Two years out, dear dead, and you had already broken your promise. You'd both agreed to it, of course. Two years out and you were aboard a dock of a different continent, the winds dry, the sun high. You wandered lost through an unfamiliar town, an unfamiliar language, with only a jet bird for company.

Of course this was how it ended. So cut back to a quarter of a year after wishing Tatter-cloak luck: you hiked through winter's claws up north along the coast, and came to mountain peaks. A melting river, ice ripping into chunks to bobble downstream.

Unwilling to jump into the river, you sat on a snowbank, discovered it was in fact a large, solid rock, set your sack beside you and just stared for a while.

You had nonexistent memories of the mountains. You recalled arriving at the caves with Kolariq in a wagon, and that it was an awful wagon ride from the mountains; you hugged your arms around your knees at the half-remembered discomfort. But stepping into the wagon, rattling down a road, glancing backward at the peaks slowly dwindling--none of that remained in your mind.

The way you thought of mountains was based on a single memory: a snow-capped peak towered above the village you lived in--presumably--with the stone top casting a long shadow and piercing clouds.

But across the half-frozen river and stretches of white snow, the mountains rose like disorderly teeth, in rows of broken, white points. Or icicles off a roof, only they pointed to the sky. How deep into them might that solitary, towering peak lie?

Perhaps the lack of a visible road was what made that wagon ride years ago so miserable. Of course it was not winter when Kolariq took you, so perhaps there was a road, and no glittering snow blocked it.

But it was winter for you. And the snow hid any possible road.

So you turned around. The river was melting but hardly warm, a perfect coolness to rip apart ice for walking but still freeze you deep. And the mountains would surely be slick, steep, melting soon and you did know about avalanches. Spring floods. You were not the only child of Kolariq's to come from a land less flat than the Nunait, one boy lost his parents to an avalanche. You had no desire to meet one and lose something too.

So you turned around.

***

I don't want to use the backpack as a stepping stool, for fear of crushing the bottles, the bandages, or the soap container. But in the gray light of dawn, as I trek from the beach with a waddling jet bird in tow, I discover I don't need to.

The woman from last night, smooth wooden cane across her lap, sits precariously atop the corner of the stone box. I tilt my head and frown, until a soft heartbeat on the other side of the box--past the crystalline blooded child--shifts and seems to stick their whole leg in the air.

I approach slowly, backpack hugged in my arms. The woman stares up at the sky, so I stop, outside the reach of her ash-stained shoe. Barely. I open my mouth.

"Who are you?" an accusing voice says. Footsteps announce the presence of the third person. Fourth, if we count the child.

"Me?" I squint at shimmering, bright green cloth wrapped tightly up legs, down arms, brazenly sharp against a black leotard.

Her teeth flash yellow. She smiles, or perhaps glares. "Yes, you. Who are you?"

"I'm...I just got here. Last night," my gaze goes to the woman precariously atop the box. "Who are you?"

Green-limbs folds her arms. Sticks her leg horizontal to prop it on the box. "I'm the niece. Of the woman you tried to sneak up on," she glares. She's young, in her teens, recently shaved the sides of her hair off to leave it like a chopped field, dull green, with a standing row of crops down the center.

"Sorry," I say. "I wasn't meaning to sneak. We talked last night," I say to the woman. "Remember?"

In the ensuing silence, the jet bird waddles around my legs to the box.

"Was that you singing last night?" the woman turns her gaze towards me. One eye flicks up and down, like a twitch.

"Yeah," I scoot away from Green-limbs, who hasn't quit glaring.

"To the box," the woman says.

"How would you know that?"

The jet bird takes to pecking the base of the stone.

"I heard you, that's how. And you were singing from right here. So either you were singing to yourself next to a confounding stone box, or you were singing to the creature inside it."

"I have a bird," I inform her. "I was singing to--"

"Ah. So that's what's pecking down there."

"Aunt," Green-limbs says, "do you really have to keep sitting up there? You're awfully close to the edge."

"I'm fine, dauntie. The human inside here, however, is most certainly not."

Green-limbs' eyebrows furrow, then her jaw drops, then she yanks her cloth-covered leg away from the stone. "There's a dead human in there--"

"Oh, not dead. I heard crying," she turns her flicking gaze to me. I have frozen in place, mind scrambling, she said last night she didn't want to know anything about it-- "Or were you singing to this trapped person?"

