1. The Summons
Astra gets an order she can't refuse...
Escape from Ice Mountain marks the start of an epic tale, one where a middle-aged fish-out-of-water librarian (and necromancer!) navigates love, betrayal, and the complexities of power as she struggles to embrace her destiny and uncover the mysteries of her own origins. Yes, there are dragons too! And also magical dogs. It’s gonna be awesome!
“Little Monk!” Uzzar called out from the tiny patio, her substantial bulk half-hidden by the shade of the buildings around them. “Don't pretend you can't hear me!”
It would have been easy for Astra to do just that. So high up in the monastery, the winds whipped through the small alleys and walkways that had been carved out between and over the old buildings, which in turn had been carved out of the mountain itself. Astra thought it was more an anthill than anything, rooms and courtyards and temples piled up over each other by successive generations of the devout until one could barely see the mountain under it.
“What is it, ranger-nun?” Astra sighed in defeat as she paused on her way up the long, narrow stairway. She was a senior nun and scholar and she knew from long experience that it never paid to ignore the call of a Ranger.
“Doyen Superior Naboch is asking for you. She's in her retreat in the Western Ward's temple.” Uzzar waved a hand to indicate she was done giving the message and walked away, her sword slapping against her leathers.
“Thank you, ranger-nun,” Astra called out softly, knowing the ranger would hear her anyway—magic that Astra was not curious about, for many reasons. She looked up the seemingly endless stone stairs ahead of her. She had meant only to go pray for a while in one of the empty jeweled hermit caves before twelfth bell called everyone to dinner.
Accepting that it was not to be, she turned and plodded back down the stairs, passing familiar doorways and enclosed patios and crossing several roofs before she was even properly on the way to the western ward's temple. There were no roads in the Qordashi monastery, just stairways and alleys and ladders. If Astra had not lived in the sprawling enclave for forty of her forty-five years, she would have gotten lost many times over, but she had made it to the vaunted title of Senior Nun without once getting lost. She knew exactly which short cuts to take to get quickly all the way to the heart of the Western Ward from the upper levels of the Northern Ward, since most of those shortcuts had not changed at all over the course of her life. They probably had not changed for a thousand years.
A summons from any doyen superior was not to be ignored or put off too long, but if it had been truly urgent Naboch the Esteemed would have sent her temple dogs to fetch her. Astra was grateful for small mercies and slight reprieves.
She detoured deeper into the Western Ward, but not directly toward Doyen Superior Naboch’s temple residence just yet. If she was going to trudge every wicked step into another ward, she was going to get something out of it that had nothing to do with Naboch’s (likely) political intrigue. She eventually slipped over the edge of a garden wall and up a ladder before taking a ledge along the roof of a low-ranking barracks until she came to the ward's residential district. No one but the superiors had private residences in Qordashi, but some dormitories were less communal than others, and a few of the oldest had shoved smaller kitchens into side rooms.
She jumped off a patio to land on the roof of the kitchen she knew best, that of Sibling-Nun Zochur. She banged on the roof's hatch until Zochur opened it.
“Why are you bothering me?” Zochur grumbled without malice, already shuffling back down the ladder into the heart of the kitchen again. Astra followed, gripping her skirts with one hand as she descended the ladder.
“Do you have any sweet dumplings?” Astra poked around at the bowls and boxes until Zochur slapped her hand with a wooden spoon. Gasping in pain, Astra held her hand close to her chest. “Ow!”
Zochur's dark, reddish skin glowed from the light of the cooking fire. The nun’s figure was of Astra's tall height, but not shapely as she was, instead being thin and angular.
“I know where you are headed. Why did Naboch call for you? You manage the Tiered Library in the Northern Ward, now. Doesn't she have her own librarians?”
Astra flapped her arms. “I don't know why, Zochur, as I have not visited her yet! I have not even seen her since she came over to my ward for the Festival of Bu.” She narrowed her eyes. “What’s got you so concerned?”
“I can't be worried for my favorite sibling-nun?”
“Thank you, sibling-nun, but you rarely care so much unless there is gossip in it for you.” She sniffed haughtily.
Zochur sighed with a resigned smile. “Maybe I simply mean that I am worried?”
For a moment, Astra felt bad about being so dismissive of someone who did care for her so much, and had been friends with her for so long.
But only for a moment, because Zochur had always been nosy.
“I think the superiors are up to their necks in politics, again, is what I think.”
“Ah. Having served Naboch as many years as I did, I fear that is always true.” Then they crossed their arms and eyed Astra with a severe expression. “But you have not been touching dead people's things again, have you?”
Astra rolled her eyes. “Oh for pity’s sake! No. I made my oath to the four winds, to Bu’s talons, when I was twelve. As you well know, since you were there.”
Zochur pointed the spoon at her. “It is rare enough to spook the superiors, and dangerous enough to terrify even the rangers, so forgive me my concern!”
“The dead have nothing to say that I want to hear,” she said with finality, which was true enough. The only dead people she wanted to hear from were her parents, but their graves were unknown and, Astra guessed, an unimaginable distance away. They were the only dead people for whom the price of her magic might be worth it.
