by Ben Wolf
When the ice wall arose from the fissure in the floor, Aeron could hardly believe his eyes. Aeron and Wafer had darted out of the way, down toward Garrick, to avoid getting pulverized in the process.
He marveled at the sight of the wall sealing itself to the opening, closing it off completely on their side. They were trapped inside this cavern… or half of it, anyway.
It glowed crystalline and slightly blue from the sunlight shining into it from overhead, casting enough light into the cavern that they could still see. In all actuality, it was easier to see now than when Aeron had first entered the cavern with Garrick clutched in Wafer’s talons.
But how had this even happened? Was it some sort of mechanism from Fjorst’s temple? Had they even found the temple? Or had Fjorst himself created the wall?
Aeron remained dubious about all of it. In any case, whatever had triggered the wall to rise didn’t matter nearly as much as the end result: the wall had separated Aeron and Garrick from Kent and Mehta.
But it had also separated five of the wyvern knights from the other seven, and Commander Brove had ended up on the other side. The wyvern knights who remained included four Leatherwings and a Steelwing Aeron didn’t recognize, all of them armed with spears and poleaxes.
Aeron braced himself for an attack, and he sensed Wafer tense up for it, too, as they hovered in the air just above the cavern floor. Next to them, Garrick still held his cursed battle-axe and flail with a crazed expression on his face.
But the wyvern knights didn’t attack. Instead, the Steelwing ordered them to set down on the cavern floor. Then he alone flew over to Aeron and Garrick atop his light-green wyvern. Splotches of blue darkened the wyvern’s scales in random areas, including around his right eye.
The Steelwing carried himself with an air of confidence as his wyvern glided toward them. He held a spear like Aeron’s—simple, but sharp and doubtless effective in his capable hands. He also looked somewhat familiar, but Aeron couldn’t place how he might’ve known him.
At about twenty paces away, the Steelwing spoke. “Leatherwing Ironglade, I call upon you and your comrade to lay down your arms willingly. There is no need for us to fight. You will receive a fair trial and justice from the Govalian Empire.”
Garrick scoffed next to Aeron. “The hell he will. What trial in all of Aletia has ever been fair?”
“Give me your name, sir,” the Steelwing said, “and I will give you mine.”
“Garrick Shatterstone,” he replied. “And I don’t really care who you are. I’m gonna rip you and that lizard apart.”
The Steelwing studied Garrick for a moment, appraising him. “I am called Raqat, and I have no wish to fight you.”
“Too bad,” Garrick growled and started toward him. As he did, something scraped off to the side, from the shadows amid the rocks along the cavern floor.
Aeron extended his hand. “Wait, Garrick.”
To Aeron’s surprise, Garrick actually stopped, but he looked back at Aeron with a snarl.
As Garrick snarled, Wafer issued a low growl, too. A warning.
But it wasn’t directed at Garrick. It was directed at something beyond him, concealed within the darkness. Aeron could sense it too, through his bond with Wafer.
Then it came out to greet them.
Whatever was happening on the other side of the ice wall, Mehta didn’t know. The ice was far too thick to see through, and it had blocked all sound from the other side as well.
But it hadn’t blocked the majority of the wyverns from ending up on this side of the wall, including Commander Brove himself.
“Rosford, Darvies, attack them,” Commander Brove ordered from high atop his gray wyvern.
Mehta glanced at Kent, who now held a stone in his hand in addition to the ice-forged dagger. He was ready.
Two of the wyvern knights, one male and one female, fluttered forward with their spears at the ready. Then they dove down at Mehta and Kent with their wyverns’ wings spread wide and their spears primed to strike.
Mehta’s knives leaped into his hands, and he bided his time as the female wyvern knight screamed toward him. With her in the air, riding atop a massive wyvern, and with him on flat ground, the odds skewed heavily in her favor. She had the reach, the mobility, and the force.
But he had speed, and he had his thirst.
The spear and the wyvern’s jaws lashed toward Mehta, but he dove out of the way, toward the wall of ice. Somewhere in the distance, rocks scraped and clacked together as Kent summoned them for his attacks.
