The air in the King's war room wasn't just thick; it was a presence. It tasted of cold iron filings and the ghostly residue of a thousand pyres, the scent clinging to Ryo Oji's velvet robes like a shroud woven from conquest and despair. It was the perfume of charred villages, carried south on the keening wind that now rattled the leaded windows like a skeletal hand. Ryo traced a calloused finger, scarred by decades of grasping power, along the jagged, alien edge of the meteorite blade resting on the vast obsidian map table. Her blade. Kaya's blade. Its surface, once lovingly etched by her hand with constellations charted during their first stolen summer beneath skies ablaze with the Veil of Lyra, now felt unnervingly cold. Not the chill of winter stone, but the absolute, void like cold of interstellar space, leaching warmth from his very bones. It felt like a fragment of a dead star, or perhaps a comet that had flown too close to a black sun. Her laughter, once sunlight piercing the palace's marrow deep chill, echoed only in the hollows of his memory, a phantom warmth against the encroaching frost. Now, the dagger bit deliberately into the pad of his thumb. A bead of dark, almost viscous blood welled, pooling in the groove marking Cassiopeia's throne, a constellation Kaya had laughingly called 'The Queen's Peril'. She'd carve your eyes out for what you've become, Kaya's phantom breathed, her voice the rustle of cosmic dust settling on a forgotten moon. The stars remember.
Ryo silenced the spectre in his mind with a vicious slash of the blade across the northern territories on the map. Vostra split open, parchment fibres curling upwards like burnt flesh under a cauterizing star lance. The rend echoed in the tense silence.
Tap. Tap tap.
The sound was precise, brittle, unnervingly rhythmic. Not hail. Not branches. A crow's beak against the war room's high, leaded window. Frost, thick and fractal as shattered galaxies, feathered the glass around its silhouette. Its prismatic eyes, visible even from the distance of the long table, seemed to fix on Ryo for a split second, an eye holding nebulae and cold, ancient voids. Then, with a rustle like the collapse of a distant supernova, the bird launched back into the swirling white chaos of the blizzard.
General Hikaru Tanaka, a bear of a man whose broad frame seemed to strain the seams of his ornate, frost rimed armour, shifted uneasily. The plates groaned and creaked like old ice settling on a dying world. "The northern villages, Your Majesty," his voice was a gravelly rumble, heavy with a dread that went beyond mere battlefield loss. "Gone. Not just frozen… hollowed." He paused, his massive hands clenching and unclenching on the table edge. "Survivors… what few stumbled south… they speak madness. Of frost that moves like… like living hands. Crawling up walls, pouring down chimneys. They report eyes in the blizzards. Not animal eyes. Stars. Cold, hungry, living stars watching them freeze."
A collective shiver, colder than the room's ambient chill, ran through the assembled lords. Priest Gin, his star shaped pendant pulsing a sickly, corpse light green that seemed to sync with the fading tap tap tap from the window, stepped forward. His thin face was pinched with pious outrage. "Heresy, Your Majesty! Baseless hysteria spawned by terror and the biting cold! The Temple archives explicitly denounce such tales as the fever dreams of star addled minds! Nyxara's cult… a fringe of deluded peasants…"
"Nyxara is no cult," Lord Haruto Isamu interrupted, his voice tight but cutting through Gin's reedy protest like a shard of ice. Silver lyres shimmered on his indigo robes, constellations of wealth and lineage, as he unfurled a scout's report stiffened by rime. The parchment crackled like breaking bones. "My men found carvings near the ruins of Frosthold. Not scratched. Melted into the glacier itself. Eight pointed stars, radiating cold that burns the skin." He met Ryo's gaze directly, his youthful face pale beneath its aristocratic lines but resolute, his imperial blue eyes holding a flicker of Kaya's own defiance. "And claw marks. Deeper than any blade wielded by man or beast. Grooves wide as a man's arm, scoring the permafrost down to bedrock." He let the report fall onto the map, its weight heavy with implication. "This is no rabble of fanatics, Sire. It's an army. An army not of flesh, but of… of winter given sentience."
