As soon as we crested the mountain, we saw it. A tree, one so massive it seemed as though it was catching stars in its branches, the entirety of it coated in a thick layer of frost. Ice-coated branches glittered in the starlight, far above us. We stood in front of the tree’s trunk, insignificantly small in the face of its majesty. A foot of solid ice separated us from the tree’s bark.

Flare walked around the tree, businesslike motions carrying her efficiently to what she sought: a section of the ice with a thin seam marking out the shape of a door. Flare knocked on the ice.

It slid inward, and split apart, revealing a small charm-coated room carved into the trunk of the tree. As we walked in, I could see that not only was the ice impossibly thick on the tree, but the bark of the tree was impossibly thick as well. The sheer scale made me tremble. There was nothing in Scorched Rock like this. The entire town could probably fit under the tree’s canopy.

The door sealed shut behind us, and then the room began to accelerate upwards. I stumbled. Flare remained perfectly still. I made a small noise of shock. Flare remained perfectly silent. I tried to steady myself, to hold my jaw stubbornly shut. Witches, it seemed, were supposed to be unflappable. Flare hadn’t said as much to me over the course of our travels, but I’d gathered it was the case.

The room stopped moving, and I stumbled again. The door opened onto the interior of the tree, and I had to choke down a gasp as Flare tucked her witch-stone into her coat and led me out the short hallway.

The interior of the tree had been hollowed out, going up and up to a domed ceiling painted with intricate designs. Balcony after balcony ringed this open hollow space, and I could see hallways forming intricate warrens into the wood around each balcony. People moved with industrious purpose in and out of these hallways.

Most wondrously of all, the air was warm without any central flame being present. I wandered out into the middle of the massive room, and turned to look up at the domed ceiling and all the balconies. Flare caught up to me at the same time the sole person on the ground floor did.

“You must be the travellers our watchmen spotted,” he said. “I am the Steward Jaokin. Welcome to Crownsbreak.”

Flare nodded. “I am Flare. This is my apprentice.”

“We have beds prepared for any travellers coming our way. Please, follow me.”

Jaokin walked away, towards a hallway containing a staircase. Flare followed. I jogged to keep up. Both of them had much longer legs than I did.

As we walked, I asked, “How come nobody’s on this floor?”

Jaokin didn’t answer. Flare didn’t say anything either. I tried a different question. “Why is it so warm in here? There’s no forge.”

This question, Jaokin did answer. “Forge? We have forges, but the heat here in Crownsbreak doesn’t come from them, primarily. We save our heat, here. Every living body makes heat, and this tree makes sure that heat stays inside.”

I could feel my thoughts dancing through my skull, each one yammering something different and vaguely incoherent about how this setup could possibly work. How thick the tree’s wall had to be, how many people must live inside it, where they got all their food and water from. Enough thoughts that they all drowned each other out and left me silent as we ascended three flights of stairs.

“The rooms for travelers are this way. You will be in rooms six and seven,” Jaokin said.

I blinked. My mess of thoughts neatened themselves up, and asked a new question. “So, do you get many travelers, then?”

“No,” Jaokin said.

“Why aren’t we in rooms one and two, then?”

“They aren’t ready.” Jaokin refused to elaborate. Flare remained quiet. Jaokin pointed out a staircase that would take us to a mess hall where we could eat for as long as we stayed, and where we could take provisions for when the time came for us to resume our journey. Jaokin also pointed out a stairway to a marketplace where we could trade for anything else we might need.

The room I was shown to was small, and plain, save for intricate wooden carvings in the furniture. Flare thanked Jaokin. Jaokin left, telling Flare that if she needed anything else, she could simply ask for directions to the Steward’s office. Flare nodded. Jaokin left.

As soon as Jaokin had vanished from sight, Flare turned to me and said, “Let’s go see room one.”

I nodded, and followed her out. When we got to the door, Flare held up a finger, telling me to wait. A charm leapt from her fingertips onto the door, and I heard a soft click as the door unlocked. Flare said, “Open,” afterwards for my benefit. I nodded, trying to commit the charm to memory.

Flare opened the door and stepped inside.

The mattress was shredded. Straw littered the floor. The bedframe had been torn to splinters. Claw marks marred the walls. The dresser had crumpled inwards. Flare walked in and picked up one of the bedframe-splinters. On the end of it was dried blood.

“A monster?” I asked.

Flare looked at the destruction around her, then continued to pick though it. A large number of the splinters were tinged with blood. There was a piece of a torn-off fingernail, as well. I grimaced.

Flare moved some of the straw aside, revealing dried bloodstains on the floor. “Old,” Flare said. Why hadn’t they cleaned it up?

Flare stood and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her. “Keep quiet. They didn’t want us to know.”

I nodded. Then I said, “What now?”

“Now, we sleep. I’m tired.” With that, Flare walked off towards her room. I didn’t follow her. Flare might have been tired, but I could feel terror and awe and excitement in my limbs. There was no way I could sleep. I headed for the marketplace.

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“Leaving?” My father’s voice sounded small and faraway. He was sitting in a study that was already starting to thaw, little drips of water coming down from the ceiling and splashing into a puddle under his feet. His inkpot had spilled, and the ink was running down off his desk onto his hand and knee. He didn’t notice.

“I promised her,” I said, and the words tasted like a lie. “I promised I would go with her if she saved the town.”

