She runs. A feet pounding, half feeling, sort of running. A desperate animal running. She feels the way the unfallen snow drifts in little eddies and flows above her, but not the way they land on her skin. She feels the ripples in the winds of magic when her feet hit the cold hard earth, but she doesn't feel the drumming impacts themselves.

When a tree blocks her path, she drinks deep from the maelstrom winds of magic and converts the raw elemental force into a brutal grinding tearing spell. Nothing found in Nagash's ancient spellbook, nothing so elegant or efficient. Just a churning block of metaphorical gears driving against each other, and the impression of teeth. All at once, with no particular beginning or end, the tree is a shower of toothpicks raining down over the non-path like the snow gently falling all around. Boulders, shrubbery, everything too inanimate to get out of her way meets the same fate, but she hardly leaves a trail of destruction. Too few things need obliterating for that, and her path is too circuitous to be easily followed. After a time that could be centuries or minutes or days or hours, she comes to a thicker knot of great ancient trees, all grown together. An old part of the Pacific Northwest forest. A gnarled, rich part growing ever up and ever out and impossibly inward. All around her the life of the place writhes and thrashes and churns, no real will unites it, but there's a half-true sullen malevolence about the place.

There's so much life there, and what is life if not power? What is life if not a currency to extend Anna's? Together with the death accumulated in the aged steel of Pabbie's Luger, there's perhaps enough for the ritual. Blindly, Elsa extends her senses, forces her mind into the nooks and gaps in the ancient bark, and into the dormant moist moss, and into the verdant blades of grass buried beneath a foot and more of snow. Into the yellowey shelf-like fungus growing in the dark gaps between roots as thick as a man's chest and into the torpid slumbering minds of tiny hibernating mammals. Into the rapid thrumming hearts of birds and into the fibers of the lesser trees all around. Out and out her mind stretches, gathering and grasping and accumulating until there's a shining blackness of knotted power clutched between the million fingers of her unreal hands. There's a dangerous slipping too, an omnidirectional pulling that seems to call the broken and repaired fragments of her mind this way and that. A calling to descend into this bird's life and see how he hunts for worms and maggots, how proud he is of his vibrant plumage and his hopes that plumage will win him a mate come spring. A calling to fall into the busy mind of that ant and see her endless code-like lists of tasks, her unending duty to her hive. A calling to slip into the slow consciousness of that tree, to savor the sweet tang of minerals, to feel the sun on the upturned faces of its leaves or the cool trickle of rainwater down its broad trunk. There's only one sensation not shared somewhere in the forest, only one memory that Elsa can cling to and remain Elsa. The taste of gas, and of a despair that the denizens of the forest are too stupid to feel. The almost-relief of death and the burning that followed. Such burning, that nothing for miles around could ever comprehend. Elsa remains Elsa, her mind unmolested by those of the forest. One by one, the birds fall silent, and lifelessly from their perches as well. The grasses yellow then grey then crumble to fine dust. The fungi shrivel in on themselves and peel from their resting places like the lifeless husks of insects shed on a warm spring night. The hibernating mammals shiver and draw in on themselves, their hearts slow their breathing stops then their hearts follow dutifully after. The trees are the last to give up their life, having so much to give. Needles turn yellow or red like an oak in the fall. Bark cracks, boughs creak and groan like a galleon tossed on a stormy sea. Heartwood shrivels and splits. Sap weeps from wounds in the wood like dark blood, flows freely, then coalesces. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the trees lose their color and stand there as lifeless monuments to Elsa's ruin. Nearly exceeding the amount of power that her old soul can channel and like a snake after a large meal, Elsa sleeps there in the midst of the lifeless trees and the snow grey with the dust of the multitudinous dead.

To her credit, it takes Anna less than a minute to notice Elsa's absence, and only a little longer to organize a search party. Not the police, not yet. Elsa wouldn't want that, she thinks. But all her family and all their neighbors. It isn't Anna who finds her- Anna had thought it would be her, for some reason- but rather one of her neighbors. A big Pacific Islander. He sees the desolation she wrought and he knows. He isn't a student of Nagash's third book, but that doesn't mean he can't know. He sees her crumpled there and he stretches out his senses- such a blinding nexus of power. There's a flash of covetous greed in his slow heart, but that isn't who he is anymore. Not since Moana.

