The Night the Tundra Broke
Pip Lenson hunched lower in the sledge, jostled, as another wild gust came howling across the white expanse, piercing wool, fur, and more undergarments than he could count, finding gaps he hadn’t known existed. It was a lazy wind, as his father would say. Not bothered about blowing around you, it’d just blow right through you.
The wind never stopped in the tundra; there wasn’t much to stop it. His eyelashes had begun to stick together. His fingers, thick and clumsy with his gloves, felt like they belonged to someone else.
The huskies ran undeterred in steady formation, their paws whispering over the hard-packed snow. Driving the sledge behind him, stood Dr Thorne Wilde, broad-shouldered and immovable, staring fixedly into the white glare all around them. His moustache was crisped with ice, and he was without his trademark hat, but otherwise, the intrepid explorer gave no sign that the cold bothered him.
Off to the side, on another sledge with more of their equipment, was Noor, a local guide, who looked like he was thoroughly enjoying himself as he whizzed and bounced along. Pip scowled at him.
They had been in the tundra for several days now, and this was their second day away from the main camp. They were travelling by husky pack across ridges and ice pools, camping in carved-out hollows beneath deep, powdered snow. Despite the cold, Pip’s face was sunburned, and his toes had entered into what he suspected was a long-term disagreement with the rest of his body.
Pip shifted amongst the baggage in their sledge, trying to burrow deeper. He adjusted the camera around his neck, turning the focus first one way, then the other. The lens had fogged. Again.
“I think it’s frozen,” he shouted over the wind, slightly worried.
“It’s the tundra,” Dr Thorne said, giving him a swift smile. “Things freeze.”
Pip tried wiping the lens with the end of his scarf. His thick gloves made everything difficult. The lens smeared, and Pip sighed.
At camp that evening, Noor dug into the snow with calm efficiency, carving out a shelter from the thick drift. His short shovel cut great blocks of snow, and he laid them this way and that, and soon they were all crammed into what was essentially an underground house made of snow. The snow was deep here, easily taller than any of them, and that was before Noor added his blocks. The dogs slept outside, curled up beside a curved windbreak that Dr Thorne had fashioned. They’d dig them out in the morning. They seemed to prefer it.
As Noor set the final block in place and the scream of the wind had muffled to a distant moan, they were finally able to strip off some layers and rest on raised ledges carved into the walls.
Dr Thorne unwrapped a faceted orange shard from an oilskin in his pouch. Pip leaned forward eagerly. An Ember Shard.
Using his knife, Dr Thorne cracked off a small chunk of the gem. He spoke to Noor in the man’s native tongue, a rolling sort of language punctuated with the occasional click. Noor looked thoughtful for a moment, then quickly arranged some stones in a circle with a small pile of wood. Pip had never heard the native man speak, and from where he pulled his never-ending supply of firewood, Pip didn’t know.
Dr Thorne put the gem shard in the middle of the stones and crunched it with the handle of his blade. It flared to life in a clean, bright flame, steady and hot. Noor arranged the kindling, and soon a proper fire crackled in their den, with the smoke spiralling out a hole in the roof. Pip held out his hands gratefully, willing his body to soak up the heat, as if he could somehow store it for tomorrow.
They ate quickly. A thick, nourishing stew along with somewhat stale bread that needed to be soaked in the sauce before they could eat it. Dr Thorne used the embers of the fire to heat some water for a quick shave.
Afterwards, Dr Thorne carefully unrolled a bundle of worn documents. The pages were stiff, cracked, and flaked if they were handled incorrectly. They were covered in symbols that, to Pip, looked like someone had dropped a box of spirals onto the paper and walked away.
Pip leaned in. “Are we at least close?”
“Maybe,” Dr Thorne replied. He tapped a cluster of symbols. “I’m pretty sure these markings correspond to lunar cycles, and this repeated sigil here,” he said, tracing it with his thick finger, “refers to the nineteenth day. I think. And here,” he continued, before Pip could interrupt. “Ice fractured over deep water. Cracked ice-pools.”
Pip looked at him dubiously. It looked like nothing of the sort. I think, he’d said. “Is it a gem?”