A drop of water fell onto my father’s forehead. “Grace…” he said, and then nothing. He always prepared his words. He wasn’t prepared for this.

“I know,” I said. “Or, I think? The town was going to freeze, and if I didn’t do everything I could I would have to watch everyone slowly freeze and I couldn’t do that.”

“The story I told you…”

I shook my head. “No, it’s not that. Or, thanks to it I offered in time, and that doesn’t meant that it’s your fault what had to be done.”

He didn’t say anything, and I scrambled to fill the silence.

“It’s what had to happen, we had to save the forge, everyone here is depending on the forge to stay lit. We can’t leave, even the harvesters can barely get out to where the good ice is. So it needs to stay. And even if that means I need to leave it behind, I’m willing to do that.”

“You don’t want to stay,” he realized. A mouthful of half-lies was swallowed. A mouthful of complete lies came up.

“Of course I want to stay. I have so many…memories here. And of course, there’s you, and I don’t want to leave you behind. I just have to go.”

“She’s not making you go, you want to leave. You want to go out there.” My father said it in the same voice he read obituaries out in. Would he write one for me, when I left?

“I…” The lies stopped coming. We both knew they were lies. Why make more? “This is my one chance to go see what’s out there. To learn who’s out there, what’s out there, everything. I’ve never been outside Scorched Rock.”

My father’s head bowed. His eyes locked onto his lap. He said, “Grace, that’s the world that took your mother.”

“It won’t take me. I won’t let it. I’ll come back,” I promised. I could feel the witch standing behind me, could almost hear her saying that I wouldn’t. But even if I didn’t come back, it would still be here. It would be able to live, and I would be able to go see what lived in the deadly cold.

I said, “I’ll live. We’ll live. You’ll live. Everyone lives. A fairy tale ending. A happy ending.” My father cringed as though I’d hit him.

“This isn’t enough for you.” He looked up at me. “Why can’t you stay? The town is saved. The forge is fixed. Why can’t you just stay?”

There was a moment of silence.

“I don’t want you to leave.” He gulped. He opened his mouth, and closed it again, and then said, “I did say that you could use your own judgement. I don’t want you to go, and I didn’t want… your mother to go. But I couldn’t stop her.”

He looked away, at his desk. He righted the spilled inkpot. A few tears mingled with the water from the thawing study.

I hugged him, and he stiffly said, “Goodbye.”

The witch led me back out, to the edge of the town’s warmth. I had said goodbye to my father. It would have to be enough. My father was strong. And I wasn’t dying. I was starting a new story.

The lantern with the witch-stone came out. “Stay close,” Flare said. I stood within the reach of its golden light, and I could feel a little bit of warmth touch the cold shard in my heart that leaving my father created. It still hurt, but hurt was something that could be lived with.

We walked. The frost fled from Flare’s footsteps, and I scurried to keep up with her. For the first time, the town began to recede behind me. For the first time, I saw grass return to life under the warm witch-stone light. For the first time, I saw the forest from a new side. Wonder, to keep wearing away at that little heart-wound.

I adjusted my pack. It wasn’t heavy. Clothes, and a piece of amber. Essentials.

I walked.

---

The witch turned away from the town. One more on a long list of towns behind her. Unremarkable.

But it had produced something interesting. The girl walking behind her. A girl whose wanderlust burst at the seams, whose eyes drank detail in greedily. Perhaps a girl who would never call a town unremarkable.

A girl who experimented. She’d created a charm all her own. Limited use, perhaps, better charms existed and could be taught, but functionality was hardly the point. The point was that it was new. Novel. A fresh breath into the dusty mind-halls the witch stored her charms in. Who could say what a girl like that might find? It would be a crime to leave her trapped in her hometown, forever drinking in details she could never reach.

Separations were never easy. The witch could still picture her own, down to the soup-stains on her ratty jacket and each individual tear on her mother’s face. But there was a long line of towns the witch had left behind her now. If the first town she’d left was still fresh in her mind, it was at least easy to drown out.

The witch turned to the girl, and said, “I think that you’ll make a good witch.”

Then the witch continued walking, and the girl followed close behind, and the witch could almost hear the thoughts buzzing in the girl’s head. And if the girl cried any tears, the witch did not notice them fall, and the glittering frozen droplets were lost among the countless stars.

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When I went back to the marketplace, the crowd around Flare’s little place on the ground had vanished. I could guess what happened. The offers weren’t enough for Flare.

“Would you take me?” I asked.

Flare looked up at me. She didn’t immediately shake her head. I pressed on with my idea.

“Me, in exchange for saving the town. I would travel with you, and you could teach me what you knew. If you wanted to. In exchange, you would fix our forge.”

She continued to stare. I didn’t have anything else to say, really. I’d already worn through what little glimmerings of a plan I’d been able to weave together. But the silence stretched, and I tried to fill it.

“You’re a witch. And you travel the world, but you travel it alone. And I think, it might be valuable to you to have someone to teach. Or to travel with you. And I want, Scorched Rock is the only world I know, right now. So if I could get you to fix it, to save it from the slow death it’s been suffering. I don’t know. But I would travel with you.”

Flare nodded, and pushed herself to her feet. A thrill ran through me, running from my fingertips up through my mind and down to the soles of my feet. My hands clenched and unclenched. I had a sudden urge to move, to dance, to grin.