A low murmur, like the drone of distant stellar engines, rippled through the lords and commanders standing around the long obsidian table, their faces illuminated by the guttering light of braziers struggling against the pervasive chill. Among them:
Lord Masato Takeda:Middle aged, gaunt as a starved comet, with eyes like chips of flint reflecting the dying firelight. Fingers steepled, observing silently, absorbing every word, every tremor, like a spider at the centre of a frozen web.
Lady Chiyo Malkor :Elderly, spine ramrod straight as a celestial pole, lips pursed in perpetual disapproval like a black hole swallowing light. Knuckles white on her cane of petrified starlight wood.
Lord Ren Nakamura :Stoic, massive shoulders like tectonic plates beneath ceremonial armour, face impassive as carved moon rock. A silent pillar of martial tradition in a crumbling galaxy.
Lord Kenji Sato :Nervous, sweat beading on his brow like condensation on a cryopod despite the chill, fingers fiddling incessantly with the hem of his robe as if seeking an escape vector.
Lord Takeshi Yamamoto:Ambitious eyes, dark and darting like rogue asteroids, shifting between Ryo and Haruto, calculating angles of profit and survival like a merchant assessing a dying star's core.
Lord Juro Fujiwara :Young, only twenty, his face open and earnest as a nebula birthing new suns beneath the weight of his House sigil. Horror warred with profound confusion in his eyes as he stared at the map marking the obliterated villages – places he'd only known as names on trade manifests. His knuckles were white bone against the dark wood where he gripped the table edge, the innocence of his generation colliding violently with cosmic atrocity.
General Hikaru Tanaka:The embodiment of troubled loyalty, radiating grim experience etched into every scar and weary line of his face, a soldier adrift on a sea of impossible horror.
Ryo lifted his bleeding thumb to his lips, sucking the iron tang. He savoured it, the visceral warmth a fleeting defiance against the pervasive cold leaching from the stones, a cold that felt less like winter and more like the breath of the void between galaxies. "An army," he mused, his voice a low rasp that instantly silenced the room, colder and harder than the obsidian beneath their hands. "An army sculpted from frost and fairy tales, nightmares given marching orders." His lips twisted in a parody of amusement. "How... quaint."
Sir Ryota "Polaris" Veyne stiffened as if struck by an electric current. The Polaris sigil etched onto the star metal vambrace on his wrist flickered violently, its usual fierce, guiding blue light dimmed by years of rust, neglect, and a deeper corrosion, the regret of a star that had fallen from its celestial path. The word 'quaint' was a supernova detonating in the silence of his soul, ripping open a memory he'd buried beneath layers of duty and denial as thick as planetary crust:
The sky wasn't just choked with smoke; it was eclipsed by it, turning the sun into a single, bloodshot eye weeping ashes. Ryota knelt in the churned, freezing mud of a nameless border village, his star forged armour searing his skin with reflected heat from the pyres Ryo had ordered. It felt like wearing a fragment of a dying sun. King Ryo's voice boomed behind him, cold and absolute as the gravity well of a black hole: "Burn it. Purge the heresy. Every hut, every scrap of vellum touched by their star slave scribbling. Leave only ash." The village elder, a woman whose fierce grey eyes held echoes of Kaya's own starlit gaze, clutched Ryota's mud splattered cloak with hands like gnarled comet roots. "Please, Star Knight!" Her voice was the crackle of dying embers. "Mercy! Our children… they sleep below, in the root cellar! Innocent!" Ryo's dagger flashed, a streak of cruel silver moving faster than thought, a meteor of malice. The elder fell, her lifeblood soaking the same soil where Kaya, radiant as a supernova, had once patiently taught wide eyed villagers to chart the harvest moons by the shifting song of Vega. Ryota's sword arm shook, the Polaris sigil blazing hot and painful against his skin, a brand of complicity. "Your Majesty!" he choked out, the words tasting of ash and bile. "This… this isn't justice!" "Justice?" Ryo's smirk was a crescent moon of pure contempt, cold and sharp enough to slice reality. "No, Polaris. It's clarity." He tossed Ryota a lit torch, the flames roaring hungrily like a captured solar flare. "Prove your loyalty lies with the Crown, not the chaotic heavens." The dry thatch caught with a sound like a universe tearing. The screams started, not just of adults, but high, thin wails of utter terror. Ryota told himself the roaring flames drowned them out. Told himself the muffled, frantic thumping and high pitched, animalistic sobs echoing from the sealed grain cellar were just the wind keening through the burning timbers, the death rattle of a dying star. But later, when the inferno had gorged itself and duty forced him, the Polaris Knight, the King's own hand, to lift the charred, still smoking trapdoor… the sight was seared into his soul. A tiny, frostbitten hand reaching upwards through the ash like a desperate constellation snuffed out too soon, still gripping a crude wooden toy lyre, a mockery of the celestial harmony Kaya had cherished. That tiny hand, preserved in its final, futile gesture, haunted every silent moment between battles, every glance at the night sky, every beat of his traitorous heart. It was the dark matter clinging to his soul.
