, where under the snow there was no grass, and where the Water was fouled with salt? They couldn’t remember. No matter. The forest tempted them back.

January 17th

Days had been taken to regain strength, which they all needed, despite it only showing in the flesh of the man Celliday. He ate and drank what Barbary had taunted him with, reclaimed his confiscated life-relics, and used them to construct a new wagon that could hopefully hold together long enough for them to reach Fimbultoe. It would have… but they did not go to Fimbultoe.

In with his confiscated relics they recovered their mysterious friend: the giant snowflake that chronicled across its face their many deeds. It too had a harrowing experience, much the same one in fact, as it had recorded in sharp relief their imprisonment and dramatic escape. Memorial images of December plotting their flight, fighting their captor, and melting out of their embrace brought them all sharp pains, but they dared not alter, or even cover, the shared history encircling the object.

It remained in the care of Jan and Feeb, who watched it always to remember and admire their valiant sister, which they could do even through their closed eyes. The next change the snowflake underwent could hardly have escaped their attention, and it didn’t, coming when their wagon was once again very near the shore still some five days out from the frosted crags of Fimbultoe.

This time it was not a new image in the center, but an alteration to one of the branching arms; it extended away from the others, formed an obvious arrow pointing off into the sea. The twins immediately took it to Tavros, but he was hardly more capable of interpreting its motives.

“It says we should go, or are destined to go, in that direction,” he guessed, staring out into my daunting main. “I think it is finally speaking, doing what it always intended.”

“But what does it intend?” November asked, taking the item from his smaller siblings and turning it around. The arrow shrank, reformed on another branch, the one closest to that seaward angle. “It’s intending to be pushy.” He turned it again, and the arrow insisted on me once more. “First it tries to cut our heads off, now it wants to drown us.”

“You can’t drown,” Celliday said, distracted. If its motives were pure, why did it not provide them directions before December’s death? Had they paid their way with her sacrifice?

“Well that’s a relief,” November sighed, “but I still don’t trust it. What do we do Mr. Celliday?”

“These are your lives my friends; I am but your chauffeur. I think I can make this wagon into something seaworthy, but it definitely won’t be able to cross the entire ocean. You must choose between Fimbultoe or this flake.” November, assuming the decision fell to him now that he was both the largest of the group and the one with the deepest voice, affected a granite intellect by stroking his chin and humming so loud his whole body sang.

“Would the calendarist care to tell me what kind of luck we’re having today? Bad luck is worse on Water than on land I imagine.” While I let the slight slide, Tavros thought over the many ways he could answer. A cursory examination was all it would take to determine November’s luck, the tumblers’, the world’s, the tides’, that beach’s, but after December it all felt rotten. And if it felt rotten it was rotten. Initiative would keep them fresh, ahead of what accidents the universe secretly planned.

“I wouldn’t dare swindle you out of the ability to make your own decisions,” he said firmly. “Best to practice your judgment here, rather than risk assessment. What is it you three want to do?”

“I think we should continue on to Fimbultoe,” November proposed to his siblings. In response Feeb flipped into the air, landed on Jan’s shoulders, so she could stand at equal height with crossed arms.

“We should vote on it,” she said, and there was no arguing with the number that most characterized the process of democracy: three. “The snowflake knows all! It knows we need to remember December. All those for following it?” Both the tumblers raised a hand, only destabilizing their tower slightly. “There you have it.” November sighed again, to cover his fear of the waves and a completely unknown destination.

“You know I don’t like that the best I can do in most situations is avoid following my own advice.”

“You’re an orator learning to listen,” Tavros assured him, “and that is the noblest and most difficult pursuit.”

“I hadn’t thought of myself that way before,” November admitted, staring directly into the sun with his chin held high, in a fashion that would allow its rays to melt his nose if he’d held the position for just ten minutes. “Noble and difficult. Yes. The months of winter will go the way of the snowflake.”

Their decision made things far tougher for Tavros, but he didn’t dream of questioning it, at least not with any of the thoughts I was privy to. First he had to transform their wagon into something seaworthy, and then either modify the wheels into oars or convince the invisible horses pulling them that they were now invisible dolphins.

It took some experimentation, and the first few invisible horses with fins and flukes were too rowdy, and had to be released into the shallow wilds. Waterproofing proved almost as difficult, as he had trouble honing in on a spell that would keep all liquid me out but ignore the solid me that was meant to be kept safely inside. Instead he settled on another invisible incorporeal creature that would roam the hull at all times, like a suctioning stingray, locating leaks and reversing them individually.

Enough time passed in the modifications that they could’ve made it to Fimbultoe already, but on their fourth attempt to shove off they took on none of me, despite having my full attention, and set the intangible dolphins in the direction of the flake’s arrow, which like a compass needle did not stray.

