I came back to my senses to Chantelle holding my face in her hands, looking into my eyes. I was laying on my back on the ice floor of the throne room and she was laying on top of me, shivering. I pushed heat into her body, warming her up.

"Hello." I said. "Maybe don't go running off with random winter people."

She blew out her cheeks and poked me in the chest. "It was the only way you were going to know where to find my clan." She said. "I had complete faith that you would be able to save me, and I needed to save them. Though next time we should work it out so that you don't die multiple times, and are in constant pain the rest of the time. I am sorry for that."

She ran her thumbs alongside the outside of my eyes, looking from one to another. "What did you do to your eyes?" She asked.

My eyes... Oh, right. I'd completely forgotten that I had added the heat vision sense to the model I'd been using to repair my body. It needed new micro-portals to my Pocket Dimension. Repairing micro-portals reconnected them to the last place they were set up, but new micro-portals needed attention while the first symbol was carved to create them in anything but the default location.

I was also having to use the ice below me as my source of matter for energy, I'd misplaced yet another staff at some point. A staff wasn't the ideal thing to get energy from I was finding, I had to use my hands too much. I briefly considered a pendant, but anything that could be taken from me would also be less than ideal. What I wanted was something that I could embed within myself that could access my Pocket Dimension, and from that I could use the stone source I had or anything else.

I added a space to my model, placing a reinforced area at the back of my skull that could hold a portal. And of course I had the portal to my Pocket Dimension in my pocket. I switched where I was getting the matter from to convert to energy to heat us to there, depositing a small chunk of stone from the stone source.

Chantelle kissed me, and I could sense amusement from her. "I lost you there." She said, smiling. "Future projects?"

"Sorry." I said. "The markings are a heat vision thing, like snakes have. But I haven't hooked it up, and I should. And that led to... Yes, future projects."

"I could sense it over our connection." She said. "We should go and get my people from the dungeon?"

I nodded and we climbed to our feet. I was covered in blood and brain matter, and Chantelle had some of it on her too from laying atop me. I tried to soak my power into the robe I was wearing, the high ranked winter priest robe, and my power bounced off. It was enchanted. I took my black hooded robe from my Pocket Dimension through my pocket and changed into it, swapping the portal to my new pocket. Then I scrubbed Chantelle and myself clean by converting the dirt and gore to air.

With that done we headed to the doors of the throne room, which were a black ice that reached to the eight meter high ceiling. They opened easily to my push and revealed a sixty meter hallway that led directly to the front doors of the keep with hallways and doors splitting off from it. Everything was ice, just as the throne room had been, and there were no people at all.

The ice doors of the throne room swung closed silently as we walked away from them to reach the front doors. The silence was a bit eerie, the only sound was Chantelle's boots clicking on the ice, my own bare feet not making any sound.

We reached the front doors of the keep, a matching pair to the ones at the throne room, and they opened just as easily. Ten meters outside the doors was the gate leading out of the grounds of the keep, which were open. I stopped in shock. The walls that the gates were in were ice, as were the gates themselves. And through the gates where there should have been a city was a flat plain of snow.

Two glowing orbs of fog, fifty centimeters wide, were hovering on either side of the gate trailing fog to the ground two meters below them. One of them approached us and I got a better look at it. It was a core of pale blue light with fog swirling around it in a solid ball.

It stopped two meters away from us and I could feel the waves of cold coming from it. A moment after it stopped Chantelle clutched her head in pain and fell to her knees. I drew my sword and pushed heat into it, extending it towards the orb. The orb retreated two meters and bobbed up and down, the other three wisps drifting closer.

"Stop." Chantelle said. "It's an ice wisp. It wasn't attacking, it was shouting."

I eyed it warily. "Are you okay?" I asked. She was still in pain.

"It's not used to talking to humans." Chantelle said. "Ah, it's saying that stories say that humans are incredibly dense when it comes to talking via magic. It was blasting what it was saying at full volume, like being shouted at directly into your ear. It's speaking at a more reasonable volume now."

I raised my sword, but didn't put it away.

"What is it saying?" I asked.

"It was saying that we are in the Winter Realm." Chantelle said. "But now it is pretty concerned about the amount of heat that is coming from your sword. 'Dense evil human scarier than fire' it just said. It's cursing and trying to yell at you."

I pulled the heat from my sword, pushing it into the stone in my Pocket Dimension, and then sheathed it. The ice wisp floated back to two meters in front of us.

"Better?" I asked. "What did it mean by Winter Realm?"

"Didn't you wonder where the winter aspected creatures went in summer?" Chantelle asked. "Or where the summer aspected creatures are while it is winter? The gods can shift creatures that are aligned to their aspect into their realms and out into the neutral realm."

"We aren't winter aspected creatures." I said. "The head priest of winter shifted us?"

"We were at the center of his power." Chantelle said. "And the ice wisp just said that the neutral realm has been realigning to be closer to the winter realm. Soon it will be cold enough for them to safely cross over, they've never been able to go to the neutral realm before."

"Are they guarding the gate for any particular reason?" I asked.

"They aren't guarding it." Chantelle said. "They eat ambient mana, and the keep has the highest concentration around here. Oh, it just said that we would need to swear to the Winter God to be able to shift back to the neutral realm. It doesn't know any other way to shift between realms other than the gods."

"That's not a problem." I said. "They won't attack you if we try to leave?"

Chantelle shook her head. I led her through the gates to the outside and the wisps move well away from us. Apparently even our body heat was slightly painful to them. I pulled out another six meters of Arachne steel thread, leaving me with only two meters unused, and formed it into a loop. We walked along the outside of the wall of the keep, which matched the keep in the neutral realm, and I started carving the Pocket Dimension doorway symbols into the thread.

When we had made it around the corner of the wall, out of view of the gate, I took the thread portal out of my pocket and formed it into a full doorway against the wall and stepped through after Chantelle.

The reason I was making a third thread portal when I already had a spare was because I had no way of getting the thread portal out of the winter realm. I compressed the portal into a line, pushing the thread together and securing it, and then sank it down into the snow and ice. I moved the Pocket Dimension side of the doorway into the stone of the protected rooms, sealing it in the wall.

Chantelle frowned at me. "We're back home?" She asked.

"Well." I said. "We're in my Pocket Dimension." I pointed to the thread on the ground next to where we had come into the Pocket Dimension. "That thread there probably leads back to outside of the keep in the Fortress of the Gods. It's still in a straight line, so I don't think anyone found it, but it might lead to somewhere else in the Fortress of the Gods at this point. I have another one started in the basement of a shop there that will be safer, but I need to finish it first."

Chantelle nodded firmly. "So we can go back and rescue my mother and the rest of the people of my clan." Chantelle said.

I opened my mouth to argue and felt a surge of stubbornness from Chantelle. I didn't want her to be in danger. But the last time I had tried to argue her out of it she had ended up going by herself anyway putting herself in even worse danger. The safest place she could be was where I could protect her. And I saw her as my equal, which meant that maybe I didn't have a right to stop her.

"We should go and see your father." I said instead. "It's going to take me another twenty minutes to finish this portal. Unless we want to go through and kill everything in our way."

Tears formed in Chantelle's eyes and she shook her head. "He's really alive?" She asked.

"He is." I said. "Though I'm sure he won't be happy with me. You got your stubbornness from him?"

We walked through the doorway into the top of my fortress.

"Not really." Chantelle said. "My mother is the one who always gets her way. She is the clan head, after all."