The jet bird squawks, and flutters away, and drops a chunk of gray stone from her beak. She hops back to the chipped corner of the prison and pecks again. It's going to take her forever to make an actual hole.

"It is a child trapped in there," I point, needlessly. "I don't know how to free him."

The woman nods slowly, frowning deeply. "Strange shenanigans going on here. Dauntie, can you climb up? I do believe there are breathing holes. Can you peer inside?"

Green-limbs nods, shakes out her wrists and leaps up to catch hold of the lip. "Stick," she grunts, dangling from the edge, bare feet struggling against the smooth wall. The woman lifts out her walking stick, shakily, and Green-limbs grabs the corner and grunts, heaving herself up. The woman nearly tips over from the force and I barely stop myself from keeping her up by her waxy-leaf textured blood. Mage business is bad business to be known, I step closer instead in case she does topple off.

Green-limbs scrabbles and clambers atop the stone box, and the woman hasn't fallen off, and the jet bird's waddling back with another beak-sized chip of gray stone as if nothing has happened.

"It's too dark," Green-limbs mutters. "I can't even see the floor inside."

The woman snorts. "Of course it's not easy. Why don't you go fetch a light?"

"On it," Green-limbs rises, briefly glares at me, and does a split-legged leap off the top of the box. She lands in a roll and sprints down the path, bare feet slapping sharp gravel.

She jogs away. I mutter, "who is--where--"

"Yua lives in the cabin beside me. She wants to be an acrobat," the woman tilts her head to the sky again. "Why did you sing a lullaby to a child, who is confoundingly trapped in a strange stone box sitting in the middle of our road?"

"Last night you said you didn't want to know anything more about it," I cross my arms, forearms hot inside my cloak.

"Yes, until you sang a strange song I couldn't understand, right outside my cabin. And then I got curious. So start talking."

I slowly puff air out my lips. "It's complicated."

"I can see that," a pause. She chuckles. "How did you know there's a kid trapped in there? My niece can't even see inside. And you only got here last night."

"Well--"

The ground rumbles. It heaves me off my feet and a woman topples off the lip of the box, halfway landing on my legs. She grunts in pain, I grimace at the gravel biting into my back.

"Aunt!" a girl screams; from within the box a child's faint voice shouts the same thing. "Aunt, are you okay?" Green-limbs sprints at us with a sputtering torch, eyes wide.

"Death mage!" an entirely different voice roars, vibrating the streets.

I push myself to a seat. This wasn't how I pictured a second confrontation going, an audience, me hardly at full strength. "Let him go!" I shout, hoarsely. The woman half on my legs gapes.

"How simple to get you to come back here," the ground rumbles. A heart, deep mountain caves, treads closer.

I glare down the street, past Green-limbs dropping to her knees beside us.

"I knew if I kept your child alive you would come find him!" his voice shouts, no ground shaking, just an old man stepping around the corner of the path, a halo of gravel about him, floating through rows of wooden cabins. "You should watch where your children run off to more carefully!"

I frown, at how none of us beside the stone box--a groaning woman, feeling about for her cane; a girl half-sobbing and crying she shouldn't have left; me, staring--are dead yet.

His heart skips. Worn mountain caves grow cold, slick with dew. I lay my hand on the jet bird to keep her from shooting into the sky.

"You couldn't kill him, could you?" I shout, hoarsely.

"Death mage?" a woman whispers.

I nod my head. Green-limbs goes still, then gasps, "we're all going to die, aunt..."

"I will kill him, after I deal with you!" the ground rumbles again, and the man quits walking. He's barefoot. Clad entirely in gray. The log cabins to either side tremble.

"Aunt..." Green-limbs whispers, gaping at me.

"Hand me my cane," the woman growls, pushing to her knees. "And death mage, or whatever you are, don't you dare come near--"

"Yes, I am a death mage," I rise to my feet. "But this death isn't for you."

"Isn't for us? Mage, there are burners..."

The gravel road between me and the stone mage erupts like an incoming wave; gravel knives, fluttering ash, a howl. I throw my hands in front of me and unloose fire from beneath my skin. Fire from Green-limbs' torch spreads hot to those senses. Goosebumps prickle up my arms, my spine; magenta overtakes my sight and dead people explode from the color.