Dr Thorne nodded. “The Starfrozen Core,” he whispered reverently. “Legendary. Said to be the key to seeing the Aurora Drake.”
“The Aurora Drake isn’t real,” Pip said, half smiling.
“Is it not?” Dr Thorne smiled confidently. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Pip knew that even if this expedition were a bust, the explorer would never give up. Dr Thorne was eternally optimistic. Constantly hunting down the mysteries of the world. He would take success and setback with the same mild humour. Pip settled back in his furs and tried to get some sleep.
On the nineteenth, they came to their third ice-pool just as the light was beginning to thin. The surface was fractured with deep fissures, ready to catch an unwary ankle. Dr Thorne dropped to his knees and wiped away the buildup of powdered snow. Pale blue light seeped up from below, so faintly as to be nearly imperceptible. “There,” he said quietly, as if he’d known it’d be there all along.
Pip crouched beside him. At first, Pip thought the light was a reflection of the sky, but deep in the water, far below the surface, something glimmered. Not bright, per se. More dense.
They worked quickly. Noor drove a metal spike into a crack in the ice and soon had a section levered back. The pool exhaled a breath of freezing mist.
Before Pip could say anything, Dr Thorne had shrugged off his own outer layers, stripped to the waist and plunged his arm into the water with barely a grimace. Behind the doctor, Noor had just turned around with a long net that he’d pulled off their sledge. The native stared at Dr Thorne, looked like he was about to say something, then quietly repacked the net.
With a final, deliberate motion and a cry of triumph, Dr Thorne withdrew his arm, splashing Pip in the face with water colder than he thought was possible to exist. The doctor’s arm and shoulder were a burning red, but in his hand, he was clutching something.
He flipped it to Pip, and in Pip’s surprise, he nearly dropped it. It was heavier than it looked.
Pip stared at the gem while Dr Thorne quickly dried himself and redressed. The Starfrozen Core. It was about the size of his hand, cold, but not painfully so, and a deep blue that bordered on black, flecked with starlike specks. No, not flecked. They were inside the gem. As he stared, the gem seemed to stretch to infinity - a frozen galaxy caught mid-swirl. It felt ancient.
It quivered faintly against his gloves. He was sure of it.
“You hold onto that,” Dr Thorne said as he finished lashing his coat around himself.
“Me?” asked Pip, now apprehensive.
“I can’t feel my fingers at the moment,” the doctor said with a wink.
Around them, the wind suddenly sharpened. The sky took on a restless quality that Pip didn’t like. Even the huskies seemed to sense it, sniffing the air and whining low in their throats. They paced uneasily in their traces.
Dr Thorne studied the sky. “She doesn’t like being moved,” he murmured. “Come on,” he said abruptly. “We’ll camp early tonight.”
He strode off, talking to Noor in that strange language, pointing here and there.
Pip stared at the Starfrozen Core in his hands. A legendary gem.
The next day, the twentieth, they set out early.
Dr Thorne had a theory. He always had a theory. “If I’ve read the papers correctly,” he shouted over the wind as they skidded along, “the Drake rises where frozen ground breathes. Not from the snow. From permafrost. Soil that hasn’t thawed in centuries.”
“Why?” Pip called.
“Why from the permafrost?” Dr Thorne asked. He barked a laugh and shook his head. “There’s so much I don’t know. If we find one, I’ll be sure to ask it.”
The weather worsened as the day wore on. Snow began to whip across the ground in horizontal sheets. Visibility shrank, clearing only in bursts depending on how the wind blew. The world reduced itself to white and grey and the untiring backs of the huskies.
Dr Thorne gave no sign that the weather perturbed him. Noor moved as he always did - steady, economical, resigned to whatever the tundra chose to do.
Pip, however, was freezing.
By the time Dr Thorne directed them towards a ridge for a better vantage point, Pip’s teeth were chattering so hard he could feel it in his ears.
“Up there!” Dr Thorne shouted, cupping his mouth. “We’ll see further with the height! It has to be today!”
