Wrapped in Slade’s bedroll and her quilted comforter, Shella quickly fell asleep on the bed of untrammeled snow.  Slade kept himself awake with some difficulty, staring at the blank whiteness of the world around him.  At least he wasn’t cold.

Thus far there wasn’t much to this world, he thought.  After all, he expected there to be a war--there was always a war, wasn’t there?  That last world was a world of war, and although he played a very brief role in it his was a critical part that hopefully saw the overthrow of the madmen who would have turned one of history’s most notorious dictators into an invulnerable immortal.  Fighting was what he did.  About the only thing here to fight was the cold, and he was ill-equipped for such a battle.  From what he could see, this could be a dead planet.

Don’t be hasty, he told himself.  After all, you’ve been here about a minute, and while you can see for miles, maybe dozens of miles, you can’t see the whole place.  You’re going to have to explore.

That won’t be easy in this cold.

Why not?  You’ve got your mirror.

“Why not indeed?” he said aloud to himself, then hushed himself so as not to disturb Shella.  They could use their scrying spells to explore the world, and try to figure out what was here.  In all likelihood whatever was here was just as unaware of their arrival as they themselves were of whatever was here.

He smiled and put his hands behind his head, wishing he could lean back in his seat, but as he was sitting atop his backpack that wasn’t likely to work.  He would get his chance to rest soon enough.  He glanced around the barren snowfields once again.

Wait--was that something?  He peered; he squinted.  In the distance--and he realized just how difficult it was to estimate distance here--there seemed to be some dark spots moving against the white.  What was that?

Now he was annoyed.  Although he had decided that he could use the scrying spell later to explore the world, it was more a way of reassuring himself that he didn’t really need to know anything yet, rather than a plan of action.  Now he really didn’t have an excuse.  He had a target object about which he really ought to learn something, and he had a means of examining it by use of the little bit of magic that he knew, so he was going to have to stand up, open the pack, and dig through it to find that shaving mirror he used for the scrying spell.

With a sigh, he rose, then knelt in the snow--he was too tall to dig into his pack standing up--and began unlacing the leather ties that secured the main compartment.  It took him a good minute to find the mirror, which was intact after all these years.  He gave it a quick polish, pronounced the spell, and tried to move his point of reference across the white nothingness to find the dark spots.  Again it took a bit of time, but then he picked up a shadow in the distance, and once he had that it was fairly easy to shift to reach it.

He gasped, lost his concentration, and with it lost the image.  But he had seen enough.  There were several of them, a herd, he thought was the proper word.  They were huge, elephantine.  He couldn’t be certain, of course, but he thought he had glimpsed a wooly mammoth.

As to the old stories that have long been here:

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