The screaming usually didn’t follow her out of her dreams. But tonight, when she was hounded out of her dreams by the fleet-footed nightmares, they chased her into a hell beyond even their worst reckonings. Anais lurched awake, aware of every drop of cold sweat that petered down the soaked nape of her neck, viscerally aware of each part of her body in a way most people never are. The stifling air around the bench where she had slumped moved as though it had become honey, dappled dust flaring across her sleep-clearing vision passing across flickering torchlight slower than usual for the sleek limestone tunnels and caverns where she made her living and which always seemed to breath with their own momentum; like the lungs of a dragon had been relocated to the mountain’s central heart. The screams which had woken her now silenced. Accidents weren’t unusual in the warehouses, she only hoped her friends hadn’t become the newest victims while her body had so forcibly taken the rest it needed. Scrubbing her grit-stained hands across her bare forearms, her face scrunched. She’d have to buy her section each a round to keep them from telling the foremen she hadn’t been present during the accident. But losing a week’s worth of pay was better than being assigned to the outer sectors of the warehouses, where the weather tangling its reaching fingers into the tunnels was as unpredictable as the heat here was certain. Sliding to the edge of the bench and tossing her exhausted limbs over the edge she hauled herself upwards, torn jumpsuit catching on the rough nodules along its edge. Body shivering, she tried to banish the rest of sleep’s effects from her system. It wouldn’t do to face the foremen more affected by the few minutes of rest she’d seized than two shots of palm alcohol. Her nightmares tonight must have been severe if she was taking this long to reacclimate; normally, she could catch snippets of rest on her feet without anyone else noticing. It must have been serious if no one’s come looking for me yet, she thought, involuntarily shivering again, violently. Looking down towards her exposed knee through the rip in her pants, she could see crystals creeping inward from its frayed edges; spurred on by the sweat from her night terrors. Ice. At the same time, the flames from the torches lining the carbonized walls began to move once again; sucked in towards the main cavern her crevice of a tunnel sprouted from as though the great dragon was taking its first full breath in a thousand years. Her body moved before the thought fully formed. Just one name. Rahja. Pushing open the ailing panels separating the tunnel from the central cavern, she was surprised to already find a foot of snow blocking the entryway and quick thickening ice coating the sorry excuse for hinges. Forcing her to use her whole bodyweight to wedge open the makeshift door and assess the damage for herself. The whole cavern was shrouded in white, thick flakes curling downwards more quickly with each second as the wind picked up in it’s upper reaches; the magic rounding inwards, feeding on itself to kick the squall into a face-tearing storm she knew would come quicker than anyone would anticipate. Scanning the walls quickly, she could see blue-tinged ice crawling up the walls from section B-25. Jonah’s section. She didn’t know what magic had broken free, whether it had been holding a sweet frost or a midwinter blizzard from the northernmost glaciers. She also couldn’t tell if there were more than one that had been damaged in the initial frozen blast. The Market’s warehouses weren’t exactly known for their organizational capabilities. Or their safety. UNTITLED BY NATASHA NAGLE A STORY EXCERPT 20
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