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"Noooo!" Hauke shouted from deep within his mind. He’d been listening attentively and observing while the two men worked but now, what was this madness? They wanted to cut off his horn to break the curse? He would rather die!

"No, you can’t!" Hauke roared, his voice echoing off the icy walls of the cavern within his mind. "Why can’t you hear me! Do something so you can hear me first, old man! Do something so you can talk to me before you start cutting on me!"

The cave that held Hauke prisoner shook and trembled with a combination of his fear and anger as he threw himself once again at Eraric’s binding spell, trying to do anything, anything at all to demonstrate how unwilling he was to suffer such an extreme mutilation.

"You can’t touch his horn," Aspakos said, stepping between Hauke and the smiling artificer. "I promised that we wouldn’t treat him until Lady Nyrielle passed judgment and she’s not going to do that until she holds court tomorrow night.

Put the saw down and think of what else could be done to free him from this curse. "

"You know that my sign says ’curses broken’, not ’curses gently removed’ right?" Erkembalt said with a huff as he put down the saw. "I’m not a healer. My methods aren’t delicate and my customers understand that."

"I doubt your customers would come to you if they had any other alternative," the other sorcerer said ruffling his feathers and heaving a heavy sigh of relief that his friend hadn’t been insistent about following the quickest path forward. "But we have alternatives. We’re traveling with witches now, aren’t we?

If you can reveal the intricacies of the curse, then the Severing Knife of a witch is the perfect tool for gently prying it out. "

"Reveal it’s intricacies? Do you know how long that would take?" Erkembalt says, shaking his head. "We have at most a day. In that time, I can find one or two other methods to remove the curse by force but if you want me to reveal it’s intricacies well enough to unravel it..."

"Then, not enough to unravel it," Aspakos suggested, thinking of a different approach he could take with his stubborn friend. "Understand it well enough to explain to Lady Ashlynn and Lady Nyrielle. When they sit in judgment, they will want to know what we’ve learned. Since you’ve found one solution already," he said, charitably referring to the notion of cutting off the young Frost Walker’s horn as a ’solution.

’ "Let’s see how many more we can find."

Inwardly, Hauke heaved a huge sigh of relief of his own. He’d started to notice something when they applied the strange, silvery powder to his horn but before he could consider it, the mad butcher had picked up a saw and started talking about cutting off his horn!

Now that the man with the broken beak had managed to once again talk sense into the saw wielding madman, Hauke returned his attention to the strange sensations he felt from his horn since Erkembalt applied the powder.

Before, he’d only noticed the way the curse manifested on him within his own mind.

He could feel the ice surrounding his hands and feet, binding him in place, trapping him between two pillars of ice within his mind, but the mental space he’d shared with the ancestral spirits was so realistic he’d forgotten that it was only a manifestation of imagination.

This space was his own mind, and within it, he should be its master.

The actions of the ancestors had robbed him of his ability to control his own body, but his mind was still his to do with as he pleased.

While he might not be able to free himself from the ice that bound him, he could still do a great deal to change the space around him.

"Polished Ice. Reflect My Truth." They were simple words for what should have been a simple act of sorcery but drawing on his energy felt like cutting open his own veins and filling them with ice water. Freezing pain tore through Hauke’s mind, nearly breaking his concentration before he could complete the working.

Closing his eyes, he poured all of his will into the simple act of sorcery until finally, he felt the space within his mind shift around him.

When he opened his eyes, the vision of the ancestral cave that the ancestors had constructed in his mind had vanished, replaced by a brightly lit chamber of ice.

The walls of ice around him were polished so smoothly that each one acted like a mirror, reflecting back images of the young Frost Walker lord trapped in the center of the chamber.

Now that he could see himself, he realized that the men examining him were right about the chains on his horn. The patterns of chains stood out starkly thanks to the Silver Leaf Purity Powder that revealed any trace of corruption and the curse certainly counted as a corrupting influence.

More importantly, however, while the men examining him might not recognize the ancient runes formed by the patterns of chains, Hauke did.

A slow smile spread on his face as he thanked Kimsel for her many lessons in the ancient symbols used to shape eternal ice.

Eraric might have been a master of using the runes to form constructs, but no one compared to Kimsel in terms of accumulation of knowledge and her lessons were particularly useful now.

"This binding isn’t something Eraric designed," Hauke realized as he inspected the runes. All this time, he’d thought himself trapped by the mightiest architect to ever be born into the Frost Walker Clan but he’d been wrong.

This binding was not only something that Eraric had learned from someone else, it had been hastily applied to restrict Hauke’s attempt to escape!

"There are flaws in this," Hauke said as his eyes darted around the room, examining reflections of the binding from every possible angle.

"I just need to find a way to attack those flaws," he said as he grasped the first glimmer of true hope that he’d had since this nightmare began.

"Now, what else do you know, old men," he said, returning his attention to the conversation between the two sorcerers.

It was clear that they have very little experience with ancient Frost Walker sorcery and both men worked carefully, making their observations as they studied the magic holding Hauke captive.

Hauke, however, soaked in their observations like a sponge, fitting them into the lessons he’d taken from Eraric, Ines, Kimsel and even Eugen.

As the hours wore on with night turning into day and even daylight beginning to fade, Hauke began to despair that he could shatter the binding from within. There were cracks in the binding, or rather, there were gaps.

Those gaps allowed him to hear and see what happened in the outside world and they had likely been left there deliberately in order to let the ancestors observe what happened while Ansgar treated Hauke’s body like a weapon to weild.

"Escaping is too difficult," he admitted when the men finally left in order to rest before night fell and the trials were to begin. "But just because I can’t escape, that doesn’t mean I can’t do something else," he mused, carefully considering the lessons he’d received from the other ancestors.

"What I need is a way to talk to people," he reasoned. "If I could speak to them... then there might be a way out of this without letting that butcher saw off my horn."

There was still time. Only a few hours perhaps, but as long as he had any time at all, Hauke resolved to spend every last moment applying everything he had learned to find a way out of this unending nightmare.

He was the last student of the five greatest Frost Walkers to ever live, or at least the five greatest to pass down their horns. If he couldn’t find something to use to take control of his own destiny, then what had been the point of becoming their student in the first place?