Ryota's gauntleted fist slammed onto the obsidian table with a sound like a small moon impacting a dead world. The impact reverberated through the stone, silencing the last vestiges of murmured horror. "Quaint?" His voice was gravel scraped raw by cosmic winds, colder and more dangerous than the blizzard outside. "Entire families frozen solid mid scream, their terror etched in ice like fossils in ancient rock. Children turned to glass statues, forever clutching their mothers in a silent scream that echoes in the void. Elders shattered like brittle comets. Is that what passes for quaint in your celestial calculus, Your Majesty?" His glacial eyes, usually as distant and controlled as the Pole Star itself, burned with a supernova's fury directed solely at Ryo.
Ryo's answering smile was a razor drawn slowly across the event horizon of his sanity. "Death," he pronounced, the word echoing in the suddenly tomblike silence, "is always quaint, Polaris, when it serves a higher purpose. A strategic necessity." He swept a dismissive hand over the map, over Vostra, over countless unnamed hamlets now marked only by unnatural frost patterns and silence. "The north is lost. But its frozen corpse can slow Nyxara's advance. Bleed her strength on the ice. Let the primordial frost chew on peasant bones while we fortify the heartlands, marshal real forces." He leaned forward, his shadow falling across the ruined map like an eclipse. "Their sacrifice buys Astralon time. A necessary expenditure in the ledger of survival."
Haruto Isamu's carefully maintained composure, already strained by the reports of cosmic horror, shattered like thin ice under a heavy boot. He surged forward, his youthful face contorted with an outrage that burned hotter than any star. "Sacrifice?" The word exploded from him, shattering the fragile silence. "You call this calculated abandonment sacrifice? You'd sacrifice thousands? Your own people? Toss them like kindling into the maw of… of cosmic nightmares?" He slammed his own fist onto the table near the ruined map of Vostra, his voice rising, silver lyres trembling on his chest like agitated constellations. "What king does that? What king worthy of the stars that forged this realm?" The challenge hung in the air, thick and dangerous as nebular gas.
"A king who understands the true cost of power!" Ryo hissed, rising from his chair with serpentine speed. Kaya's dagger gleamed wickedly in his hand, catching the firelight like captured starlight turned malevolent. "My wife," he spat the word, lacing it with venom, "once knelt where you stand, Haruto. Bathed in starlight and foolish tears." His eyes, cold and reptilian as a deep space predator's, locked onto Haruto's. "Begged me to spare a village of star worshipping rats. Swore their 'light' would be a shield against my wrath." His lips peeled back from his teeth. "Know what I did?" He didn't wait for an answer. He dragged Kaya's blade savagely across the map, tearing Vostra completely in two, the parchment ripping with the finality of a universe rending. "I burned it. To the bedrock. Reduced their celestial hopes to ash and screaming shadows." He leaned closer, his breath hot and sour against Haruto's face. "And she watched. Watched her precious starlight gutter and die."
