Duffy smiled.

“You didn’t think we were going to walk all the way, did you?”

Leopold looked around, making a show of their predicament. He shrugged and gave the bard an expectant look.

“It’s not far. I thought we’d reunite you with an old friend along the way.”

Duffy marched on, leaving Leopold perplexed and once again frustrated by the riddles and games. With nothing else to do but follow, he trudged behind and did away with his cloak as a hopeful bead of sweat formed on his forehead. The purple whorls of energy trailed behind him as the vault in which he kept his possessions vanished once more into the void.

“The last time you said that Clarissa tried to shoot you.”

“But she didn’t, so it all worked out in the end.”

“I…” Leopold closed his mouth, knowing better than to try and moralise anything in which Duffy was involved. Though he loved his brother dearly, there was nobody else in the world quite so blinded by altruism. If he had decided to help, then he bloody well would regardless of what anyone else wanted.

“It’s someone you’ve not seen for centuries.”

Leopold raised an eyebrow, half because of the titbit and half because the snow underfoot began to crystallise. It danced with its own light, oblivious to the sun that cast a new day across the tundra. His stomach rumbled.

“Duffy…” He crouched to run a gloved finger over the ice. “Have you seen this?” He looked ahead, gesturing at the changing terrain when the bard looked back and nodded.

“We’re close.” He waved Leopold on, “just over that crag.”

Ahead, the terrain rose again, a soft, icy incline preceding a cracked outcrop that dropped away into the unknown beyond. Leopold had spent decades criss-crossing across these lands in caravans, trading between the people of Salvar and the orc tribes. He had a memory for logistics, and this was new.

“That looks like the edge of a crater.”

“It is.” Duffy reached the ledge and rested his hands on his hips. “And there’s our meteor.” He pointed ahead, and Leopold hurried up as quickly as his legs could manage.

The crater ahead was five hundred feet from one side to the other, a ring of cracked ice like a crown proclaiming the monarch below. Whatever had fallen, Leopold guessed, had been ablaze as the snow had melted and reformed into alien cavalcades of bubbling ice. The merchant followed the natural flow of the landscape to the crater’s heart and took a few moments to recognise the thing that slumbered in the middle. He gasped.

“That’s impossible.”

“Yet here she is, all the same.”

The creature was gigantic, far bigger than its namesake implied. It’s great cyan wings arced back and covered the bird below from the elements, though Leopold doubted it felt the cold. A black beak, hard as diamond protruded from beneath navy blue and grey feathers and dust whipped around it as though it held private court with winter.

“Phoenix.”

“The Old God of Life. Free from its wicked mistress and reborn anew.” Duffy sat down on the edge of the crater and produced a small pipe from his pocket. He blew on it, to check it had survived the journey and tuned it by playing a few trite notes.

Leopold hesitated. He clenched his fists, wary of the last time he had met.

“Why is it here?”

“Let’s ask it, shall we?” Duffy’s mischievous smile before he played the song confirmed Leopold’s fears.

“No!” He tried to swat the pipe away but when the clouds parted and the creature reared its head to scream, he balked and unholstered his pistol.