Yandelf moved like a blade of midnight wind—her spear whistling through the air, curved and merciless.
In a single arc, Ashlyn's arm—the hand that clung to Orion as if he were her anchor—was severed.
The sound was not just of flesh, but of bonds snapping. A wet, sickening note that hung in the silence like a curse.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!"
Citlali's voice cracked the stillness, raw and sharp, like porcelain shattering on stone.
Her eyes burned, her breath ragged. "Don't you see? She just came back from the Abyss—"
But Yandelf did not flinch. Her stance was rooted, her spear an extension of her will.
"Look closer," she said, her words as cold as iron. "Look at what clings to her skin. Look at what she carries."
Frieda's breath caught in her throat.
Instinct overruled thought—she pulled Orion to her chest, clutching him as though he were an ember in a storm, a flame she would not let the wind steal.
"What is happening?!" she whispered, her voice trembling against the weight of dread.
Ash stood frozen for only a heartbeat before rushing forward. His small arms spread wide, fragile shields of flesh and bone. His body trembled, but his voice… oh, his voice did not waver.
"Stop it!" he cried, desperation cracking his words. "Don't hurt Ashlyn!"
Yandelf's jaw clenched. Her spear quivered, not with fear but with fury—the fury of duty, of inevitability.
"Step aside, boy…" she hissed, the edge of command in her voice.
"Don't you dare touch my son!"
Frieda's voice tore through the room like a mother wolf's snarl, primal, aching, unyielding. She pressed Orion closer, even as her own hands shook like autumn leaves caught in the wind.
Then—Citlali froze. Her eyes widened, her lips parted as though she had seen the sky split open.
"This… no…" her whisper was a hymn of horror.
"This is not Abyssal energy… this is no mere corruption… this is essence."
And then Orion gasped.
It was a sound not of breath,
but of something awakening.
His knees buckled. His body convulsed like strings cut from a puppet, dragging Frieda down with him.
"Orion?!" Frieda's scream tore from her soul, raw, unrefined. She cradled his face, searching for her son in his fading features.
"What's wrong—what's happening to you?!"
And then… his skin began to change.
First, the veins darkened, crawling with unnatural fire.
Then the flesh itself began to shift—earth-brown blooming across his body like soil reclaiming stone.
It was not just a color—it was the weight of something ancient, something buried, rising through him vein by vein.
The air thickened. The room seemed smaller, pressed inward by a truth no one dared to name.
Orion's eyes opened—not with warmth, nor with anger, but with a hollow stillness.
They were not eyes, but mirrors of a void too vast to understand.
Slowly—deliberately—he raised his hand.
His fingers, once clumsy with youth, now traced Frieda's cheek with the tenderness of winter touching a dying flower.
"You care so much for me…"
His voice was silk stretched over ice, soft yet merciless.
"…then join me."
At his touch, Frieda's skin darkened, the warm hue of life fading into a pallor of earth.
Her eyes, once frantic with a mother's terror, dulled.
It was as though her love had been harvested, drained into that abyssal well, leaving her body to tremble with the shell of obedience.
Ashlyn's hand found Ash's shoulder, her grip trembling like a prophet overcome by vision.
"The time of change… is nigh…" she whispered.
The boy stiffened.
Ash's hair bled into black, strand by strand, until it was as though night itself had nested in his skull.
His eyes glazed over, the fire of childhood dimming, his gaze surrendering to the same abyss that now ruled his sister and mother.
"No—!"
Yandelf's fury broke the trance. Her spear slid forward like lightning chained to steel, striking at Ashlyn with a speed born of desperation.
But before its edge could bite—
A sound split the air.
Steel on steel. Ice on ice.
Orion moved.
His sword did not appear so much as manifest, an extension of his will, forged in the blink of eternity.
He caught her strike as though he had always been waiting for it.
"Tch!" Yandelf hissed, her heels grinding against the floor as she twisted back.
Her knuckles whitened on her spear, her jaw clenched tight.
"Little girl! Don't let them touch you! The Abyss invades the mind through touch—once it enters, it devours."
Citlali stepped forward, her breath steady though her teeth grit like stone resisting a storm.
"Who do you think I am?" she spat, fire in her eyes.
Her hand flared with light, her aura swelling until the house itself seemed to tremble.
"The Abyss may corrupt the weak—but I am Citlali. The Abyssal essence cannot root in me. My body rejects it. My will is absolute."
Without another word, she surged out of the house, her power flaring like a shield against the shadows, chasing Yandelf into the open air.
