I tried to look at each step before I placed it, but it was hard when the rainbow-shimmering ice kept twisting and turning before my eyes. Sometimes, like last night, it called out to me, telling me I’d have all the answers I ever needed if I sank into its grasp. It showed me visions of events that happened long, long ago with my family, enticing me by whispering don’t you want that in my brain, though I shook the thought out thoroughly. Images of me and Soren spending peaceful moments together for the past year came as swiftly as the visions of my family went. Don’t you want this? The peace and comfort? Don’t you want to sink back into a happier place? It could never happen. Family was gone, in a better place, and I was here. While I may not have had the time of my life since entering the Permafrost, there were times when I was wholly content among the danger that the Norns, the masters of our fate, set out for us.

But still, my heart was hungry for those images as the ones I had of my family rapidly faded away in my memory. I lifted my chin and turned my gaze to right in front of me, looking at Seppo’s back and focusing on his easy movements through the ice.

The lure, the tug that pulled from behind my belly button, disappeared, and I continued forward with less of an urge to fall into the icy prison. I scanned the field in front of me, happy to know everyone else was managing to do the same … except … Soren had stopped in his tracks and stared at the ice with his eye vacant of any emotion or thought.

“Soren!” I cried out. Our eyes met and I recoiled: his eye was dull with an unseeing gaze before looking back down at the translucent ice. He began to step forward off the path that Lydian had traced.

“Fuck,” I said to no one in particular but started to trace my steps back to where Soren stayed frozen.

The sound made everyone else turn and look at the scene. Someone screamed our names, something about too much tension on the ice. But I knew whatever the ice made him see, it would keep him trapped there forever until he eventually fell through and was embraced by the freezing water.

And I couldn’t let that happen, not to him.

I stepped forward on the treacherous ice, off the path myself. No longer was it clear and spiderweb-free but clouded, and the little fissures in the ice ran from every direction at some points. I steeled my courage and continued on, close enough that I could speak to Soren.

“Soren,” I said, “we need to follow the path.”

“Don’t need the path, my other eye is here,” he mumbled. “Don’t need the path.”