The Bleakwatch Fort was less a fortress and more a scar on the landscape. Little more than a jumble of dark, mortared stone and sharpened ice palisades clinging to a windswept ridge. As they approached, the wind carried not just the bite of cold, but the stench of smoke, unwashed bodies, and something else: a sweet, coppery rot that made the back of Koronos’s throat tighten.

  The gates, reinforced with sheets of crude iron, creaked open just wide enough to admit them. The courtyard within was a tableau of exhausted despair. Bergian soldiers in silvery platemail with blue enameled accents huddled around feeble braziers, their faces hollow-eyed. Their discipline was evident in the neat stacks of supplies and the clear lanes kept through the slush, but it was the discipline of automatons, of men going through motions whose purpose they’d forgotten. It felt like oppression. The grind of an imperial machine wearing its cogs down to nubs.

  The commander was a man named Brynjar, his blue skin grey with fatigue, a bloody bandage wrapped around his forearm. He met them in a blockhouse that served as his command post, its walls sweating ice.

  “You are the… specialist… from the capital?” he asked, his voice raspy. There was no energy for courtesies here. He did not bow as he eyes the newcomer’s attire and tattoos that were visible on his bare upper left arm. “Your orders are from Lord Ultramar himself. He knows this pass. Served his first command here, decades back. Came out of it… changed. Cold as the stone itself. Some say he likes the chill.”

  “I am,” Koronos said. “Describe your enemy.”

  Brynjar laughed, a short, bitter sound. “Enemy. Yes. They come at night, always at night. Not in ranks. They… shamble. Some look like men, or what’s left of them. Their skin is grey, their eyes are voids. They feel no pain, no fear. Blades slow them. Arrows annoy them. They only stop when you remove the head or burn them. Others… are not men at all. Shadows that move against the wind. Things of ice and sharp edges that howl with a sound that freezes the blood.”

  “Raiders don’t shamble,” Pericles grunted from the doorway.

  “No,” Brynjar agreed, his tired eyes finding Koronos’s. “They do not loot. They do not take prisoners. They kill. And they defile. They leave corpses… altered. Twisted. As if the life has been sucked out and replaced with… black ice.”

  The Nightlands. Koronos didn’t need to say it. The description was a key turning in a lock he knew too well. The Aberration in the Cursed Valley had left a similar psychic stain.

  “Show me,” Koronos said.

  They walked the ramparts. The soldiers they passed looked at Koronos with a mix of curiosity and resentment. He was a barbarian in their midst, a living reminder of the frontier savagery they despised, yet he was also their last, bizarre hope. Their cause was for an empire he felt no loyalty to, for a Celestial Majesty whose games had put Corvannafax in a crystal hole. Their brave, disciplined endurance inspired no fellowship in him, only a cold recognition of waste.

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  Beyond the walls, the pass was a white gash between two mountains of sheer black rock. The wind whipped snow into spectral shapes. Nothing moved.

  Then, near the tree line of stunted, frozen pines, Koronos saw it. A flash of white fur darting between trunks. An ice-fox, a clever survivor. But its movements were wrong—jerky, frantic. He reached out with his senses, the connection flowing easier here, in this majikally richer world, like a door swinging open on well-oiled hinges.

  He touched the fox’s mind with the Bond.

  It was not the quick, sharp cunning of a predator, nor the simple fear of prey. It was a screaming static. A terror so profound it had eroded into madness. Beneath that was a cold, invasive presence; a whispering void that hungered not for flesh, but for warmth, for spirit, for the very concept of life. It was a familiar, vile signature, amplified a hundredfold: the tainted black touch of the Nightlands. The Cold Whisper.

  Koronos recoiled, severing the connection. The fox collapsed in the snow, twitching, then lay still, a tiny life snuffed out by a cosmic disease.

  Zeyzey’s eyes widened at the sense of Koronos’s true power because she’s never felt anything like it. Now that her witch powers are manifesting, she is more sensitive and attuned to majikal forces. It made her feel small; earlier on the way here, she felt like maybe she was powerful. But her power was a small foothill at best, compared to the mountain of the Kazarian Everliving’s power.

  “You felt it,” Brynjar said, not a question. He’d seen Koronos’s slight stagger, the paling of his already blue skin.

  “I know it,” Koronos corrected, his voice grim. “Where is its source?”

  Brynjar led him back to the blockhouse, to a map nailed to a plank. He pointed to a jagged symbol deep in the mountain range. “Scouting parties vanished. The last one to return… half-came back. A boy, frostbitten, babbling about ‘singing caves’ and ‘the heart of the frost.’ He died raving. But his report mentioned a glacial cave system here. The Heartfrost Caverns. We haven’t the men to assault it. Every patrol we send is… diminished.”

  Koronos studied the map. It was too obvious. A known location of evil. A depleted garrison. A demand from the capital for a swift, quiet resolution. They were being herded.

  “It’s a trap,” Hybornyesis said softly, his eyes also on the map, seeing the tactical picture as clearly as Koronos felt the mystical one.

  “Yes,” Koronos said. “But the bait is real.” He looked at Brynjar. “Prepare your men to hold this fort. We will go to the caverns.”

  “You are four men and a… woman,” Brynjar said, disbelief warring with desperate hope.

  “And a pantera,” Koronos said, turning from the map. “And we are what you have. We leave at first light.”

  As they left the commander to his grim vigil, Koronos looked once more at the weary, disciplined soldiers. They fought for flags and an emperor on a distant amethyst throne. He would fight because the thing in the mountain was a blight, a corruption of the natural order he was compelled to protect, even on this alien world. And because destroying it was the only path back to his people.

  The trap was set. Tomorrow, they will spring it.

  Koronos the Kazarian | Royal Road