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It had been dark for a long while by the time we got back to town.  Lumi headed back to the palace, and Tae joined me on my walk back to the inn.  The glowing balls were lighting our path as we went, but the town was silent, for it was already late in the night.

“Where do I have to go next?” I asked. “Findlay mentioned more trials and runes.  Will we find those here, or are they in other places?”

“Look at the map,” he instructed, handing it to me.

When I did, I noticed that the dot over Yule Forest was gone.  The remaining six dots were still there, and I now realized that one of them was occupying Eira itself.  I pointed this out to Tae.  He took the map from me and inspected it.

“I suppose it might belong to the map itself.  If it doesn’t move when you leave here, we can search for its purpose later.  For now, we should focus on locating the rest of these.”

I nodded in agreement. “Should we head for Himesh next?”

“We can discuss this in the morning.  For now, we should get some rest so we have the energy to journey tomorrow.”

☀☀☀☀☀

We regrouped the next morning after breakfast.  Lumi joined us in the back room of the inn.

“It seems unreasonable to go back to Chanda before finding the other two here in Alba,” Lumi commented as the three of us stared at the map.

“We’d have to cut around the mountains if we go the Gelid,” Tae pointed out.

“I know the way there, though,” Lumi replied. “Remember?  I used to go there all the time.”

Tae nodded. “So, that’s the first place you should head, then.  We’ll figure out how to get to Himesh when you get back.”

“Are you not coming with us?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I’ve gotta keep an eye on the inn.  Jungkook can’t handle it alone for the time it’ll take you to go to Gelid and come back.”

Thankfully, my bag was already packed from the previous morning, so I didn’t have to worry about that as we got ready to go.  The three of us headed back to the lobby of the inn.  Jungkook shut his book when he saw us.

“Are you guys headed out again?”

Tae shook his head. “I’m staying.  Odelle and Lumi are headed out.”

“Where are you going?” Indra asked, entering the room.

“We’re headed to Gelid,” I replied before I could think about if that was a good idea.

“Oh!  Let me come with you!  I know all the shortcuts!”

“That’s ok.  I know my way around,” Lumi informed her.

Indra shook her head. “I’m headed home anyways.  I’ll join you.”

☀☀☀☀☀

The journey across Eira’s flatlands turned out to be more of a trek than I’d expected.  Thankfully, we didn’t receive much interruption from any creatures along the way, but that didn’t mean that the journey was necessarily easy.

By the time we reached the Viola Mountains, the sun couldn’t be seen anymore, so we began setting up our camp.  Indra, strangely enough, had stored one of the glowing balls away in her backpack, and she stuck it in the middle of our campsite so we could see more easily.  I had half the mind to start a fire using some of the items in my bag, but maybe that wasn’t such a great idea in this snow.

Although I didn’t feel entirely safe sleeping in the snow in the middle of nowhere, it seemed we had no other choice with the lack of villages or anything really around us.  Lumi seemed confident that we’d be ok, so I trusted her, falling into a deep sleep.

☀☀☀☀☀

The next day greeted us with much more walking.  Once we’d made it around the mountains, we were faced with a village with walls towering high.  I wondered why we hadn’t gone further and stopped here last night.  It certainly would be less terrifying than sleeping in the snow.

We walked on for nearly the whole rest of the day.  None of us spoke much, so it was pretty exhausting.  By the time we reached Gelid, it was getting late in the day.  Indra was insistent that we go to see the leader of their little town, who just so happened to be her great-grandmother.  Lumi didn’t seem thrilled by this, but I didn’t have time to ask about it before Indra was leading us into the biggest residence in the village.

“Grandma!  I’ve brought my friends!” Indra exclaimed as she entered the main living space of the residence.

The lady’s icy eyes were just as cold as their color when she noticed Lumi.  I glanced at Lumi and noticed she had the same look of distaste on her face.  What was going on here?

“Why are you here?”

“Grandma, this is Odelle.  And this is Lu-”

“I know who Lumi is.”

Indra cleared her throat. “Odelle, this is my grandma, Crystal.  She runs the village.”

I greeted her with a smile, unsure what to say in the heavy tension the room had.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” Crystal told Lumi. “I thought we agreed to never see each other again.”

“I’m accompanying my friend here,” Lumi replied, nodding to me.

Crystal glared at me. “What’s your deal?”

I ripped the map out of my backpack and unfurled it, noticing now that the dot I was headed for wasn’t even on the land.  It was somewhere off the shore in the water.

“Crystal doesn’t believe in the curse,” Lumi explained to me. “Take the map and find the place you’re looking for.”

“You’re not seeing anything on my land!”

“It’s not your land.  You don’t own it.”

“I do too!”

“You don’t own the waters around Gelid.  Odelle will get what she needs and go.”

“You’re always trying to lord over me!  Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

Lumi glared at her. “I have left you alone.  For one hundred years.  I thought by now you’d be mature enough to talk to me leader to leader, but it appears that you can’t.  Odelle and I will be in and out.  It’ll be like you never knew we were here.”

Before I could protest, Lumi grabbed my wrist and dragged me outside.  It seemed that these two had a past, but I couldn’t entirely put together what had happened solely based on the conversation they’d just had.

Lumi walked me outside the village gates to the edge of the beach.  Unlike the beaches back home, these were loud and angry.  The waves shoved at us as we approached the water, and Lumi looked over at me.

“Get out the map!”

I pulled it out, and sure enough, we were very close to where the dot was telling me to go.  I glanced out at the ocean.  Past all the tall waves, I could see some trees.  They were a deep green, and I had to admit that that was the first time I’d seen a color that dark since I’d arrived.

“How do we get out there?” I yelled over the wind blowing in our ears.  How did the people of Gelid live in this climate?

“You have to figure it out!” Lumi exclaimed. “I don’t know!”

I glanced down at the rune hanging around my neck, and I now noticed that it was glowing.  I had no idea what to do, but I knew that there had to be a way where I didn’t see it.  I stuffed the map back into my bag and turned to Lumi.

“Stand back!”

“What?”

“Get away from the waves!”

Lumi stepped back a few steps, and I stepped into the waves.  The water below my foot stilled and held me up, so I took another step.  Before I knew it, I was running across the water in the direction of the trees in the distance.  As my feet hit the land on which the trees sat, the waves around me all seemed to stop. 

Something poked my leg, and I pulled out my bow faster than I could blink.  I looked down to see a small creature with large ears staring up at the sharp arrow pointed at him.

“Where is the mystic?” I asked.  I knew there was no way this guy was the mystic.  He didn’t give off the energy that Findlay had emitted.

“Across the island…without trees…big and scary.”

Ok, so this creature couldn’t really speak, either.  I took a few steps forward, still pointing my arrow at the creature.  A few more steps and I was faced with multiple of the creatures.  Maybe getting to the other side of the island would be harder than I thought.

“I need to see the mystic,” I explained to them.

“No…scary,” one of them replied.  Then the rest of them started whining the same long tone of ‘scaryyyyy’.

I sighed and pulled my bag out.  There had to be something in here to help me.  The only thing out of the ordinary in here was an arrow with a rope on the end.  What was I supposed to do with this?  I glanced around.  There were a lot of trees around me.  Maybe I could shoot the arrow and use it to swing?  It didn’t hurt to try.

I tied the end of the rope to my wrist and shot the arrow.  It caught a tree, and I went flying in that direction.  I found myself landing in an open field of ice a few moments later.

“Who goes there?”