Instead, I just followed Flare as she walked towards the forge. It felt unceremonious, somehow. Saving everyone I’d ever known felt like it should carry more weight. People should be told, there should be cheering, there should be something to mirror my heart. Flare cast the charm to protect us from the heat, as though it was something she did every day. We entered, without asking permission from anyone.

Flare raised one hand, and rudely pulled another charm into being. I could maybe half-recognize noise on one side of it, and silence on the other. It was a combination which made no sense to me. How could a charm be both?

She whistled, and while the whistle was no louder than it would ordinarily be, it somehow cut through every other noise in the forge and made itself heard. Curious heads turned towards us all around the forge. The forgemaster came jogging over.

“What?” the forgemaster asked.

“I’m ready to fix the forge now,” Flare responded, and the forgemaster’s eyes crept down to me. I couldn’t resist the urge to smile. The forgemaster gave me a respectful nod.

“What’s the problem, then?” the forgemaster asked. “And, if you wouldn’t mind, I would like to know how you could figure out something in a few moments of inspection when none of us have been able to find a single flaw in nearly a decade of work.”

Flare looked at her, then she said, “What do you know of monsters?”

The forgemaster didn’t respond.

“I thought so. Information about monsters never travels far or preserves well. If you’ve heard anything, I expect you’ve heard half-baked superstitions at best.”

The forgemaster scowled. “There’s no monster in this forge,” she said. She seemed to take it as an insult, even.

“There’s the other thing. Information about monsters paints them as obvious threats. Bloodthirsty. That’s rarely true,” Flare said, and as she did, she reached down and, seemingly at random, picked up a piece of coal. Without another word, she walked out of the forge. I jogged to catch up to her. The forgemaster walked to catch up to me.

Outside, Flare sat down on her little rug, reached into her coat, and pulled out a pot with a stand, a small tin, and a flask of water. The forgemaster stared. Flare poured water into the pot, placed the pot on the stand, and opened the tin. The tin held a small fire charm. The water began to boil. A vein stood out on the forgemaster’s head.

When the water bubbled, the forgemaster did too. “What are you doing?” she roared.

Instead of saying anything, Flare dropped the piece of coal into the pot. “Testing something,” she said, and as she did, the water stopped boiling. The forgemaster’s face creased in confusion. Flare gestured to the now-still water. “There’s your problem.”

Flare reached in and plucked the coal out, tossing it to the forgemaster. The water began to bubble again. The forgemaster’s confusion creased further. Flare began to speak. “Gauldite. Fool’s Pyre. A monster which disguises itself as coal, and sneaks its way into great congregations of the stuff. It feeds off of heat, and is the source of the forge’s flame weakening. You’ve been infested.”

The forgemaster began to speak, but Flare cut her off. “Touch each piece of coal in your forge. Throw out any that are cold. The forge should go back to normal. Inspect any new coal you bring in, ensure you don’t get infested again.” The forgemaster opened her mouth to speak, then closed it, then opened it, then turned and walked back into the forge. Flare packed up her things.

I said, “That rock was a monster?”

Flare turned to look at me. “Yes,” she said. “Witches know monsters.” That was all the explanation I got. Then a strange look glinted in Flare’s eye, and she said, “What was the charm you used to scale that building? I’d never seen it before.”

I showed her the sticky-fingers charm. She listened to my explanation in silence, letting me talk about the kitchens I’d watched up close, and the way I’d seen caramel made, and the way I’d wondered if I could use a charm to get something caramel-like to happen.

Flare turned and cast it without a second thought, then dispelled it. “Interesting,” she said.

A wave of heat shoved past me, and I stumbled. I looked, and behind me was a stunned forgekeeper with a wheelbarrow of coal. Behind them was the forge, as I’d never seen it before. I could see tongues of flame dancing up out the top of the forge into the starry sky, a bright orange glow suffusing the streets around us, the roar of the forge escaping for the first time I’d ever heard.

The forgemaster, hands coated in soot, came dashing out of the forge, but Flare was already walking away. She gestured for me to follow. I did.

Behind us, I could hear the forgemaster bellowing thanks. Flare didn’t even break her stride. Instead, she said to me, “You should say goodbye to your father.”

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He didn’t say anything, not at first. My father just sat down next to me on the step, and put a hand on my back, and let me cry. Tears were part of life, he’d said. He’d seen a lot of them. It was part and parcel of obituaries.

It didn’t feel like a part of life, caught up in the tears as I was. It felt like I was trapped there, miserable feelings coming streaming out of my eyes and dripping down onto my hands and pooling around my shoes. It felt like everyone and everything I ever knew being condemned to a slow frigid death. It felt like it would never end, the tears and emotions just whirling faster until the ice came for me too and then my tears would freeze to my face and my feelings would freeze in my head and I would be stuck in that misery for the rest of forever.

That didn’t happen. The emotions whirled themselves down to a murmur, the tears stopped flowing quite so hard, I blew my nose on my father’s handkerchief. I breathed in, and out, and I felt like I could be human again.

“You okay?” my father asked. He knew the answer already, but it was the thing to say. Just like the study was where the father worked, or that the washing got done on Wednesdays. Simple. Easy. I wanted to cry again.

I didn’t. Instead I said, “I don’t know how to help.”

