Is this how it happens?

Here's how it works: your mother finally puts her foot down.

You're just a boy, of age or not, she tells you. Her face is lined with stress, no small part of it your doing. You tower over her, feeling too large and too clumsy and too ridiculous in your clanking armor. Your sword, lovingly honed and wrapped in a leather sheathe you crafted yourself, is suddenly a child's toy. By contrast, your mother is prim and sensible in her Sunrise Islands wrap. Her knitting is on her lap. The wool and dye in her growing creation were both collected less than a mile away and will never leave your hometown.

Stories about adventure are all well and good for boys, your mother tells you. But you're getting too old for this sort of nonsense. There's no glory to be found leaving home for the capital. If you're lucky, my son, you'll only find loneliness. If you're unlucky, the rumors about war with the Southern Regents will come true. You'll be dragged off to battle, little sellsword, and meet your end in an unmarked grave in a godless land, where dreadful dragons roam, and the songs of magic fall on deaf ears. Stay home, Samgar. There is nothing for you there. Stay home, get married, and continue your family line.

Is this how it happens?

Yes, of course it happens this way. At that moment on the eve of your eighteenth birthday, you waver before this dreadful foe. A faithful knight, you fall to one knee before the lady of the house and yield. The armor is sold to a passing recruit, whey-faced and filled with what you now see to be pointless aspirations to glory. The sword you balk at giving up, at least at first. Your mother spends years trying to get you to sell that too, but it's your wife (the miller's daughter; an arranged, prosperous match) that finally takes matters into her own hands and trades it for a chubby ewe. It's been five years since you've needed it, she says, and says rightly. You are forced to concede the point. War has never come to Pellea, she adds, and you cannot dispute her. The ewe will bear many lambs, and the flock will grow. Our prosperity in the town, in spite of the poor soil of the hills your family owns, will be assured. Why can't you see that, Samgar? Was that childhood dream of adventure so important?

Yes, of course it is.

No, of course it isn't. You ought to know better than to contest her. You don't win arguments anymore, not since you were eighteen and you realized nothing was worth the fight. Nothing was worth this match (your mother worked so hard to secure it) or your land (your father's, passed to you when he died two years ago.) This is what happiness feels like. This is what prosperity feels like. Be silent. Obey. Grow.

Winters come, and your flock sustains you. Summers follow, and the house is lulled in the sunshine by the buzz of insects and the soft calls of your sheep. It's peaceful, to be certain; peaceful like the drowsiness of falling asleep in the snow. Your wife bears first one son, then a second. She names them after her father and her grandfather, and they grow as chubby and obedient as the flock outside. A good thing, your neighbors assure you. An obedient child is a blessing from the gods, and two no less? Sons, no less? You nod at their words. It's not your place to question the elders of Pellea, the traditions of your people, or the will of Nuhan. What would an excitable child bring besides trouble? You kill your own memories of being the sort of boy who fought off wolves with a stick and broke his arm falling out of trees. They do you no good.

On the eve of your younger son's eighteenth birthday, when you are to begin searching for a wife for him–when your wife will tell you who he marries and you will nod because she knows best–your mother dies.

It's an utterly mundane death. There's no violence or excitement to it in the slightest. A bout of influenza passes through the village. The youthful and hale are spared, but a number of elders, your mother included, fall asleep feverish and never wake up. A tragic death, you are assured. How painful and awful you must feel to lose a mother before she has the chance to become a crone. At least now she can rest beside your father, your wife tells you. You can work through your grief with the rites and the village, and cover it with the flourishing of your family line.

Cover your grief, mourn appropriately, and carry on, everyone says. You wonder why you only hardly feel sad at your mother's passing. You hardly feel anything. Haven't for years. This is maturity and honor, they tell you. You don't contradict them. You never contradict anymore. Fighting is a young man's game, and you haven't been young since you turned eighteen.

A year passes. Your youngest marries the smith's daughter and moves down the road. Your oldest is still with you, tending the flock. You could see them every day, if you liked, and they you. You hardly exchange two words in a month. This is growing up. This is all you need, says your wife. You hardly speak to each other, either. It's not hostility–gods, you would kill for hostility, for a proper fight, for anything. You simply have nothing to say.

This is how it happens. This is your life. It's warm out. You don't feel cold. The air is clean. You don't struggle to breathe. Your limbs are tired from your day's labors. Why not lay them down to rest?

No! Keep moving, you have to keep moving–

On the anniversary of your mother's death, you leave your house at dusk. A jealous wife might wonder at her husband disappearing into the night without a word. Yours doesn't even notice. Why should she? Where would you go? There's nothing but Pellea and the empty woods. Better to rest at home. The bed isn't comfortable, but it's yours, and it's the only one there is.

