By dusk, the Grand Lecture Hall reeked not of learning, but of profound humiliation, crushed juniper berries, congealing gravy, eye stinging pepper dust, and the acrid, animal bite of noble fear sweat, expensive perfumes turned sour and cloying. The ozone tang of unleashed fury lingered like static after a storm. Temple guards in polished, sweat streaked breastplates grimly scrubbed brown smears from the walls, their expressions stony masks of discomfort and resentment. Others picked glitter from the cracks in the marble floor with the tips of their spears, each tiny, defiant sparkle a reminder of the chaos. Professor Vayne, stripped of his ruined robes and any shred of dignity, ranted incoherently at Priest Gin near the shattered remains of the celestial globe, spittle flying like cometary debris. "HERETICAL BIRDS! SORCEROUS CROWS! EYES LIKE FROZEN HELLFIRE! THEY DID HIS BIDDING! THE DEMON GHOST COMMANDS THE VOID! HE SUMMONED THE MEAT FROM THE ABYSS!"
But Shiro and Kuro were already gone, ascending the familiar, treacherous rust of the ancient access ladder to the central roof. The wind here was sharper, cleaner, brutally scoured of the hall's cloying miasma, carrying the distant, earthy scent of woodsmoke from Higaru and the ever present, bone deep cold of the approaching Nyxion winter that seeped into the stone itself. The crow circled high above, a black speck against the bruised purple and deepening indigo of twilight, King Ryo's stolen ring glinting defiantly in its beak like a captured, rebellious star winking against the dying light. Shiro flexed his star scarred hand, the wound still raw and pulsing in time with his heartbeat, a compass needle vibrating with urgent intent against the growing, pervasive chill that seemed to emanate from the very air.
"Demon Ghost, huh?" Kuro snorted, leaning his back against the crumbling, ice rimed parapet, tossing a fig pit out into the vast, darkening expanse beyond the academy walls. The pit vanished instantly, swallowed by the gloom gathering over the slumbering city. "Catchy. Has a certain doomed romanticism to it. Better than 'Slum Rat,' aesthetically speaking. More… marketable. For terrifying the nobility, at least. Sounds like something from one of those penny dreadfuls they pretend not to read." He rubbed his thumb over his own matching scar, the action absent, yet grounding.
Shiro grinned, the wind tugging insistently at his imperious white hair, the fading adrenaline of the chaos still humming just beneath his skin, a low thrum of defiance. "Still prefer it to 'Black Prince of Blighted Expectations.' Yours sounds like a bad bed time story. Needs more what's the word flair."
"Debatable," Kuro retorted, pulling another fig from his seemingly bottomless pocket. He polished it briefly on his sleeve. "Personally, I think 'slum rat' lacks the necessary mythic resonance Gin's clearly aiming for. It's pedestrian. Crude. 'Demon Ghost'…" He took a deliberate bite, the burst of cloying sweetness a brief, stolen pleasure against the rooftop's biting cold. "…implies power. Primal fear. Potential for an excitingly tragic backstory involving cursed stardust, vengeful spirits, and maybe a tragic love affair with a sentient icicle." He swallowed, the forced lightness not quite reaching his eyes, which held a distant, weary shadow. "Though 'princeling'," he conceded with a wry twist of his lips that didn't touch the gravity in his storm grey gaze, "uttered by you, does possess a certain… venomous charm. Still cradled by Father? Awwww." He mimed rocking a baby with grotesque sweetness. "Adorable imagery, Ghost. Truly heartwarming. Makes me nostalgic for nap time and silver rattles."
"Fuck off," Shiro shot back, though the insult lacked its usual heat, softened by the shared space on the cold parapet. He nudged Kuro's shoulder with his own, a solid pressure against the chilling wind. "Says the one named Princeling, perpetually swaddled in silk and suffocating paranoia. Touche. Touché, Slum Rat." He bumped Kuro's shoulder again, a silent offer of solidarity that spoke louder than their banter. It was a language forged in shared blood, rooftop rebellions, and the cold certainty of their path north.