He rubbed my back and waited for more. I could feel the words building up in my throat, and I tried to put them in some semblance of order before they came gushing out. “Flare, the witch, she wants something, she wants something really meaningful, and then she’ll fix the forge and save the town, and I thought, I figured, she used a charm and I think it was an amber charm on me because I was following her so I thought maybe if I gave her mine she’d save everyone but then she didn’t take it and it’s here and the ice is right there and I don’t know what to do!”

My dad stared off into the ice for a moment. I could see it creeping closer down the road, tree-branching its way inexorably towards me and my dad. I turned and stared off towards the forge. An iron giant, warming the whole town, failing now, and the only person who could save it wanted something I couldn’t give because I didn’t know what it was.

My father said, “There are stories about witches, you know.”

“Fairy tales?” I asked. I’d heard one or two of those. The one which came to mind was one where a witch lived in a massive ice crystal outside of town. One day a man who wanted a gift to win his sweetheart’s love went to see the witch. The witch gave him three tests, or something, and then he got to choose a gift, and he chose something simple, and it turned out to have some sort of immense value. I couldn’t remember the details. It had been a long time since I’d heard it.

“This one isn’t a fairy tale,” my father said. “Just a story. I feel like there’s a grain of truth in it, but you can use your own judgement.”

I nodded, and wiped the tears from my eyes, and listened.

“The story is about a young girl, much like yourself, who loved to explore nature. The world was warmer, then, warm enough that you could venture out onto the ice without needing charms, so long as you dressed in warm clothes and covered your face.”

I pictured it. It was difficult. For as long as I’d known, the cold was a death sentence, no matter who you were, if you didn’t have a charm to ward you against it. Even then, it wasn’t easy to venture out onto the ice. The harvesters were willing to risk it, to bring back ice to drink, but it was a dangerous job. Mother had been a harvester. Father wrote at least one harvester obituary a month.

“The girl lived in a town on a mountainside. The town had no forge, for in those days the chill could be blocked out by a sturdy enough house. The girl, though, longed for the outdoors whenever she was indoors, and one day, she set out to explore the world, and come back to her village with news of what she found.”

I could understand that. There was a world out there.

“She packed food, and clothes, and a tent to pitch, and she went off into the world. Now, in those days, water wasn’t nearly as difficult to gather. It would fall from the sky, in fact, liquid and drinkable, needing no purification. In this way, the girl sustained herself as she walked.”

That was hard to believe. Water from the sky? Where would it come from?

“She walked, and walked, and walked, until eventually she’d walked so far she reached a place where the cold became like our cold. Deadly cold. And the girl could progress no further. She walked anyways, looking to see what she could be missing out on. As she traveled along this boundary she came to a witch living in an old tree, caked with ice.”

A witch! Living alone? Who did she talk to? Who did she rely on?

“The girl knocked on the old tree’s door, and the witch answered. She was a woman as old and gnarled and frost-covered as the tree she lived in, and she asked the girl what she wanted. The girl said she wanted to travel on. The witch said she could help with that, that she could give the girl a gift that made the cold stand at bay, and that would give her a life as long as that of the witch herself, and that would be the key to a whole new world of charms. All she asked was a simple bargain in exchange.”

It sounded too good to be true. Maybe the girl thought that too.

“The witch wanted the girl’s firstborn child. Whenever the girl had a child, and when that child reached its seventh birthday, for seven is a charmed number, the witch would come to collect it. There would be no issue should the girl die before she could give birth, no issue should the girl choose not to give birth. The girl agreed, for she could not imagine staying at home long enough to have a child, much less to raise one to seven years old.”

“The girl agreed, and the witch gave the girl a witch-stone, and with the witch-stone in hand the girl ventured forth, and found many strange things in the distant lands where not it is too cold for any charm to protect from.”

“Eventually, though, the girl grew homesick. She followed the warmer air back to her home village, and there she was greeted by a man that would become her husband, and eventually father her a child. The girl had adventured for so long that she’d forgotten the promise she made to the witch. Her family was happy, but when the child reached her seventh birthday, the witch appeared out of the ice and stole her away, citing the bargain the girl had made.”

“The girl charged out into the wilds again for the first time in seven years, looking for her child, looking for the witch to beg her to give the child back. She wandered, and wandered, heartbroken, searching and searching, but she never found her. She wandered for so long even the witch-stone couldn’t protect her, for nothing lasts forever, and in time the ice came to claim her body, freezing it solid in a canyon a lifetime away from here.”

The poor girl.

“So, beware of a deal a witch makes, for they feel no qualms stealing your body, your lifeblood, and your soul away from you, should you be reckless.”

We were silent for a moment more. I could feel an idea beginning to fit together in my mind. The barest glimmerings of a plan, dancing just at the edge of my perception. Steal your body, your lifeblood, and your soul. These things were valuable to a witch. They were precious in a way other things couldn’t be. Witches, at least in the story, were alone. They had the world at their fingertips, but they were alone.

I rubbed the last of the tears from my eyes, and hugged my father. Flare had come alone. I whispered, “Thank you,” into his ear. He guided me to the dinner table, and prepared dinner for me. Flare was a witch. I ate mechanically. He guided me up to my new bed. I lay down. Flare wanted something proper.

In the darkness, I could feel the pieces begin to fit. My father wouldn’t like it. It was an idea that would break my father’s heart. But better my father be heartbroken than frozen in his study, midway through writing the town’s obituary.

I dreamed of travel.

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My father was in his study when I got back. I could hear his teeth chattering as he mumbled his words back to himself. I greeted him and asked if he needed anything. He needed tea; he’d forgotten to drink his old cup and it had frozen solid. I put a teapot on to boil.

