Day seven arrived not as a light, but as a suffocating, pressurized silence. The blizzard had finished its work during the night, drifting a wall of packed, crystalline snow across the mouth of the cave, sealing Kael inside a granite coffin.
The only light came from a faint, ghostly blue glow emanating from Kael's own spine, reflecting off the damp, weeping stone and the bleached-white ribs of the child who had died here years before.
Kael tried to sit up, and for the first time since the fall, his body simply refused.
The "redline" had been reached. The cocktail of adrenaline and Umi's spiritual patchwork was finally curdling. His right arm, the one he had used to vent his desperate fire, was swollen to nearly twice its size, the skin a mottled, angry purple-red. The fire-rash had evolved into weeping blisters along his collarbone, each one a tiny, stinging crater of heat. Every time he tried to draw a breath, a wet, rattling sound echoed in the small chamber—the sound of his lungs beginning to fail under the weight of the mountain.
He lay there, staring at the skull of the Fire Nation child. A tuft of black hair, preserved by the sub-zero air, danced slightly in the microscopic draft of his own wheezing breath.
"You stayed... didn't you?" Kael whispered. His tongue felt like a piece of dry leather, and the words tasted of salt and old sulfur. "You got tired."
The skull didn't answer, but the sight of it triggered a wave of nausea that made the world spin. The salt-purge from the day before had left him dangerously dehydrated, and the sulfur he had inhaled at the spring was now turning his blood into lead. He felt the Presence in his spine move. It wasn't the frantic, hungry pull from the salt lick. It was slow. Heavy. Like a constrictor coiling tighter to keep its prey from falling apart.
Sleep, the sensation murmured into his mind—not in words, but in a heavy, liquid urge that pulled at his eyelids. The vessel is broken. Sleep, and let the ice take the weight.
"No," Kael grunted, his teeth baring in a snarl that was more animal than human. "No... sleep."
He knew that if he closed his eyes now, the heat in his chest would finally go out, and the blue serpent would retreat into his marrow to wait for the next host. He reached out with his left hand—the one Umi had "repaired" with the sulfur and salt—and grabbed the tattered red tunic of the dead girl.
As his fingers brushed the ancient fabric, a sharp, electric snap surged through his arm.
Kael's mind was suddenly flooded with a flash of someone else's life. A girl. Older than him—twelve, maybe thirteen. She had been running from the same shadow, the same Syndicate hooks, a lifetime ago. She had hidden here, just like him, praying for the storm to pass, but she had been too weak to dig her way out. She had died in the dark, her final thought a lingering, heartbreaking craving for a cup of warm jasmine tea.
The memory was so vivid it was parasitic. He could taste the tea; he could feel her fading heartbeat.
He ripped his hand away, gasping, as the blue mark on his spine flared with a predatory, neon light. The Presence had just fed on a ghost. It had consumed the lingering spiritual residue left on the girl's belongings, using the "weight" of her death to fuel Kael's life.
"Stop it!" Kael screamed at his own back, the sound echoing pathetically in the tiny cave. "Don't touch her! She's... she's not food!"
The Shiver didn't care for his morality. It had provided him with a sudden, artificial surge of "ghost-fuel"—a cold, clean energy that made his swollen arm feel lighter and his lungs feel momentarily clear. It was a loan with a terrible interest rate, but Kael had no choice but to spend it.
He used that hour.
He didn't dig with his hands; the snow was too packed, his fingers too damaged. Instead, he turned and pressed his back against the wall of snow blocking the entrance. He focused on the fire in his core, the jagged, angry heat he had been fighting to contain. He didn't try to punch it out. He simply let it bleed through his skin.
"Burn," he whispered.
He turned himself into a human heater. The snow behind him began to hiss and shrink, turning to slush, then to scalding water. The cave filled with a thick, suffocating steam—his signature "Steam-Lock" environment, but without the explosive violence. It was agonizing. The heat was cooking his own back, the fire-rash screaming in protest, but Umi acted as a heat-sink, absorbing the excess temperature before it could seize his heart.
Slowly, the wall of snow thinned. A pinprick of gray light broke through. Then another. With one final, desperate shove, Kael broke through the drift and tumbled out onto the ledge.
The world outside was a wasteland of blinding, pristine white. The blizzard had passed, leaving behind a silence so absolute it felt like the mountain itself had died. The air was thin and sharp, biting into Kael's lungs like shards of glass.
He looked back at the cave. The hole he had made was already starting to frost over again, reclaimed by the cold. He looked at the tattered red scrap of fabric he was still clutching in his left hand. He didn't drop it. With a shaky hand, he tucked the remnant of the girl into his own belt.
"I'm taking you with me," he whispered to the silence. "You're not staying in that hole."
He began the descent. He was on the "Spine of the Dragon" now—a narrow, treacherous ridge that led toward the timberline. The wind was a constant, horizontal force, trying to shove him into the abyss on either side.
Every step was a gamble. His joints felt like they were filled with broken glass, and the artificial energy from the "ghost-fuel" was already starting to fade.
Then, he saw a movement in the white below. Not a cat. Not a hunter.
A bird. A giant messenger-hawk, its wingspan wide and powerful, circling a thermal vent a few hundred yards down the ridge. In the Fire Nation, those birds meant civilization—either the military or the wealthy. Both meant a chance to steal, to hide, or to die in a warm bed instead of a cold hole.
"That way," he wheezed, pointing his right hand toward the hawk.
He didn't know how far it was. He didn't know if he could make it before the "crash" truly claimed him. But for the first time in seven days, the weight in his chest didn't feel like a stone. It felt like a tether.
Left foot—cold. Right foot—heat.
He was moving. And as long as he moved, the mountain couldn't claim him.