Part 2 Frozen to the Bone 2d

And so they wandered the landscape, searching back and forth for some path or route that would lead them up the face in a less...direct path. Gage was confident that he could climb it, having lost his ability to perform much of his soul communication due to the cold but he needed to make sure that Elan would make it too. She was not as hardy as he was so it was almost his moral responsibility to make sure she is okay. The cold wind had already burnt the both of their faces, the sun also having singed them under the eyes. Gage really did hate the heat but in the extreame condition that he was in currently he couldnt help but feel like he would like a desert right now.

Some place so hot and dry that snow is concidered a myth. Gage can feel himself getting colder and colder, the weather starting to make him daydream. Looking back at Elan he spots her, taking off her cap and gloves while trying to unbutton her jacket. "HEY! ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND!? Your going to freeze to death!" Gage turns around and staggers through the snow to her, his hands fumbling with her jacket as she mumbles to herself about how she was burning up and that it was too hot. She has gotten too cold, she is starting to lose her grip on reality. We need to get to cover. That was when Gage finally looked up to his surroundings.

Gage has been out in a storm once on a mountain side but it was not a snow storm, the clouds overhead dropping rain like a waterfall. Even though it was not a snow storm he felt the temputure drop to just over freezing but now, with the normal tempurture being below freezing the storm would bring subzero temputures, killing anything caught in its winds within hours. Setting her against the stone of the wall he concentrates, doing what he can to draw on his Soul Communication powers to see if there are any caves nearby. The cold though is too intense, the air being enough to make him blind to the outside world.

Cursing he strips his gloves and scrapes through the few feet of snow built up on the stone wall, the cold instantly synging his hands. Placing his hand against a small bare peice of stone he shoves, more force in that one push than in a hundred mile an hour car wreck. He was hoping to just cause an indent, somewhere that they can huddle out of the wind and build up a snow wall in the hopes to buy himself some time to warm up but that was the best case scenario. The wall shatters in a horse sized hole exposing a small cave, something that he had no knowledge of being there.

Gage spends as much time as he can sitting there, shuddering intensly from the cold before he finally settles on the fact that if he does not act now he is going to freeze to death in here too. Sturggleing a little he pulls away from Elan and sits on his knees, breathing into his hands to warm them. He was decent at one point at using soul communication to produce fire but the extream cold has all but sealed his Soul Communication away so he was going to have to resort to another form of self preservation to conjure heat. Something that Elan had taught him while he was still in Naruki City, a spell if you could call it that.

Holding out each hand as if he were holding a baseball in both he tries to conjure his energy, the cold making his hands shake and shiver but not enough that he is unable to perform. Filling his palms with energy he summons his Reiatsu into small orbs, each the size of a golfball. Concentrating he rotates both the orbs clockwise, spining them slowly at first so that he can get them up to speed. Once they are spining the once swirling colors now fade together so that they make a single glowing red color.

"Elan, are you alright?" Gage nudges Elan's shoulder trying to get her to stir. "Elan, I got a little fire going, are you okay? Come on girl, I need you to wake up." Gage sits there for another ten minuets before she finally starts to sit up, sliding backwards to the wall so she has something to lean on.

"Gage, whats going on?" Elan rubs her eyes with two fingers as she feels a massive migraine set in. "All I remember was walking up the mountain and...I think I saw something in the snow but it was so hot..." Elan holds her face up to the fire, her bodies shiver slowing to a chill. "Is this Ignis?" Elan holds her hands up to the fire for a moment and starts to relax. She was actually the one that had taught him how to conjure this fire without the use of Fire Soul Communication.

"Yeah it is, thanks to you it is," Gage smiles and holds the flame steady. Flopping down on his butt he hops back up when he feels water on his pants soak through instantly.

"Oh thats cold," Gage stands up and looks at the ground beneath him for the first time since getting into the cave. Colored black with quickly spreading white lines he realizes that they are actually sitting on top of a layer of ice, cracking beneath their feet. A sudden snap in the ground makes the floor shudder and shift beneath them," Oh no." Then it was all falling, the floor faded away underneath him dropping him and Elan into the dark. Gage started yelling, Elan's screams being louder than his own in his ears. Reaching out and grabbing at her in the dark he pulls her close directing himself so that he is on the bottom.

Then everything was dark, not black like the darkness around him but like he was out. The next thing he knows is that he is laying flat on his belly, Elan speaking gibberish behind him as she straddles his legs, his hands on his back. As soon as he feels the blurry darkness recede he feels a blinding knife like pain in his back. "Ah...aahhh...AHHHH!!!" Gage begins to wither, the pain in his back starting to drive him insane.