Now with his back against the wall of ice, Mehta waited for the wyvern knight to attack again.
Normally, he preferred to fight out in the open to give himself more freedom and mobility, but the wyverns could utilize most of their best tactics in the open. By facing off against this one with his back against the wall, he was taking away a sizable percentage of the wyvern knight’s movement capabilities.
She couldn’t fly her wyvern parallel to the wall and get close enough to him to strike—its wingspan was too large, and it couldn’t exactly fly lopsided. And if she tried to attack head-on, the wyvern was large and unwieldy, and could only get so low and so close to the wall before it had to land or pull up.
Either approach would force her to get close to him—and to stay close to him—long enough that he could attack in return. And that’s exactly what his thirst wanted.
But as Mehta calculated her next attack and steeled himself to react to it, an otherworldly shriek sounded from one of the dark corners of the cavern.
Someone yelled, “Look out!”
Then a creature launched through the air and hit the female wyvern knight from the side. It appeared to be covered in frost or ice or powdered with fine snow, and it wrenched her off of the wyvern’s back and took her down hard to the cavern floor.
Mehta recoiled at first, unsure what the thing was, then he sprang into action. Because it didn’t matter what it was—it wasn’t on his side, and it clearly wasn’t on the wyvern knights’ side. That meant he’d have to fight it eventually, and killing it while it was distracted was better than facing it head-on.
He lurched toward it as the wyvern next to him hissed and roared, awkwardly trying to maneuver its way around to reach its rider. Mehta got there first, and he drove his knives into the thing’s back at what should’ve been critical points.
The creature’s spine was extra pronounced and tipped with small spikes that appeared to be made of ice, from its neck down to its tailbone. Mehta’s knives went in easily, but as soon as he jerked them free for another stab, jagged shards of ice sprouted where he’d stabbed the thing.
It abandoned the wyvern knight and turned toward him instead.
Two light-blue fangs, comparable in color to Kent’s ice-forged dagger, protruded from its gaping mouth. Inside, Mehta saw its dead, blue tongue and a row of enamel, humanlike teeth, some of which were missing. Its eyes were twice the size of a normal human’s and glossed over with an icy blue film of some sort.
Instead of a nose, two holes punctuated its blackened, frostbitten face, now frozen in a mortified expression of pain. Frost covered its equally dark, naked body, yet it moved as fluidly as if it were living, healthy flesh.
But it definitely wasn’t living or breathing, and it could barely be considered flesh anymore. It certainly wasn’t human. It was an abomination. A frostblood, just like his grandfather had said.
It should’ve been dead already. Instead, the frostblood lunged at Mehta with arthritic, bony fingers.
Mehta stepped back, out of its grasp and away from its groping fingers and those wicked blue fangs, and he executed a perfect sequence of cuts to the clumsy frostblood’s midsection, throat, inner thighs, and arms.
The cuts would have felled virtually anything else, but they only exposed more jagged protrusions of ice from under the frostblood’s skin. His thirst reveled in every strike, but the frostblood kept coming at him.
Then a boulder slammed into its head from th
e side, crushing its skull against the wall of ice with a heavy CLOP. The frostblood wilted to the cavern floor.
Its head lay in pieces beyond its body and around its torso, and blackened skin clung to some of the fragments. But soon after, ice crystals bloomed from the half-husk of its skull that remained attached to its neck.
Mehta stole a glance over at Kent, who had thrown the boulder with his magic. Beyond him, a swarm of at least a dozen more frostbloods had overtaken the wyvern and the knight that Kent had been fighting. They went down in a series of screeches and yells.
Meanwhile, Kent rushed toward Mehta and the female knight, who’d recovered her footing and was hurrying to remount her wyvern.
And by the time Mehta looked back at the frostblood, it had already started to push itself back up to its knees. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
What are these things? Why won’t they die?
For the first time in his entire life, Mehta’s thirst hesitated.
