Villainous [Wattys 2021 Shortlist]

15: Naga

Delilah fell to her knees as the wind battered her with a vicious roar. Her hands, hastily wrapped in strips of ripped fabric as makeshift gloves, were blue - she could not feel or move them. The snowstorm concentrated its force on her, pushing her against the deep carpet of fluffy snow that blanketed the land.

"Get up!" Dante roared from somewhere out of sight.

Delilah hated the north. Hated, hated, hated it.

She closed her eyes, eyelashes sticking together, and longed for Pelenu's sun, its dry air and deserts.

"I can't," she croaked, opening her eyes again with difficulty. The snow had made them puffy and raw. The skin of her cheeks was peeling. And she was cold beyond shivering.

"Come on, Princess." Dante strode towards her and grabbed a chunk of her hair. He tugged and she yelped.

"Get off me!" She careened onto her feet, struggling, and collided with a mass of solid muscle: his chest.

"If we don't start moving now, we'll freeze where we stand," Dante shouted in her ear.

Struggling, she took a step. They used each other for support, heads bowed against the wind. Delilah's hair was frozen together in clumps, and the gale whipped strands against her face.

She groaned, and the movement made her chapped lips crack. Blood trickled down her chin, and that was when she realised they would die out here. There was no way they could get out of Arctica alive.

"The Fire Opal!" she shouted at Dante. "We have to use it!"

He was shaking his head, eyes huge. "I can't."

"Then I'll use it, you spineless worm, and you can carry me if the wraiths are too much!"

"No. We can't risk the wraiths overpowering us - we'd die in the snow no matter how much fire you produce."

"That Opal is an heirloom of my people." She snatched for the pouch at Dante's belt but he dodged, backing away and leaving her standing unsteadily, buffeted by snow-laden winds. "It's my heirloom! Mine!"

"We'll be seen," he said vehemently.

"Seen by who? No one's suicidal enough to come out here!"

As if to mock her, a chunk of snow in the wasteland around them moved.

They stiffened, hands on their weapons.

A square of hard-packed snow was moved to reveal a hole of light. A round, furry thing waddled out of it, and Delilah thought of snow monsters.

But it was a person - a person bundled in a massive fur parka. "In." No patch of skin had been left uncovered, and she couldn't make out the face. "In," it said again.

Knowing that death awaited them if they refused, Delilah and Dante hurried towards the light. Delilah reached it first, dropped onto her hands and knees, and crawled through a tunnel made of the same hard-packed snow blocks as the door. The space opened up into a snow cave, an igloo of blocks.

She gaped at it, at the fire crackling in the centre, the huge pack made of hide and supplies littered everywhere. From the outside it was invisible.

Dante's rasping breath behind her made her jump, and she scooted aside to give him room. They collapsed by the fire.

The fur creature had followed after replacing the door, and the sound of the storm had lessened considerably. Delilah and Dante watched apprehensively as it unwound a strip of cloth covering its face, threw back its hood and pulled off a strip of hide with slits as eye-holes.