Yandelf crouched mid-air, her spear coiled in her hands like lightning waiting for release. Her voice rang sharp, echoing into the cold skies:
"Noctharn!"
The cry split the horizon, and from the rift between frost and storm he came.
The Frost Dragon's form unfolded like the nightmare of a glacier given flesh—jagged scales of permafrost overlapping in cruel symmetry, glowing faintly with the aurora of forgotten skies. His frame towered—fifteen feet at the shoulder, twenty in length—his wings unfurling into the heavens like the vaulted ribs of a cathedral of ice.
Every breath he loosed was a stormcloud; every movement bent the very air into brittle silence.
"Frost Lieutenant Noctharn, here to heed your call…" the beast intoned, voice deep as avalanches.
Yandelf stepped lightly onto his head, her silhouette sharp against the glow of his ridges.
Her gaze narrowed, the spear's tip dripping with a cold that could shatter stars.
"We are facing enemies…" she whispered, her sigh carrying the weight of resignation.
"Enemies?"
The mist thickened—shimmering silver threads woven into its folds. From its veil emerged Felix.
Small, yes—but regal beyond measure.
Scales white as dawn-kissed snow shimmered, pristine and absolute. Upon its brow sat a crown of feathers, as if heaven itself had touched him with its last mercy. Its wings—thin, silken, almost fragile—unfurled with a grace that was not beastly but angelic. Every motion carried the solemnity of a benediction.
Two creatures—nightmare and angel—stood in stillness before the crumbling world.
---
Then it came.
A low groan—like the death-cry of mountains.
The ground itself seemed to shiver beneath their weight.
Citlali's house convulsed.
From its base, jagged veins of ice erupted, tearing upward through stone and timber. Shards longer than pikes, sharper than spears, exploded through the roof with a thunderclap. The walls buckled, beams snapped like splinters, and the proud little home collapsed in a cascade of ruin.
And from within that ruin—crystals kept growing.
Not ice born of winter, but glacial monuments, alive and seething with abyssal hunger. They spiraled upward in grotesque symmetry, forming pillars that clawed at the sky, reflecting the faint light of dawn in a thousand fractured colors—like a cathedral of broken glass rising from the corpse of the house.
The sound was deafening, the sight unbearable—too beautiful, too wrong.
And then the air went still.
The house was gone.
In its place stood a frozen wound in the world, bleeding silence and light.
The ice split with the sound of a thousand cathedral windows shattering. From the ruin, two forms emerged.
Ashlyn.
Oh, Ashlyn.
Her body was not clothed in skin anymore, but bound—smothered—by a tar-like substance that clung to her like a lover that would never let go. It was blacker than absence, blacker than night, so dark it devoured the very light that dared to brush against it. Her once-white coat hung in ruin—turned red with the blood soaking from her severed arm, dripping in mournful rhythm. Shards of broken jewelry clung stubbornly to her frame, fragments of silver and glass sliding free, one by one, like tears unwilling to remain.
Her eyes opened.
A small, cruel smirk curved her lips—an expression too empty to be joy, too calculated to be grief.
Beside her stood Orion.
No longer a king, no longer a man, but a relic carved by storm and frost.
His dark skin gleamed beneath the ragged furs wrapped around his body—not for pride, not for ornament, but survival. No gold thread, no jewels. He was stripped of glory, made only of endurance. His hair cascaded like frozen rivers, pale and soft, yet flowing with a weight that whispered of glaciers breaking.
His eyes—black as obsidian, soft as snow—opened with hers.
And upon his lips, the same smirk. Empty. Absolute.
"Orion?" Felix's voice cracked, his pristine crown trembling. Concern and recognition warred in his gaze.
"Wait…" Citlali's eyes narrowed, her chest heaving as she stood amid the shards of her ruined home. "Where are the other two?"
It was then that Ashlyn and Orion moved as one.
Their hands reached to their chests. Slowly, almost ceremoniously, they slid back the cloth that veiled them.
And there—etched into their flesh—faces.
On Ashlyn's chest, the visage of Ash—a hollow reflection of the boy, his lips downturned, his eyes weeping without tears. A mask of sorrow, a child trapped in grief eternal.
On Orion's chest, the visage of Frieda—her features contorted in silent sobs, her eyes lifeless yet brimming with despair, mouth frozen in a soundless cry.
The faces were not living.
Nor dead.
They were dried, desolate, imprisoned in the abyssal flesh—forever mourning.
The smirks on Ashlyn and Orion did not falter.