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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 76: Slade 276
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 97
The world swirled around him and turned white; he caught himself and stood upright, fully restored to an uninjured state from that strange process of passing through the scriff to a new universe. He was somewhere else--but all he saw was white below and gray above.
“Why is it so cold?” Shella asked. She apparently had arrived awake this time, although collapsed on the ground with her eyes closed. “Are we dead?”
“No,” Slade replied. “But I think it’s likely we will be if we don’t find a way to protect us from the cold.”
She sat up and glanced around. “Winter?”
“That’s a fair guess. I hope that’s all it is.”
“What else could it be?”
“A world of snow and ice? I’ve heard stories of entire planets that were buried in ice and snow. In fact, I’m told that there was a time when my own home world was covered in ice--they called them ‘ice ages’, and one might describe it as winter lasted for many hundreds of years. As someone wrote in a book I once read, ‘Always winter and never Christmas,’ although he wasn’t writing about that or, I hope, this. But whatever it is, we’re going to have to find a way to get warm.”
She nodded. “What do you suggest?”
“All I’ve got is a bedroll; and of course there’s your comforter and some other stuff you picked up for bedding. It’s not going to be much help against this. I think we have to hope that some of your magic works here.”
Shella nodded, and shook a bit, perhaps shivered, before slowly rising to her feet. She ran a string of mumbo-jumbo and waved her hands in the air, and it was suddenly significantly warmer. Slade also realized that the breeze he had felt was gone. They were inside the shelter they called a comfort bubble. Hopefully it would last a few hours, and hopefully when it lapsed Shella would be able to create another. It struck him that it might be useful for him to learn this, but he wasn’t a wizard, just a warrior who dabbled a bit in magic here and there, and besides, Shella was good at it, and they were a team.
“O.K., let’s set up the bedding, and you get some rest while I watch. If you get enough sleep, or I get too tired to stay awake, or the bubble bursts, we’ll swap.”
Once he had pulled the bedding from it, he sat on his backpack to stare into the vast expanse of white and gray nothingness, in the hope that something would reveal more about this world.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
