The farewell was the hardest part, an inconvenient, sticky, and irritatingly sentimental truth I refused to admit even to Eos. The Freljordian winter has a brutal way of pruning feelings, of freezing everything not strictly essential for survival until only the hard core of resilience remains. But the bond that had formed between me and the young Avarosan heir was a stubborn anomaly, a frost-flower that refused to wither under the frost of my cynical logic, and that, more than anything else, annoyed me deeply.
We stood at the settlement gate, the snow falling softly around us, muffling the world in a white, melancholic silence. The Avarosan caravan had already been gone an hour, giving us a moment of forced privacy. Grena, the Warmother, had given us her reluctant blessing the night before, a solemn event that involved strong mead and even stronger advice. Along with provisions, she had given us a map drawn on elnuk hide. On it, a vast area to the north, our journey's objective, was marked not with a name, but with the rune for 'Silence'—a warning more potent than any skull and crossbones.
"Legend says that place devours songs and freezes words," Grena had warned us, her eyes as hard as obsidian chips, fixed on Morgana. "No hunter from our tribe has dared go there for generations. The spirits that sleep there are ancient and do not like to be disturbed. If the spirit of winter lives there, leave it in peace." She then turned to me, crouching until we were face-to-face. "And you, little wind-sage, do not trust every story you read. Some doors were closed for good reason. Not all keys are meant to be found."
Morgana had nodded solemnly. I had just shrugged, a gesture intended to be nonchalant, but which did not fool Grena, who let out a huff that was almost a laugh.
The supplies were ready. The time to leave had come. And Ashe refused to accept it.
She was hugging me, her thin arms tight around my thick furs, her face buried in my shoulder. I, who had spent aeons perfecting the art of emotional distance, who considers a hug a violation of personal airspace, was surprisingly still. My arms hovered hesitantly at my sides, but one small, gloved hand rested gently on her back, a clumsy gesture of comfort, learned by observation and not by instinct, like a child mimicking an adult.
"You have to come back," Ashe whispered, her voice muffled by the wolf fur. "At the next solstice. You promised to teach me that Shuriman stone game."
"Imperial Chess," I corrected, my voice low, almost devoid of its usual armour of irony. "And the chances of my return are directly dependent on how tedious the rest of the world proves to be. Given humanity's recent track record of stupidity, the odds are in your favour."
"So you'll be back soon, then," she retorted, managing a small, sad smile that didn't reach her eyes. But she didn't let go. I could feel the slight tremor in her shoulders and the warmth of her tears beginning to seep through my clothes, a damp heat that contrasted with the biting cold of the air.
[Analysis: increased moisture and salinity detected on your left shoulder. Subject 'Ashe's' oxytocin levels indicate high separation stress. Social comfort protocols suggest a reciprocal gesture. Recommendation: pat on the back. Suggested count: three. Frequency: one per second.]
I ignored Eos's clinical advice. "If you don't let go," I said, my voice softer than I'd intended, "the snow will turn us into a single, very strange ice sculpture. Warmother Grena would have to use us as a hitching post for the drüvasks. It would be a profoundly undignified and frankly embarrassing death."
The absurdity of the image made Ashe laugh, a wet sound that ended in a sob. She finally let me go, wiping her eyes on the back of her glove. She took a small amulet from her neck, an Avarosan spiral carved into a piece of elnuk bone polished smooth by use. "Take this," she said, pressing it into my hands. "It's to calm the wind spirits, so they will guide your feet and not freeze your words."
I looked at the simple object. I could see the tiny scratches of the carving, feel the residual warmth of her skin. Eos could tell me it was just calcium carbonate with no detectable magical properties. But I saw something else: an act of faith. And in my vast and weary curriculum vitae, I knew that faith was sometimes the only magic that mattered.
"Grateful," I said, tying it firmly to my belt beside my wooden jian. "It's an ingenious aerodynamic design. Should break the air current quite effectively."
Ashe didn't understand the technical analysis, but she understood the gesture. It was our farewell.