"Touche, touché," Kuro echoed, bumping back, the brief contact a spark of warmth in the encroaching dark. They sat in companionable silence for a moment, shoulders touching, trading half hearted insults that were more ritual, more lifeline, than rancour. The camaraderie forged in blood and shared defiance was a warmer shield against the encroaching night than any fur lined cloak the nobles below might own. The stars above remained stubbornly hidden, smothered by the thick, suffocating clouds that had rolled in from the Nyxion peaks, a celestial censoring, a dome of oppressive grey. But their own defiance was etched in far more permanent, visceral mediums: blood on skin, stolen ink on parchment, the sharp, stolen laughter that still seemed to hang, crystalline, in the icy air around them, a counterpoint to the distant, fading sounds of outrage and scrubbing from below. The rooftop felt like the prow of a ship sailing into a starless sea, guided only by the cold, throbbing beacon on their palms. The war declared in blood on this very spot was no longer theoretical scribbles on a chart. The first skirmish had been fought, and decisively won, with gravy, glitter, and the potent weapon of fear. The next, they knew in their bones, in the ache of their scars, would demand a far steeper price. Paid in a different currency.
Kuro looked down at his star scarred palm, raw and stinging in the cold air, the lines stark against his paler skin. He traced the raised edges with a fingertip, then lifted his gaze north, towards the storm shrouded peaks, invisible behind the solid wall of cloud, yet a palpable presence, a vast, frozen weight pressing against the horizon. The grin, the mask of arrogant defiance, faded completely, leaving his face strangely bare, vulnerable in the twilight. The lines around his eyes deepened, etched not by laughter, but by the weight of kingship denied and the icy path ahead. "Burn the sky," he murmured, not to Shiro, but to the darkening horizon, the words heavy as glacier ice, scraping raw in the stillness. "Easy to say up here. When it's just words thrown at the wind. Feels heavier now. Tastes like blood on the tongue and frost in the lungs. A promise…"
He paused, the silence stretching. "…that could freeze us solid long before it ever sparks a fucking flame." The raw admission hung in the frigid air, stark and terrifying.
Shiro saw the shadow cross his face, the uncharacteristic stillness, the immense weight of the unknown pressing down, not just the physical journey, but the crushing reality of challenging a god king and a demon queen. He didn't speak, didn't offer false reassurance or hollow bravado. Words were currency they couldn't afford here. He just shifted his shoulder, pressing it more firmly against Kuro's, a silent pressure, a solid anchor, a shared axis against the gathering, hungry dark. The twin stars, marked in blood, holding their ground against the coming storm. The wind moaned around the gargoyles, carrying the first flurries of snow like ash from a distant pyre.
The hallway below, moments later, reeked of panic, stale gravy, acrid pepper dust, and something sharper, darker: the metallic tang of Gin's fury, thick as spilled blood in the confined air. It mixed nauseatingly with the lingering scents of noble perfumes gone rancid with fear. Gin loomed over the trembling janitor, a gaunt spectre of zealous wrath. His star shaped pendant pulsed like an infected heart, casting sickly, throbbing green light that made the man's sweat slicked, dirt streaked face look cadaverous, hollowed out by terror. The mop clattered to the wet stone floor as Gin leaned in, his breath reeking of cloying temple incense and the deeper rot of decaying faith. "Demonic crows, you say?" Gin hissed, the pendant's light intensifying with his anger, casting jagged, leaping shadows across his hollowed cheeks and the damp walls. "Elaborate. Leave nothing out. Every detail is a thread in the tapestry of heresy!" His knuckles were white where he gripped his own robes.
The janitor trembled violently, sweat gluing his threadbare shirt to his spine despite the hallway's chill. "T-they… they dropped buns, Your Holiness! From the rafters! Like… like falling stars made of meat! Came from nowhere! And…and their eyes…" He gestured wildly, desperately, to the crow still perched implacably on a nearby sconce, its prismatic gaze fixed unblinkingly on Gin, reflecting the pendant's diseased glow with unnerving clarity. "Watching! Always watching!"
"Eyes?" Gin's voice dropped to a venomous whisper, laced with a fear he couldn't entirely suppress, a crack in his fanatical armour. He'd pored over the forbidden texts in the deepest vaults. He knew the lore of eyes like fractured glass, windows to realms where stars died. "What of their eyes?" He took a half step closer, the sickly light washing over the janitor's face.