A glacial silence descended, deeper and more absolute than the vacuum between stars. Priest Gin retched, clapping a hand over his mouth, his pendant's green light guttering. Lady Chiyo Malkor gasped, a sound like a dying star collapsing inwards, her hand flying to her throat, her knuckles white on her cane. Lord Kenji Sato swayed, his face the colour of lunar regolith, looking ready to implode. Lord Juro Fujiwara stumbled back, collapsing into his chair, his youthful face a mask of utter horror and disbelief, the idealism of House Fujiwara shattering against the King's monstrous pragmatism. Even Akuma, a statue forged from obsidian shadows near the door, shifted almost imperceptibly, his inky darkness stretching towards Haruto like a silent event horizon, a warning of impending annihilation. Only Lords Masato Takeda and Ren Nakamura remained unnervingly still, Takeda's flinty eyes absorbing the scene like a cold sensor array, Nakamura's stone face unreadable as ancient asteroid rock. Lord Takeshi Yamamoto watched with avid, horrified fascination, his merchant's mind doubtless calculating the shifting value of loyalty and survival.
Ryota's voice, when it came, was a whisper colder than the Oort Cloud, carrying deadly weight in the stillness. "Kaya… was your queen. Your sworn star." The reminder hung in the air, a luminous accusation.
"Kaya," Ryo spat, venom dripping from each syllable like toxic stellar plasma, "was a star whoring fool! Her eyes perpetually adrift in the damned celestial currents, never fixed on her throne! Never focused on the bloody, necessary duty of wielding power in a cold, dark universe!" He took a step towards the centre of the room, the dagger held low, a sliver of captured night. "She drowned in her own celestial fantasies while the realm needed a firm hand! A hand unafraid of the dark, My hand!"
Before Haruto could unleash the torrent of fury building within him, a collective gasp, sharp as the snap of a neutron star, went up. Frost, white and intricate as the crystalline lattices found in comet cores, crept silently under the heavy war room door. It didn't spread randomly like natural ice. It coiled, writhed with sentient purpose, and solidified with unnatural, terrifying speed into the perfect, chilling form of the Sovereign's eight pointed star. It centred itself directly at Ryo's booted feet, a cosmic sigil etched onto the floor by an invisible, freezing hand.
The King recoiled as if physically scalded by liquid nitrogen, his face twisting in fury and a flicker of primal, cosmic fear, the fear of something vast, ancient, and utterly indifferent to his crown. He stamped down hard, grinding the icy sigil under his heel with a crunch that echoed like breaking bones. "ENOUGH!" he roared, the sound bouncing off the stone walls like a shockwave, his eyes, wild and bloodshot now, finding Akuma's void dark gaze. "Akuma! Purge the northern refugee camps gathered at the Silver Pass. All of them. Every man, woman, and child clinging to their pathetic spark of life." His voice dropped to a guttural snarl. "Let Nyxara feast on corpses. Deny her fresh… fuel."
Ryota Polaris Veyne didn't hesitate. The memory of the tiny hand in the ashes, the phantom screams from the cellar, the King's monstrous calculus, and now this final, unspeakable order coalesced into a single, supernova bright point of clarity. His hand, moving faster than thought, flew to the intricate Polaris insignia pinned over his heart, the mark of supreme loyalty, of a thousand battles fought under its guiding light, of bloody service rendered unquestioningly for decades. With a wrenching tear of metal and velvet that sounded like the rending of his own soul, he ripped it free. The sigils light, usually a fierce beacon, was now a faint, dying blue ember, its glow catching in Haruto's widened eyes, reflecting not just the present horror, but the ghost of the village elder, the phantom of the child with the toy lyre, the shattered constellation of his own faith. With a snarl of utter, cosmic disgust, Ryota flung the insignia at Ryo's feet. It skittered across the obsidian like a fallen star, coming to rest near the ruined map of Vostra, its light guttering out. His voice, when it came, was the grinding of tectonic plates, the finality of a star going dark: "I'd sooner serve the frost than this butchery!" The war room plunged into absolute, suffocating silence, broken only by the King's ragged breath and the relentless tap tap tapping of the crow's beak against the frozen glass, a metronome counting down the end of an era. The Polaris Knight had fallen.