Captured in ice

Njoro opened her eyes.
A throbbing pain radiated from the back of her head.
At first, she couldn't orientate herself at all.
It was dark, apart from a small, strange light shining out from atop a tall figure standing in the middle of the floor facing her.
The light was as cold as the walls of the snow cave she gradually recognised as the place she’d been in before something happened to her. She'd never seen such light before.
"Who are you?" she said to the lightbearer.
The figure said nothing.
She could sense an intense negative energy filling the cave. All blocked-up. Nothing flowing freely. The creature was human like herself, but was totally out of balance. She could sense this effortlessly, so the imbalance must have been very apparent.
"Do you want something from me?" she asked.
The lightbearer still said nothing. It just stood still, radiating fear.
Then it said:
"When I want you to speak, I will ask you to."
She thought this behaviour most peculiar.
She decided to shut up anyway.
The off-balanced human was preoccupied with staring at, and fiddling with, some small device it wore on its left wrist. The device let off the same kind of cold, lifeless light that shone from atop its head, but this one seemed to have a wider spectrum with different frequencies of color radiating from it. The flickering dead colourplay lit up the face of the strange human. Judging by the body build and voice, it was a male, and she saw that he had covered large areas of his face with more artificial-looking materials like the one on his wrist. He also lacked all traces of facial hair, something she found quite repulsive for a grown male.
She decided to give up gathering further understanding of the intruder from the exterior, and rather examine this thing from the inside.
Assured of his total immersion in whatever he was doing with the strange instrument, and content after he rudely assumed that she would not speak unless he wanted her to, she closed her eyes and reached for the Innerworld.
She could see the flickering of millions of lights like tiny stars as the veil tore, and suddenly another world opened up before her inner eyes. She moved towards the hairless device-man. His soul looked even more stark than his exterior. It was as if all his yin energies had been blocked out of the system. Suppressed. Suffocating. Dying.
Njoro had trouble breathing as she got closer to him. She knew it was lucky she was in her dream-body and didn't need air.
Very strange. His whole being seemed uncontrollably dominated by male powers. Just as she was about to look further inside, her mind suddenly broke her concentration:
Pi!
She'd been so preoccupied with trying to examine the intruder that she'd forgotten all about Pi.
Where on Earth was he?
She abruptly left the Innerworld and opened the eyes of her physical self.
She could hear her body breathing faster than when she left.
The light-head didn't take notice. He was still staring into the thing on his wrist, touching it with the fingers on his other hand in tiny, rapid movements.
Insect-like movements, she thought. Not very graceful.
She grabbed the chance to look around inside the cave.
Then she saw it.
Mungpuk.
The Eskimo's dead body lay on the cave floor in the darkness by the wall. She hadn’t noticed it before. A gaping wound beneath his chin led to a wide patch of dried, dark blood covering his upper body.
It was horrible.
She could feel a terrible sorrow fill her soul, and tears pushing through.
What a primitive, savage creature this must be. She couldn’t even imagine how a living thing could do this to one of its own. To take another human's life required the ability to totally block out all one's birth-given empathy and natural connection to the collective consciousness, and by performing this action the Savage proved that he had long since crossed that line.
This meant that she was facing a great danger.
If all empathy and connection to the Soul of Everything was blocked, she had no means of communicating with the creature on any profound level.
She hastily blessed the soul of her passed-on friend and travelling-companion, and then decided to leave the matter of grieving until the situation allowed for it, and instead search for Pi’s whereabouts.
As there was no-one else in the cave now but herself, the Savage and Mungpuk’s dead body - no other presence, living or dead - she felt great relief.
But she was still anxious about wherever else Pi might be.
He had to be somewhere out there. Alone. Hopefully not hurt.
She decided to take another look from the inside as the Savage was still busy.
Eyes closed. Mind still. The flickering of lights, and once again the Innerworld opened its gates to her.
She was floating across the vast, blue landscape. She could feel the tiny pinpricks of crystal icicles penetrating every pore of her facial dream-skin as she flowed through the chilling air. She filled her lungs with the clean coldness, and even though she knew this was her senses on overload giving her sensations that weren't really there, as they were on the physical plane, she enjoyed every second of it.
Njoro simply loved sensing. It didn’t matter what her senses told her, as long as they were present.
As she crossed the ice-clad dreamland she looked all around thoroughly for any kinds of tracks, like recent movements of life-force, imprints on the dreamweb of passing emotions, basically any trails she could possibly follow. But there was nothing there. Not even signs of a stray bear or some other lost polar animal.
And certainly no sign of Pi.
He had to be somewhere out here.
At least he had to be alive, as there were no signs that any being had crossed over to the far side as she could see, and she knew the Savage wouldn't have been able to move him or his body to a very remote location in so little time.
"Hey, witch! I'm talking to you."
She rushed back to reality and opened her eyes.
"What do you people eat?"
The Savage was standing in front of her, shining his cold headlight straight into her face.
She felt very uncomfortable.
He spoke Global quite well, but with a very strong Middle-Northern accent. He must be from the Nova Baltica area, she decided. That's where the most fierce outbreaks of revolt against the House had taken place over the last few years.
It would also explain the strange devices he was carrying.
The main argument in the Middle-North for declaring independence from the Global Unity Circle was down to the resistance they met against their urge to speed up the technology race.
"You probably wouldn't enjoy it very much", she answered.
"So it's all stuff like the smelly lamp here, then? That'll be lukewarm seal-gut stew for dinner, then?"
“Actually we had plans for whale blubber tonight”, Njoro said. “Whale blubber and lime-juice. It’s very nutricious and keeps the scurvy away.”
The Savage said nothing. Then he pointed the headlight down, and she could once more make out his hairless features. His attitude was as unpleasant as before, but at least he had decided to stop blinding her for now.
He pulled some boxes out of his sack, opened them, and started eating the contents.
When she kept looking at him without a word, he said:
"You hungry?"
She shook her head.
He raised his eyebrows and just continued eating. After a while, he said:
"So, tell me. Where's your other friend? You travel in threes and twos, don't you? Law of five.”
Njoro said nothing.
He continued: “The first entourage had two sorry souls in it, so that automatically makes yours a party of three, right? Funny how your superstition makes it all quite easy for me, isn't it?"
Njoro froze from the inside.
"Are you going to tell me, or do I have to make you?"
"I don't know." Njoro said. "I honestly don't know."