"Like… like sorcery!" The janitor whimpered, shrinking back against the cold wall, his voice a terrified rasp. "Glowing! Unnatural! Not of this world! Like ice lit from within by hellfire! And…and the frost! All the fig stems, frozen solid, even deep in the warm kitchens… solid ice inside! Not just cold, Your Holiness! Wrong! And the cold… it clung, Your Holiness! Like ivy made of winter! Crawling up the walls! And the posters…" He pointed a shaking, grimy finger at a nearby wanted notice for a petty thief. Frost, unnaturally white, brittle, and gleaming with an inner light, had spread across its surface, forming intricate, jagged patterns that seemed less like random ice crystals and more like… deliberate claws raking the parchment. "It moves! It grows! Like it's… alive!"
Gin stared at the frost. The patterns were unmistakable, horrifyingly familiar, sharp, aggressive lines coalescing into fractured eight pointed stars, mirroring the malignant shape of his pendant, before shattering into chaotic, hungry fractals. It wasn't melting near the sputtering torch nearby; it seemed to be crawling across the stone wall beneath the poster with a faint, almost inaudible sound like grinding teeth or cracking bone. His star shaped pendant flared violently, a sudden, searing emerald burst that scorched the skin beneath his robes with a sizzling hiss and the smell of burning wool and flesh. Gin gasped, staggering back, clutching the burning metal as it guttered violently low, plunging the immediate hallway into near total gloom, the afterimage of that malevolent green star burning his retinas. "Nyxara's sigil..." he breathed, the name ash on his tongue, cold dread coiling in his gut like a serpent of ice. The texts shrieked the warning: Her frost is her sigil, her hunger made manifest, writing its claim upon the world. The shepherd… the frozen villages… it wasn't just rumour. It was here.
Lady Reina, clutching her ruined silks like a shroud, saw his dawning, horrified recognition. Her own fear, momentarily overshadowed by outrage, surged back, icy and paralyzing. "The northern caravans, Your Holiness!" she interjected, her voice trembling, stripped of its usual haughty cadence. "Weeks ago! They found a shepherd… frozen mid scream! Ice inside his bones, they said… cracking his ribs from within! Bursting him open like a rotten fruit! And his flock… hollow eyes, like the warmth was… sucked out." She shuddered, the memory staining her voice, making it thin and reedy. "Like something fed on them. Drained them dry before the frost took hold!" She wrapped her arms around herself, as if suddenly freezing.
Lord Takeo Sudo, still flecked with juniper glitter that now looked like a mocking disease, stepped forward, his earlier panic replaced by a colder, deeper dread that settled in his bones. "It's spreading, Your Holiness! The frost… it's not natural winter! It ignores fire! It's her! Nyxara's breath! Her touch! And the slum rat… he's her herald! Her claw in this world! Koji saw his eyes glow! Like the crow's!"
Koji nodded furiously, his jade cufflinks clattering like falling, cursed stars. "Amber! Like a demon's furnace! Like hot coals in the face of winter! He beat me senseless in the lecture… pure animal fury! Crows appear wherever he is , in the shadows! He brings the frost! Where he walks, the cold deepens! The ice forms!" His voice cracked, the wet stain on his trousers a humiliating testament to his terror.
Gin whirled, his pendant flaring erratically again, casting strobing, sickly shadows. "Enough excuses!" he roared, the sound raw, bordering on hysteria. "Weakness invites the Blight! Doubt feeds her! The Temple's light does not suffer doubt!" His gauntlet shot out, seizing Takeo's throat in a vice like grip, lifting the noble slightly off his feet. "You question the Temple's power? You let this cancerous fear fester?!" Spittle flew from Gin's lips, landing on Takeo's terrified face.
