Weaponized avalanches were now my new favorite thing… and also my new biggest fear. A natural avalanche wouldn’t reach as far as we needed to go (most start and stop on the same mountain), as we wanted to go all the way into the forest in the huge valley below.

And that is where the preparation came in. More than a dozen ice cultivators adding snowpack (while simultaneously reinforcing the whole thing with a carefully built latticework of ice) were able to add way more mass than would be otherwise possible. It reminded me of the difference between a river overflowing normally, and a man-made dam busting open to release hundreds of times more water than would ever be there in even the worst of storms.

Simply put, one was a natural disaster, the other was a calamity of epic proportions. If our targets were people, it would feel more like a war crime than an attack…

In fact, the cultivator-enhanced-avalanches were so large that the biggest danger to the cultivators of House Spiritwind was parts of the mountain itself collapsing, adding a landslide of rock and earth (which they couldn’t control or manipulate) into the mix which they couldn’t control as easily. It was considered a small risk, and if it did happen the fix was to try and add even more snow, as snowfall was lighter than rock and would generally be able to safely ride on top of the churning disaster below.

Regardless, as long as our luck wasn’t absolutely terrible, it wouldn’t be an issue for us.

***

Jesvae glanced calmly at the excited faces of Heller’s young friends, glad that neither of them was showing signs of fear or panic. It was a long-held House Spiritwind tradition that any warrior that lost control (or, spirits forbid, tried to retreat) during their first real battle would be quietly culled from the pack; not that she would risk doing the same to these three – they were all touched by the Merrik, in one way or another, and were far too valuable to just toss away.

Heller himself was much harder to read, but then again he had always been a mystery to her. At times he acted like the child he was, but it was much more common to see him behaving more like an adult, to the point that he interacted with his two older companions as though they were younger than him… and they seemed to view this as completely natural, making Jesvae think it wasn’t a new occurrence.

Then again, he was chosen by the Merrik… so all bets were off, as far as she was concerned. It didn’t really matter to her if he was chosen because he was odd, or if he became odd after he was chosen. And as she turned to regard his hulking icy visage, she was again amazed at what he was able to do; even her father wasn’t able to completely transform into ice!

Now all that was left to do was to properly nurture and train him, instilling in him the virtues of House Spiritwind as best as she was able. It would be ideal if he didn’t become as antisocial and disconnected as his master was, but for all she knew perhaps that was a side effect of their shared cultivation technique – there was a price for power in all things, after all.

Her largest concern was the rumors that her younger brother, Wolfram, had somehow managed to develop a friendship with Heller, although spirits knew how that was possible.

There had been odd rumors surrounding Wolfram ever since he was only a few years old, and her father had told her bluntly that she was not allowed to… remove… her youngest brother from the competition for control of House Spiritwind until they saw how he would develop.

Not that she had planned to have her sibling murdered anyway…

Jesvae returned her full focus to directing the flow of powdered ice around them as more and more of it filled the air around them. Part of what she and the other ice cultivators were focusing on was keeping the snow below them as cohesive as possible, so that it would flow like a river rather than crash like a waterfall. Losses were impossible to avoid, but it wasn’t the worst thing to have a cloud of ice covering them as they crashed down the mountain.

From the valley floor she knew that the attack would look like a vast flowing cloud descending with impossible speed, faster than even the quickest House Flameward lightning cultivator would be able to run. The beasts down there knew well to fear the snow – centuries of culling their numbers had taught even the dullest creatures that ice and snow meant pain and death. But this time things would be even worse for there targets: The Merrik’s apprentice had arrived.

Jesvae smiled.

***

The sound was astonishingly loud, although not as painfully deafening as the initial crack had been. The snow billowing up around them from their rushing descent was so thick that it was entirely opaque now, blocking the sight of anyone who couldn’t magically see through ice and snow because they had transformed into a living frost goliath…

It didn’t seem fair how advantageous this situation was for me, and I decided that, as crazy as it was, I was going to have to study how they did this so I could do the same when (or if) I ever tried to actually cross the mountains.

Everyone else was blinded by this point, which they had expected, and they were steering based on the course they had planned in advanced – conversely, I could see perfectly fine, and extending my control of ice through the avalanche-made snowstorm around us felt completely natural.

I did not dare do anything to manipulate or change what was going on around us, however tempted I might be to test the limits of my power, because I could sense the carefully controlled energies of the Spiritwind cultivation technique circulating all around me. It was even trying to invade my body – maybe because I was also made of ice – but it had no way to actually bypass my innate Qi barrier (the same barrier that every living thing had).

I didn’t want to risk disrupting their work and causing everything to fall apart, especially since I knew that I wouldn’t be able to control even close to this much ice and snow at the same time. Not that they could either, not even with all seventeen of them working together, but that was where their carefully laid formation of ice came in, allowing them to handle a lot more than they would be able to without weeks of preparation.

All of this meant that I was the only one who was able to fully witness the havoc that our avalanche was wreaking on the mountain around us, rolling over small stands of trees that clung to the mountainside without so much as a whisper; crashing into jagged stone formations and over steep cliff faces with equal disregard; and finally entering the lowlands like a devastating tsunami of snow… which is exactly what it was, I suppose…

When we first left the foothills the ice sled upon which we were anchored was on top of a mammoth tide of snow that stood, in my estimation, about four times the height of the tallest tree in the valley. I could see, off in the distance, a large variety of beasts fleeing from our swift approach, but we were on course to overtake them well before they could reach the nearest passage out of the flatlands between these intersecting mountain ranges.

There were a number of different types of beast fleeing from us, including the one which was starting to dominate the valleys nearby. It was a type of flying beast, which was both the most dangerous type, and (luckily) the rarest type. The only saving grace was that flying beasts could generally be seen coming a lot further out than those who were bound to the earth – their advantage in speed was somewhat mitigated by their lack of stealth.

Well… that, and the fact that they generally tended to be a bit smaller and weaker, since they needed to be able to lift themselves into the air – we had no record of gigantic legendary magical flying creatures, like dragons or rocs, thankfully…

These particular flying beasts reminded me somewhat of wasps from back on old Earth, although they were grey and black with green stripes and about the size of an adult’s head. They did appear to build hives, however, and to bring back other beasts as food. They also appeared to be venomous, from the observations that our scouts had made, although, as usual, the venom had no noticeable effect on our people.

That was yet another thing that set us apart from all the other creatures that surrounded us; none of them were immune to diseases and poisons like we were, so far as we could tell, and all of them tended to look like the creatures that spawned them (the children resembled the parents). It was only us, the people of The City, who were born with seemingly random traits and features…

Thoughts of why we were so different from all the other living creatures around us fled my mind as we approached one of the hives, which was even larger from up close than it looked from afar. Our avalanche was aimed to roll right over two of the three hives in this valley (it hadn’t been possible to line up the third), but as we approached I was given somewhat of a shock…

… as swarms of head-sized flying beast-hornet-wasp-things exited the hive in a flurry, and started to fly straight towards us…

I wasn’t sure if I should be worried or not, but there was little I could do besides preparing to pepper them with shards of ice once they got close enough – it was still too loud to reliably talk, and nobody else would be able to see them through the billowing clouds of snow in the air. This also meant they wouldn’t be able to see us, and they were literally just blindly flying towards certain doom.