Leon, Valeria, and Maia quickly caught up to the Gorgon.  The serpentine woman wasn’t moving too quickly, so it was easy enough to fall into place not too far behind her as she led them toward the ice-covered foothills at the edge of the Vale.

Valeria and Maia were quiet, and Leon wasn’t in any particularly talkative mood, but he still had a few questions that he wanted to be answered by the Gorgon, so he moved ahead a little bit to fall in beside her.

“So,” he hesitantly began, not entirely sure if she would be receptive to more conversation, “how long have you been here?”

The Gorgon shot him a strange look out of the corner of her eye, one that had Leon about to apologize for broaching a sensitive topic, but a moment later, she said to him in a heavy and weary tone, [Too long.]

Leon nodded, taking the hint to drop that line of questioning.  “Not a problem.  I was just kind of curious because you clearly remember me from when I lived here…”

[I do,] the Gorgon said, her tone lightening up a little bit.  [You and your father were hard to miss.  I actually approached him not too long after the two of you arrived.  I think you were only one or two years old at the time.]

“Really?”  Leon could guess that things had ended between them on a somewhat amicable note, otherwise his and Artorias’ time in the Vale would’ve been much more complicated than it otherwise would’ve been.  However, he never heard his father talk about this before, and Artorias had always kept them at quite the fearful distance of the Gorgon.  “I never knew that the two of you knew each other.”

[I wouldn’t go that far,] the Gorgon said, smiling at Leon in a way that clashed heavily with his view of her from the day before.  It was decidedly un-monstrous.  If it weren’t for the snake tail and the serpentine eyes, Leon could even see the Gorgon as being civilized, with all the bearing and custom that was absent from Maia when he first met her.  [The two of us met only once, when I approached after he started building your little cabins.  He almost responded with hostility when he sensed me, but all he did was interpose himself between me and you.  We exchanged a few words, and once he made it clear that he didn’t want to interfere with my business, we parted ways.]

“Nothing more than that?  Just parted ways?”  Leon had a hard time believing that, the Gorgon had acted quite hostile and determined to cause harm once he and his party ran into her the day before.

[Nothing more than that,] the Gorgon confirmed with a smile.  [All we did was agree not to interfere with each other, and we stuck to that agreement for the entirety of your time living here.]

‘Surprisingly civil…’ Leon thought.

“Never once did you think of breaking it?” he asked.

[As far as I was concerned, so long as you stayed outside of my territory, you weren’t my problem,] the Gorgon replied.  [Of course, you were hardly much of a threat, so in the state I was in, I wasn’t of a mind to hunt you down out of spite.]

“It does seem a little strange that you weren’t more hostile, though.”

[You left me alone, that was enough,] the Gorgon repeated in simpler terms.  [Had I been more aware of myself, less of a Gorgon, then we might’ve had more contact.  I mean, I refrained from mating with anyone in my life, as should be obvious, but your father… now there was a human who could’ve made me break that streak.]

Leon smiled awkwardly, not knowing how he should follow that up.  Fortunately, he didn’t have to, for only a few moments later, the Gorgon came to a halt not too far from the first sheets of demonic ice.

[This is where we need to be,] she said to all three of them.

Leon cocked an eyebrow as he surveyed their surroundings.  Nothing but rocky hills were around them, they’d left the forest behind almost half a mile ago.  Before them lay the ice-covered hills that extended up into the mountains, which the ice quickly blocked.

“Damn…” Leon said as he finally beheld the true scale of the frozen barrier.  The great sheets of ice extended north, spreading out and flaring upward, forming the gigantic wall that was preventing them from investigating whatever lay beyond.

[We’re going to go under it,] the Gorgon stated.

“Under it?” Valeria repeated with a confused tone.  “There aren’t any safeguards preventing that?”

[None that I’m aware of,] the Gorgon said.  [My current theory is that all of this ice was designed to keep something in rather than others out.  Look at the pattern of the ice, see how it all emanates from five separate points?]

Leon nodded along.  Xaphan had said something similar, with the assumption that the ice had been created by the ice demons that had probably led the weaker ice wraiths.

[Maybe I’m wrong, though,] the Gorgon continued, [maybe it’s all just strange never-melting ice.  In all the time I’ve lived here, I’ve never seen anything come out of the plain on the other side of this thing.]