Then I walked over to where my old room was. The door was encrusted with ice, little tree-branching jewels clutching its surface tight. It had been the solid brown of wood, before, but the ice had lightened it a shade or two. I used a rag to touch the doorknob without burning my hands, then tried to open it. The rag just slipped around the doorknob. I grimaced, then stuffed the rag in a pocket and activated the sticky-fingers charm. Then I grabbed the doorknob.

The cold burned, channeled through the metal to my hands in a way that made me want to scream and flinch away from it. Instead, I began to wrestle with the doorknob, trying to force it to move so I could open the door.

It wouldn’t budge. I let go, hands red and burning from the contact. The teapot whistled. I poured my dad a new cup of tea, then placed it on a coaster that was now stuck to his writing desk. I still had about half a pot of boiling water left.

I poured it over the doorknob. A little splashed against my shoes, but the nice solid material kept the heat from roasting my feet. Then I tried the sticky-fingers charm again, and the knob turned. I kept the pot of boiling water with me. If nothing else, the steam would be a decent bit of warmth in there.

Slamming into the door with my shoulder two or three times opened it just enough for me to slip inside.

Inside was my old room, petrified. I stepped carefully as I entered, trying not to slip. The air bit into my skin, gnawing at me, forcing numbness into my fingers and toes and nose and ears. My bed was still as death, still a mess from when I had slept in it last, every ridge and wrinkle in its rumpled mass held perfectly still. My little dresser was sealed shut, the clothes inside held in a static prison, stored away eternally. And on top of my dresser were all my little childhood treasures, now unsalvageable permanent fixtures.

There was the rainbow-colored stone that I had found in an alleyway, discarded by someone, happened upon by chance. There was the iron tree statue, given to me by Katrine on the last day I saw her alive. There was the broken pet-collar I had kept, in case I ever happened upon the long-lost Lethe. And sitting at the end of the row of treasures was the block of amber.

A little honey-colored stone, inside which the little two-winged creature would move no more. It would never shift, or flap its wings, instead staying in this one little moment for the rest of eternity. I looked up, and around at my room, and shivered. This wasn’t a good place to linger in.

It was frozen fast to the dresser. I wrestled with it for a moment, ignoring the pain in my hands, then I gave up and poured boiling water over it until it came loose. My own little block of amber. After the charm she cast on me, I thought it might make her happy enough to save my home. How many people knew what amber was, after all?

I escaped my room with no unfortunate slipping, and warmed myself up by making a quick dinner and going to bed and nestling myself under the covers. I was thoroughly exhausted after so much charm-work, and I needed sleep. It was sweet and dreamless, and by the time I woke up again the cold had left me.

A crowd had been spilled across the marketplace. It rippled, offers radiating into the center like little waves. Words, numerous enough to be incoherent, rose up from the crowd like steam off my father’s tea. I clambered up a nearby building to get a better view.

Sure enough, at the center of the commotion, sitting on a small rug that none in the crowd dared step on, was Flare. Every so often she would look directly at someone, and shake her head, and the crowd would just expel them, sending them spinning off dejectedly into the marketplace.

And, from here, I could see what they were bringing. Money, food, jewelry, books, precious precious things. A whole sea of offerings to get Flare to save the town, and none of it appealed to her.

I climbed back down, but I could feel my heart beginning to pound. What if she didn’t want my little piece of amber? What would I do then? There was no charm I knew to just make things exist, there was no charm I knew to convince someone of something, my charms only did simple things, little things, practical things. If she didn’t want the amber, I didn’t know what I would do.

I started trying to push my way into the crowd, but I was just a teen. These were adults, many of them forge-workers, huge and burly and able to bat me out of the way without a second thought. The crowd’s ripples and flows were so hard to see up close, becoming just a miserable awful jumble of noise that I couldn’t navigate.

Then I spotted an opening, and without thinking I dove into it, and then I was squeezed tight in the crowd’s hold, helpless against its whims and eddies and whorls. It was a mad dance, and one I had little to no control over. All I could do was try, and push and make for the witch at the eye of the storm.

It took a lot of time, and a lot of bruises from elbows and knees, but finally I made it to the front. I caught my breath, just for a moment, and Flare’s eyes locked on me.

Wordlessly, I held up the amber.

She took it, and turned it over in her hands, and I could feel hope suddenly burst inside my chest, that maybe things would work out, that my home would be saved. She placed it back in my hands. She shook her head. The crowd expelled me.

My father found me sitting on the front step of the house, crying.

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“Get down here,” Flare said.

I put the sticky-fingers charm back on my hands and climbed down the side of the building. Flare walked over to me, grabbed a hand, and inspected my charm before I had a chance to dispel it. Then she let go of my hand and said, “Do you know who I am?”

I shook my head. I knew she was a traveller, and one who knew a lot, but I hadn’t heard who she was.

“I’m a witch,” she said. “Follow if you want, but know that.”

I nodded. She was a witch. I didn’t know much about what that meant, but the way she talked to the forgemaster told me that witches were phenomenally important. The charm she’d trapped me in told me that witches knew magic. The way my heart thundered in my chest and my mouth refused to make words told me that witches had presence, or Flare did at least.

She turned to keep walking with the forgemaster, and I scurried to catch up.

“You were saying?” the forgemaster said.

