Given my penchant lately for writing in odd places, I wanted to have this somewhere I could access and add to from anywhere. Feedback and thoughts welcome, but mostly this is an attempt to work out the characters and all in my head.

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Prologue - Kerron

Kerron never understood the thirst for outside knowledge until, in his fiftieth passing, the opportunity to attain outside knowledge first presented itself.

He stood in the hallway now, keeping so still even his breath seemed to have all but stopped. From the other side of the door came voices, familiar but indistinct – Greaton Methesel’s rumbly baritone, the faint squeak of Greaton Penita, the endless drones that could only be Greaton Carver giving a sermon – he could tell who was talking but not what they were saying.

Every once in a while, the sound of the others talking would die down and he’d hear the girlish hum of Eleya’s answers or explanations. When he heard that, he would lean in a little closer to the door, until his ear was all but touching the woven leather layers that covered it.

He’d just been sitting in one of the alcoves, working on a form, when he heard the sound of rapid footsteps. Then she’d gone galloping past, arms swinging wildly at her sides and loose hair whipping and tangling behind her. The footsteps slowed and faded, then grew louder again, and she scuffled backward into his field of view again.

“Kerron! Oh, bless the luck and bless the… no, but it broke didn’t it? You’re perfect!”

He’d looked up at her, then raised and dropped his hand in a vague gesture, but she would have none of it. Her smaller hands wrapped around his wrist as she’d tried to bodily haul him to his feet.

“Umph. Come ON, we have to find the… ha, I do sound crazy don’t I? Yes, yes, I sound crazy, but I AM, Kerron.” She released him and twirled away like a small child. “We have to gather the greatons of the small seat. It’s happened, and on my patrol, it was like the roar of a waterfall, or-“

Kerron put a hand on her shoulder, which jolted her abruptly from her giddiness. “A great chunk of the ice,” she said then. “It’s fallen. Kerron, that’s the sign isn’t it? It’s a sign that the end is coming.”

She’d begun running again at that, heading for The Hearth. Kerron followed, keeping pace but stopping outside the doors while she went in. She’d sent one of the greatons’ runners out to look for the members of the small seat.

That had done it for Kerron. Even if Eleya were given to falsehoods, this was the small seat she was summoning. None would be fool enough to gather them unless they were certain.

As he ran this over in his mind again and again, the door finally opened again. Eleya walked out sedately, though her smile threatened to split her face. She maintained that calm walk until she reached a turn in the tunnel. Then he could hear the quiet steps turn into the rolling sound of running.

Then the Greatons were beckoning him inside.

Kerron did as he was bid, wishing that he could ask them half a hundred questions which were chasing one another around his mind. He couldn’t, of course, but in this case it didn’t really matter.

“We’re putting a group together to go to the Sky Hole,” Greaton Penita said. “It seems the end is approaching. The ice is falling, the snows are disappearing-“

“Can’t be sure of that yet,” interjected Greaton Methesel.

Penita waved his objection away. “Oh, go melt. You know that child wasn’t making stories as well as I do. We need to gauge it.”

“Should we send a second group to the front quarter?” Methesel asked.

It was Carver who answered. Head bowed, not looking at the others, he said, “It has been a bit more than nine hundred passings since we sent a group up there, to the spaces our order used to occupy. I am inclined to believe that even if the end is approaching, there will not yet be a change at the black gate. However, I have been outvoted, and we all agree you would prove singularly useful in leading a group up there. So, if you will choose four or five and depart before the next pass, and see if there is light coming through the black gate.”

He nodded to each of the three and set out at once. Behind him, the three began arguing about who would lead the other group, but Kerron’s thoughts were caught up in this trip – his first trip to the front quarter, the long-abandoned former living space which was now, according to rumor, completely iced in shimmering blue from the long years of cold. And the black gate… no one had seen the black gate in how long?

Truly, the end was coming.

Prologue – Jovec

“It bores me, Dedron.”

Dedron paused in his pacing long enough to frown pointedly at the younger man. “It wasn’t two months ago that you couldn’t wait to reach forty passings so you could stop patrol and take up lookout instead. Because it bored you, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yes, but-“

“And after the Greatons of the Blue Room decided you weren’t mature enough, I put my reputation on the line-“

“Yes, and I appreciate-“

“-promised them you would settle down-“

“-just.. Very well,, very-“

“-and instead it’s not a single passing since and you’re-“

“Very well!”