"N-no! B-but the frost…" Takeo gagged, eyes bulging, feet scrabbling against the slick floor, his hands clawing uselessly at Gin's iron grip. "It… burns… the cold… burns…"
"IS HERESY MANIFEST!" Gin roared, his voice cracking with zealous fury bordering on madness. He shoved Takeo away with brutal force. The noble crumpled to the floor, wheezing, clutching his throat. Gin turned his burning, bloodshot gaze on the assembled nobles, their silks stained and torn, their faces pale masks of terror he recognized with chilling clarity as the fertile ground for Nyxara's hunger. Weakness. Rot. Her feast. He'd read the signs too late, dismissed them as peasant superstition. The frostbitten fig stems appearing like morbid offerings. The crows with eyes like fractured portals. The slum rat's unnatural defiance, a spreading taint, a catalyst. The texts screamed the warning: "Nyxara's hunger grows where kings falter, where faith rots." King Ryo's grip was slipping, his heir a heretic dancing with shadows, and Gin… No. He was the High Inquisitor, the Purifying Flame. He'd burn the doubt from their bones himself, cauterize the wound before the infection spread. He'd burn Astralon itself to smoking ash before he let her frost take root, before he let the Winter Queen claim his domain. He'd burn it, all right. Starting with the source of this corruption. Starting with the Demon Ghost's eyes.
"Prepare the pyres," Gin ordered the guards, his voice a ragged scrape, yet vibrating with terrible conviction. "Tonight! Burn the heresy festering in these walls! Cleanse it with holy fire! Burn every crow nesting in the city spires! Purge the sky of their filthy eyes! And bring me Shiro Artatani! His own eyes, wide and bloodshot, fixed with fanatical intensity on the spot where Shiro had stood moments before, as if he could summon him back by will alone. "Alive! I'll peel his skin into parchment for the Temple's records! I'll preserve his eyes in lenses of crystal, so he may watch as his demon queen falls before the might of Astralon! BRING ME HIS EYES!"
Behind a pillar draped in shadows as thick and velvety as a funeral pall, Kuro mimed vomiting silently, his face contorted in disgust. "Dramatic and delusional," he breathed, the sound barely stirring the air. "Gin's truly outdone himself. A fucking poet laureate of pyres. Someone get this man a thesaurus and a straitjacket."
Shiro snorted, a short, humourless sound, but his gaze stayed fixed on the frost near Gin's boots. It curled toward the priest, tendrils of white, crystalline malice extending across the flagstones, the deep, bone aching cold radiating from it palpable even at their distance, a separate, living entity from the winter air. It seemed to pulse faintly, in time with the pendant's dying sputters. "He knows," Shiro murmured, his voice low and flat. "He's terrified. Nyxara isn't just a fireside story to him. It's a nightmare walking."
"So? Knowing's half the battle," Kuro whispered back, his storm grey eyes hard. "The other half's not being a spineless zealot waving a glorified glow worm and screaming for eyeballs." He flicked a remaining fig pit with deadly accuracy. It struck Koji's already tender ear with a sharp tock, prompting a high pitched, girlish yelp of pain and surprise.
"DEMON!" Koji screeched, instinctively scrambling behind the still wheezing Takeo, pointing frantically towards their shadowed pillar. "HE'S HERE! THE GHOST IS HERE! IN THE SHADOWS! HE STRIKES FROM THE DARK!"
Shiro stepped into the flickering torchlight from their hiding place, arms crossed over his chest, a silhouette carved from pure defiance and shadow given solid form. "You called?" His voice was calm, dangerously calm, a flat lake over hidden depths. The torchlight caught the amber of his eyes, igniting them with that unnerving, predatory glow Koji had shrieked about.
The nobles recoiled as one organism, a chorus of gasps rising like a startled flock of crows. Lady Yumi let out a tiny whimper and fainted dead away into a startled guard's unprepared arms. Torchlight flared and guttered wildly in the sudden movement and rush of displaced air.
Gin spun, his pendant flaring with a final, painful, sputtering intensity, casting one last sickly green pulse over the scene. "SEIZE HIM!" he bellowed, his voice cracking. "IN THE NAME OF THE TEMPLE! PEEL THE HERETICAL MARK FROM HIS FLESH! TAKE HIS EYES!"
Shiro smirked, a cold, sharp expression that held no mirth, only challenge. The feral light in his eyes seemed to deepen. "Careful, priest. Nyxara likes her prey petrified. Frozen solid from the inside out. Saves her the trouble. More… efficient." He took a deliberate step forward, not back.
Kuro materialized beside him like smoke coalescing in the disturbed air, tossing the frozen fig stem he'd retrieved earlier onto the frost spreading flagstones at Gin's feet. It landed with a brittle, final tink, like a tiny bell tolling doom. "Happy hunting, heretic," Kuro said, his voice dripping with icy contempt. "Mind the frost. It bites harder than your piety." He gave a mock salute.