“What have the sigils been doing?” Flare asked. “Have they changed at all?”

The forgemaster shook her head. “No, they’ve all seemed fine. They glow with a stable light, none have been scratched or marred, I doubt anything is wrong there.”

Flare asked another question about the sigils, this one involving technical details I didn’t understand. The sigils carved into the great forge took years of dedicated, careful study to understand, and I hadn’t had the time for that sort of thing, helping my father with the house. The conversation around sigils stretched on, and we began to near the forge itself.

“How about fuel? What fuels it?” Flare asked.

“The flame itself comes from the earth, a flammable gas of some sort. We bolster its heat with coal,” the forgemaster said, “But the coal only gets changed every so often.”

Flare nodded. “The sigils on the inside,” she said, and the forgemaster nodded.

We arrived. Flare looked up at the great forge, her expression a cold consideration. Not taking her eyes off it, she stretched a hand out and began to twist a charm onto it. But she didn’t stop with the one, which was already a complex one I didn’t recognize.  She kept twisting, layering a second charm atop the first.

That stunned me. Was that possible? I’d put charms together before, but putting them on top of each other, I didn’t know what that would do, or how it would work. It seemed impossible to hold a charm’s form while in that soft limbo of it being cast and then continuing to hold it there while beginning a second one.

Flare pushed the two charms outwards, and together they released a pulse of magic that took the heat-shimmer around the forge and made it bend and twist and ripple for just a moment. Then she asked, “Can I see inside?”

The forgemaster nodded, and walked to the door that dwarfed even her, right at the front of the forge. Flare raised a hand, and brought down from the empty air something which was almost the chill charm I’d seen the forgekeepers use to keep themselves from catching fire. Almost, but slightly changed. An extra slash through the glyph, an extra swirl at the end.

Then my whole body shivered, and I realized what had been different. She’d modified the charm to cover both of us. I took that as tacit permission, and took my first steps into the forge behind her.

Awe crackled through my body. The great forge’s inside was something incredible, a work of engineering that dwarfed anything else. We stood on a metal lip on the bottom story, but I could see balcony after balcony all the way up the forge, workers maintaining glyphs on the upper floors or handling coal. Every balcony had a trim of coal, barely visible through the flames, that forced the flames to rise further all the way up the structure. Even the bottom floor had a ring of coal lit aflame.

I could feel wind rushing from one of the sigils beside us, and see more sigils of that sort gleaming all around the floors. Sigils which directed the fires inwards, focusing them into the central channel. The massive archways in the forge, then, served as vents for that air after the fire had superheated it, so that it could blast out and cover the whole town.

Then the fire flickered and sputtered for a moment, and I saw the giant hole in the center of the floor, the source of the flame. A great, gaping maw in the earth, descending into darkness, jagged stone teeth and a fiery roar. Then the flame caught again and hid it from view.

Flare walked out to the edge of the metal lip we were on, and began to inspect the coal. She would pick up a chunk, examine it, and then place it carefully in the spot where she left it. A forgekeeper with a long, sturdy-looking metal rake walked by, shifting the coal with the rake so as to keep it burning steadily on all sides. Flare allowed the forgekeeper to pass by her, raking through the coal that was under inspection, before finally going back to work.

I watched her as closely as I could, but the flame was mesmerizing. It was easy to lose yourself in the blanket of heat, watching the flame lick in directions at random, seeing embers and smoke roar up off of it, listening to the crackling noise’s peace. If I could, I would stay here all day, simply watching the place dance around me, the forgekeepers in a maintenance-waltz around this tamed monster.

Flare stood. She walked back over to the forgekeeper. “I know what the problem is,” she said, “But it’s a difficult one.”

The forgekeeper’s expression was pained. “Can you fix it?” she asked.

Flare nodded. “I can,” she said. “First, though, what will you give me in return?”

The forgemaster blinked. “Well, there are all sorts of items in the market the harvesters came back with. I can give you those. I’m afraid food is a little tighter, but I’m sure we can provide provisions–”

Flare cut her off with a gaze. Flare said, “As I told the child, I am a witch. I will stay in town for three days. Bring me something proper before then, and I will repair your forge for you. Otherwise, I will have to leave you to your own devices, and hope you survive.”

The forgemaster looked pained. I thought. Something proper. Something proper. I left and headed back to my house. Something proper, to save my home.

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The traveller moved like a cloud. She moved with a silent, still grace, but all of us felt her shadow pass overhead, bringing snow and hail. The crowd melted before her, nobody wanting to be around for when the things she forecast began to fall.

She stopped walking at the very edge of our town, content to wait in the cold rather than press forward. It was easy to tell that she could, though. Whatever tidings a traveller brought, nobody wanted to get in the way of them.

I couldn’t help myself, though. My eyes refused to leave her, drinking in every detail of the person who had been beyond the horizon. She carried no pack, but the inside of her coat shone with charms. She carried a twisted iron lantern, inside which a golden rock shone. Her hair was long, and as a little breeze stirred, it was carried just outside the reach of her lantern’s light, dusting the ends with a slight layer of ice.

Otherworldly, was my thought. I wanted to ask: what worlds have you seen? Where have you been? What’s out there, in the endless ice? Her presence kept me quiet, though. It was hard enough to talk to normal adults, to try and glean a new charm or a scrap of harvester gossip. A woman like this? It felt as though my voice had drifted into the cold, like her hair did. Observing was easier. It let the barriers between us stay up.

