Tower of Winter (The Traveler's Gate Chronicles: Collection #1) Read Online Free PDF

tasks they would never assign to anyone else, and they expect me to do it. They know I won't fail. So far, I haven't. Not until today. I'm the one who succeeds every time. What will they think when they hear that I've died?"
    Donia let her voice ramble as she wondered out loud. "What will they think, when word gets out that I died in some random engagement on the sixteenth floor? Will anyone ever tell my parents? The rest of Helgard might have more to worry about soon. Maybe no one will ever know. Maybe I'll just be one casualty among many..."
    She sat there as her voice died, letting the silent cold sink into her skin.
    Outside, the cultists murmured their indistinct chants.
    Something tickled at the back of Donia's mind, like a half-remembered dream mixed with a sound just out of hearing.
    She strained to hear the whisper, to remember the thought.
    In her mind, she reached out.
    And a tumble of thoughts, ideas, and images blasted into her head, sitting her bolt upright despite the pain. It was more than a simple voice, in the same way that a wild forest fire was more than a single color, but somehow she understood.
    Go on, it said.
    It wanted her to keep talking.
    "Who are you?" she asked. On instinct, she glanced around, though of course she saw nothing but ice.
    The voice responded.
    It sounded almost like words; a string of a hundred syllables somehow shoved into her mind in the space of a heartbeat. But these words carried the image of ice, endless ice, a timeless winter, a green light, an impossibly ancient intelligence forced to sleep and kept from waking for countless thousand years...
    ...now, finally, roused from its dreams.
    The rush of thoughts slammed into Donia's brain, leaving her panting, disoriented, trying to sort words from memories from ideas. It felt like she had managed to read an entire book in half a second, with every word shoved through her at the same time so that none of it made much sense. She only caught broad themes, and a few key facts, but something jumped out at her.
    He's a Frozen One. I'm speaking with a Frozen One.
    The ice rumbled beneath her feet, and the light far below flickered once more.
    The thought triggered a wave of fear on pure reaction. She could barely fathom the nature of this thing, any more than she could understand the size of the Tower itself. What little she could piece together scared her more than anything she had ever seen in her Territory.
    After a moment, her fear subsided, and rational thought caught up with her once more. The cultists outside had been trying to find and raise the Frozen One, but he had not come to them. He had come to her first.
    She could use this.
    "I need help," she said. "I'm trapped. Can you help us?"
    She was more prepared, this time, as a rush of sensations flooded through her mind. Two strangers, meeting across a frozen plain. Two points as impossibly distant as the stars. An insect and an oak tree, discovering one another for the first time.
    I do not know you, he meant. And he was right.
    For two beings in Helgard to call upon one another, they had to share not only names, but also the essence of who they truly were. Their histories, their personalities, their secrets. For something like an icefang, a creature of pure instinct, Donia only had to open herself a fraction. But something this intelligent, this powerful, this old...he would know her entirely. Every shameful secret, every painful admission, every stark truth of her personality. He would learn things about her that she had never known herself.
    Even worse, she would learn about him in return.
    Could she handle it?
    Once more, Donia pictured herself as others saw her: strong, competent, unfailing. She would not have hesitated to give her name to this frozen elder being, not if it meant rescuing an Overlord's son and destroying a danger to the Tower at the same time.
    The real Donia had already hesitated, but that didn't mean it was too late to try.
    She took a deep breath.
    "My