As guards surged forward, swords scraping from scabbards with a chorus of metallic shrieks, Shiro and Kuro didn't run. They flowed, vanishing into the narrow, dripping maw of a servant's passage hidden behind a tapestry depicting some forgotten battle. Their laughter echoed down the dank, dripping stone corridor, a sound colder, sharper, and far more unsettling than the encroaching winter night outside. It was the sound of chaos embracing its name.
Gin stared at the fig stem. Before his eyes, frost already spreading from it in jagged, aggressive tendrils across the flagstones, forming Nyxara's unmistakable, fractured eight pointed sigil before shattering and reforming, crawling towards his boots. His pendant guttered violently one last time, then died, plunging the hallway into deeper, more ominous shadows thick with the scent of fear and failure. Above, the crow let out a single, resonant caw, a sound like ancient ice cracking over a bottomless crevasse, before diving. It snatched a torn scrap of parchment that had fluttered from Gin's discarded satchel during the commotion. The fragment spiralled down, a pale leaf in the gloom, landing in a congealing puddle of gravy and melted snow where Shiro had stood moments before.
Kuro, already moving swiftly down the dark passage, snatched it up without breaking stride, squinting at the spidery, faded script in the dim, greenish light filtering from a distant grille. "...the Sovereign's crown smudged… Nyxara's frost smudged…twin stars torn…" He looked up, his storm grey eyes locking onto Shiro's scarred palm in the gloom, then down at his own matching mark. The throbbing seemed to intensify. "Twin stars bleed," he read aloud, the words hanging in the damp, frigid air of the passage, cold and stark as a headstone inscription. A confirmation that resonated deep in their throbbing scars, in the marrow of their bones. The prophecy wasn't abstract scripture; it was them. Their blood on the ice. Their path written in pain and frost.
The crow swooped low, a shadow with intent, passing just overhead as Kuro read. When he spoke "twin stars," it let out a soft, guttural croak that sounded disturbingly, unmistakably, like... acknowledgment. Understanding. Recognition. Then it darted, a black blur against the passage's mossy stones, snatching the scrap from Kuro's fingers with surprising gentleness. For a split second, caught in a stray beam of eerie, phosphorescent fungus light, the smudged words "Nyxara's frost" glowed with a faint, ethereal blue luminescence before the bird swallowed it whole, the light extinguished down its gullet like a snuffed candle.
"Hilarious," Kuro deadpanned, staring at the empty space where the scrap had been, a shiver that had nothing to do with the passage's chill tracing his spine. "Even the damn crows are dramatic. And literate. Possessed of truly terrible taste in reading material. Adds a whole new layer of existential inconvenience." He rubbed his star scarred palm absently.
They emerged moments later into an empty storeroom reeking of pickled turnips, damp rot, and the sour tang of long neglected vinegar barrels. Shiro leaned against a mouldering, damp slicked barrel, catching his breath, the sharp scent of vinegar cutting through the adrenaline haze in his nostrils. "Those nobles… they truly believe I'm a demon now. Koji pissed himself. Literally." He flexed his hand, the scar pulling tight.
"You are," Kuro stated matter of fact, tossing him another fig, this one slightly warm from his pocket. "A demon of profoundly terrible life choices, spectacularly bad timing, and undeniably effective public relations." He pointed the half eaten fig in his own hand at Shiro's face. "But Koji's right about one thing…" He paused, his gaze intent. "…your eyes do glow. When you're pissed. Amber, like banked coals in a forge or a feral cat caught in a hunter's torch beam. It's deeply unsettling. Borderline unnatural." A flicker of something like grudging admiration touched his smirk in the gloom. "I love it. Utterly perfect for haunting jade clad idiots and sending priests into apocalyptic frenzies. Keep it."
"Whatever you say, Princeling," Shiro retorted, biting into the fig, the sweetness a fleeting distraction. But his mind snagged not on the glow, but on the frost moving like a living thing, the crow's knowing, almost intelligent gaze, the janitor's raw, animal terror echoing in the dripping halls, Gin's pendant burning at the sigils mere touch. Not paranoia. Not just winter's bite. The cold had intent. It had hunger. A sentient frost, spreading from the myth shrouded north, and it was watching them, studying them, through prismatic crow eyes and the falling ice crystals that stung their cheeks. Its mark was already etched onto their palms, a brand and a compass. The star scar throbbed, a needle vibrating with urgent, icy warning, unerringly fixed north, towards the source of the frost... and the true storm gathering beyond the monstrous lie of the Ice Wall. The crow's flight path was their map.
