"The path ends at this mountain," said elder Konri Oko.
"Thank you for accompanying me this far, elder," I said.
"You are welcome, Teacher," she said, as she climbed the steep incline along with a group of fur-bundled hunters.
I walked beside her, my breath turning to mist despite the bright sunlight. We were going up to the final base camp of the Oko tribe here in the Northern Mountains. Perennial glaciers made it impossible for the tribesmen, with their limited climbing technology, to proceed any further. They will be able to explore the glaciers with their balance magic in the future, but for now, they wanted to focus on their homeland.
The base camp was not very impressive. A few dug out pits that may have once held campfires, a flattened area with unnatural rock formations and marks left behind by tent pegs. Still, it was the last sign of civilization that I was going to see for a few weeks.
"Please accept this, Teacher," said elder Konri as a hunter passed her a hide-bag, which she presented to me.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It is a specialty of our tribe," she said. "Dried meat cooked in a hearty helping of lard. We find it warming and filling, although the people of the other tribes do not appreciate the taste."
I smiled at the elder. "I will try it, thank you." I thanked the other tribesmen too. I told them they should head back soon. They did not like to camp up here unless they had to. It got quite windy and there wasn't a lot of food. Even I was going to keep moving forward, although the glaciers and tall peaks up ahead were not going to be any more fun to camp on.
We separated around noon. I watched the Oko tribesmen disappear over the lip of the mountainside, and exhaled. I turned around and took in the scale of the glaciers. Massive icy formations that cut through the jagged landscape like slow-moving daggers. The ice cut a menacing figure within the rocks, bouncing and intensifying the sunlight like a mirror, a mirror that stretched into the distance and made me squint from far away.
I walked down the mountain away from the Oko tribe's lands. I kept my map open, using air magic to protect myself from the howling winds. With the compass, I was able to estimate the distance I'd crossed over the past few weeks, and knew how far I had to go to fill out the map to the same length as I'd filled it out in the other three cardinal directions. Judging by how difficult the terrain was, I figured it would take at least a couple of weeks, which would give me enough time to get back to Bek Tepe for the solstice.
I approached the foot of the glaciers and made a marker on my map for the location. I used the mountain with the Oko tribe's base camp as a landmark, since that would help any future explorers follow in my footsteps if I gave them the map. After making a few more notes, and estimating how far I'd be able to walk up this steep, slippery glacier before it got too dark, I identified what looked like a small rocky outcropping far above my head, and decided that was where I was going to camp tonight.
I wrapped a thin piece of treated monster skin over my eyes, grabbed my copper-tipped walking sticks, fixed my copper strengthened leather boots, and began climbing the glacier. Thanks to my balance magic, as well as the occasional bit of water magic around slippery areas, I was able to reach my planned camp before the sun dipped over the crest of the mountains. I made a small fire to warm myself up, covered the rocky outcropping with some treated hide, and huddled down in my makeshift shelter.
I warmed up the food elder Konri had given me. It smelt like jerky and gravy, which wasn't a particularly appetizing combination, but I bit into it nonetheless. It tasted like jerky and gravy, except that turned out to be a winning combination after all. Elder Konri was right, eating something this warm and filling by a campfire at this altitude and at this temperature, felt great. I finished the whole thing and let it settle in my stomach. I went to sleep with a smile on my face.
---
The glaciers were relentless. They kept going and going and going into the distance, like rolling sand dunes or wide windswept plains. There was barely any food but I managed to make do with what I could find. Mostly strange monsters that swept through the frigid air or burrowed within the ice. Thriving within these difficult conditions must have been difficult, but somehow, even here, life had found a way.
I went up the side of the glaciers, making sure never to climb all the way up because that would be unnecessarily tiring. I spent several days in frosty solitude, putting one foot after the next, digging into the ice with my sticks, and casting so much balance magic that I could probably have balanced on the pin of a needle by the time I was back at Bek Tepe. I was gathering 'wisdom' for my magic, constantly, but I was also gathering another kind of wisdom too.
It took me a while to realize, but eventually I understood what I had been lacking. What I had needed, after all those days of finding myself in a different world with strange people, inventing magic, battling powerful immortals and whatnot, I had barely had the time to stop and reflect on my self. My actions. My feelings. My motivations. And, most importantly, my goals.
While Noel was around, I was swept up by the need to deal with the issues of the Jora tribe, and then later, to find them. But after she left, the other thing that I had been trying to do was finally put in center stage: to find a way home. The only hint I had was the word the Immortal of Madness had used: annihilation.
I had made some progress on understanding this word. Inspiring by mystical thinking from my previous world, I'd decided to look at this word through the lenses of other languages. The language of the humans of this world, which I had already started to codify and to learn, suggested that annihilation could mean: to be destroyed by becoming part of something else.
But I needed more. More lenses. More perspectives. More… languages. And to get more languages, I needed to meet more peoples. I'd stumbled into the elves of this world, and although they did not know anyone outside their community, I'd found the humans soon after. I knew the elves and humans had different languages, but without Noel around, I had no way to decipher the elfin tongue. And with the elfin Jora tribe having passed away, and Noel storming away in her bid for revenge, that meant my only hope to rediscovering the elfin tongue and using it to decipher the Immortal of Madness' hint was to find the other elfin tribes.
And to find the other elfin tribes, I had to explore this icy, unforgiving landscape. I did not think that I would be able to cross these mountains on my own, nor did I intend to try. But by filling out the map, and sharing it with the humans at Bek Tepe, I would at least be able to start the process of filling in the unknown portions of the globe.
These thoughts ran through my head as I crossed the glaciers. I also spent some time working on my magic. With the lodestone in my hand, I was able to finally begin working on a new and incredibly useful type of magic: magnetism.
Magnetic magic made me excited. Although I wasn't quite there yet, I felt that with enough experimentation and practice, I could skip thousands of years in the technological advancement of the peoples of the double river basin and unlock all sorts of things with magic alone. It would also be of amazing help with navigation, construction, and for things like hunting. All sorts of possibilities flitted through my mind.
The sun shone brightly on the day I finally left the glaciers behind. Judging by my lodestone as well as estimates of how long and far I had walked, I figured there was still some ways to go before I reached what would be the new, farthest North marker on the map. I would have to pass through at least four more towering peaks, with massive walls of rocks and ice to scale and no sign of any easy passes or alternate routes.
By the time I crossed the fourth mountain, I was in a terrible mood. I'd begun to see, far into the distance, peaks that were even larger than the ones I had just been crossing. The scale of this mountain range was awe-inspiring.
I used earth magic to create a massive column of earth at the place where I had marked the farthest North on my map. I decided to leave an inscription, etched in stone and written in the language of the humans of the double river basin:
"To have climbed the giant's foot, only to come upon the leg, is the folly of the ant. To have climbed the mountains, only to find that they were hills, is the folly of the explorer – Caspian Holm."