There was a rhythm to handling the chores around the tower that Damon had once hated and now loved. He remembered complaining about chopping firewood as a teenager, sulking over the way it made him sweat, never appreciating the results. Each piece of firewood he brought back to the tower would prime the hearth. Each piece would help keep him and his family warm. Each piece would—
“Fuck!” He brought his hand to his mouth, sucking on where a broken stub of a branch had left a gnarly scratch along the back of it.
“I was wondering if you were paying attention,” whispered Myr. “Isn’t that fresh blackwood you’re cutting?”
He frowned at the small pile of wood he’d assembled. “You’re right. Dammit. Alright. Let’s try this again.”
Undaunted, he found another tree of standing deadwood and began his task anew. With each thunk of his axe against the slender trunk, he made progress, reaching out toward greater goals through the limited chore. With each tree he pushed over and brought down, he laid the groundwork for a greater future. With each…
“Shit.” Damon wiggled his axe from side to side, noticing a new problem.
“The axe head is loose,” whispered Myr.
“You think?”
“Hey! Don’t be grumpy.”
He sighed and tried to see if he could still knock over the tree into which he’d been working a notch. It took a fair amount of ungainly wrestling, but eventually, the tree came down, and Damon set to dragging it back to his clearing, swearing under his breath and feeling as though he was thirteen again and loathing every aspect of his chores.
He stopped to rest once he had the log near the tower and examined the axe handle. Once, it had been such a simple thing to replace a broken tool, a simple trip to the marketplace in Morotai. Damon wasn’t even sure how many days he’d have to travel to find someone capable of trading for a new one now.
He pulled the axe head loose from the wonky handle and tried the obvious thing, simply flipping it around to set onto the other side. It was a bit too thick, which left him with no option but to spend the next hour whittling it down into shape.
The idea of creating an axe from ice was obvious enough that he stopped midway through his task to try it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a workable solution. The recoil from even a modest axe strike shattered his creation within two swings.
Eventually, Damon got the handle fixed and finished chopping the firewood. He set it into a neat pile next to the tower’s entrance. Lilian was wiping down the table in the common room, still barely dressed, and he enjoyed the view through a slit in the window’s curtain for a few minutes before continuing with his agenda for the day.
He’d been experimenting with Myr’s enchantment ever since he’d relearned to control it, figuring out his relative power level and limitations. The most challenging aspect of the process was determining where the gap in his abilities came from and what caused it.
As he’d speculated before, he was sure that the season had a certain amount of influence over his power level. It was midspring, and according to what Vel had told him, winters along Veridan’s Curve and within the Malagantyan were mild compared to how they’d once been.
There was also the aspect of his abilities as a wielder. From what he understood, his aptitude in using enchanted weapons and artifacts should theoretically still apply to his myrblade, since it still existed, though it was now permanently inside of him. It was still a factor to keep in mind, however, one to consider if he ruled everything else out.
The one aspect of his ability he suspected he might be able to control was the relative temperature of his close environment. For that, he needed the lake. Vel was just finishing up as he made his way over, carrying the last few freshly washed garments to the drying line hanging from the tower.
He felt her eyes on him as he bent low and let his fingers brush the surface of the lake’s water. She ran back over after hanging up the laundry, standing behind him and leaning forward against his shoulders.
“What are you up to, anyway?” she asked. “Is this like the water stepping, or the pillars, that you used to play around with?”
“Sort of,” he said. “But… on a more intricate scale. Make sure you stand back, alright?”
He looked over his shoulder, holding her gaze so she knew he was serious. Vel nodded slowly and backed away, fascination and anticipation written all over her face.
Damon exhaled and sank his hand into the water. He closed his eyes, picturing what he intended, and then opened them again and tried to overlay his mental creation onto the lake.
A crust of ice began to form, sinking downward and freezing a section of water into a specific shape. He created a staircase of ice, carefully shielded from the rest of the lake on either side by walls of ice thick enough to hold sturdy against the shifting water.
Step by step, he expanded the staircase downward, following the bowl-shaped curve of the lake’s basin. He began walking down it even as it continued to resolve from the water ahead of him, keeping one hand on the ice and all of his concentration on the task.
The cold was unreal, and the fact that he couldn’t shrug it off like he’d once been able to was one of the most obvious ways in which his power level had declined. He ignored his hands as they passed beyond prickling from the temperature of the ice into outright numbness, continuing to walk down the ice stairs as he shifted into the second phase of his idea.
He created a ceiling of ice ahead of him, connecting to the walls on either side and forming into a small room entirely submerged underneath the lake. He heard Vel whistle appreciatively from behind him, but he was too focused on what he was doing to glance back.
“Can I come down, too?” she called.
“Uh…” It was hard to even think enough to answer her question. “That wouldn’t be a good…”
She was already hurrying down the ice steps toward him. Damon took a breath through his nose, staying right where he was and trying to commit as much of the process of maintaining his little underwater ice hideout into the background of his thoughts. It was like trying to remember a series of names or numbers, except with the height of walls, and the shape of a curved ceiling, the points where they both connected.
“Damon,” said Vel. “This is incredible! How long could you keep this here, do you think?”
He cleared his throat, speaking in a rasping voice. “We’re probably going to find out soon.”
Vel blinked, and he wasn’t sure if she took his full meaning. His original purpose in creating a room of ice was to see if the reduced temperature would allow him access to some of his lost abilities. Turning himself to ice, healing from the ice, summoning ice elementals, they were all powers he’d first experimented with during winter, when temperatures had been near freezing or below.
Unfortunately, he could already sense that his experiment was at least a partial failure. Those kinds of powers were still beyond his reach, but he certainly had proven that he could manipulate static ice with as much fine control as ever… for limited amounts of time.
“Do you want to go for a swim?” asked Damon.
Vel had been staring at the water above the ceiling with a wide-eyed expression. She glanced at him, frowning a bit. “What?”
“You should probably start back up those stairs if you don’t.”
She did, but not quickly enough. Damon’s concentration lapsed as the effort became too much. The ice dissolved, and the water rushed into the underwater room with tremendous force, spinning him around and soaking him through.
He kicked his legs, swimming back to the surface, and sucked in a breath. Vel emerged next to him an instant later, blonde hair hanging limp and wet across her face. Despite that, he got the sense she was a little annoyed with him.
“I did warn you,” he said.
“You did,” she admitted, still pouting.
They swam to shore together, both sagging under the weight of their soaked clothing.