Phoresis

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Freya walked slowly across the ice, using her rake to scrape aside the thin cover of dirt and crystalline powder, peering down into the translucent slab below for any sign of a slender rootlet struggling to force its way out into the air.

Something dark and linear caught her eye, about a hand’s breadth deep. She stopped walking and squatted down for a closer look, then she took her pick and swung it into the ice. Once the surface shattered it was impossible to see anything beneath it, but after a dozen blows she stopped and cleared the debris out of the hole she’d made. She’d exposed the inclusion, but it wasn’t a root: it was just a streak of trapped gravel.

The sun was behind a bank of reddish clouds that covered most of the western sky and left the ice field in a state of ambiguous gloom, so she glanced up at Tvíburi, hoping to find that the time had sped by while she worked. But the twin world was still just a crescent: the afternoon shift was barely half over.

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