“We've been having this argument for years, Zochur. Decades. I may be a freak, but I am not a foolish young girl, testing the limits of my doyen superior’s patience.” She crossed her arms in return, leveling Zochur with her best “librarian glare of displeasure.”
“Am I not allowed to worry?”
“Yes, of course,” Astra said, melting in the face of Zochur’s concern. “You always get this way when the spring melts start running,” she added with a grumble, turning to look into the baskets lining the wall. They were mostly filled with root vegetables and herbs and nuts.
“Get your bookish hands out of my supplies,” Zochur huffed as they turned back to one of their kettles. They were silent for a while. “I had to ask. I promised, after all.”
A chill ran down Astra’s spine. “What?”
“I promised I would always make sure you were keeping to the righteous winds.”
Astra stood frozen by the baskets she had been harassing, her mind whirling like a winter cyclone until all the pieces it carried fell from the sky.
“Traz left in the early spring. Just before the spring melts down the mountain started.”
Behind her, Zochur sighed heavily. “That he did.”
“All these years? Annoying me for an old, pointless promise?” She shook her head in disbelief. “And why even tell me now? It’s been half a cycle since he left us behind!”
Zochur sighed again.
“Zochur, what’s going on?” Astra walked over and took her friend’s hands in hers, holding tight.
Zochur did not look her in the eyes, just stood there for a long moment while Astra tried to read the emotions on their face. Eventually, they pulled their hands away and looked out the window to the spread of scenery below—the monastery proper down to the heavy, ancient walls and beyond to the folds of the Balashilar mountain range. Their gaze was soft but distant.
“Your arrival heralded great change, for all of us.”
Astra shook her head. “You know that is just silly gossip. I’ve lived here since I was five years old, and Qordashi is the same home for us as it has been for nuns for thousands of years. I understand why people believed that, given the circumstances of my arrival, but it’s been forty years.”
“What is even a single cycle in the turn of the wheel of the world?” Zochur quoted the Nuf, their gaze distant, before finally turning to face Astra. “Traz asked me to look out for you because I believe he saw what is coming, or some form of it. I have never thought his request of much consequence, other than of a boy asking me to care for his friend. But odd winds are blowing in from the eastern steppes, rumors of dragons acting strange. It would not surprise me if that is why Naboch has called for you.”
Astra shuddered as if she was the one out in the winds on the steppes, the way she did whenever Zochur talked about the world outside. She shook it off.
“None of that is why he left.”
“No, I suppose not,” Zochur said softly and returned to their cooking. Astra let the silence sit for a while.
Trazkhor had disappeared out of their lives nearly twenty-five years prior without a whisper of a reason or explanation and had not been heard from since. Astra had woken up one day to find that he had become history, his name already struck from Bu’s Board. They had vowed as children to go to the Sky Cliffs together when they were old and ready to die, but he had left her behind. She had never felt more alone than that distant morning when she had gone to his cell in the junior barracks and found it stripped bare.
The anger of that wound still flared hot and bright in her heart despite the passage of time and the near-certainty that he was long dead.
Some of that must have shown on her face, since Zochur dropped the spoon and came over to her, grabbing her forearms. “I still miss him, too.”
Astra took another deep breath. It had taken her many years to realize that Zochur was only about ten years older than Astra and Trazkhor, and not the ancient elder she had assumed when she was a child. Back then, they had been as close to a parent as a sibling nun could be, tending to her scrapes and holding her at night when Astra’s nightmares threatened to wake the whole junior nuns’ barracks. Their shared grief for Traz had been something to bind them closer, as adults.
“Thank you, Zochur,” she said quietly, reaching out to grasp their hands again.
“His concern was for your happiness and long life, as is mine. Wherever the winds have taken him, we still share that love for you.”
“He is gone, and the worst of the winter winds have passed,” Astra recited.
“May the gentle currents of the unending sky bring us together in spring, renewed.” Zochur finished the mourning prayer with a firm voice and a soft expression. They turned and grabbed a travel basket, lining it with a towel and putting some hot stuffed roka buns into it.
“Whatever reason Doyen Superior Naboch has for calling you, I have no doubt it has something to do with Dzrezor. Walk through the storm with a clear direction.” They closed the basked and looped its thin rope across Astra’s chest. “I know you would prefer to spend all your time with your books, hiding in your library, but it is good to see you, and I am sorry for mentioning our loss.”
Astra let herself be pulled into a hug, wanting the familiar affection even as she steeled herself to leave it behind for what she was expecting to be stressful meeting with her old mentor.
“Thank you for the dumplings,” she said by way of a peace offering.
“I must give you the right tools to play politics, mustn’t I?”
Astra groaned at that, for despite her own exalted status, there was little she liked less than the rampant politics that filled the temple hierarchies. Zochur patted her on the back with a chuckle as she peeled herself away, gathered the skirts of her dress, and hustled back up the ladder into the cold.
Two thumbs up!!