NOVEL SIMPLE Ch. 15: The Elements
Cass’s pounding head woke her in the night. That and the freezing cold of the dark and the insistent beeping of the System. Thunder roared in the distance, adding to the ringing in her ears.
The fire had gone out. The stone had cooled around her and was now doing its best to sap the little heat left in her body out instead. She shivered, chilled to the bone.
The trembling wouldn’t stop as she inched closer to her fire pit. Not an ember still burned. Her hands shaking, she clumsily piled the remains of her gathered wood over the cold coals.
Clenching her teeth to attempt to control the chattering, she willed fire into existence with Elemental Manipulation. Nothing happened. She stared at her empty hands. She tried again.
There was the briefest flicker of fire before it sputtered out again.
She balled herself up, wrapping her arms around her shoulder, trying not to panic. She opened her status screen.
Stamina: 5/8 (27)
Focus: 43/59 (117)
Health: 4/24
Status Effects:
[- Beginner Reward: Bonus Staff Skill Growth
- Beginner Reward: Bonus Wll Skill Growth
- Disease: -75% max Stamina, -50% max Focus, -75% effective Wll, -50% effective Ala
- Hypothermia: -1 Health/20 minutes]
Cass squinted at the information in front of her. It hurt to focus on it. It hurt to keep a coherent thought. She just wanted to be warm.
But through the fog, she was sure that the last two statuses were new. And bad.
The system was beeping at her, the sound ringing in her ears and splitting her brain.
The only thing she was sure of was that she needed a fire. She needed to be warm. And to do that, she needed Elemental Manipulation to work.
She leaned over the fire pit, grimacing at the effort it took to move her aching body. On her knees, she put a hand at the base of her wood pile. Elemental Manipulation.
A puff of flame burst from her palm with an outpouring of will. Her eyes blinked shut and she felt the world around her spin.
She shook herself. Squinting at her firewood, she saw nothing had changed except the pounding in her head had gotten worse and her Focus had dropped again.
Stamina: 5/8 (27)
Focus: 23/59 (117)
Health: 3/24
She could barely see straight. The pounding was overpowering her slipping thoughts. She knew only two things: she had one more chance to light it and she needed that fire.
She needed more than the little puffs she’d been casting. She needed the amount of fire she’d made last night. Last night when she hadn’t felt this sick. Last night when…
Blearily she looked over the disease’s debuff. The numbers made her head spin. She knew they weren’t that complicated. If she could hold more than one of them in her head at once it would probably be easy enough to figure out how much of what each debuff was doing. Yet, her pounding mind could barely handle playing spot the difference.
-75% to effective Wll
That had to be it though. She vaguely remembered thinking Wll had something to do with the size of the fire she could summon. It was… her eyes crossed as she briefly tried to calculate how much less she had.
It wasn’t important, she decided after a moment. She had much less now. She could figure that much out.
But she didn’t need that much fire to get the fire going. Just a match stick into a properly built pile of kindling.
Cass usually left that to Kaye, her younger sister. Kaye was the pyro. Kaye was the outdoorsy one. It was Kaye who planned and organized the sibling camping trip every year. Kaye could build a fire with wet logs, a newspaper, and a good knife. Cass had seen her do it.
Cass didn’t like fire. Not near her body anyway. She liked it from afar. The glow at night. The warmth against the chill. The flicker in the wind. But she was more than happy to let others build it and maintain it.
She blinked blearily over her cold fire pit. Kaye would have been able to start this fire without magic.
She wanted to curl up and cry again. Kaye’s face, awash with terror as Cass had fallen into the void, filled her mind. There wasn’t time for speculation, but the questions echoed around uselessly in her head.
What did they see?
What did they do when she disappeared?
What did they tell their parents?
Were they okay?
She was crying. Tears poured down her face. Her trembling shoulders heaved as her sobs wracked her body. Her head hurt. Her eyes hurt. Her chest hurt. Her wounds hurt. The cold soaked into her bones, robbing her of the comfort of even her body heat.
She was going to die and no one she loved would ever know.
She didn’t know how long she cried over her fire pit. The cold kept sapping away her health and her will to move. Her throat grew hoarse from the sobbing. Eventually, she was too tired to keep it up. Her hopelessness transmuted into an empty numbness.
Stamina: 5/8 (27)
Focus: 29/59 (117)
Health: 2/24
She barely had any health left. Hypothermia was going to be her undoing, the cold stripping her of everything she had left. She’d woken in pain, but it was a faint whisper now, its force stolen by the cold.
It would be so easy to collapse here. She wouldn’t have to worry about monsters or food or sickness if she just let herself go now.
But they would never know.
Cass pushed herself up. Her body protested, but she ignored it.
They had to know.
She rummaged through the detritus around her fire pit. Her hands barely felt the ground beneath them, but she forced them to gather up a small collection of dried leaves and twigs.
They had to know.
She piled them slowly in the center of her fire pit, restacking her wood progressively bigger around them. It wasn’t as tidy as Kaye’s firewood back at the camp, but it had to be enough.
She had to get back to them.
She kept a single twig back from the pile. She held it in her left hand, one end up. Her right palm, she pressed up to the raised end. This had to work. She imagined what she needed the fire to do again and again in her mind. She had one chance. She didn’t know if her Focus would recover enough for another shot before she passed out. This had to work.
Elemental Manipulation!
A single flame puffed into existence in her right palm. She caught it, wrapping her will around it, keeping it from puffing out immediately this time. She guided it the centimeters to the end of her narrow twig, willing it to catch.
She barely breathed. It had to catch.
All too quickly, her spell ran out. She held her breath as she felt the control slip from the flame. As she saw it flicker at the end of her twig.
As it burned weakly in front of her like the world's least impressive candle.
It was too early to relax. Slowly, she leaned toward her firewood. She knew there’d be no gust of wind to steal her fire, her Atmospheric Senses promised it. Yet, she still held her breath praying to the universe nothing would blow out her tiny flame.
Slowly, carefully, she lowered it to her pile of kindling.
Relief washed over her as the kindling caught and the flames spread. She watched her little fire grow, licking at the larger sticks before biting into them. Slowly, carefully, she fed it more, until the fire pit was again filled with flames.
She let the heat soak into her. It did nothing for her headache or the pressure in her chest, but it was heaven on her freezing skin.
There was still tea in the pot. Cass scooped a cup and cradled the homemade mug in her shaking hands. She sipped it carefully. It was only warm, not yet back to boiling. All the while, she watched her status, waiting with dread for the Health to drop again. Waiting with hope for the Hypothermia status to drop from the list.
It happened simultaneously.
Stamina: 5/8 (27)
Focus: 14/59 (117)
Health: 1/24
Status Effects:
[- Beginner Reward: Bonus Staff Skill Growth
- Beginner Reward: Bonus Wll Skill Growth
- Disease: -75% max Stamina, -50% max Focus, -75% effective Wll, -50% effective Ala]
Cass breathed out a sigh of relief and, with the released tension, passed out again, the exhaustion too much for her to handle.