The mouth of the Heartfrost Caverns was a jagged tear in the mountainside, exhaling air so cold it burned the lungs. The wind howled around it, a mournful counterpoint to the deeper, subsonic hum that vibrated up from the earth. Shelove, released from her sled-kennel, paced before the entrance, her hackles raised, a low growl rumbling in her chest. She smelled death, and worse.

  Koronos stood facing the dark maw, his back to the group. For a long moment, he was still as the mountain itself. Then he turned, and his white eyes found Zeyzey.

  The change was instant. The weary commander vanished, replaced by the warlord who had broken the Octavian Empire. The air around him seemed to grow heavier. He took a single step toward her, and his right hand rose, fingers curling unconsciously as if already feeling the crush of a throat.

  “Now we enter a dangerous place,” Koronos said, his voice a low scrape of stone on stone. “And I do not trust you, woman. I have a mind to squeeze your neck until the breath leaves you and be done with it. Give me a reason why I shouldn’t.”

  The threat was not a shout; it was a promise, cold and absolute. Pericles’s own hand rested on his sword hilt, not to defend Zeyzey, but to be ready for whatever happened next.

  Zeyzey flinched as if struck. The calculating arrogance she’d worn since her power awoke melted into raw, animal fear. She dropped to her knees in the snow, her head bowed.

  “I forsake them!” she gasped, the words tumbling out. “The Purifiers… their faith is a lie. It leads only to this.” She gestured wildly at the corrupted pass behind them. “I serve power. Real power. I see it now. Please. Spare my life. Let me serve you.”

  Pericles watched her closely. Was it a trick? A survival gambit? He couldn’t tell. But Daggeroth, standing pale and tense beside him, gave a slow, almost imperceptible shake of his head. No. Don’t kill her. The Samiran guide’s eyes were wide with a different kind of fear; not of Koronos, but of losing the one tether to a world he understood in this entire frozen, alien hell even though he hates Purifiers with a burning passion.

  Koronos stared down at the trembling woman for a span of ten heartbeats. The only sound was the wind and Shelove’s growl.

  “Rise,” he said finally, the tension bleeding from his shoulders. “Do not betray me. There will not be another warning.”

  Zeyzey scrambled to her feet, her face a mask of stark relief. She did not look at Koronos again, but fell into line behind Daggeroth, her earlier confidence shattered, replaced by a watchful, cowed obedience.

  “Hybornyesis, take point,” Koronos ordered. “Pericles, rear guard. Stay sharp.”

  The cavern was not dark. It was a tomb of terrible, beautiful light.

  The walls were a fusion of clear ice and jagged, embedded crystals that glowed with their own soft, blue-white radiance. Bioluminescent mushrooms in impossible lavender and green clustered in crevices, and ghostly pale salamanders skittered across the floor, leaving faint tracers of light. Glowing insects like frozen sparks drifted in the still air. It was an underground galaxy, breathtaking and utterly silent.

  But the beauty curdled as they descended. The pristine ice gave way to veins of black, oily frost that pulsed like a sick heart. The glowing crystals here were clouded, their light dim and jaundiced. Then they found the first soldier.

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  He was a Bergian infantryman, frozen in a block of black-tinted ice, his face a rictus of silent scream, one hand outstretched as if begging for help. His eyes were open, pupils swallowed by the same oily blackness that stained the walls. More followed, a gallery of frozen horror scattered through the side tunnels.

  The hum was louder now, a physical pressure in Daggeroth’s skull. It pulled them downward, a siren song of wrongness.

  They entered a vast central chamber. In its heart, driven deep into the cavern floor, was the source.

  The Void Anchor was a spire of pure obsidian, ten feet tall, but it seemed to twist the eye, suggesting impossible depth. It did not reflect light; it drank it. Around its base, the black ice pulsed rhythmically, like a diseased vein connected to the mountain’s heart. The very air tasted of iron and static, and the beautiful, natural glow of the cavern was strangled here, replaced by a sickly, actinic shimmer from the Anchor itself.

  “Gods of the deep forest,” Daggeroth whispered, his breath frosting. This was no raider’s den. This was an altar to something that should not be.

  Koronos took a step forward, his spear held low. “It’s a breach. A tiny tear. They’re feeding it.”

  They.

  Shadows detached themselves from the deeper darkness behind the Anchor. Not shadows, men. Or what was left of them. Bergian soldiers, their armor corroded, their skin the color of corpse-flesh, their eyes void pits. They moved with a jerky, marionette grace. Among them shambled a larger figure, a thing of rime and jagged ice-shards, with a gaping maw where a face should be: a Frostwight. It turned its head, and a sound like grinding glaciers filled the chamber.

  “Ambush!” Pericles roared, his sword already clearing its sheath.

  The corrupted soldiers charged, silent but for the clatter of their dead armor. The Frostwight lurched forward, its passage leaving a trail of instant frost.

  Chaos, sound and motion. Pericles met the first two corrupted soldiers, his blade shearing through a rusted breastplate. Hybornyesis’s bowstring thrummed, and a shaft took a shambler in the eye-socket, barely slowing it. Shelove was a blur of black fury, rending and tearing.

  Koronos moved toward the Anchor, the Frostwight intercepting him. Ice shards shot from its form. Koronos batted them aside with his spear, the attuned weapon humming with each impact, but he was driven back. The Frostwight ignored the others, its grinding gaze locking on Koronos. It didn’t attack with mindless rage, but with a chilling, focused intent. As if it had been instructed. As if it knew what he was.

  Daggeroth fumbled for his own short bow, his hands numb. He saw Zeyzey, pressed against a wall, her eyes wide; not with fear now, but with a frantic, calculating intensity as she stared at the pulsating Anchor.

  Hybornyesis, from his elevated position on a crystal outcrop, saw what Daggeroth could not. He saw the corrupted soldiers were not endless, but they were a screen. He saw more shadows massing in tunnels above. He saw the Frostwight herding Koronos away from the Anchor, toward a narrowing fissure.

  It wasn’t just an ambush. It was a press. A grindstone meant to crush them in this chamber.

  “My lord!” Hybornyesis shouted over the din. “It’s a trap within a trap! We must retreat!”

  Koronos, locked in a shoving match with the Frostwight, snarled in frustration. He knew it too.

  Hybornyesis didn’t wait for an order. He nocked a strange, silver arrow from his Bergian quiver, its head a glowing crystal. He drew, aiming not at the Frostwight, not at the shamblers, but at the very base of the pulsating Void Anchor. When he was given the arrow, the quartermaster said it was worth more than a man can earn in a year, so use it wisely.

  “Everyone, DOWN!” he bellowed.

  He loosed.

  The crystal arrow flew true and struck the nexus where obsidian met black ice.

  For a heartbeat, nothing.

  Then, a piercing high-pitched sound with harmonics and light. Not the Anchor’s light-devouring darkness, but a furious, expanding sphere of white-hot force. The majikal explosion was deafening in the enclosed space, a blast of heat and concussive fury that shattered crystals, tore the frozen corpses to splinters, and hurled the living off their feet.

  The world became noise, light, falling stone and ice crystals.

  Koronos the Kazarian | Royal Road