The weather was getting colder as time passed. Eventually we realised that we had to make camp and hopefully avoid getting caught blindsided from an unexpected blizzard. Therefore we began hastily gathering some supplies like food and water, not that we actually found some seeing as we had already reached past the treeline of this mountain range. It was now about five hundred meters below us, to far to climb down in this freezing weather. Sight was limited and although slowly, we noticed even that was beginning to feel like a privilege, seeing as even that was beginning to drop.
We had to figure something out soon, as there were no caves around, not to our knowledge at least. Windspeed was picking up now. Our faces were no longer visible, instead being hidden inside the warmth providing flames around our necks.
"I think we s..s..hould try and make a tent or something." said Ares, the cold making his teeth clatter against each other. Great idea, I thought while focusing on extending the flames to cover my entire body. Progress was slow but steady. We could try to make a tent out of flames, maybe even make them imitate fabric, but first we would have to figure out how to endure the cold. Ares couldn't see what I was doing, not because I was hiding it but because everything was now a mix of grey and white. A flickering grey fire, one that didn't actually provided light, was practically invisible.
There! Finally got it. The fire now covered my body, having slipped beneath my clothes and began to provide a dense cushion of warm air between the fabric of my clothes and my skin. The snow that had gathered on my hair and clothes soon began to melt. But while that was happening, I had already reached out to grab Ares shoulder and used the same magic on him.
Our fingers frozen and stiff began to feel.....better. More like they were supposed to feel like in warmer weather. "So what now?" Ares asked. "Should we just move on? Now that we're nolonger at risk to freeze?"
"No. Visibility is still to low. At this point we can barely see a few meters ahead. We do as you said. We're going to make a tent and for that we need our fire to imitate both the form and function of a tent."
Thanks to incredible luck, we already had the groundwork for our new endeavour, although it was born out of convenience. Our scarfs already imitated fabric. So now all we had to do was change it's shape, connect or stick it to the ground and there, done. Sounded easy? Sure. But was it? Absolutely not. The scarf refused to change shape. So we had to start again, using the already established base for the fire scarf, as we had begun to call it, we tried and tried again. Sometimes the fire spun out of control, in which case we just cut the energy supply and let the blizzard put it out. Othertimes, at least in my case, the fire changed colours and seemingly it's effects. The green fire, just as before stunk of rot and despair. The purple fire was a lot more volatile but seemed to burn away the stink of the green one. A few more fire types snuck in, but none stuck around. Ares and I made blankets, sticks and even proper cushions of fire, they weren't intentional either but what can you do. After who knows how many tries, the fire tent finally worked.
First a small whitish grey spark appeared in mid air before us, then it began to spin and spit eight more sparks in a semi-occtogonal shape. As soon as those eight sparks fell to the ground, It was like watching a wildfire. The sparks began to connect with each other using their outer perimeter burning an actual octagon into the frozen snow. The original spark spit out more of them and soon the shape grew larger, eventually safely eveloping our current standing position and putting us close to the center of the spell. The fire began to well up from the ground, rising like a tide and creating flowing walls of fire around us. Within minutes we were no longer outside in the freezing cold but within a grey glowing tent with one flapping entrance. The wind howled outside, tearing on the magical fabric. Meanwhile the two of us were inside, feeling the warmth of the tent drive out the last of the cold within our bodies.
"Uhm....Percy. What now? Just sleep?"
"Pretty much, yeah. There's nothing else to do and practicing inside here would probably cause some problems."
"What about the floor? Are we just supposed to sleep on the ground? We can already make fabric. Shouldn't we try to make a bed or something?"
Huh, I mean..... he's got a point right there. We already have the baseline for it. We should also be able to manipulate the ground below us to make shapes and dry. I think we could do it.
I looked first at Ares, then at the ground before me, with a slight frown on my face, concentrating on what I wanted to do.
Then I stretched out my arm. Merely a gesture with no actual necessity but it helped.
Slowly but surely the ground began to rise, cold as it was. Then I introduced warmth into the slab, melting the snow on top of it and feeling how it began to turn the slab into mud.
The frown consisted as I focused on cranking up the heat, while also creating pressure to press it back into a solid slab.
Then, after I had actually succeeded, I used more magic to carve out small channels throughout the slab all of which started in a small indention engraved on the lower side of it. There I ignited another fire, grey just as before. It's temperature was low, somewhere between 15 and 21 degrees Celsius. A comfortable temperature. Another blanket out of flames was created and thrown over the risen slab, it's temperature a little lower than the fire within the slab.
Meanwhile Ares was busy with his own design. Wait what?
"Ares, did you seriously just make a tub and filled it with fire?" Where will you sleep?"
" Inside. Isn't that obvious?" " But what about breathing?"
" Well first of all, haven't you noticed that the fire around us doesn't consume air? If it did, we would have suffocated by now. And secondly. I made a headrest above the fire..."