When they came back from their 'outing', they were out of the hotel room in ten minutes.
Finn threw what he had in the room into his bag and Ciri did the same, not bothering to fold anything, just pushing it all in. The key card got left on the bed. Finn just dropped the second key on the front desk on the way past and kept walking.
They entered the forest west of Solaceon immediately. The trees were dense and tall and the canopy cut out most of the midday light, leaving the path ahead in a kind of permanent late afternoon. Chip was in his ball. Kelpie too. Better that way.
Finn kept his eyes on the compass and his pace fast. Ciri matched it without complaint.
There was simply no path at all. Roots crossed through their way in thick ridges and they stepped over them one after another, pushing through low hanging branches. The compass needle is pointing somewhere ahead and slightly northwest, toward the base of Mt. Coronet where the rock started to rise out of the forest floor.
That was when Finn felt it.
A biting coldness. It was not gradual, but sudden. His breath turned white in front of him. The temperature kept dropping.
"Finn…" Ciri called out.
"I know," he said.
Ciri pulled her jacket tighter. "What do we do?"
"Keep moving." He didn't slow down. "And don't use your powers. Not unless there's no other option." He pushed a branch out of the way. "But until then, we run."
So they ran.
The forest floor was uneven and the roots kept coming and Finn's bag swung hard against his back with every stride but he kept his footing. The cold deepened around them. Ice was forming on the bark of the trees now, crackling when branches knocked together overhead. Frost appeared on the grass underfoot.
They ran, and ran, and ran, and for a while there was nothing but the sound of their boots and their breathing and the creak of freezing wood around them.
Then the portals started opening.
The first one tore open between two trees off to the left, bluish light flooding through the dark forest floor. Then another, ahead and to the right. Then two more, somewhere behind them.
"Shit," Finn said.
An ice hound came through the nearest portal at a sprint, its feet almost silent on the frost-covered ground. Another followed. Then three more from the portal behind them.
"We can't outrun them!" Ciri shouted.
She was right. The hounds were already closing the gap, and behind them came the riders, with their skeletal armour clattering. More portals opened. More of them are pouring through. It stopped looking like a small scouting party and started looking like a horde.
Finn reached into his bag without stopping.
His hand found the staff. He pulled it out and it unfolded with a soft mechanical click, extending to its full length in his grip. The crystal at the tip caught the cyan light from the portals and gave back almost nothing. Just a faint blue pulse, very weak.
He pressed his thumb against it. The pulse stuttered.
"Come on," he said under his breath. "Once more. Just once."
The riders had cleared the treeline now. All of them spread around the forest, galloping in a formation that left no direction open. The hounds ran ahead of the horses, closing fast, and there were too many of them to count.
Finn quickly stopped.
He turned around to face them, planting his feet, and behind him he heard Ciri skid to a halt.
He raised the staff and started drawing runes in the air.
The runes came out faint. The crystal was barely giving him anything at all, and the lines he traced in the air were thin, almost transparent, fading at the edges before he could finish the sequence. He drew faster. The hounds were thirty meters out. Twenty. He could hear them now, that wet grinding sound of when flesh clashing against ice.
Then, he finished the last stroke of the final rune.
He brought the staff up over his head with both hands and swung it down hard, driving the tip into the frozen ground between the runes. The crystal flickered once, and then went out completely.
The ground shook.
Then it rose.
From the point where the staff hit, the earth pushed upward in a cone, dirt and root and frozen soil erupting forward in a wave that tore across the ground toward the charging line of riders and hounds. The hounds hit it first. Several of them went airborne, tumbling, and didn't land right. The riders behind them had no time to pull up. Horses slammed into the rising wall of earth at full gallop and went over hard, sending their riders pitching forward into the ground at speed.
The cone still moved for a few seconds. Then it settled, and the dust came down in a slow curtain.
Not all of them were down. Finn could already see shapes moving on the other side of the debris, riders pulling themselves up, hounds shaking off the impact.
He turned. Grabbed Ciri's hand.
"Anywhere," he said. "Doesn't matter where. Just go."
Ciri's fingers closed around his. She nodded.
Then, the world around them folded.
And then they were gone.