The forgemaster pushed her way through the crowd, my father at her heels. The pair of them made quite a sight. My father was a slight man, with thin delicate hands and a thin pair of spectacles that always seemed to be moments away from toppling off his nose. The forgemaster was a head taller than him, her hair shaved off like all those who worked the forge so it wouldn’t become an alight snack for the forge’s flames. My father stooped a little, long hours inside the study doing nothing for his posture. The forgemaster stood tall, her shoulders wide, an imperious expression on her face.

“This is Scorched Rock,” the forgemaster said.

The traveler bowed her head.

“Welcome,” the forgemaster said.

The traveller stepped over the edge of the town. She tucked her lantern into her coat, and a brief flare of light inside it told me she wore a kind of storage charm around her.

“Where are you from?” the forgemaster asked. I crept a little closer. I hadn’t known there were other wheres to be from at all.

The traveler said, simply, “Nowhere.”

“Your name?”

“Flare.”

“I am Juno,” the forgemaster said. “Our forge has been flickering, since before I was placed in charge of it. Can you help?”

Flare said, “Let me see.”

The forgemaster looked around herself at the crowd. She bellowed, in her forge-work yell, “Don’t you have homes to get to?” The crowd vanished in moments.

My father slipped past me, into the house. I didn’t move. Curiosity held me fast. I watched the ice every day, but here was someone who lived it. Who walked through it like it was nothing. Who the cold couldn’t stop. Curiosity was bright and hungry, and it carried me along in the wake of Juno and Flare as they began to walk.

“We haven’t had a traveller in a long time,” the forgemaster said, as they walked. “Do you have news? I remember my father telling me there was a town on the other side of the mountains, Gleamridge. Have you passed through there?”

The traveller said, “Gleamridge is gone. The scar in the earth they drew their heat from has cooled.”

There was a moment of silence as they walked. Then the forgemaster said, “Could you have helped? The stone you carry, it’s a witch-stone, isn’t it? I’ve heard stories.”

Flare didn’t respond. Instead, she turned and looked at me over her shoulder. She reached out with one hand, and I could see her fingers begin to shine with a charm’s light, tracing out a form I had never seen before. She wrenched the air, and a sigil shone under my feet. I was trapped in a thin cylinder of light.

“Eavesdropping is wrong, girl,” Flare said, and her tone made me flinch. I’d been rebuffed by others for poking my nose into things, but hearing it from someone who’d come so far made the words hang with the weight of every mile she’d traveled. Then she turned to walk with the forgemaster again, leaving me trapped in the street.

This wasn’t magic like I’d seen before. But I could learn. I knelt down to the sigil under my feet, as they walked away. It was complex, twisting whorls and hard edges mixing to create a symbol I had never seen before. But I had seen things like it. If I blocked one half of it out of my vision, I could see the charm-symbol for ice. If I blocked the other half, I could see the charm-symbol for plant.

In the forge, the harvesters sometimes brought trinkets they’d found to sell. One of the trinkets that caught my eye was a golden-yellow stone, inside which a small strange creature with many legs and two wings had been trapped. I had asked my father to buy it for me, and when he did he happened to ask what exactly the stone was. The merchant had told him it was called amber, and it was a stone made from the sticky sap inside trees hardening under the ground for ages. I kept it in the house, on the side farthest from the cold, to keep it safe. I didn’t understand it, and that made it exciting.

And, looking at the sigil under my feet, I thought that was what it might mean. Tree-ice. Amber. I traced the sigil with a finger, trying to commit it to memory. Then I reached inside the sigil, and bent it, and the barrier vanished from around me. There was a charm-maker in town who liked me, Katrine, and she’d once shown me how she unmade faulty charms that her customers occasionally brought to her that had frozen themselves onto their belongings. She had passed away the year before. I still remembered the obituary my father had written for her.

Flare and the forgemaster were long gone at this point, and Flare had made it clear she didn’t want to be followed.

I made for the building nearest me, and as I did, I activated my own little sticky-fingers charm. This was a charm I’d figured out for myself, once upon a time. The sweetening charm chefs used on their food mingled with the heat charm they used to heat it to coat my fingers in sticky, gooey magic. It was a relatively simple charm, but it was also mine, because nobody needed to be able to climb walls. No job required wall-climbing. There were a couple charms like that I knew, charms I’d discovered for myself because nobody else needed them.

I scaled the front of a building. Someone passing by below looked at me, then kept walking. A lot of the town was used to me, honestly. There goes Grace, the quiet charm-girl. Figuring out something else useless.

Once on the rooftops, I let go of the charm so as not to strain myself, and then I ran for the forge. I’d see the forgemaster with Flare at some point.

A jumping charm let me cross the streets without having to climb back down. Normally they were just used to harvest fruit from trees in the tower-farms, but I’d found that if you were running, you could leap vast distances while barely breaking stride.

I was starting to tire, though. This many charms one after the other was hard work, especially when I usually only used one or two in a day.

Finally I made it to where Flare and the forgemaster were walking, and I could pick up their conversation again.

“That’s exactly it,” the forgemaster was saying. “There shouldn’t be anything wrong, but every year homes are lost as the flame dies.”

Flare said, “I think I can help. What–” Flare cut herself off abruptly, and then she held up a hand for the forgemaster to wait. And then she turned to look directly at where I was sitting on the rooftop.

