Running Out of Time

"I don't need forever," Ashlynn said with as much confidence as she could muster. "Just long enough."

The words were more bravado than truth. She'd already been fighting for what felt like hours inside this crystalline prison, and her enhanced strength was beginning to falter. Already, she was denied any source of living growth to fuel her witchcraft, and at night, she couldn't even draw on the sun's faint warmth as a source of flame. The Ice Tomb only added to her troubles, isolating her from the mountain wind and the vast reserves of ice and snow. 

In the end, only the solid stone ground under her feet offered any source of strength, but Ashlynn had long ago found that there was a vast difference between lush, living soil and cold, barren earth. What the mountain offered her, it offered only grudgingly, as if it knew that the right to command it belonged to a different lineage of witches.