You ignore sense, putting one foot after the other to go to your mother's grave. She had been cremated according to the customs of her homeland, but a memorial stone still sat at the base of a tree in the woods. You haven't visited the grave since the funeral, and you're not sure why you're going there now. You're not sure why you do anything these days. The labors are already so long, and you just want to rest. Sleep. Isn't that the best life has? Slumber? Oblivion?

You keep walking through the dark trees, the starlight smothered by clouds. It's supposed to rain later, and the damp chill is already making your toes go numb. If you had any sense, you would turn away, but instead, you come to a halt before the memorial stone. The inscription is written in your mother's tongue. You used to speak it, but it's been so long since even she spoke it to you. Better you learn the language of Pellea, of Nuhan, she would tell you. You'll never go to my homeland anyway, and why would you want to? Everything you need is right here.

Your toes are fully numb, and you open your mouth to speak to the stone, to your mother, but you inhale something besides air that makes you cough. The words are lost. The memory of what you wanted to say is gone almost as quickly.

It occurs to you that this stone, this rock carved in a language you don't know, is the last piece you have of your parents. The last piece of your life before you became who you are now. And who is that?

A father, you reason. What were your sons' names again? You can't recall. There's nothing to distinguish them in your mind, just a blur of ruddy pink and stolid obedience. A husband as well, to a wife who married a completely different man. A herder, caring for a flock that does not grow despite all these years of careful care, stagnant as a puddle of piss in a ditch. Just another man, and barely even that. Barely more than a sack of flesh that stands and sleeps and shits. There's no spirit here. Just life, nameless as the sheep in your flock.

Samgar!

Shut up. You don't know that name. That name belongs to a stranger. Stupid thing. It means sword in the old tongue, the tongue of heroes in stories you never bothered to tell your children. Does that sound like you, old fool? You're–

Oh, hush now. I didn't mean to get angry. There's really no need for fuss, not when you're have such a difficult time. Don't you think it would be better to lie down and rest? Your mother would approve of such a display of filial devotion. Lie at her grave, and breathe slower and slower. Sleep. No one needs you. No one wants you. No one will remember you if you decide that breathing is such a burden. Just stop fighting. Stop being.

Adeline.

No. There's nobody by that name. Just let it g–

Addy's no one to you? You're willing to throw her aside just like that?

Hush, fool, you don't believe silly things like that anymore. Your sons are fine.

Obedient sons? Hah! No wonder you're bored to sleep. Your daughter is foolish and excitable, and she believes every single one of your stories. She sneaks into bars and beats up her friends in practice bouts. You live in a shitty little house in Minoa, and you aren't married, and you don't have sons. You have Addy, and she burns with life.

This is a lie, Samgar. Can't you feel the despair singing in your veins? This isn't your life; this is...

This was winter magic. The magic of water, cold, and shadow. The season of sleep. The season of despair and death. Gods, it must have been powerful, too–mind magic was famously difficult to use, and this world was unsettlingly immersive. Samgar stood in front of his mother's grave and felt a slow smile spread across his face.

His mother neglecting to teach him her language? A pair of sons with the personality of a wooden table? A woman foolish enough to marry him? A life void of purpose and excitement?

Liar.

Liar.

He laughed aloud, and something amorphous, cold, and slimy choked the sound. The cold in his feet was frosting armor all around him, and he was no longer standing; instead, he lay flat with his face pressed into gritty stone. An unadorned gray room, striated with the same patterns of compressed sediment, was filled with thick, blue-tinted smoke. The tint came from a single flameless lantern, cast to the ground but remaining unbroken. Samgar scrambled to get his arms under him, the cold metal screaming in protest as he stood.

The taste of the ocean and incense filled his mouth. It choked him as he stood, wracking his lungs with involuntary coughs that nearly sent him spasming back to the floor. An invisible fist was squeezing his chest as black and blue bile was forced from his mouth. In spite of the pain, however, Samgar felt warmth start to return to him with every retch. His armor began to steam, the frost disappearing.

For a moment, all he could do was breathe. Then, with a start, he noticed babbling in Southron. Cold lead pooled in his stomach, and he squinted through the smoke to see Jindi, a blue-swathed heap in the center of the room. Her eyes were open, gaze fixed on an unseen target. Samgar couldn't understand a word she said, but he knew the tone: dread. Pleading. It didn't take a genius to guess what she was seeing.

Samgar bent his head. "Shit."

He sat by Jindi's side, wondering what to do. If this spell created fear and despair, then Jindi was a uniquely vulnerable target: who would know despair better than a woman who had lost everything? Her misery would be such a luscious substrate for winter magic that she might never wake up. Perhaps that was the point: the pain and fear could keep them trapped until they slowly froze to death.

Of course, the problem then became how to break a spell without a mage or even the slightest glimmering of magic.

Samgar exhaled hard. Again. His eyes widened.

