The healers’ office kept Gwendith and the other women for a few hours. Diagnostic techniques showed that all of them had been suffering from some form of malnutrition, or rather, that they were recovering from malnutrition.

The odd thing was that they were much further along the road to recovery than the ten days or so since they had escaped. Gwendith wasn’t particularly malnourished since she had been fed relatively well.

She’d also been given a vial of Auxilius Vitae, which helped the recovery of both her Anima and body. Not that her Anima was wounded to begin with, but the elixir merely infused what both needed to recover. Each vial cost about a gold mark and she didn’t see one being given to the others. She almost declined but sighed and considered that she’d rather be in better shape to be able to fight.

The healer watched her down the potion then guided her into Recovery. Gwendith was perfectly capable of using the technique by herself even if she didn’t have it inlaid, but guided Recovery aided with the Vitae was much less painful than usual. More pins and needles rather than gut-wrenching pain.

Afterwards, she was discharged and a decanus, a youngish man with a straggly mustache and freckles all over his pale face, led her to a building in the south, flushed next to the wall. The barracks, as it turned out. She was given a room on the second floor. A single room with a bed and a wardrobe, not that she had much. She still wore Yuriko’s clothes and if not for the comfort runescript weaving on it, it would be far too loose and large.

After the decanus had her sign a form, a camp attendant walked up to her room and gave her a bundle, which had a bunch of clothes and toiletries in it. Underthings, a shirt and trousers, as well as the militia’s green overcoat. Technically she should wear Agaza’s red, but oh well. She was told that dinner would be served in the mess hall in about a couple of hours and that the common baths were at the end of the corridor.

“Where was…Knight Davar given room?” she asked the man.

“I believe she was given a suite on the third floor,” he answered easily. “Suite 5.”

“Thank you.”

After she closed the door, she dug out a change of clothes, a towel, soap and shampoo, then marched towards the bath, sporting the faint hope that she’d see Yuriko in there. But the suite probably had its own toilet and bath so…

She used the facilities with as much gusto as she could reasonably muster. Doing her ablutions out in the wild was just plain annoying. It was hard enough missing the conveniences of home back in Ouera Bo. Those barbarians didn't even have water closets! They used trenches and latrines! They also didn’t subscribe to bathing more often than their religious occasions required.

It was also quite hard to bathe when the water was more often than not, frozen or icy. Gwendith and the others were rank, and she was honestly grateful that Yuriko hadn’t wrinkled her nose at her stench. Or maybe it wasn’t too bad?

Hmmm, for that matter, how often did she see the gorgeous girl go out to do her business? Even after all those days roughing it, Yuriko’s hair and skin had a scent that reminded her of sun-drenched meadows and warm days. Curious.

She lingered over the hot showers, scrubbed herself thrice before she was satisfied. Her fingertips and toes were wrinkly and sensitive by the time she toweled dry and got dressed. She gathered her borrowed clothes and debated whether to send it to the laundry or simply hand them over. Yuriko’s backpack had a cleaning runescript weaving, so she might prefer having the clothes cleaned that way.

She also needed to retrieve Yuriko’s other things from the freed women, but there was enough time to do that tomorrow. More importantly was to decide what she would do now.

For one thing, she needed to meet with Commander Perry to know what her family had done. She and the others had been ushered out of the office before she could hear anything relevant. For another, she wanted to leave. She didn’t want to stay in the Frozen North for a second longer, and she especially didn’t want to spend another Season of Water or even Air, here. Blizzards that lasted days if not weeks, and the air became so cold that her breath froze and turned to snow before it could leave her lips were the least of her suffering.

Many of the captives capitulated or died during that time, and only the most stubborn of them resisted. It was also those two Seasons when the bored barbarians had nothing better to do than torment them.

She didn’t know how the outpost weathered through those two Seasons, though she supposed extensive heat runescript weaving, and an Animus engine, would do the trick.

But her desire to leave warred against her sudden desire to stay with Yuriko. The sudden blossoming of her emotions took her by surprise when she first saw the girl appear out of the Tidelands and now that she had some privacy, it was the perfect time for introspection.

What did she feel for that girl?

She was pretty sure she was attracted to boys back before she entered Agaza, what with her infatuation for Kato Davar. That particular crush had transferred over to Yuriko, albeit so subtly that she didn’t even notice when. And, with her capture and abuse, even the thought of being touched by a man made her shudder in disgust. Such a tangled skein her thoughts and feelings had become!

Every Imperial outpost, camp, fortress, and settlement had healers, of the mind, body, and Anima. There should be a counselor she could talk to here. She should before she decided to do anything else. But then again, there was another part of her that wanted to stay and massacre the remaining barbarians. Despite what she said to Yuriko a while back, she despised all of them. The bulk of her anger was towards the men, of course, but she was disgusted at the women who did nothing to curb it.

‘They might not have had the power to,’ her treacherous thoughts said. In fact, she hadn’t seen a female barbarian who had a Geist.

Yes, they were second class members of the tribes, treated as nothing more than chattel. Any power they had was what they could take from the men they were bound to.

Then the proper course was to kill all the men and rescue and rehabilitate all of the barbarian women. And children, she supposed. As long as the sons weren’t too bad?

Snorting to herself, Gwendith refocused her thoughts. She had finally reached Sollus and was ready to advance. She should do it now, so that she would have enough strength to make a difference.