The huskies laboured up the incline, and they leaned into the wind. At the top, Dr Thorne and Noor moved to the ridge’s edge, scanning the dimming landscape, though Pip didn’t know how they saw anything in the squall.
The light was fading fast. The two men had to shout to hear one another, and Pip couldn’t make out a word.
Pip crouched by the sledge, hands aching. He couldn’t feel his fingertips properly anymore.
Just a bit of warmth, he thought.
He hunched over the sledge and rummaged through the bags until his gloved hand closed around the Ember Shard. Just a bit of warmth.
As he held the Ember Shard close to him, his own pouch shifted suddenly, as if pulled by a giant magnet.
“What the…” was all he had time to say before the catch on his pouch broke and the Starfrozen Core shot out, pinging against the Ember Shard with a painful ring that stung his ears.
A vibration ran through the air, subtle at first, then building. The snow beneath his boots trembled. The Starfrozen Core hung in the air, spinning rapidly, humming with a furious, rising pitch. The snow around him started to follow it, stinging his exposed skin as it spun faster and faster.
The ridge shook, dropping a hand’s length so it looked like the falling snow was suspended for a second. With a roar, a hurricane of snow and ice erupted around Pip, wind screaming in a tight spiral.
“Pip!” Dr Thorne roared, though Pip couldn’t actually hear him. Then he was gone from view.
The ridge split, and Pip’s stomach dropped in a sickening lurch. The world tilted violently.
He tumbled down the slope, scrambling for purchase, grabbing at anything, grabbing nothing but air. Snow went down his collar, up his shirt, in his mouth, and he knew nothing but spinning in the air and crashing down before spinning some more. Pip lost all sense of what way was up.
Then he hit level ground and hit it hard. He lay there, half buried, stunned, pain stabbing him from all angles. The wind still blasted across the open expanse. The slope above him had completely collapsed, taking him with it.
The ground below him was iron, jabbing him mercilessly despite his layers. The permafrost, he thought dizzily.
The Starfrozen Core still spun several meters away, humming madly, popping every few seconds like grease on a hot pan and flaring brightly in the fading dusk.
There was a sharp, audible snap. One that Pip felt in his bones. He froze, anticipating the worst.
The ground before him cracked. Not the snow - the soil.
The permafrost split open like a shattered glass, each whip crack of sound feeling like a slap to the face, pushing the air out of his lungs. Light poured out from the ground.
In front of Pip, the Aurora Drake rose from the earth, pushing through huge chunks of it as if they were nothing, and sending them crashing off in the distance.
Pip gaped. The Drake was huge, bigger than a house. It towered over him, shaking off frozen clumps of earth from its long, serpentine body. It was blue, green, aquamarine, Pip couldn’t tell. With each movement, the colour of its scales shimmered and changed. It unfurled its wings - translucent, vast, majestic - and the air around Pip ignited in colour. Greens, violets, and blues shimmered from its wings as though the aurora itself had been caught and woven into them.
Pip remembered to breathe. “Camera,” he whispered.
He fumbled for it, hands clumsy, heart hammering. By some stroke of luck, it was still around his neck and miraculously looked intact. He raised it, framed the Aurora Drake, but could see nothing. Was it broken?
The lens cap was still on.
“Oh, you absolute…” He yanked it off, severely hampered by his thick gloves.
The Drake turned its luminous head towards the spinning Starfrozen Core. With a slow, almost gentle movement, it grasped the gem gently in its talons and beat its wings.
The gust stopped Pip from breathing and knocked him flat again.
Then the Drake ascended, dissolving into the storm swirling around them, which immediately petered out.
Through stinging eyes, Pip managed a single shot.
Click.
Then, there was only silence and fading aurora light.
A moment later, he heard a joyful bark. One of the huskies bounded through the drift at him and sent him sprawling for the third time in as many minutes. No matter which way he turned, it licked his face. “Get off,” he said, struggling to push it back.
Dr Thorne appeared through the dimming glow, followed by Noor, both struggling hip-deep in snow. Dr Thorne took in the cracked earth, looking like something had exploded there, the exposed permafrost, and the fading sky.
He looked at Pip with a glimmer in his eye. “Did you see her?”