“You’ve been to the other side?” Leon asked.

[Yes,] the Gorgon confirmed.  [It was one of the first things I did once I arrived.  I wanted to see what was beyond.]

Leon waited a moment for the Gorgon to elaborate, and she rather frustratingly didn’t.  Before he could ask, though, her aura suddenly spiked as she reached a hand out in front of her.  Only a moment later, the stone and dirt immediately in front of her began to flex and sink.  In mere seconds, a gentle ramp down into a dark tunnel that bored through the hills had been formed.

[Just this way,] the Gorgon said with a dissonant amount of cheer as she slithered down into the tunnel.

Leon took a deep breath.  Going underground with a creature proficient in earth magic was dangerous, and he began to hesitate.  Beside him, Valeria was clearly feeling just as anxious, as she kept looking between Leon and the ramp as if debating with herself whether or not she should speak up.

But Maia didn’t hesitate for a second.  She walked right past the other two and started heading down the ramp.  Leon almost made to stop her, but her confidence and poise were striking enough that he ended up just scowling and following after her.  Valeria just swore under her breath and then did likewise.

The tunnel was about what Leon would expect: simple, dark, and cold.  The walls were smooth, the ceiling was arched, and the only light source was the entrance, which was slowly getting smaller and smaller as they pressed on deeper into the earth.  That wasn’t much of a problem for anyone, though, since all of them were strong enough to have near-perfect vision even in the dark.

Ahead of them, the Gorgon slithered on, pushing the stone back more and more to lengthen the tunnel.  On and on she led them on, not once looking back over her shoulder, until the entrance was little more than a pinprick of light far behind them.  It made for an oppressive atmosphere, and no one spoke for a long time.

They didn’t continue on like this for long, though, or at least, not as long as Leon would’ve thought.  By his reckoning, they traveled through that tunnel for about three miles before it started to tilt upward.  Another half mile and the tunnel ahead of them suddenly burst with bright light as the Gorgon broke through to the other side.

[We’ve arrived,] the Gorgon smugly stated as she shot them all a proud look over her shoulder.  But instead of making way for them, she slithered into the doorway and turned around, blocking the exit.  [Now it’s time for you to fulfill your end of the bargain,] she hissed, her serpentine eyes locking onto Leon.

He glared right back, but at this point, he had no intention of not fulfilling his end of the deal.  He’d been waiting for the Gorgon to make any kind of hostile move, but they’d gotten through the entire tunnel without a single incident.

But he wasn’t going to just give up his blood without seeing what it was paying for.  He sent a quick pulse of magic senses at the exit of the tunnel, hoping to see what was past the Gorgon.  However, it soon became clear that the Gorgon had chosen her exit point quite well, for barely a few feet past her, Leon’s magic senses were scattered, giving him only a brief look at the grassy exterior of the tunnel.

With a sigh and a desire to just get this over with, Leon walked over to the Gorgon, lightly brushing against Maia as he passed her.

[It’s all right,] his river nymph lover whispered into his ear.  [I’ve been talking to her, it’ll be fine.]

Leon gave her a bitter smile, but he was reassured, nonetheless, if a little curious as to what they were talking about.

As he approached the Gorgon, he asked, “How are we going to do this?”

[What’s with that face?] the Gorgon teasingly asked.  [Do you think I’m going to bleed you dry?  I may be a monster to you humans, but I’m far from a vampire…]

“Be that as it may, I’d still prefer to get this over with as soon as possible.  I don’t enjoy pain, you know.”

The Gorgon shrugged and reached into her soul realm, producing the stone bowl that she had shown Leon before.

[Give me your arm,] she demanded, extending her hand to Leon.

Leon took one last deep breath, then complied.  Barely a second later, the Gorgon did something Leon had never seen before and turned one of her nails into obsidian, slicing into Leon’s arm with one clean stroke.  Leon grimaced from the sudden white-hot pain, but he held his arm steady as the Gorgon slid the bowl beneath his wrist to catch the blood that was starting to drip.

It was a steady flow, filling the bowl with a reasonable amount of blood in about a minute, which Leon considered fortunate since his natural healing factor as a seventh-tier mage had already started to seal up the wound, and he didn’t want a second slice.