Winter magic was inevitably tied into ice and cold. As soon as Samgar had freed himself, his body and armor had defrosted. He couldn't cast the tiniest summer magic cantrip, but what if he didn't have to? What if all he needed was heat? The purifying force of light and fire, the hallmark of summer magic?

"It would serve me right," Samgar said aloud. "If saving your life lit a gas pocket and we both died immediately."

Jindi's answer was all Southron, a desperate appeal. Her eyes stared ahead, seeing nothing. Her lips were blue. Her teeth chattered. Samgar laid out the tinderbox and an oiled cloth wrapped around a stick. He pulled out the flint and steel, positioning both over the nascent torch.

"Let there be light," he said, and struck.

The spray of sparks fell on the oilcloth and immediately ignited. Samgar almost wept with relief; after so many days in the darkness with only the unearthly blue light of the flameless lantern, the blaze of heat, of orange and vermilion and buttery yellow, with only the tiniest sliver of green and blue by the base, it was like the sun had come into the heart of the earth. A bloom of heat caught, banishing the foul, chilly incense surrounding the room–the spell was potent, he realized, but unstable. Samgar knelt by Jindi's side, holding the flame as close to her frost-tinged face as he dared.

"Come on, you old bat," he muttered. "You can do this. You never let Nuhan break you before, don't start now. Come on, Jin, you can do this, you can beat it–"

The frost turned to dew, which turned to sweat. For an immeasurable amount of time, there was nothing. Then, Jindi's eyes abruptly refocused. With a leonine roar, she lashed out with one hand, knocking the torch from Samgar's hand and into the wall, where it clattered to the floor, still burning. She leaped to her feet with a curious spiraling motion around her right hand, spoiled only by the wracking coughs and spurts of black bile.

Samgar braced himself, hands out: he was still without a weapon after his sword had been melted by the dragon's blood, and Jindi's eyes were wild. He said absolutely nothing as she coughed and spat and, at one point, actually vomited out what were recognizably trail rations threaded with black and blue. After an eternity, she slowly straightened, eyes focusing on Samgar.

"Are you real, laoxiong?" She asked, stance unsteady, eyes crossing. Her hand was on her blade, and she was still breathing heavily.

"I think so," Samgar answered. "Had one hell of a nightmare about–" He considered what it was that she had probably seen and was immediately ashamed by the mundanity of his illusion. "–I can't remember. Are you all right."

"No," Jindi replied, and immediately vomited again. Samgar winced and went to retrieve the lantern, still blazing merrily in the corner. By the time he was back at her side, she had steadied herself. As she drew near her side, she gripped his shoulder with manic strength.

"Samgar. Tell me we haven't found a real dragon. Not yet."

"We haven't," Samgar answered obediently. Jindi took a shuddering breath, then released it. "Come on, crone. We're almost through. The door's right over there. We need to get moving now before whoever set that spell comes back."

Jindi stiffened. "This is Nuhan sorcery?"

"And not just any Nuhan sorcery. There's only one person I can think of in the entire country who can sustain such powerful winter magic without being physically present, and we definitely don't want to meet her. I don't even know how–" Samgar cut off the thought. "It doesn't matter. The point is we have the scrolls. We need to go. Now."

Jindi dearly looked like she wanted to punch something but had not yet decided on what. She inhaled and exhaled again. Meditation breaths. Her clothes were still laced with frost in delicate, deadly tesselations. "Samgar, we're close to the end. Are you ready for what comes next? I don't doubt that the final guardian of the true dragon will be even deadlier than this spell and the beast that came before it."

Samgar considered her question. He considered the smoke, and the nightmare, and the haunted look in Jindi's eyes.

The blunt fact of the matter was that he had almost died. He was a man past his prime, swordless and armored. Salvation was a young man's game–all the stories agreed. If he went in after a superhuman, centuries-old warrior nun, death was the more than likely outcome.

He grinned at Jindi. "Of course I am. What's an adventure without a little danger, Jin?"

Her expression hardened. "The hell are you saying, Samgar? This isn't a game!"

"Yes, it is." His eyes matched hers, glare for glare. "You play, and you die. Or you don't play, and you die anyway. Better to do something meaningful with the time you have. Something worth the effort. Something you can be proud of and your children after you. But if you don't play, you never win. I saw my greatest fear, Jindi, and it was forgetting that fact. I've spent years trying to forget. Never again. I choose the good fight, even if I lose. I choose your good fight, and you can bet your ass the best master-of-arms in Minoa won't lose, no matter what comes."

Not for the first time, Jindi looked at him as though she would never understand him. This time, however, the weight of the unknowing stare didn't weigh on him in the same way. Samgar gave her another sunny grin and this time was rewarded with a tiny, almost imperceptible quirk of the lips.

"Well, if you're going to be cocky about it, we'll just have to disabuse you of that delusion," Jindi drawled.

"You can certainly try, crone," Samgar answered, and together they went through the door.