Gwendith looked at the pallet set along the far wall. A peek at the window revealed the courtyard and several hundred militia and legionnaires doing their drills. There was light snowfall, but the yard had been swept of any snow, revealing bare dirt with a few tufts of grass.

She sat in a meditative pose and began by envisioning her core. It was a storm of ice and snow in a sphere, but lately, there was a difference. Right at the middle, there was a dot of light. Golden light much like Yuriko’s. Heat.

Her mind could barely grasp the concept since it clashed so much with what her Heritage and Facet had. The Sharine lineage had always been about manipulating and creating ice and cold. Animus pressed with the Intent to freeze interacted with the environment outside the body, resonated with the ambient Chaos and created ice.

Her first Facet was called Freezing Touch. Freshly inlaid, it allowed her to freeze anything she directly touched with her fingers and hands. With extensive training in Agaza, she’d managed to expand the effect through any weapon she wielded, hence, her use of a collapsible staff. The metal was somehow more conductive to her Facet.

Her second Facet was what allowed her to live in the North with relative comfort. Internal Temperature Control. She could keep herself warm or cold depending on her needs. It didn’t cost too much Animus to keep active too. And as she got used to it, she could keep it up perpetually.

In her imprisonment, she had learned to use ice and snow manipulation, almost kinesis actually. The power to shape and move ice with her mind and Animus. She infused her Animus into any snow she could and could manipulate it through that. It was close to what her third Facet should have been.

But when she froze Thaer, she hadn’t used any of that. The Iron Skin Tribe were remarkably resistant to the cold, and she knew that her ice daggers wouldn’t have even penetrated his skin. That only left one thing to do.

It had been oddly easy to knock him into the river. She thought he would have been stronger than that but maybe she’d timed her lunge just right that he was off balance. Once they were submerged, she had only an instant. And she knew instinctively that Freezing Touch wouldn’t have done what she wanted it to do. Instead, she pulled at the water, drawing out all of its remaining heat and it froze.

Cold was the absence of Heat. Just like darkness was the absence of light. That was what Natural Sciences taught. But why? Why did heat and cold exist in equal measure within the boundless possibilities of a single mote of ambient Chaos?

Putting Intent into Animus allowed it to change form. But this would not have been possible if not for all the possibilities within Chaos. She was sure of it.

What she did to Thaer followed what she learned in Natural Sciences, but also broke some of its rules. For one thing, she wasn’t in physical contact with the barbarian or the water around him that froze when she did it. All she had then, was hate and anger. Fury bubbling within her core, wrath so great that it burned away everything else.

The heat was so intense that it must have resonated with the ambient Chaos around her. Animus filled with cold Intent had probably seeped out of her body and permeated the water around them. But it was already so cold that what her Animus added was negligible. So she’d thought to draw away what heat remained around him.

And it worked. She drew in all of the heat in the water around Thaer, but had only been able to dump it within herself. If she had been more agile with her thoughts, she might have dumped the heat away from her body instead. Or maybe she could have shoved it into the ambient Chaos?

Either way, she thought that the ability to control and move heat and cold, temperature to be exact, was more useful than ice and snow kinesis. She could already do the latter, even if it took a bit more concentration and cost more lumens to do it without inlay.

Internal Temperature Control. External Temperature Control? Or just remove the Internal from the second Facet? Freezing Touch had most of its inlays in her arms. Internal Temperature Control had inlays around her torso, with more concentrated around her heart and lungs. External Temperature Control on the other hand…had inlays around the same area as Freezing Touch, and along parts of her leg and lungs.

Ah, Freezing Touch would be merged with it as well as Internal Temperature Control, essentially merging all three Facets.

Gwendith swallowed in nervousness. She would need to etch and inlay the pattern for that Facet, as well as the supporting lines in one go. Failure…well, would mean she’d deplete her Animus and she’d need to rest for a few days to let her Anima recover.

Nothing to it!

She made sure her door was locked and she hung a do not disturb sign on the knob outside. Then she began the etching process.

Her Heritage contained the needed knowledge. It was traditionally the Knight level Facet, but that was fine. It made doing this a bit more complex but her mind was steady. Slowly, inch by inch, she spent her Animus to etch the inlays until it was complete, then she filled it with lumens, locking those away from her current reserve. Being a higher tier inlay, it ate up more Animus than she expected, and she was left with less than half of her total reserve. But that was fine. The feeling of Sollus was gone, and now, she could increase her Animus cap again!

The air around her warmed up considerably as she took the cold aspect out of the ambient Chaos around her. Then she reversed the process and made it so cold that the air barely seemed to move. The heat had to go somewhere so she shunted it to the air above her palm. A burst of heat and light, contained by her Will appeared. A ball of superheated plasma popped into existence, hot enough to melt stone, but with its temperature utterly contained so that the air around it remained freezingly cold. Gwendith’s grin was so wide that her cheeks ached.

With the snap of her fingers, the temperature equalised. All of a sudden, she felt faint and nearly blacked out.

“Ancestors…” she murmured. She lay back down on her bed and slept.

The next morning, anxious to share her news, she made her way to the third floor and knocked on the door to Suite 5. Her grin froze when the one who opened the door wasn’t Yuriko. It was the Chaos Lord, Songstress of Heartfelt Desire. Her hair was mused and she wore a nightgown.

“Who is it?” Yuriko’s lazy voice called out from the bedroom.

Desire looked up at Gwendith’s eyes and grinned knowingly.