From there the journey took several days more, days without any land in sight. Really now!? Again I am being accused of favoritism, of giving them calm seas until they were free of danger over trivial sympathies. Yes, I agree with you, after December they had suffered loss enough, but I am not the universe! Nor am I the arbiter of life and justice. I am but life’s main ingredient. If you have objections, take them up with the cook, and for that you’d have to get in line behind me. You talk about it enough in some of your old stories, but I promise none of you have ever parted the seas in such a way as to cut in front of my position.

No, Tavros and the months did perfectly fine on their own, using magic to fish and desalinate me for drinking. They earned their reward, which came in the form of an island, appearing pure white over its bedrock, at first blending in with a bank of approaching clouds to the point that they almost collided with it before they discerned it.

They might have, if Tavros hadn’t screwed some very good heads onto those invisible dolphins. The magical creatures slowed at its edge, pulled up right alongside, allowing their passengers to step smoothly onto it.

Tavros immediately slipped and fell, having never encountered such slick ice in all his life. The months helped him up, and along, having to pull him as he kept stiff, as any attempted step would send him flying off in a random direction.

Everything was white except for the dullest most obscured gray: the rock upon which the ice had all grown, draping in layer after layer like jungle ferns. Icicle waterfalls of many tiers formed gullies and outcroppings, some of the latter looking crafted as wedding cakes. There was no vegetation or animal life anywhere, not even the albatrosses and storm petrels that often nested in such places.

The island was without even a beach hospitable to crabs and seals. The ice extended all the way into the Water, so thickly that it couldn’t be determined if the dull darkness underneath was rock or sand.

“I’ve never seen such a place!” Tavros said, expelling an icy breath that seemed to fly away as if alive, into a frozen crevasse.

“The snowflake has,” Jan guessed. “This has to be where it came from!” There seemed little chance he was wrong, and even less when they slowly, carefully, spun the calendarist around a corner and looked up to see such a gargantuan wall of white ice and snow that they almost dropped him out of shock, which I can assure you would’ve caused him to slide backward all the way into the sea.

Stretched between small mountains, the wall was utterly featureless except for two deviations: striations where fresh snow, which now fell heavily around them in clumps like drifting spiderwebs, gave way to ice that was subtly bluer and a neat divot just off the ground.

The party reached the divot, Tavros steadying himself against the wall with two flat hands, careful not to generate the slightest backward momentum. He was correct in feeling that a single ant crawling under his boot would be able to send him sliding out of control. Turning his head was almost the same level of risk, but he had to in order to see the divot and confirm his suspicions.

It was the exact size and shape of the snowflake, at the perfect height for Feeb, who currently held it, to place it inside. She looked to her siblings and saw that another vote was not necessary in the slightest. They put their hands on her shoulders, and with a narrow nervous gesture, the taking of an unnecessary breath, she hefted the giant snowflake and slotted it in.

There came a sound, like the closing of a door within a cave within a drifting iceberg within a still sea within an ice age. A marvelous clink, like cubes in a drink, refreshing even me. New creases appeared in the wall, radiating out from the flake as it started to spin. Outlines much bigger than our friends became boxes. Inside them much of the ice shrank away, formed the many murals that had existed on the flake, though this time they were arranged side to side rather than in a spiral.

Again they saw each and every step of their adventure, now larger than life, and bittersweet pangs moved them to sorrowful syllables as they noticed on December’s magnified face that even her expressions were on this magnificent record. There was her zest for love and life. She was as flawless as the wall, never blemished with a speck of doubt. There simply wasn’t time for it in all her good days.

Like all glorious experiences, save for the amazing glacier race circa forty-five million years ago, it was fleeting. A mighty rumble traveled up the wall, split it in the middle, instantly conforming to any features that extended across the line like outstretched hands or life-relics. More splits rose all along the wall before the ice receded from their sides.

Right before them all the background of the images gave way, left only statues of themselves in their most dramatic moments astride columns of ice like the gates to a city. As they saw between they realized that was exactly what they were.

Dwellings stood everywhere, from low humble igloos to shimmering glassy townhouses of ice with diamond windows. Frozen rivers in a plush grass of snow made excellent roads that wound between transparent wells, inside of which circled many fish that had come up from the sea, eyes wide with the same curiosity plastered on the faces of the months of winter.

The fish were merely decoration for the true residents, who had all gathered in anticipation of their visitors. A hundred ice sculptures, all as alive as the months, dotted the paths and windows, waving and smiling in welcome.

Still other varieties of twice-living solid me were there, in shapes Tavros had never even considered. Happy snowballs rolled up to them, simple faces pressed into them by the thumbs of children who had irresponsibly borrowed their parents’ life-relics for some experimentation. Snow angels, naught but winged depressions in the fresh powder, swam about around the feet of the others in a silent and elegant dance while crude snowmen with coal and carrot noses, the only spots of color in the entire realm, flailed their twiggy arms in creaky salutations.

Many of them had voices, with which they celebrated the new arrivals in such a fervor that the tumblers grew bashful, crossing their legs and looking away. November drank it in, nodding his head, welcoming them right back with open arms and puffed chest as if they were visiting him.