Thanks to the phantom steel weapons in Garrick’s hands, rage flowed through his body, both unnatural and severe. And thanks to the arrival of Fjorst’s frozen chosen, the rage was not unwelcome in the least.
As a dozen frostbloods burst forth from within the cavern, two thoughts crossed Garrick’s mind. The first was that Mehta’s grandfather had been right about something terrible grabbing men and hauling them away in the night. Garrick shouldn’t have doubted him.
Second, Garrick wondered how quickly he could take them all down.
He shifted into full berserker mode and became a whirling, spinning mass of green-tinted destruction. Lord Valdis’s weapons sang in haunting tones as they whipped through the frigid air, laying waste to the frostbloods in blow after furious blow.
But as he tore through them, Garrick noticed that he was the only one doing any lasting damage. Wafer had knocked a few of them over, and Aeron’s spear had stabbed a few others, but nothing they did seemed to fell any of the frostbloods.
Instead, wherever normal weapons pierced the frostbloods’ flesh, jagged spikes of ice sprouted from the wounds instead of blood. By comparison, Garrick’s phantom steel weapons dismantled the frostbloods with ease, and they didn’t get back up when he was finished with them.
Raqat and his wyvern knights weren’t faring any better. Wyvern teeth and talons and the knights’ weapons carved into the frostbloods, all to no avail. Before long, Raqat ordered his knights to pull back, and Aeron and Wafer did the same.
That suited Garrick just fine, though. It gave him more space to wreak havoc.
The unnatural rage threw his movements into vicious strikes, and his phantom steel weapons had no trouble obliterating the frostbloods’ frail bodies.
But contrary to what Lord Valdis had told him about the weapons’ abilities to harvest the essence of their victims, Garrick didn’t feel any gain in power like he had when he’d fought the soldiers back in the village.
Perhaps these frostbloods were already dead and thus had no essence to take. From their appearance, it made sense that they would be.
When the last of the frostbloods went down, Garrick slammed the head of the flail down on its face for good measure. Then he immediately turned back toward Raqat and his wyvern knights. If the weapons couldn’t take essence from the frostbloods, they’d take it from those knights and their wyverns instead.
“Garrick!” Aeron called after him.
The sound of Aeron’s voice grated on Garrick’s nerves. Perhaps when he finished with Raqat and his wyvern knights, he could turn the weapons on Aeron and Wafer next. Their essence was just as good as anyone else’s, after all, and Garrick could use their power more effectively than they could.
But something within Garrick resisted that idea, hard—some part of him, locked and chained and drowning in black shadows.
He remembered that voice. The part of him that didn’t want Lord Valdis to have control over him anymore. The part of him that wanted to eliminate Lord Valdis rather than to serve him.
He listened to that voice, and for the briefest moment, the voice got him to open his hands. His weapons clattered to the cavern floor, and he inhaled a shuddering breath of icy air as the rage dissipated from his chest and exited his body with a ragged exhale.
Gods, that was close.
The weapons had almost taken him again. They’d been harder to resist this time, yet they might’ve been the only weapons among any of them that could take out these frostbloods if any more of them showed up. So what was Garrick to do about it?
He turned back to face Aeron, inhaling and exhaling quick, yet deep breaths to calm his racing heart.
“You good?” Aeron asked, still riding Wafer and still high enough that Garrick couldn’t have struck at him short of hurling his spear.
Garrick nodded. “You?”
Aeron nodded, too, and then he and Wafer landed next to Garrick, who snatched up the weapons, subdued the rage that ignited in his chest, and quickly fastened them to his belt. The rage subsided once more, and together they faced Raqat and his wyvern knights.
“If you want to get out of here,” Aeron began, “then I suggest you work with us instead of trying to arrest us.”
Raqat’s rigid posture straightened even further. He still held his spear. “Whether we escape or not, I am oathbound to fulfill my obligations to the empire.”
“You think those things, or anything else that’s in here, care about your oaths?” Garrick huffed and motioned toward the demolished frostbloods on the cavern floor. “We’re nothing but meat to them. And your weapons can’t get the job done. Mine can.”
