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forces her to break contact and rub her temples until the throbbing stops. “It’s like the creatures are hibernating or dying. If I push myself then I can go deeper, but it might reveal our presence to whatever is in trouble. An injured animal might panic and hurt itself trying to escape. We need to search with our physical senses.”
    “The snow is too bright and flat for me to see anything clearly,” the barbarian growls. The sound of shuffling and mild cursing draws his attention to Nyx who has sunk up to her nose in a nearby drift. “What are you doing, fire sprite?”
    Nyx shivers while squinting into the distance, her eyes coated in bronze energy. “The reason you can’t see anything might be because you’re too tall. I’m trying to see if there’s anything that breaks the level ground. This is a trick the apprentices and I used when playing magical hide and seek. My eyes are enhanced right now, but I don’t . . . wait a second . . . I think there’s something buried out there. A beast of some kind? It’s a very subtle up and down motion that reminds me of something breathing. It just stopped moving, but I don’t know what that means. I’ll lead the way.”
    Not waiting for a response, Nyx pushes through the thick snow and uses wind magic to shift the powder out of her path. She does her best to move quietly and avoid disturbing whatever they are approaching, but the crunch of frozen grass beneath her boots makes the half-elf cringe with every step. A violent sneeze threatens to erupt from her nose, stifled quickly by a silence spell around her nostrils. Rubbing at her cold legs, Nyx is thankful when Timoran gives her a vest made of black fur that runs down to her knees. The Ifrit hair warms her body and drives away the looming cold that has been brewing in her chest for the last few minutes. With renewed energy, the channeler walks a little faster and adds a simple heat spell to the wind that is steadily clearing a path.
    “Wow. Such a beautiful creature,” she whispers when she steps into a circular clearing that surrounds the dead animal.
    The enormous snow tiger’s blue and black fur is thick, the hairs sparkling when touched by direct sunlight. The predator has long incisors of glistening white that jut out of its mouth due to their length and thickness. A slender tail lies limp in the exposed grass, but still jerks around as the muscles lose their tension. Powerful legs and massive paws are splayed on the ground, giving the body the appearance of having peacefully died in its sleep. The gaping wound in the gorgeous snow tiger’s side is the only sign of an attack, the surrounding fur matted with aromatic blood.
    Timoran’s rage boils when he spots three cubs that are mewling and pushing against their dead mother. Judging from their size and faint, black stripes, he knows they are no older than two months. Rusty manacles are attached to their back legs, the chains running to a stake that has been driven into the muddy earth. Restraining most of his anger, the barbarian moves within reach of the animals and gently breaks the metal bindings that are cutting into their delicate ankles. Scared and confused, the cubs cower against the warm corpse and hiss whenever one of the adventurers comes close. One of the snow tigers bravely charges at Timoran and bites his boot, proudly returning to the others when the towering warrior moves away.
    “I say we go hunting,” Luke states, his brown and gold eyes never straying from the terrified animals. Knowing that the cubs will die without help, he calms down and gets on all fours. “We should find a safe place for them first. Maybe they’ll listen to another cat.”
    Feathers sprout from the forest tracker’s neck and his nose grows into a beak, but he does not get any further into his transformation before the champions are ambushed. A pack of scaly figures burst from the surrounding snow to hurl blunt weapons and crude snares. Luke is caught by a rope