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.Every now and then it glanced around behind itself, searching for a tail it no longer had, and sometimes it looked up to check the progress of Atreus and his companions.Atreus tried to point and found his arm pinned against Yago's chest.He groaned as the effort brought him back into his pain-racked body.Until now, he had passed the trip across the glacier a pleasant distance above himself, somewhere outside the seared and hideous form in Yago's arms, a spirit connected to his body by only a thin strand of memory.Time itself had ebbed and flowed, swirling past in slow eddies as his companions scrambled up the icefall, then rushing ahead madly as they crossed the snowy flats.Atreus had floated along, vaguely aware that Seema had promised to take them to Langdarma and wondering how she could offer such a thing.She herself had called it a myth, and he could not believe she would deceive him.Not about something so importantSeema reached the clefting and stopped directly across from the dark band of granite.With the sun hidden behind the middle Sister, this part of the glacier was a sheet of hard ice, so she had to stand in the tracks they had made that morning.Rishi stopped a pace below her, both feet planted comfortably in one of Yago's frozen footprints, and Yago stopped behind the Mar.Atreus found himself looking back down into the basin.Their pursuer had vanished again, leaving Atreus to wonder whether he had been imagining the dark figure all along."This isn't Langdarma," said Yago.The ogre leaned past Rishi and peered down into the frigid blue murk of the clefting."We been here before.""You searched, but you did not examine," said Seema."This is the way to Langdarma.Rishi and I will go first.Then you can pass Atreus down to us."The healer lowered herself into the clefting, dropping onto the first of the boulders wedged between the cliff and the glacier wall.Rishi followed, and Yago stepped to the brink of the chasm.As the ogre turned to straddle the edge, Atreus glimpsed a dark figure below, angling up the slope along the course of their frozen tracks.The form was hazy and indistinct, no more than a darker blue in the indigo shadow of the mountain, but it looked solid enough to set Atreus's heart pounding.Look!The word echoed around inside Atreus's mind, but could not quite find his lips.He had a little more luck trying to point.As Yago bent down to lower him into the clefting, his arm came free of the ogre's grasp and swung toward the dark figure.A surge of anguish rushed through his body, but he kept his hand raised."Don't worry," Yago said."They know what'll happen if they drop you."Atreus forced himself to keep pointing as he heard an agonized groan escape his lips."I do not think it is us he fears," said Rishi."Is he not pointing down the slope?"Atreus sighed in relief and let his arm drop.Yago scowled and passed him into the waiting arms of Seema and Rishi, then turned to look down toward the glacier."He must've seen our friend back there," said Yago.Tarch is coming up fast now."Atreus nearly choked on his astonishment.If his companions knew about Tarch, what were they doing here? They would be trapped in the clefting, with no room to flee and even less to maneuver."We must hurry," said Seema.Leaving Atreus to Rishi's care, she squatted at the edge of the boulder, then jumped down to the next one, landing as lightly as a feather."Come along."Yago lowered himself into the clefting, took Atreus from Rishi, and descended to the bottom of the trench in two quick hops.Seema and Rishi followed close behind, and soon Atreus's companions were standing together in the bottom of abyss.The murk was thick and frozen, as dense as resin and as cold as death.Atreus started to shiver and felt, absurdly, a ring of goose bumps surrounding his burns.A fiery nettling sank deep into his bones.His broken leg began to throb, and he sensed himself slipping away, aware of his pain yet apart from it.Yago said something about losing him, and Rishi began to worry about Tarch catching them in the trench.Seema spoke to them both in calm assurance and took their hands, leading the way to the dark band of granite.Atreus's perceptions must have grown hazy and unreliable, for it seemed to him that she simply pressed herself against the face of the cliff and melted inside.Yago and Rishi followed and gasped, and Atreus's stomach floated up toward his chest, as though he were falling.Seema walked ahead and became the only thing visible in the darkness.Yago and Rishi followed, and the falling sensation continued.After a time, a golden wheel appeared far below their feet, its scarlet spokes slowing revolving around the glimmering six-pointed star of a snow-flake.As they traveled deeper into the murk, the wheel stayed beneath them, growing larger with each step.The snow-flake began to pulse.As it grew larger, it became apparent that the different triangles inside its star were pulsing randomly, flashing first sapphire, then emerald, ruby, diamond.all the colors of the gems.Seema continued to walk, and the falling sensation persisted.The wheel grew ever larger, its golden rim spreading outward until it became large enough to encircle them all.The scarlet spokes ceased their spinning, and Atreus grew dizzy, as though he were twirling around.The snow-flake seemed to dissolve, to become nothing but pulsing arrows, each pointing down a different spoke of the wheel.The wheel became as the basin beneath the Sisters of Serenity.The scarlet spokes grew as long and wide as roads, each pointing off toward a different corner of the compass, and the pulsing triangles became the size of ship decks.At last Seema stopped walking, and the triangles rejoined, becoming a snow-flake as large as the glacier basin.The wheel's golden rim disappeared somewhere over the horizon, and the scarlet spokes vanished.The dizziness and the falling sensation faded.The air grew tepid and moist, and Atreus stopped shivering.Seema turned toward one of the snow-flake's distant points and spoke a few words in the archaic tongue of her people.A blue light appeared above the point.Yago and Rishi cried out as their knees buckled.A warm wind began to whip past, and though there was no sensation of movement, the light slowly began to expand, becoming a tiny blue square.What little sense of time Atreus still had vanished completely.They seemed to stand there forever watching the square grow larger, the breeze whipping through their hair, and the musty smell of a cave growing ever stronger in their nostrils.When the square had expanded to the size of a man and they found themselves standing before a shining blue portal, it seemed that only an instant had passed.Again Seema took the hands of Yago and Rishi."You will see many strange things," she told them
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