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The world glittered.

The sky had lost its sun, but the stars still twinkled. Their thin, pale light shone on a world of ice. Old, petrified past-forests, leafless and stone-stiff, stood amidst a valley where cold misty winds blew. Massive rocks bathed in frost stood silently over the scene, monoliths watching over the stillness.

Magic lived here, and little else.

A woman crunched her way through the frost, a girl in tow. She held a lantern, in which a golden rock glowed. The stone’s light touched the frost, and for a moment, the frost was gone. The lit patch of road she traveled on appeared as it did in life, a dusty trail up through the mountains.

She looked back, for a moment. Behind her, in the distant dark, was a red-orange gleam of light. The town of Scorched Rock.

She remembered what she did there.

---

Our house was starting to freeze.

It was worst in the room that used to be my room. My old bed was rimed with ice, the little desk totally covered in frost, the door stuck to the doorframe, the doorknob so cold it burned skin. I didn’t sleep in there. Not anymore. It wasn’t as though I’d lost much to the cold anyway. I had never spent much time in there.

It was nearly as bad in the room my father still insisted on using as his study. Sitting down, carefully handwriting obituaries with hands shaking from the cold, breath stumbling in misty bursts out into the air, glasses fogging enough that he’d have to stop to shakily wipe them every five minutes like clockwork. He still wouldn’t hear any thoughts of stopping, though. He insisted on using that study, even when he had to go out and thaw the ink in his inkwell every so often.

It made it hard to do the washing. The clothesline had been right on the edge of our little yard, that space where the only the very last whispers of the great forge’s heat reached, beyond which was nothing but the stars twinkling in the sky and endless stretches of glittering crystallized ice.

Sometimes, after hanging the washing up to dry on the new clothesline I’d strung across the yard’s warmer edge, I would lean against the fence and watch the stillness. Mile after mile of ice, from the nameless peaks in the east to the grasping sparkling fingers of the forest to the south to the rolling hills in the west that seemed so smooth that I could only imagine how fast you could go sliding down them.

Sometimes, instead, I would watch the ice’s glacial encroachment into our yard. A whole blade of grass, slowly being coated with a stiff bluish tinge over the course of an hour or two. I could imagine what it was doing to our house, the way the cold would slowly seep into the walls and the floor and the ceiling, until eventually the whole place would be frozen over and my father and I would have to move inwards like all the other families had done a long time ago. Closer to the forge, which had been suffering a sort of slow decay for years now. There had been homes even further out than this, when I was only taking my first steps. Now those homes had grown brittle and cracked and shattered long ago, and ours was simply the next in line.

Today, I was headed into town. Among other things, Father wanted me to pick him up a new blanket, since he’d forgotten his old one in the study and stepped on it, shattering it. My little shopping bag flip-flopped on my arm as I made my way to the Forgeside Market. The houses huddled together for warmth around it, and as I walked they grew more and more tightly clustered, and taller and taller. Close to the Forgeside Market they teetered at five stories tall and ten families deep, and this close to the forge the heat seeped into my bones and made me forget for a moment how alone we were in here.

And then I was only feet away from the great forge itself. I watched in silence. It stretched higher into the sky than any other building in town, and great gaping maws in the sigil-encrusted iron revealed the ever-burning flame that kept our town warm. On the bottom floor, the forgekeepers buzzed in and out of iron doors, covered in dust and grime and little burns.

As I watched, the flame flickered. It wasn’t even reaching the uppermost vents. I shivered, and turned to the crowd at the marketplace. I had things to buy. I was just a teenager, a kid. I didn’t know anything about the forge, or about how long it would last, or anything. I would just buy a blanket, some apples, some bread, pick up a water jug, and head back home. Simple, like everything.

I twisted a simple charm around my purchases, something small to help me carry them. Lightening the load. Sometimes I wished I knew the advanced charms. The inner fire charms that let the harvesters journey a short ways out into the cold to bring back ice-chunks to quench the town with. The springtime charms that the tower-farmers used to keep their plants blooming fast enough to feed everyone. The power-charms that kept the streetlights on. So much to learn, and I’d only ever had the chance to learn the basics.

I went home. I put away the groceries. I took down the washing. I started on dinner. I went outside to take a moment to myself to breathe.

That’s when I saw it. The golden light, far, far away over the ice. It bobbed slowly up over the hill, a beacon in the darkness.

For a long time, I just stared as it made steady progress towards the town. Behind me, I could hear people beginning to come out onto the street, staring, disbelieving. Had a star fallen? Were there others out there? Was it a ravenous beast of the wilderness? It was the first time anything like this had been seen in a very long time.

I heard someone fumble into a charm to let their sight travel, heard him gasp. “It’s a woman,” he said. “A woman with a lantern, coming this way. She’s walking in a circle of unfrozen ground. How is this even possible?”

Chatter began to spread. I just stared. It was better than watching my house get swallowed slowly by the cold. It was something hopeful. Something new. Something that made my heart spark and sputter and pump warmth through my body. Someone who knew things nobody in Scorched Rock could know.

My dad came out, still shivering, hugging himself. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“A traveler,” I said, reverence and awe creeping into my voice. I pointed at the little golden light in the distance. “There’s a traveler coming.”

My dad nodded. “I’ll fetch the forgemaster,” he said. He left. I was alone with the crowd once more, to watch the traveler approach.

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