Asleep and frozen, Isdis’s consciousness sank deep into her own soul, drifting across the shallow frozen hell of her fate. A daunting storm, a raging tempest, and the steel-cracking frigid blizzard. The wind blew hard enough to rip mountains from their roots and topple the very sky.

It was a world so cold that its atmosphere had frozen into solid stones, and where time refused to move. Not a single life was allowed to exist here, because this was a long, god-forsaken wasteland. There wasn’t a single shred of heat, yet in that desolate place, Isdis opened her eyes, stuck in the violent storm.

She pushed on the ground with her hands and tried to look up, but the wind was just too strong, and the cold was so bitter that even she was rapidly freezing, unable to maintain her consciousness.

"How curious. After eons, someone finally showed up." A deep, cold voice called from the raging blizzard, and when Isdis lifted her eyes, she saw him. A gaunt man with a thin beard and a face full of scars, he wore a brilliant silver armor, and was sitting on a mountain of archdevil, archangel, gods, and abomination corpses.

She tried to speak, but her lungs were already frozen solid. She could barely see, but what she made out, was the large, bold, and black engraving on his armor spelling. [ABSOLUTE ZERO]

"You’re still too warm for this realm, human." As those words drowned in the loud storm, Isdis’s eyes froze, and almost immediately, she woke back up on Arad’s bed with a gasp. How long had she been asleep? What was that just now? A dream, a nightmare?

Looking around, she could see Arad having just stopped pounding Aella’s back end. He looked at her for a second, and it was then that she noticed that everyone was looking at her.

"Are you okay?" Arad asked, and she lay back on the bed. "Yeah... just a nightmare." She rubbed her eyes and then stretched her arms. "I was in a cold, freezing storm. I guess I might’ve gotten a bit too cold."

"No, not just that." Arad looked at one of the maids, and the maid rushed in. She jumped to the dressing table, picked a mirror, and brought it to Isdis.

When Isdis looked at the mirror, she noticed that her pale skin had gotten paler and was now as white as snow. Her blond hair had also gotten a bit paler, but the clearest change was her lips and eyes. Her lips, which were once bright red and full, had turned purple, and her eyes now looked more like they were made of glass, two blue crystals. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Looking closer at her own face, she could see that her pupils had frozen and now looked like sapphire, and that her vision had become far clearer and stronger than before, allowing her to notice the faint texture in her own skin.

"It seems that I’ve got colder." She clenched her fist and immediately noticed that her nails, which she had painted blue, had lost their nail polish, which seemed to have frozen and fallen off. She had never seen it freeze before.

"This might seem bad, but it’s good for me. I’m trying to get as cold as possible after all." She leaned back, and took a deep breath. "For me, it’s only a matter of time."

As she relaxed, she saw two maids approaching her with towers, and one of them asked. "Can we... clean you now?"

Isdis blinked, opened her legs, and looked down, seeing that what was frozen underneath her was still as solid as rock, so she tried to unfreeze it and then leaned back. "Yeah, you won’t freeze now that I’m awake."

As the maids cleaned her, Isdis turned around and picked up the carafe of water, putting her hand inside to cool it down. "Don’t worry about me, keep going."

Arad turned back to Aella, looked at her slender body, and then smiled. "I kept you waiting." Then, like before, he grabbed her feet and lifted them up as he thrusted right back inside her back end. As she gasped and grasped the sheets, Arad started licking her feet and sucking on her toes. What amazed him more than anything was that Aella was feeling better from her feet than anything else.

But then, something clicked in his mind; he could feel something strange on Aella’s toes, something that should’ve been long since erased by the merciless hand of evolution. He could only sense it due to how sensitive his tongue was, but he was certain it was there... roots.

There were millions of them, but each one was far smaller than a hair by thousands of times. They grew out of her soles and toes, extending down like nerves and amplifying her senses. That was probably the reason elves had sensitive feet... but won’t their hands be the same?

He turned Aella to her side, dropped one foot, and lifted one of her arms, licking her palm and sucking on her fingers. As he expected, there was something there, but it wasn’t roots this time; it was something else, something akin to branches. Just as small, but definitely there.

Since the first elf Core was born from Yggdrasil’s fruit, and the elves are his descendants, it seems that at the core of it all, pun intended, the elves were closer to plants than anyone had ever expected.

"Arad... slow down..." Aella cried as Arad started to move faster when his mind wandered away, and he immediately slowed the moment her words hit him. "Sorry, I got distracted for a second."

She glared at him, lifted her free foot, and kicked him on the face. "Distracted by what? You’re here with me..." He didn’t even flinch, and instead caught her foot, and started licking her toes.

"By your hands and feet, of course." He smiled, and she blushed harder than before. "What... what are you talking about, you fool!"

To calm her down, he gave her one hard thrust, and she gasped for air, moaning as she felt it hammering her innards. "Relax a bit... I’ll explain. You’ve got roots." He pointed at her toes. "They are small, but still there."

She blinked a few times, and everyone stared at her. "What?"

He pointed at her feet with a smile. "They are far smaller than hair, but are there and act as nerve endings, which is the reason why the elves are sensitive there. The first elf, Core, was born from Yggdrasil, so I guess the roots originally came from her."

Everyone got a bit closer to look at Aella’s feet and try to see if they were really there, but they couldn’t see anything. Soon, with almost everyone glaring at her feet like that, Aella cried and wrapped herself around Arad’s hips. "Leave it for later!"

Of course, he obliged, thrusting inside her once more, and she gasped for air as her hands clenched the sheet as hard as they could.