Maui sighs and approaches the unconscious litch. Her hair is splayed across the ashy snow, and more snow has fallen since she has; it's hard to tell where the snow ends and her snowy white hair begins. She doesn't have a pulse, he can feel that in the winds of magic, but he only barely does. He bends, coat straining on his massive back, and feels at her throat. No pulse there either, not that he expected one.

The third book of Nagash is the book of bone. Maui doesn't study the third book, didn't know it existed until the litches were revealed to the world all those years ago. His is the fifth book. A copy of a copy of a copy. There are errors and mistranslations and typos and omissions that have all persisted in a centuries-long game of telephone, but there is great power still in his bastardized copy of the book of spirit.

Maui reaches for the winds of magic and finds none natively near him. Very well, Maui's own capacity is vast and more malleable than that of the rigid practitioners of Nagash's bone spells. He sets a driving gear turning, feeds it, and stretches out a tendril of Van Meersland's Sensing spell. Yes, there's life in the old unconscious litch. Blasted to unconsciousness by the aftershock of her spell, but not permanently damaged. Not by that, at least. Her spirit is broken, but those scars are older than her face suggests. He sighs again. The spells in Nagash's fifth book were built for searching out treason and commanding weak wills. For binding wraiths and specters to the mortal world and prying information from recalcitrant minds. They would be clumsy tools for repairing a traumatized mind and what was that Moana is always harping on? Consent? He scoops up Elsa's too-light form and stands. She isn't a big person, and cradled in Maui's huge arms she's like a child.

He produces his cell phone, lets the searchers know that Elsa has been found, and trudges back toward civilization. Anna is crying when she opens the door. Not a sad sort of crying, a happy overwhelming relief maybe. She keeps one arm over her stomach, as if to keep a rein on her churning feelings, the other at her mouth in a futile attempt to conceal the tears.

When Elsa wakes, it's in Anna's bed, wrapped tightly in cheerful patterned blankets. Anna sits in a chair by her cluttered desk, but she's nodded off- a while ago, if the impressive string of drool is any indication. A pant of guilt lays heavy on Elsa's unbeating heart, and she resolves not to wake Anna. Some shifting of her covers perhaps, or an accidental breath, betrays her and Anna sits abruptly upright.

"Elsa!" She cries, and brushes quickly at the drool staining her shirt. "You're ok! I mean, are you ok? You're ok, right?"

"I…" Elsa struggles to say. Her voice is heavy with power, her throat feels like it's full of hot desert sand. The lights buzz and blur in her vision. Anna looks worriedly around and Elsa realizes that they're blurring outside her vision as well. "Yeah, I'm alright."

"Oh good," Anna smiles but it's a worried, distracted sort of smile. "I…" she bites her lip. "I love you," she says all in a rush.

"Ich liebe…" Elsa begins, but Anna cuts her off.

"Elsa," she pleads. "I don't speak German."

"I love you," Elsa says with a sigh. "That's what it means."

"Oh," Anna nods happily, as if that solves all the problems that plague the world. "Good." She thinks for a second. "You've said it before," she says, not as a question.

"I have," Elsa agrees guardedly.

"So all this time?" Anna makes it sound like a question even though it isn't.

"I…" Elsa shrugs uncomfortably. The air hums. "Yeah." She makes an equivocating gesture. "I love you."

Anna grins broadly. "I love you too!" Her brilliant sunny expression goes dark. "But don't you ever worry me like that again."

AN: yay! Less than a year between updates! Aren't I so fast? Ahem. As always, comments, favorites, and reviews are greatly desired.

Ambulance pro tip: sometimes, people die. My job is to keep that from happening, or to undo it if at all possible. Sometimes it's not possible. Sometimes, people have a piece of paper called a "Do Not Resuscitate Order" or a DNR for short. This piece of paper is a legal order that informs ambulance crews that they are not permitted to try to save that person if their heart should stop beating. This order has legal weight, and more importantly informs us of the patient's wishes. We are not allowed to disobey it, and if we were we wouldn't anyway. We're there for the patient. If we can make the family's life easier we will of course; we're in this profession because we want to help people, but that is NOT going to come at the patient's expense. We WILL respect the patient's wishes. It doesn't matter how you scream and shout, it doesn't matter how you beg, we will not disobey the patient's wishes. All you will accomplish is making us feel terrible. You won't bring your loved one back, all you'll do is give me something else to drink away when my shift ends and I've held enough dying children that I don't need you adding grandma to my list of things to drink away. Sorry if that is heavier than the flippant tone of previous ambulance pro tips, but it's a really important message.