Pip nodded, and his neck gave a wonderful tweak that promised something larger in the morning.
Noor, already having gathered what lay scattered around them, began constructing a shelter from the drifted snow as though none of this was particularly surprising.
By morning, Noor had fashioned snowshoes for them from spare branches and rope. They struck out after a quick breakfast, Dr Thorne scouting the way ahead, while Noor helped Pip, who was feeling less amicable towards the tundra than usual.
“Was she nice?” the native man said.
Pip blinked. He wasn’t actually expecting the man to speak, so he had to actually replay what he’d said before he could understand it. “You…you speak our language?”
“Of course,” Noor said, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“B-but Dr Thorne’s been speaking your language this whole time.”
Noor considered that. “No, he hasn’t. I’ve no idea what he’s saying. I just pretty much guess.”
Pip opened his mouth a couple of times. There were just so many questions he wanted to ask. But he would get nothing more out of Noor.
It took them over a week to return to the main camp. They recovered the scattered huskies, fashioned crude sledges and harnesses, and travelled slowly over the unforgiving ground.
When they finally reached home, Pip’s mother met them at the door. This was not the first expedition that Pip had gone on with Dr Thorne, and he’d never known the man to shy away from danger, but he detected a distinct apprehension in the man as they approached his gate.
Come to think of it, as he stared at his mother’s face, he found himself slowing down as well.
“Hello-” was all Dr Thorne managed before Pip’s mother rocked his cheek with a slap.
“I expected you back over a week ago!” she screamed. “I was so worried! Not a word! Not a letter! Not a-”
Dr Thorne pushed a small twine-wrapped parcel hurriedly into her hand. If she were holding something, she wouldn’t have a free hand to slap him with. “Crystalised Honey Stars,” he said with a wince. “I know how much you like them.”
“Yes…well…” Pip’s mother said, momentarily flustered. She seemed to lose some of her bluster. She raised the hand holding the box, remembered that she really liked what was in it, then set it gently on the ground.
Dr Thorne winked at Pip when Pip’s mother wasn’t looking. The Crystalised Honey Stars had been Pip’s idea. The doctor jerked back, somewhat cross-eyed, as Pip’s mother waggled a finger under his nose as if it were a dagger.
“What happened?” she barked.
“It was my fault, mam,” Pip said quickly. “I, eh, fell,” he finished, somewhat lamely.
Pip’s mother turned her stare onto her son, and he immediately flushed red. She took in the bruises, the torn clothes, the general air of dishevelment. “You fell” she said, emphasising each word.
“I can see you two have a lot of catching up to do, and I don’t want to get in the way of that, lots of exploring to do and so on.” Dr Thorne tipped his cap at Pip’s mother while her attention was diverted, flashed a toothy grin at Pip, and scarpered before she could say anything.
Pip could see his mother’s jaw working as she watched Dr Thorne retreat. Then she gave a great sigh and came over to her son. She took his face in both her hands and kissed his forehead. “You had me worried,” she said. “I want to hear all about it. But first, you need a bath. I love you, but you smell really, really bad.”
She pushed him towards the house.
Later, in his room, blessedly warm, Pip developed the photograph in his darkroom.
The paper floated in the shallow tray of chemicals, blooming slowly into view. Pip hovered over it, waiting for the opportune moment to take it out, wanting to get it just right.
There it was.
The Aurora Drake, rising into the sky, wings ablaze with colour, mirrored by the sky behind it. Despite Pip having taken the photo with potato fingers, it came out amazingly. Far better than he could have hoped for.
He sent a copy to Dr Thorne with a short note.
Weeks later, a reply arrived in the mail. Inside was a single sheet of paper, which the doctor had obviously ripped off of something else, and with a stain splotched along the middle that Pip didn’t want to guess at.
“Perfect.”
There was a lump in the envelope, and when Pip upended it, a tiny chip dropped out, sparkling in the sunshine - a piece of an Ember Shard.
At the bottom of the note, in Dr Thorne’s scrawled hand, a postscript: “P.S. If you must experiment, kindly refrain from standing on anything I am standing on.”