She passes out

"As long as we are lucky we attribute it to our smartness; our bad luck we give the gods credit for."

- Josh Billings

Awaking with a start, it took a few moments for Morginn to remember what had happened before she had passed out. Raising her head slowly from off the dashboard, black fingers crept into the edge of her vision again, threatening to pull her back into passing out. Fighting against the sensation, she reached out and slid open the pilot side door. Ice cold water parted either side of the gull wing door around it as she stuck her head out through the gap, sluicing down either side of the metal above.

’Rain. How the hell can there be rain?’

It should have been impossible for rain to fall here. Come to think of it, it should have been impossible for rain to have been falling anywhere for that matter. Any water that did drop from the clouds normally froze and landed as snow as soon as it got low enough to form into droplets. 'What the hell have you dragged me into Dagaz?'

Even through the downpour, the visual range outside the Ro•zir had dramatically improved from being out of the blizzard raging above. It was a sensation akin to having fallen into the eye of a storm, that calm centre inside all hell breaking loose beyond.

What she saw as she gazed out was almost enough to make her doubt that she had actually survived the drop, that she wasn't bleeding out and hallucinating as her broken body lay dying in the wreckage. It was that, or she had already passed over into wherever the hell she was destined to end up when she died.

The ground was clear. Well, there were mountains of debris strewn everywhere as far as the naked eye could see, but the actual ground under her feet was visible. The snow was gone. Not cleared, not swept aside. Just . . . gone.

Craning her head up around the side of the door, she shielded her eyes from the rain with a hand as she surveyed the scene.

The landscape unfolded before her, filling her with both a deep sense of awe, but also a healthy dose of pure unbridled terror that churned and mixed together neatly deep in the pit of her stomach.

’Holy. . . Fuck. Me. Sideways.’

Audible words failed her, this was unlike anything she'd ever encountered before, let alone prepared herself for.

She had known that there were the ruins of the old buildings here, Mist'holme had stripped anything of use that they could from the levels that had remained above the ice over the years, which wasn't a whole lot considering they had arrived late to the party. But never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined how much was left buried down here still waiting to be discovered.

The tallest of the buildings she could see were the ones that had used to poke out above the surface, reaching up like fingers trying to claw their way out from the snow and ice encasing them. Some of those buildings must have been, eighty, damn maybe even a hundred stories tall, stretching high up into the sky so high she struggles to see the tops of them with her naked eyes. Maybe they even went higher than a hundred stories. Any taller and they'd reach almost as high above the earth as Mist'holme was deeply buried beneath.

That single word right there was the flaw of the situation, the flaw that really set her mind racing into overdrive.

Beneath. Buried beneath.

This whole place was meant to be buried deep down underneath the ice, not sitting here in the open defrosting slowly in the rain.

That just shouldn't be possible. It couldn't be.

Reaching hurriedly back into the interior of the Ro•zir, she reached across the dashboard and switched off the still pinging radar. It was going to be far too risky to use it to map any of her new surroundings she realised. With this much cover available for things to hide in, she didn't want to take any extra changes of being detected.

Something had to have caused this place to thaw, and she hoped to hell that she hadn't announced her arrival by leaving the radar running as long as she had. She say for a moment and tried to compose herself.

Fuck it. If she wanted to know what was out there, then she was going to have to go and find out the old fashioned way. On foot and armed to the teeth.

Reaching back inside, Morginn hauled her pack off of the passenger seat and onto her back. Slipping the two halves of her Välyö securely in an X shape underneath the straps, she made sure the wouldn't knock against each other. Her Välcri• she put securely in its holster on her thigh, buckling the straps. She wanted easy access to it at a moments notice if things went sour. If something even attempted to get the drop on her, it would find itself being violently, and repeatedly shot as a warning.

Reaching down under the drivers seat, Morginn groped around for a few seconds before her fingers closed around the item she wanted. Her hand pulled out a portable version of the hook that had just saved her skin.

It wasn't exactly lightweight, but considering that she had been expecting to be operating on relatively flat terrain, the ability to be able to scale this new uneven environment had just added itself fairly high on the list of her priorities. That was secured onto her belt, to make sure the claws didn't dig into her leg as she walked. She didn't fancy stabbing herself with it if she needed to run, and bleeding from the thigh was an almost guaranteed way to slow yourself down.

Reaching out, she formed both hands together in a crude cup shape and attempted to catch some of the rain, raising them to her mouth and drinking deeply. A fresh wave of pain roared through her lips as the water hit the still open cuts her teeth had inflicted. Swilling the water around to wash them out, she spat a crimson hued mouthful of it back onto the floor by the seat. There was no way she was willing to leave the scent of her blood laying around.

Pulling the door down closed as quietly as possible, she locked the Ro•zir behind her with a click. She was loath to leave her ride laying out here in the open, but the prospect of having to start the engine up again in the hope of trying to find somewhere safe to stash it would be too time consuming, not to mention loud as hell. Having arrived down here with enough noise to wake the dead, she knew that by creating any more that she would just be setting herself up for misery later on.

The horizon wasn't visible from down here, but she didn't need to be able to see the sun to be able to know it had begun its daily rise across the sky. Light had slowly begun to creep along the ground towards her position as it did, far from golden, but greatly appreciated. Daylight would give her enough time to try and get the lay of the land. She hated walking into a situation blind, but with no easy was back up that drop, she was left with little say in the matter.

Being this far down, it dawned on her that she too was going to miss her scheduled window to check in. Karma's a bitch of a mistress when it wants to be.

Time to move.

With nothing behind her except a sheer wall of un-scalable ice, she set off in the only direction left available for her to travel.

Into the heart of Vüthor •Ilaz itself.