Page 206 of Mud

They would undoubtedly breakanykind of ice if they were to fall off the roc statue.

My heart skipped a long beat, and for a long second, I was perfectly calm. Perfectly still. Thin and light as air. It all aligned so perfectly in my head that I almost laughed at why I hadn’t seen it before.

I couldn’t break this ice with my knives, and Taland couldn’t break it with his magic—but those talons could.

I was as sure of it as I was sure that I was lying on this ice right now.

Going back to tell Taland was out of the question—my blood was boiling when I jumped to my feet, and my knives were in my hands again, and I was slamming them onto the edges of the ice cube the roc stood on.

I was climbing.

Don’t ask me how; I can’t tell you. And if you wonder how many times I almost fell, that number is possibly somewhere in the three digits.

But Ididn’tfall. And I didn’t look down, not once. I just stabbed the ice with my knives and pushed myself up as far as I could. I even heard Taland’s voice from the ground calling my name sometime later, but I didn’t stop climbing until that talon, the smallest of the four, was right there within my reach.

I stabbed it on either side with my knives, then pulled myself up.

My muscles screamed. My body buzzed. My blood rushed, and sweat lined my forehead, made my shirt stick to my back.

But I sat on the talon of the roc and I looked down, finally.

I was so high up Taland and the few other players who’d gathered to watch lookedtiny.

Laughter burst out of me, perhaps because I was delusional to think this would work, or perhaps because I knew I was probably going to slip and fall to my death soon.

Either way, I took a moment to breathe, to calm my racing heart, to rest my muscles. Then I waved at Taland, and I could tell he was shaking his head at me. I could tell he had his eagle against his chest still. I could just tell he was thinking I was batshit crazy.

Hey, it was better thantraitor.

Then I sat up on the smallest talon of the roc, found the thinnest ice that connected it to the gigantic foot, and I began to stab.

A hammer would have been nice. Too bad I had none on me. And the ice that made the roc wasn’t as white or as thick as the one that covered the ground. It was almost see-through, crystal clear, blue instead of white.

Most importantly, after the hundredth stab of my knives, a crack formed on the surface of the talon.

That’s when I stood up. I had little energy and strength, so my hits weren’t strong, but I was consistent. One knife, then the other, on the same place. One arm up, the other down, and so on. My hands were numb, but I was still moving so you wouldn’t find me complaining.

And what could have been years later, the ice of the talon groaned as the crack from my knife spread all the way to the other side.

It moved, the ice. It made me stop stabbing it for a second, get up and move back, up on the roc’s foot. The feeling that took over me as I watched that crack become bigger and bigger, spread wider, ahead and below and to the side, was one I couldn’t quite describe. But when the piece of ice broke all the way and began to fall down to the ground, I believed I had all the power in the world.

The fall felt like an earthquake when the talon smashed against the ice on the ground. A damn earthquake, and the statue shook, too. I had to lean down and grab the next talon, the second smallest one, to hold on in case it didn’t stop.

A white cloud of ice below me, on the ground. Taland and all the other players who’d been closer just now had run farther away.

“Come on, come on, come on, come on…” I chanted to myself as I held onto the ice, looking at the cloud as it settled, at the pieces of ice.

Let there be water, please, please, please…

There wasn’t.

That huge piece of ice hadn’t managed to break the surface at all.

I screamed.

The sound came from deep inside me, from my very soul. I screamed, and the crowd disappeared, and Taland was the only one who remained by the edge of the lake, watching.

Come down,he said, though I only heard his voice in my head.Come down, sweetness; it’s over.

---