[That should be enough to experiment with,] the Gorgon said with a smile.  In a flash of light, the bowl filled with Leon’s blood vanished into her soul realm, while Leon at the same time pulled out a weak healing spell and pressed it to his wrist.

A moment later, the Gorgon moved out of the way, finally giving Leon his first real look at what lay beyond.

And his jaw almost hit the floor of the tunnel.  For him, it was like looking out into a paradise.

What lay beyond was a grassy field perhaps half a mile wide.  It was warm, the sun was shining, the sky only had a few fluffy white clouds, and the entire field was surrounded by steep mountains.  It was essentially a tiny hidden Vale.

But all of that was only the cherry on top for Leon.  It was gorgeous, but not enough for him to stare in wonder.  Rather, it was the corpses and the enormous colossus that had seized his tongue.

Scattered throughout the field were five enormous corpses, each one only resembling the others in general body shape: bipedal, humanoid, and startingly thin, but packing many human features, like a nose and mouth.  Their skin was white-blue ice, sparkling in the light of the sun as the ambient chill they gave off caused a ring of frost twenty or thirty feet thick to form around where they had fallen, causing the grass that still somehow grew there to sparkle as if they were made of glass.  If the corpses had been upright, Leon guessed they would’ve been about twice his height.

[Xaphan, I think I found where those greater demons went,] Leon whispered to his demonic partner.  He felt Xaphan’s attention rise up out of his soul realm, but by then, Leon’s focus had already moved on to the field’s bigger feature.

Across the breadth of the field lay a mountain with a perfectly smooth face, as if it had been cut in half and had one of those halves taken away.  Carved partially into the face of the mountain and partially projecting off of it was an avian colossus, its wings spread in a threatening manner, its talons tucked back in and resting on the top of a small hill at the foot of the mountain, its watchful eyes gleaming in the daylight.  It took a moment for Leon to realize, but as he stared at this gigantic depiction of the Thunderbird—he couldn’t imagine this titanic thing being a depiction of anything else—he realized that the eyes in the colossus’ head were singular precious stones of a white or cloudy color, though he couldn’t say which kind.  He knew for a fact, though, that both of those glittering stones were probably three or four times as large as he was, if his estimation of the scale of the colossus wasn’t distorted by distance.

So captivating was the colossus that Leon barely registered the others following him out of the tunnel and the Gorgon tossing a scroll on the tunnel floor and disappearing back into it.

He was only pulled back to reality when he heard Valeria mutter, “I really hope she doesn’t seal this thing behind us.  I don’t want to have to try and dig our way back out…”

Glancing back at her, Leon grabbed the scroll—assuming it to be the recipe to counter Gorgonism he’d asked for—and released his magic senses, hoping that he was now past whatever enchantment was preventing him from seeing this place before.  His hope was correct, for a moment later, all of this tiny Vale was for him to see.  Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to see anything of note other than the five corpses and the colossus at the other—

And then he saw a small doorway about large enough to let all three of them through shoulder-to-shoulder, almost hidden in the shadow of the Thunderbird colossus.  It was made of familiar dull grey metal, trapezoidal in shape, and with a small runic circle glowing in the center of it.

“Can either of you… see anything?” Valeria asked, sounding a little uncertain and hesitant as Leon and Maia gawked at the Vale around them.  For the briefest of moments, Leon wondered just why she wasn’t as amazed at what they were seeing as he and Maia clearly were, but then he remembered that they were ostensibly here looking for her missing father, not to satisfy his curiosity and need to find whatever his Clan had left behind.

[I can see a lot,] Maia snarkily replied, drawing a look of ire from Valeria.

Knowing what Valeria was talking about, though, Leon quickly took one more look around with his magic senses as he put the Gorgon’s scroll in his soul realm, to be examined later.  He bathed the field in magic, searching every pebble and blade of grass for signs that someone had recently come through.  It didn’t seem like there was anything to see, nothing jumped out at him as out of place.

Until, just before he said as much to Valeria, he saw something that gave him pause.  Around one of the demonic corpses, in the ring of frost that covered the grass, he saw several footprints, faint but unmistakable to his senses.

“There was definitely someone here recently,” Leon said as he stared off at the corpse.

Valeria’s head whipped around to him, but before she could ask for clarification and before Leon could freely give it, Xaphan suddenly started shouting into Leon’s mind.

[Boy!  That statue is preparing to attack!]

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