The shout echoed down the half-lit tunnel and disappeared into the darkness down around the bend. Jovec stared after it, as though he could see the sound bouncing off the barely visible stone.

A sigh sounded from the right. “Jovec. I’m sorry. I just worry.”

Jovec continued concentrating on the tunnel, on the shadowed far end. The guttering blue light of the illumination forms kept that blackness constantly shifting and moving. “No reason for you to be sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I just don’t want to hear it again. Things I already know.”

This time it was a chuckle, not a sigh. “If you didn’t keep doing them, we wouldn’t repeat things.” When Jovec didn’t answer, Dedron stood up from the floor and walked in front of him.

“I’ll be right back. Time for a little look.”

That spurred him. Jovec hopped to his feet as well. “Not fair!” he protested. “Ice and stone, I was just saying that all this sitting here-“

“-bored you,” Dedron finished over top of him. “Why do you think I’m going? You’re still not doing the job for the job. You’re doing it because you think it’s supposed to be some sort of entertainment.”

He put his hands on Jovec’s shoulders and leaned his head forward until they were forehead to forehead. This close, Dedron’s eyes looked as deep a blue as real ice and stone. This close, Jovec couldn’t look away.

“Promise me you’ll watch from here?” he asked. “Promise to try and understand why?”

Closing his eyes, Jovec said, “Very well. I promise.” He opened his eyes again, grinning at his guard-partner. “Besides, if something does attack, there’s no way you’d be able to fight it off.”

Laughing, Dedron pushed them apart and turned away, toward the shadows. “Right. Because you’re the expert on fighting unnamed horrors.”

“Better than you.” Jovec pushed him playfully in the back, hurrying him along. “Talk them to death? Explain that they couldn’t possibly exist, so if they’d do you the kindness of accepting the fact and disappearing you’d appreciate it SO much?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Dedron called over his shoulder as he scooped one of the forms off the wall. Its ever-changing shape guttered for a moment as it was hit by a passing breeze, then straightened again. “I’ll be back soon.” Then he was down the hall, around the corner, out of sight. The form’s light faded more slowly, but after a while, it too was gone and Jovec was left alone at the guard post.

For a while he stood there, back straight, eyes scanning the darkness for any sign of suspicious movement. Then, slowly, he began so sag. He leaned against the wall, folded his arms over his chest, looked back toward the more well-lit tunnels of the compound. He started humming tunelessly. He tried very hard not to be irritated at Dedron, who claimed to hate the cold tunnels but who always did the walkabouts down them, every day.

The Greatons of the Blue Room had made it clear that the reason the two of them had been allowed to guard together when most friends were kept separate was that they complemented one another better than they would have any other people currently in the guard corps.

He also suspected they had another reason behind pairing him with Dedron, but he wasn’t about to admit it to anyone. Everyone already had enough reason to think less of him. If they-

“Dedron? Dedron, you have to hear!”

The sound of running feet and a distant, shouting voice startled Jovec. One hand was on the wall and the other had gone to the hilt of his stone knife before the voice really registered.

“Eleya,” he called back, relaxing his grip on his weapon as she came jogging into view. “He’s gone down to take a look around. He should… be…”

As she came closer, he could see her face more clearly, her cheeks flushed so much they looked purple in the forms’ blue light and her eyes unnaturally wide. Were she not smiling, he would have suspected something was amiss. As it was, he simply trailed off, unsure what to say or how to frame the question he wanted to ask.

Her grin faded to a bit of a glare. “Why do you make him to that all the time?” she accused.

“M.. me? He won’t let me do it, I’d be happy to,” Jovec sputtered. “He could be the alarm, he’d be better at it than me.”

Eleya rolled her eyes at him. “So you say. But you still stick him with the job.” She said it simply, as though this were not her opinion but an undebatable fact. He decided to leave it at that and changed the topic.

“So, what were you looking for him for? If it’s that important, shouldn’t you tell your dear brother first?”

At this, her grin returned. She seemed years younger when she did that. “I figured you’d have heard it through the rocks already,” she teased. But he didn’t tease beyond that, for which he was thankful as soon as she’d said it.

“Jov, the ice in the Upper Yard. It broke! The ice is failing. That means-“

But he wasn’t listening. He already knew.