The Monstromancer

- 1 -

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.”

The Monstromancer’s words cut through the restless Antarctic wind. Not shouted. Not even a call for my attention, necessarily. Just an observation.

All the same, her strange warbling voice bounces up the mountain wall and finds my little perch. Right in my ear. I startle. A small huff of vapor leaves my nostril and quickly whips away.

I’m not very high up. If this mountain were an apartment building, my ledge is maybe on the second floor. But it’s high enough and skinny enough to not want to be startled. I look out to the valley floor and see the Monstromancer. She is in a full squat, hovering over a large print in the ground, bare hands pressing into the dirt. Reading it. Or… listening to it. Whatever.

“How can you tell?” The sound of my own voice is thin and dry, fatigued by the cold and muffled by the wind. I clear my throat and start to try again, louder, but change my mind. I’ve been around the Monstromancer enough to know that she heard me just fine.

“The microbes,” she answers. I see her head rotate slightly toward me, but she doesn’t get up.

Her voice still warbles. Almost like there’s more than one person down there. The sound of magic. I shiver.

The Monstromancer’s bare hands stay put. Her arms flex and extend slightly. “These microbes are like the others, but younger. Descendants.”

For our trip into the Valley, we could only take the bare necessities. Everything else was left behind at the base. We don’t have the scientific equipment capable of confirming what her hands tells her. But I know it would.

I shiver again at the thought of her ungloved hands planted in the dirt. For Antarctica, this area isn’t too bad. Wright Valley is one of the Dry Valleys, about sixty miles outside of our base at McMurdo. The Dry Valleys are all mostly snow- and ice-free year round, thanks to the crazy winds and high mountain walls keeping glacier ice out. And it’s warm today. We might even get above freezing.

Still, holding your bare naked hands in the cold dirt like that… My hands are ashy enough as it is.

No problem for a Monstromancer, I guess. Another shiver.

“Descendants?” I say. “Like, descended from the ones tested by my…” I remember who I’m talking to, and I stop.

She wordlessly fills in the blank, and I’m surrounded by warbling again. “Yes. Descended from Vostok.”

Vostok. I try to remember what I’ve learned about it. What Dad taught me.

Vostok is another Antarctic research station, like McMurdo, except it’s run by Russians instead of Americans. Also like McMurdo, it’s roughly the same distance from the South Pole, some eight hundred miles away. But Vostok is much, much colder and sits on top of a prehistoric lakebed full of freshwater.

Yep, liquid water. Same as anywhere else, for the most part. Lake Vostok is a subglacial lake, buried beneath two and a half miles of solid ice. It wasn’t until about ten years ago that the scientists were able to drill deep enough to reach the lake’s surface.

And what did they find?

A bunch of gas. Huge amounts of oxygen and nitrogen just chilling in an underground lake, along with evidence that the lake might somehow support a population of microbes. Specifically, microbes that tend to do their best in environments with plenty of heat.

Environments like…

…Like a dragon den, I hear Dad say.

I tuck a loc of my hair back into my hood and slowly get up from my perch. Everything is already packed into our two duffel bags. I strap one to my back, grab the other, and carefully make my way down to the valley floor.

I’ve gotten pretty okay at navigating the gravelly paths at the feet of the mountains. And, again, I’m not very high up. But it’s high enough to wish I had two free hands and zero duffel bags obscuring my vision. My boot finds a patch of moss on a rock and I slip.

Before I can clench my core and force myself to fall left into the mountain wall, I fall right and into twenty feet of cold, open air. Despite the rush of wind in my ears, I hear the sucking of teeth as I tumble over and away from the ledge.

A yell erupts from me and I brace for impact.

When the impact comes, it’s not what it should be. It should be hard and sudden and painful. Instead, it is soft and lurching, and I feel support under my shoulder blades and behind my knees.

The Monstromancer is holding me. She caught me.

“Raelle,” she breathes, “are you okay?”

A second passes. Half a second for my mind to come back online, another half for my lungs to start working again. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m good.”

She considers me for a moment, nods, and then sets me down. While I gather my bearings, she goes over to the other duffel bag lying a couple yards away. We left most of the delicate equipment behind. We basically just packed clothes, food, and emergency supplies. The bag should be fine.

My gaze wanders farther into the Valley. The print that she was reading must be a good hundred feet away. Maybe a bit more. I only fell twenty.

Looking the other way, the Monstromancer heard me fall, sprang up from a squat, ran—leapt?—flew?—a hundred and some feet, and caught me plus a twenty-pound bag perfectly. All in less than two seconds.

No human should be able to do that.

But I guess the Monstromancer isn’t all the way human.

I look back at her. Given a minute for the adrenaline to wear off, there’s actually some sign of tiring after pulling off that impossible stunt. She sags a little bit now. She’s young, probably younger than my mom, but her face is lined. Her eyes blink slowly. Wearily.

“We should get going,” she says. “If there is more to read, it can wait until tomorrow. We need to rest.” There’s no warble, no echo, in her voice. It’s the sound of one voice now, rather than one of many. For now, the magic has been shelved. Or spent.

At first, I don’t respond. But then, because Dad would cuss me out if I didn’t, I say, “Thank you.”

The Monstromancer doesn’t respond right away, either. Then, not quite meeting my eyes, she gives a slight nod. Duffel bag in hand, she takes a step, stumbles for a second, then continues east.

I silently count to five before I do the same.