The world was a roaring, shattering blindness.

  Koronos was thrown backward as if swatted by a giant. Heat washed over him, then was instantly swallowed by a wave of sub-zero cold as the cavern vomited its stored frost. The sound was not just an explosion; it was the mountain screaming. Crystalline shrapnel whistled through the air. He hit the ground, rolled, and came up with his spear braced against a collapsing wall of ice.

  “HYBORNYESIS!” Pericles’s roar cut through the din.

  Through the choking dust of pulverized crystal and ice, Koronos saw the outcrop where the archer had stood. It was gone. A waterfall of shattered rock and glittering debris filled the space. There was no sign of him.

  The Void Anchor was not destroyed. A deep, ragged crack ran up its obsidian length, and the pulsing black ice at its base had been vitrified into a glassy, dead crater. The actinic shimmer was gone, replaced by a feeble, dying flicker. But the Anchor stood. The explosion had wounded it, not slain it.

  And it had exacted a price.

  Hybornyesis had not been crushed by falling stone. As Koronos’s senses, reeling from the blast, began to clear, he felt it—a fading echo in the charged air. A snap. Not physical, but metaphysical. The archer had used a tool of immense, focused power against an entity of pure anti-life. The majikal substrate of reality itself had rebounded along the line of that conflict. The backlash had not been heat or force, but an instantaneous, absolute negation of the life-force that had dared to channel such power. One moment, a sharp, vigilant soul. The next, a void. The majik had consumed its wielder.

  The price of power.

  “He’s gone,” Koronos said, his voice flat, final. There was no time for grief, only the cold accounting of loss. A trade: one keen eye and a steady hand for a wounded nightmare.

  The cavern groaned. Cracks spiderwebbed across the ceiling. From the new fissures, torrents of glacial meltwater began to pour, mixing with the dust to create a churning, freezing slurry.

  “The way we came is buried!” Daggeroth yelled, pointing to a solid wall of collapse.

  “Then we go deeper!” Koronos snarled. “Find another way out! Move!”

  They became creatures of instinct and desperation. Pericles led, using his bulk to shoulder aside smaller falls of rock. Koronos brought up the rear, Shelove pressing against his shoulder, a low whine in her throat. Zeyzey and Daggeroth floundered in the middle, the witch’s newfound senses seemingly overwhelmed by the chaotic collapse of natural and unnatural energies.

  They waded through rushing, thigh-deep water so cold it burned, less so to the Kazarian and his natural resistance to the cold, with the current trying to pull them into unseen depths. They scrambled over shifting piles of ice rubble, each step a potential slide into a crevasse. The beautiful, glowing caverns were now a tomb in its death throes, every groan of stone a promise of burial. All the unnatural creatures and corruptions in the cave system were killed when the Void Crystal was damaged, so they encountered no more horrors. At least for now. However, there should be far more; where is the corrupted army?

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  After an eternity of blind struggle, a slash of gray daylight appeared ahead; a crack in the mountain’s skin, not their entrance, but an exit born of violence. They clawed their way toward it, emerging gasping onto a steep, scree-covered slope high above the pass. The air, though freezing, tasted clean.

  Behind them, the mountain shuddered once more, and the crack sealed with a final, grinding roar. The Heartfrost Caverns were sealed. Hybornyesis was entombed with the horror they had wounded.

  Through the Bond, Shelove says she knows this place, it’s on the other side of Bleak Pass.

  Pericles sank to his knees, his big shoulders heaving. Daggeroth vomited icy water. Zeyzey simply stared at her hands, as if seeing the cost of power written there.

  Koronos did not rest. His eyes scanned the slope. Among the debris spat out by the explosion were not just rocks and ice. There were fragments of corroded armor, shards of black ice, and… a body. One of the corrupted soldiers, mostly intact. He walked to it.

  The thing was truly dead now, its unnatural animation extinguished with the Anchor’s wounding. Its flesh was grey wax. Koronos used his spear tip to pry open a clasp on its crude, fungal-leather satchel. Inside, along with rotten rations, was a scroll case of polished berg-wood.

  He uncapped it and pulled out a single sheet of vellum. The script was a flowing, formal variant of the Old Tongue, the language of the Bergian court. Koronos’s literacy, beaten into him by Octavian tutors, was enough.

  ‘The capital is ripe. The eastern wards are thin, the garrison loyal to the old fool is deployed north. The Whisper hungers for more. I agree to the terms; In exchange for providing its sustenance, I accept the weapon to kill the Everliving and seize the throne. Await the sign at the moondark. I sent several dispatches in the event one or some cannot make it through the lines. – U.’

  Ultramar?

  The words weren't just strategy; they were the latest entry in a long ledger. This wasn't a lord hiring a mercenary horror. This was the correspondence of partners. He feeds it. It empowers him. They have been doing this for a very, very long time. Then the pieces crashed together with the force of the collapsing mountain. The Bleak Pass disturbance was never the goal. It was the feast. A way for Ultramar to feed his patron, the Cold Whisper, to strengthen it for the true assault. And the target was not some border fort. It was the very heart of the Bergia Coalition. The capital. The Celestial Palace. The throne.

  Ultramar wasn’t just a traitorous lord. He was a would-be usurper, buying his crown with the souls of his own people, paid to a horror from the Nightlands. And the corrupted army slipped past the fort using this very passage, so there is nothing between them and the capital city.

  Koronos crushed the vellum in his fist. He looked south, past the jagged peaks, as if his Everliving sight could pierce the distance to the distant, shimmering spires of the capital where Corvannafax was held.

  The trap had never been just for him in the cavern. It was for the empire. And he had just damaged, but not destroyed, the usurper’s key weapon.

  He turned to his battered, grieving remnant of a company. Their faces were etched with exhaustion and loss.

  “We run, we must keep moving, or the cold from being wet will kill you all,” Koronos said, the words leaving his lips like chips of ice. “Now. The capital is the target. We have to get there before he feeds that thing an entire city and makes using the crystal apparatus to get back home an impossibility.”

  The game was no longer about survival or going home. It was a race against the devouring dark.

  Koronos the Kazarian | Royal Road