Growing up on Earth, Jonny never knew how good he had it. Even when he had to go up north during the winter for whatever reason, and he thought things couldn’t get much worse, he still always had modern amenities to save him. Between sprawling cities full of easy shelter, modern heating systems, salted roads, and even those little pocket hand warmers, he was never more than a few seconds away from warmth, and rarely had to worry about losing his footing on ice.That was not so in the mountains. For some reason, no one was setting up inns out here, and there weren’t even any trails, let alone salt to keep the ice away. Not that he would have used salt for that if he had it. As much as he liked meat, he never realized how much better it tasted with salt until now.The only clothes Jonny had were the ones he had been wearing when the assassins showed up at the orphanage. They were warm, and designed for the winter, but they weren’t designed for this. Igrette had taught him how to push mana into his skin to insulate himself, but whenever they went without fire for too long, he would start shivering. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Not even close. On top of all the usual environmental issues that came with traveling through an unmapped mountain range in the winter, there were a bunch more when you factored mana into it.First of all, unlike the relative stability of the mana down closer to sea level, the mana here was more like the wind, yet somehow more fickle. One second, there would be so little it almost felt like it had vanished entirely, and the next, it would arrive in a gust, denser than the stone circle near the orphanage. Sometimes, there were magic beasts riding (...)