High above the slums, the crow banked on silent wings, a stitch of living darkness weaving across Higaru's fractured, obsidian shrouded sky. Below, the city sprawled, a tapestry of fear and flickering hearths struggling against the unnatural cold leaching the warmth from the world. Its prismatic gaze reflected frozen canals like veins of ice, the shattered skylight of the archives where a corpse gleamed under the indifferent moon like a fallen star, and finally, the obsidian fangs of the palace spires clawing at the starless void. It circled once, twice, over a high, narrow window where torchlight bled onto snow dusted battlements, a grim lighthouse in an ocean of gathering, hungry night.
Beyond that window lay a mouth of darkness.
The King's war room wasn't a chamber; it was a wound in the world. Dread, thick as congealed blood, choked the air, heavy with the metallic sting of a cold that burned the lungs with each breath. Frost, white and jagged as shattered teeth, gnawed at the seamless basalt walls, devouring the feeble light of guttering torches, their flames struggling valiantly against the encroaching void. The massive obsidian table drank the illumination like a black hole, its surface scarred by maps pinned under paperweights of petrified traitor hands, their final agonies frozen in stone. At its centre lay a vellum, ink blurred by what looked like frost blood: "Frozen Villages devoid of any warmth frozen solid."
King Ryo stood silhouetted against a dying hearth, his scarred plate armour swallowing the light, making him a silhouette of pure, impenetrable shadow. Blackened obsidian gauntlets were clenched behind his back, knuckles bone white against the dark metal. He didn't turn as the colossal, rune carved doors groaned open, a sound like a glacier tearing itself apart, stone grinding on stone, echoing in the vast, oppressive silence.
Silence answered him. Not quiet. The silence of a tomb breathing. The silence of a predator waiting in the utter dark.
A shape coalesced from the gloom near the door, resolving with the grim finality of an avalanche given form. General Ryota "Polaris" Veyne moved with lethal, economical grace. Midnight blue armour, tarnished silver filigree hinting at forgotten glory, and eyes like the north star in a face carved by decades of northern winds and harder choices. The star metal sigil on his wrist gleamed dully, a mark of supreme, bloody loyalty.He radiated an aura of absolute cold that had nothing to do with winter; it was the cold of the grave, of duty executed without remorse.
From the deepest shadow, where frost actively licked the stone around a narrow arrow slit, another figure crystallized like hoarfrost on a windowpane. Haruto Isamu, twenty winters old and Head of his ancient, serpentine House, was a spectre of gilded decay. Liquid indigo silk, darker than midnight, drank the dying light, seeming to flow like poisoned water around his slender frame. Hair like spun moon ice fell in a perfect cascade around a face of sculpted, imperious beauty that held no warmth, only calculating intelligence. Eyes of polished obsidian reflected the guttering flames, holding depths that promised only schemes and winter. He smelled faintly of frost killed orchids and the old, dry blood of political sacrifices.
Seven other shapes bled from the surrounding darkness, hints of rich, sombre fabric rustling like dead leaves in a crypt, the feral gleam of eyes from within the depths of high backed chairs carved from blackened bone wood, the faint, dry creak of ancient leather grown stiff with cold and disuse. Watchers. Judges. Carrion birds perched on the edges, waiting for the kill, their identities swallowed by the gloom, their presence a suffocating pressure.
The hearth gasped, a death rattle. Embers died, winking out like snuffed stars. The torches drowned in their own wax with soft, hissing sighs.
Darkness, absolute and suffocating, swallowed the room whole. No light. No warmth. No sound but the relentless, crunching advance of frost spreading across the table like a living map of conquest, the phantom pressure of unseen, judging eyes, and the hungry, infinite void where a kingdom's fate was slowly, silently strangled in the frozen dark. The game had moved beyond the academy. The true players, cloaked in shadow and ice, had taken the stage. And the twin stars, marked in blood, were hurtling towards the storm's eye.