As we walked away, leaving the warm light and the smell of smoke from the settlement behind, the silence of the road suddenly seemed much emptier. The journey towards Hjorthar's Silence, towards the bridge of legend, seemed much colder, much lonelier.
The first few days were a march through a desolate beauty. The Avarosan territory gave way to a no-man's-land, a scar of rocky hills and stunted pine forests whose branches looked like skeletal fingers scratching at a low, grey sky. Here, Morgana's philosophy shifted from botany to paranoia. "Don't listen to the sound, little star," she would say, her violet eyes constantly sweeping the shadows. "Listen to the intent behind the sound. The snap of a twig can be the wind, or it can be a predator shifting its weight for the kill."
We then passed through the Pale Forest. The trees here were tall and white, not from the snow that gathered on their branches, but because their bark had lost all colour, becoming as pale as sun-bleached bones. The very air felt thin and sterile. There were no birds' nests, no animal tracks in the snow, not even squirrels or insects. The silence was profound, sickly, like the quiet of a room where a long and debilitating illness has finally won.
"This place is dying," Morgana whispered, touching the trunk of one of the pale pines. Her glove came away not with dust or sap, but with only the dead cold of the wood. "The earth is… hollow."
I extended my Qi perception, the sense I have honed over millennia. The flow of life energy from the land, which should have been like a slow, deep river beneath the ice, was faint, like a stream at the end of a long drought. And it was not a natural decline. It was being drained, pulled relentlessly northwards by something insatiable. "It isn't dying," I corrected, my voice low. "It's being siphoned. Something to the north is drinking the life from this forest. And it is very thirsty."
It was on the fifth day that we found them.
We were at the top of a hill, looking down into the valley below. Three figures were moving through the snow. They looked Freljordian, but their movements were stiff, jerky, like puppets with tangled strings, lacking a hunter's natural fluidity. And there was the ice.
It wasn't True Ice. It was a Dark Ice, black and translucent like obsidian, which seemed to absorb the light itself, creating pockets of unnatural darkness around them. It grew from them, like a malignant crystalline fungus. One had his right arm completely encased in the substance, and I could see black veins pulsing slowly beneath the surface, like worms trapped in the ice. Another's face was partially covered by a frozen mask that seemed fused to his skin, and from his mouth came a cold vapour with a subtle, chemical scent of ozone and rot.
They were not alone. Cornered in a small clearing was a hunter, a man bearing the marks of a minor tribe. He brandished his axe, terror battling with desperate courage on his face. The ice-puppets surrounded him, unhurried, with the cold efficiency of wolves circling a lost sheep. The one with the ice-arm held out his hand. A tentacle of Dark Ice shot forward. The hunter, with a cry of fury, struck at it. His axe rang out as if it had hit stone, and a black frost spread across the metal, which began to crumble into dust.
The tentacle touched the man's chest.
His scream was instantly stifled, as if the sound had been frozen in his throat. Where the ice touched, his skin turned grey. The Dark Ice spread over his body like a web, through him, visible beneath the skin. His body contorted in silent spasms, muscles clenching and tearing. It wasn't killing. It was harvesting. In seconds that dragged on for an eternity, the man became a statue of black ice, the expression of terror and agony perfectly preserved in a nightmarish sculpture. And in the centre of his chest, where the tentacle had touched, a faint, bluish light pulsed.
The thralls approached the statue, placed their hands upon it, and I felt it. The life energy, the soul, the memory… everything was being drained, absorbed, channelled. They left behind only the frozen husk, now empty and dull, which dissolved into a cloud of black dust on the wind.
Morgana gasped beside me, her hand to her mouth. I remained still, a cold, ancient fury stirring within me. I had seen this process before. In another life, in another universe, with another race.
We retreated in silence, my heart pounding in my ears. The search for the bridge had become an infiltration mission. For two days, we moved like ghosts, skirting their patrols. We had to pass through their territory to find the way, and one night, we took shelter in a glacial fissure. Below us, we saw their sanctuary.
