Freedom was a cold, silent expanse of white. Kai moved through the foothills south of Frostfall like a winter ghost, his new grey cloak blending with the granite and snow. The encounter with the Inquisitor was a fresh, sharp memory. It wasn't just a skirmish; it was a declaration of war. The "Sun Throne" knew he existed. They had a name for what he was: an abomination.
The Warding Stone the old woman had given him was a dull, cold weight against his chest. It helped, masking the "song" of his power as she had said, but it was like trying to dam a river with a sieve. The Primordial Frost mana within him was a rising tide, and containing it was a constant, exhausting effort. The strain was a low hum in his bones, a reminder that his human shell was housing something infinitely greater.
Aurelis's voice had been silent since the consumption of the Frost-Blossom. Kai felt a strange emptiness without the dragon's rumbling guidance. He was truly on his own.
According to the map, the fastest route to Silveridge, the capital, was through a pass called the Howling Cleft. It was marked with a warning symbol—a jagged line representing a cliff face. The annotation read: "Prone to avalanches. Home to Frost-Trolls. Avoid."
Kai looked up at the pass. It was a narrow gouge between two towering peaks, the wind screaming through it with a voice that justified its name. For anyone else, it would be suicide. For him, it was the path of least resistance. The cold and the height held no fear. As for Frost-Trolls… he was curious.
He began the ascent. The climb was trivial. He willed handholds into existence on sheer rock faces, the ice bonding to stone at his touch. The screaming wind, which would have torn a normal man from the mountainside, was a familiar caress. He was home.
After several hours, he reached the entrance to the cleft. It was a canyon of blue-shadowed ice, so deep and narrow that the sky was reduced to a thin, grey ribbon far above. The wind's howl was deafening, a constant, maddening roar.
He had gone only a hundred yards when he found the first sign of the trolls. A massive, yellowed bone, gnawed clean, was wedged into a crevasse. Further on, the frozen carcass of a mountain goat was impaled on a sharpened icicle as thick as a tree trunk—a grisly trophy.
Then he heard it. A sound deeper and rougher than the wind. A guttural snorting, followed by the scrape of something heavy on ice.
Kai melted into the shadows of an ice overhang, his cloak pulled tight. Two figures emerged from around a bend. They were Frost-Trolls. They stood over nine feet tall, their bodies thick with corded muscle and covered in shaggy, pale fur that was caked with ice. Their faces were brutish, with flat noses, small, stupid eyes, and long, powerful arms that ended in claws capable of shredding steel. They reeked of old blood and rot.
One of them sniffed the air, its nostrils flaring. It grunted something in its crude language and pointed a thick finger in Kai's general direction. They had caught his scent. The Warding Stone hid his magical signature, but it couldn't mask the smell of a human.
So much for stealth.
Kai stepped out from the shadows. There was no point in hiding. The trolls bellowed in surprise and then in glee, seeing a lone, small creature before them. They charged, their heavy footfalls shaking the ground.
The boy Kai would have been terrified. The Dragon Incarnate felt only a cold, analytical calm. Frost-Trolls were tough, regenerative, and strong. But they were creatures of brute force. They had no finesse, no true control over the ice they called home.
The first troll swung a fist the size of a boulder. Kai didn't try to block it. He flowed around it, his movements preternaturally agile. The troll's fist smashed into the ice wall where he had been standing, sending shards flying.
As the troll was off-balance, Kai placed a hand on its massive forearm. He didn't need to summon a wall of ice. He focused his power into a single, concentrated point. A wave of absolute zero shot from his palm into the troll's flesh.
There was no fire, no explosion. Just a swift, silent transformation. The troll's fur and skin turned instantly blue-white. The flesh and muscle beneath froze solid. A crackle echoed as the troll's entire arm, from shoulder to claw, became a frozen, useless log.
The troll stared in dumb confusion at its immobilized limb. Before it could react, Kai leaped, using the frozen arm as a stepping stone to propel himself onto the creature's broad back. He placed both hands on the base of its thick neck.
"Sleep," he whispered into its ear.
The Primordial Frost flooded into the troll's spine and brain. Its eyes glazed over, flashing with blue light for a second before freezing solid in their sockets. The massive creature shuddered once and then collapsed forward like a felled tree, its body locked in a permanent state of frozen death.
The second troll, seeing its companion fall so easily, hesitated. Its tiny eyes, once full of hunger, now showed a spark of primal fear. It roared, not in challenge, but in panic, and turned to flee.
Kai dropped from the dead troll's back. He couldn't let it escape. It would alert others.
He raised a hand toward the canyon wall above the fleeing troll. He focused not on the air or the ground, but on the unstable shelf of snow and ice perched high above. He reached out with his will and gave it a single, sharp push.
With a deep, groaning roar, the avalanche began. A wave of white death crashed down, filling the cleft. The fleeing troll was engulfed in seconds, buried under tons of snow and rock.
Silence returned, deeper than before, the avalanche having momentarily stifled the wind's howl.
Kai stood amidst the aftermath, breathing evenly. The fight had taken less than a minute. He felt the cold energy within him swirling, satisfied. He had used it with precision, not waste. He approached the first troll, the one he had frozen. He placed a hand on its chest, over where its heart would be.
He remembered the Frost-Blossom. "Consume the essence of cold."
He focused his Heartcore and pulled.
A faint, sluggish stream of cold energy, murky and bestial, seeped from the troll's frozen form into Kai's palm. It was nothing compared to the pure, vibrant energy of the flower. It was like drinking muddy water after tasting fine wine. But it was energy nonetheless. The troll's body desiccated slightly, the ice on it turning grey and brittle.
It was enough. The strain of containing his power lessened just a fraction. He could feed on the cold to sustain himself, to grow.
As the energy settled within him, a familiar, thunderous voice echoed in his mind. It was fainter, as if coming from a great distance.
"The hunters have sharp eyes, Incarnate." It was Aurelis. "You have drawn their gaze sooner than I anticipated."
Kai looked south, towards the end of the pass and the lands beyond. They hunt me. What are they?
"The Order of the Sun," the dragon's voice held a note of deep, ancient contempt. "Zealots who worship a false, burning god. Long ago, they helped purge this world of my kind. They fear the primordial cold, for it extinguishes their feeble flames. They will not stop."
Then I won't stop either, Kai thought, his resolve hardening like the ice around him.
"Good. The wolf does not plead with the hunter. It either escapes… or it turns and devours him. Continue south. Your destiny lies in the heart of their world, not on its edges."
The voice faded again, leaving Kai with a new understanding. This wasn't just about survival or revenge anymore. It was a war that had begun long before he was born. He was now a soldier in it.
He pulled his cloak tight and continued through the Howling Cleft, the ghost of the dragon's warning and the taste of troll-ice lingering in his soul. The path ahead was clear: descend into the world of men, into the very heart of the kingdom that sought to destroy what he had become.