“We don’t want to fight you, but we will if we have to,” Aeron said. “Join with us instead. We’re sealed in here. There’s no way out at the top—I checked. And this ice isn’t gonna melt any time soon. It’s freezing outside. This far north, it may never melt. But if we cooperate, maybe we can find a way out together.”
Raqat stayed silent for a long moment.
Garrick didn’t know what he had to think about; the choice was clear. Their wyverns couldn’t stay in this cavern forever, and if more frostbloods attacked without Garrick there to fight them off, they wouldn’t survive.
Maybe Raqat was just being difficult.
“Very well,” Raqat finally said. “I offer you a truce.”
“And a three-day head-start once we get out,” Aeron said.
Garrick blinked at him. The kid sure had stones when he was riding Wafer.
“One day,” Raqat said. “And don’t press me further on the matter.”
“Deal,” Aeron replied. He anchored his spear to Wafer’s saddle and then dismounted. Raqat also dismounted, and they met in the center of the cavern, before the glowing ice wall, and shook hands.
Kent failed to destroy even a single one of the frostbloods by hurling rocks at them. He’d pulverized some of them beyond recognition, and yet still they came at him and Mehta, as relentless as ever.
Worse still, their bodies re-formed and fused together, reinforced by ice wherever breaks or gashes happened. How could they defeat such wretched beasts if brute force could not prevail?
But Kent had encountered supernatural entities before—specifically the water golem back in the dungeon in Muroth. No amount of swordplay nor any form of anima magic had harmed it.
Yet when Kent struck its core with a blast of magic from Garrick’s old snow steel blade, the water golem had frozen solid. Then Kent had managed to destroy it with raw magic.
These frostbloods wouldn’t freeze, no matter what Kent did to them, but perhaps raw magic could harm them.
There was only one way to find out.
One of them lunged at Kent with its bright blue fangs bared, eager to bury them in his neck or his arm or whatever part of him they could reach. Instead of moving away this time, Kent sent a blast of raw magic at the frostblood’s misshapen head.
The magic sheared half of its face and the bone behind it away. Kent adjusted his aim and took out the rest of its head
as well.
This time, ice didn’t replace the frostblood’s head. Instead, its body crumpled into a heap of frostbitten flesh and bone, unmoving.
It had worked.
More of them came at Kent, and he felled them just as easily. But expending raw magic always took more out of him, and the familiar sense of fatigue returned quickly.
Focusing magic into the various natural elements associated with anima magic actually amplified the power of his magic at a lower cost. As a result, it depleted him much slower than using raw magic.
By the time he’d overcome the entire pack of frostbloods, Kent felt as exhausted and out of breath as when he’d tried to burn his way out of the other cave. But at least he’d fended off the threat.
Well, most of it, anyway.
The instant the last frostblood went down, Kent dropped to his hands and knees, all but totally spent.
Meanwhile, Commander Brove and his wyvern knights lowered to a hovering position just above the cavern floor and slowly approached Kent.
He didn’t have the energy to fight them, too. His magic needed time to recover, to rejuvenate.
Then Mehta stepped in front of Kent, facing the wyvern knights with nothing but his knives in his hands.
Commander Brove raised his hand, and the wyvern knights stopped their advance twenty feet away from Kent and Mehta’s position. “A pair of knives? Against six of the finest wyvern knights Govalia has to offer?”
Mehta didn’t reply, and Kent couldn’t get any words out anyway. Better to rest and let his magic replenish than waste even a breath talking to Commander Brove.
“What, exactly, do you expect to accomplish with those?” Commander Brove asked.
“You’re about to find out,” Mehta replied with total sincerity and certainty in his voice.
The way he’d said it reminded Kent of his own decisiveness. In many ways, Mehta was a timid, quiet sort, usually unwilling to speak unless he had to.
But when it came to doing battle, Kent had never encountered someone more fierce and precise—not even Garrick. If anyone could make good on a promise of violence, it was Mehta.