The initial tide of warmth faded, and from it came a single figure: an ice sculpture woman whose unfinished base glided along like a fancy ruffled gown. She was the tallest of them all, surely her sculptors had used a ladder when scratching away to give her precise white ice-lashes and disguise their maker’s mark and initials in the canals of her ears. She spoke with a voice of spring rain and thunderstorm hail that was heard cold first, but warmed greatly on each echo.

“Welcome to you who have passed the test! I am Kalifrigik, but that is only one name. There are so many more for you to learn. We are so practiced that your three names will be a delight to add. What are they?”

“I’m January!”

“February!”

“I am November… but I am also confused. What is this place? And what was this test?” Kalifrigik pointed to each of the statues atop the columns, swirls of falling snow spiraling about them as she went, ending on a rendition of odious Barbary snatched into eternity by the snail-spirit.

“Tests provided by the world,” she explained, “but monitored by the snow-follower we sent to you. We’ve all done our best to hone and use the magic that animates us, but it took many generations, and many more deaths, for us to found this place in the north, where all with frozen blood may live safely.

We cannot bear to sit idly by while others, brought into the world irresponsibly,” her eyes and tone narrowed on the notary, “are left to melt in the worst fear. As soon as we detect that another is born we make and send a snow-follower, so that it may guide them to us.

But we are all capable of evil. Here in Laufi-La we have no violence, no structures of power, and we would never welcome them. The snow-follower has watched you carefully, marked goodness and misdeeds alike. It has determined that in your short lives, even under the duress of the sun, you have become good. You are citizens of Laufi-La.

Had you failed the wall would’ve been painted only with your shame. No sound would have escaped our side of the divide. It would remain up, and you would be turned away, left to drift like any other chunk of ice in the sea. Sadly, it has happened many times before. November, January, February, please step into the village. We are all eager to know you.” The months moved to obey, but Kalifrigik threw up one hand, and with it a geyser blast of snow. “First you must say your goodbyes to the human. They are not welcome here, noble as the follower has shown this one to be, for all of our safety.”

“I understand,” Tavros announced to the village, taking one step back, and as a result sliding a great distance until a bank of snow absorbed his feet. The months retreated to speak with him one final time. “I’m so proud of you all,” he said, giving up more breaths that swam into Laufi-La like leaping sailfish. “If they’ll allow it I will come and visit when I can; I’ll come with a proper ship and we can spend days on it. Until then… please take this.”

To November he handed Vander’s antler, which was treated reverently. The calendarist told them that, since they were likely to receive magic lessons from their new neighbors, they could use the relic to keep in contact with him. When they spoke into its end he would hear their words whispering out of his cowrie, just more sounds of the sea.

“Are you going back to your business?” Feeb asked him as professionally as she could, sniffling back tears and emotions that could still be seen sparkling under the surface of her nose and cheeks.

“No actually,” he said, finally making the decision real to himself, though he’d been mulling it over the whole time they were on the raft. “I’m going back to Zottovoir.” The trio flinched, but all Tavros did in response was chuckle. A fire burned in his chest despite the crushing cold all about him.

“Won’t being there make you sad?” Jan asked.

“Certainly. There’s a lot of magic there though, and something should be done with it. I don’t mean to get anyone’s hopes up, but it’s hard to avoid when mine are in the sky. You should know that I’ll be attempting to contact the animal spirit within once more. If it can take Inko out of our world and into the land of the dead… perhaps it can also escort December back to the land of the living. I want her back.”

“Good show man, good show,” November praised, crinkling his chin. “I’ll hardly be able to sing the praises of brotherhood without thinking about you. Best of luck.”

“Will you try and find her on the luckiest days?” Feeb asked, grin curling into mischief as she anticipated his answer.

“I promise to try every day,” Tavros said, crackle of passion in each fireplace word. “There is no circumstance in which she will not be worth the effort, for when she returns she will rob even the most rotten luck of its power to extinguish joy. She will be loved once more, and the days will blur together.”

And there’s a little bit more here and there, things you’ve guessed I’m sure. Tavros departs, the months make themselves at home in a way they hadn’t even dreamed of. All very nice. I know some of you wish to learn if the calendarist succeeds in resurrecting dear December, but that really wasn’t the point of this story, so stop asking.

The point was that you have a lot to learn about life from living the watery way, but that you also shouldn’t expect my help in situations both watery and grave. Yes… yes instinct is telling me I really should be wrapping this up. I must have quite the knack for this storytelling business. You’re welcome.

Do not attempt to contact me, as I won’t be listening. Just to make sure you don’t grow dependent on my figurative ear I’ll be making sure that I don’t hear or comprehend a single human thought or statement for at least two generations, that way all of you who might remember this narration firsthand will be long dead.

As I return you to the activities I froze you in you may experience a slight fall, no more than a couple inches. Whether or not you land on your feet is not a matter of luck, but your own skill entirely. I bear no responsibility for any injury.

Now I believe this is standard for all tales in the world of mortals, as you like the assurance that other things finish in much the same way you do, completely, and always somewhat unceremonious:

The End