Dread huffed, tilting his head. He didn't grasp what Svartis meant; after all, he could move in and out through the crystals, so barring other Gembound didn't occur to him. Keeping out the cold, however...

"A good shield," he agreed, and then rapidly wing-walked forward, thrusting his head into the snowstorm. (He hated that cold.)

He struggled, for a moment, to see anything beyond: to peer for someone setting out crystals, perhaps, or stealing them... he wasn't sure. But as before, when he'd been here before the crystals had mysteriously appeared, he saw nothing at all.

"I don't see anything," he informed Svartis, which may have seemed odd without context: as it stood, Dread simply looked like he'd shoved his head into the snow to stare outward. And given how his magic had failed, that was exactly what he'd done.

Dread glanced with some surprise to Svartis. Somehow, he'd expected his son to have already explored the depths of the storm, so it was with slow confusion that he explained:

"You can't go far in." The older dragon then rallied himself to actually detail what this meant. "The wind is too bad. It's as bad as home, but you can't see. So it pushes you back. I looked in, but it is too hard to fly in there." Relatively coherent, at least.

Dread nodded out into the swirling white, thinking for a moment. Warmth flickered up around him as he did so.

"We can both look-? Maybe. I don't know if it will make it better. Or easier," he added, staring off into the snow.

It sounded like there should be some 'but' on the end of that, some idea, some offer--but there wasn't. Dread just fell silent, glancing to Svartis for confirmation.

Dread eyed Svartis, and then just sort of draconically-shrugged his agreement, looking forward. He didn't know what Svartis meant by 'narrow'; so far as Dread knew it was just the broad northern expanse of Polaris. But he didn't bother asking: he didn't always understand a lot and it wasn't, to him, alwys worth questioning.

For now he reared back, trying to peer magically into the snow again. "There are things in there. At least one big thing. On four legs. With a tail," he said, at last. "But it's very far back."

"Try it. The walls. If you can make them big enough for us," he agreed. He knew the wind was strong enough to shove them out; large wings were powerful, yes, but they also just gave stronger winds more surface area to work against, as Dread had discovered the hard way. They were like... big umbrellas in a wind tunnel, basically, billowing out like sails and sending him tumbling the other way. Skillful maneuvering helped, but didn't fix it all.

"I can't do much. My magic is still bad," he explained, though he couldn't... even remember if he'd told Svartis about the trial.

He shook himself, as if trying to remember; and he tried to keep his heat bound to him as he wing-walked swiftly toward the first glacial barrier. Svartis had set it up neatly, and Dread hunkered down, head low, in an almost serpentine manner as he hurried for it.

"I did a TEST. Thing. There was an owl! There were gemstones falling out of rocks. And a bowl," he 'explained.' "When I finished, my magic was strange! Broken. But I think it may become stronger." He said all of this almost absently, eyes still searching the snowstorm, spined flattened back against the cold.

It was bitter. He didn't like that. But so far, he couldn't really tell where they should go from here--and so he simply waited for Svartis to decide, to make another barrier--or to retreat.

Dread flinched against the snow, and glanced at Svartis as his son spoke.

"No... Hm." He tried to think of how to describe it in some way that made sense. "It is like... falling out of the sky. And your wings hurt. But you can feel that you will fly higher when they heal?" He wasn't sure that all made sense, and with an irritated huff he called on his magic again to warm him. It hadn't done anything, last time.

"The owl-thing is strange. It is very big," he added; "It's cave is somewhere past here. That is why I wanted to come here--to ask why it took my fire! Maybe it put all this snow here... so I can't find it, again," Dread lamented, his tone one of mourning.