It was an old Avarosan temple, now defiled. The great runes of life and community had been covered over with Dark Ice, and painted upon them was the symbol they venerated: a large, watching purple eye, stylised in geometric lines. The ice-thralls moved within, in a ritualistic silence.
We were about to pull back when a patrol passed inches from our hiding place. I held my breath. We could hear their dissonant voices, a human tone and an icy whisper overlapping.
"…the dreams are getting stronger," said one. "The Abyss stirs."
"The Ice Witch has given us our orders. The watch must be doubled."
"Glory to the Preservation. Glory to the Eternal Silence."
Finally, after an eternity of stealth and fear, we arrived. Hjorthar's Silence. The air grew so thin it hurt to breathe. And the silence… it was not an absence of sound. It was a pressure in the ears, a vacuum that actively sucked in every noise. Our footsteps made no echo. The wind howled in the distance but died as it touched the canyon's edge.
And in the centre, was the bridge.
It was not the ethereal, moonlit structure the legend painted. It was a nightmare construction, a marvel of funereal architecture. A colossal bridge, made of a black, light-absorbing stone and the fossilised bones of creatures the world had forgotten. It stretched over an abyss so deep that no light reached the bottom.
From the abyss, came a sound. Not the wind, but a constant wail, a chorus of thought, feeling, and pure hunger, the non-Euclidean language of the Void, that filled my soul with a weariness that almost brought me to my knees. The Howling Abyss.
"This… this is a seal," Morgana whispered, her face pale.
Guarding the bridge was a single figure, an older Iceborn, its body almost entirely covered in Dark Ice, sitting on a stone throne.
And as we drew closer, the psychic energy of the place, the echo of history, hit us like a wave. The vision was not a choice. It was an invasion, a millennia-old scream forced into our minds.
My fragile, childish body couldn't take it. The overload of information—aeons of betrayal, power, and cosmic sacrifice—was an immense pain in the arse, or rather, the head. It felt as if information were being hammered into my skull. Flashes of the battle, the pact, the fury of the Three Sisters, and the cold silence of the Void mingled in a dizzying chaos. My consciousness, however, was another matter. To protect this fragile vessel, I had to raise mental walls, a countermeasure to compartmentalise the torrent of memories and silence the pain that threatened to overwhelm my small brain.
Morgana, beside me, resisted. I saw her shudder violently, her hand flying instinctively to her temple. She did not fall, but her face, normally a mask of melancholic calm, was contorted into a grimace of a headache. The weight of millennia of Freljordian history, a history of her own celestial kind in conflict, struck her like a physical blow. Her lips moved in a silent whisper, perhaps her own sister's name, an echo of familiar betrayals.
When the vision finally receded, leaving only the lingering image of True Ice sealing the darkness, the truth, complete and terrible, was laid bare.
"We have to go," Morgana said, her voice taut, but not trembling. She turned, urgency hardening her features, and helped me up, her hand firm on my arm. "Now."
But as we turned to flee, our path was blocked.
She was standing there, having emerged from the shadows as if woven from the ice itself. Serene, regal, ancient, and absolutely terrifying. The air around her frosted over. Her eyes were covered by a blindfold, her horned helm a crown of Dark Ice. I felt her magic, an ancientness that rivalled my own.
We were trapped.
Her voice cut through the silence like cracking ice. Calm, cold, and filled with an authority that froze the soul.
"It is poor form to pry into a woman's oldest secrets."
Her helmed head turned slowly in Morgana's direction, blindfolded though she was, as if her perception needed no sight. A heavy silence fell.
"And you, Daughter of Justice, should know better than anyone that certain verdicts must remain forever sealed."
Then, her attention shifted, focusing directly on me. The weight of her gaze was physical, a pressure on my chest. An almost imperceptible, heatless smile touched her pale lips.
"And it is more reckless still, child, to bring an echo from other worlds to witness how I saved this one."
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
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This chapter was written with 100% vital energy, 3 liters of coffee and a dubious pact with Morgana. The least you can give me is a comment 👀☕✨.