The abandoned guard post was a freezing pocket of desperation carved from the palace's obsidian heart after Kuro's declaration of, "let's give those starved shadow hounds a fucking supernova to chew on." Reality set in for Kuro the pain was like a rupture within his body, his body convulsed violently, a strangled gasp tearing from his ravaged throat, the sound of a steam valve rupturing under impossible pressure, echoing the tearing of his own flesh. His face, a grotesque mask of grime, frozen blood, and raw torment, twisted as shattered ribs ground like shards of broken pottery shifting with every shallow breath. The starlight scars on his forearm pulsed erratically, casting flickering, spectral images of shattered chains dissolving into dying starlight onto the slick, breathing ice walls. The air reeked of stale sweat, old blood, frozen corpses, and the faint, metallic ozone of dying starlight mixed with void static.
Outside the heavy oak door, the world exploded. Not with renewed assault, but with the terrifying silence of focused predation. The door bucked violently under a new impact, splinters spraying like frozen teeth. A guttural snarl, thick with unnatural hunger and the promise of rending flesh, vibrated through the thick wood and into Juro's shoulder as he braced the crowbar beneath the iron bar. Ice crystals, dislodged by the impact, pattered onto the sacks near Kuro's head.
"Fucking… ice," Kuro choked, his voice wrecked, each syllable thick with blood and the coppery tang of raw, internal damage scraped from the lining of his soul. He clutched his left side. "Not just cold… gnawing… under my skin. Like… frozen fucking lightning… made of teeth… teeth that seem to know only my fucking name…" He shuddered, a full body spasm, teeth chattering uncontrollably despite the sweat freezing instantly on his brow. His gaze flickered to his right arm, the horror visible even through his haze: mottled necrosis spreading, threaded with luminous blue ice that pulsed with a sickly, non Euclidean luminescence, burrowing deeper like parasitic worms forged from solidified void. Each pulse sent a wave of existential wrongness through him, a violation that felt like liquid nitrogen injected into his nervous system while alien intelligence whispered glacial equations into his marrow.
Shiro leaned heavily against the icy wall opposite, the cold biting through his tunic like daggers. He clutched his own savaged wrists, the exposed flesh a ruin of pulped meat, shredded tendons, and glistening bone fragments. The star forged manacles hadn't just torn flesh; they'd pulverized, grinding bone and nerve alike. Every heartbeat sent fresh waves of white hot, nerve shredding agony up his arms, a brutal counterpoint that threatened to eclipse conscious thought. It felt like red hot wires were being threaded through his ulna and radius, igniting every nerve ending. And beneath it, deeper, resonating in the very core of his being, was the deep, resonant thrum of the Polaris scar embedded in his palm. It pulsed in sync with the constellation of scars on his forearm, shattered chains dissolving into stardust, a trapped star humming a desperate counter melody against the encroaching void of the Frostway. He watched Kuro's struggle, the unnatural, sentient seeming frost visibly creeping, a grim, cosmic foreshadowing etched in pain and cold light. It's rewriting him, Shiro realized with visceral horror that momentarily eclipsed his own torment. Atom by frozen atom. Turning him into… something else. Something for the frost. The thought sent a fresh wave of nausea through him, unrelated to the pain.
"We linger, we die," Ryota growled, the low rumble vibrating the frigid air like the prelude to an avalanche felt deep in the chest. His Polaris eyes, swirling galaxies of blue and white fury, scanned the cramped space, dismissing the mouldering sacks, the rusted weapon rack, the frozen rat corpse whose tiny, ice filled eye sockets seemed to watch them. His gaze lingered, heavy and assessing, on the twin starlit sigils blazing on the arms of the wounded princes. "Frostway. Now. Only path the crows showed that might slip the King's grasp." He shifted his massive frame, the gore smeared head of his executioner's axe, Starbreaker, catching the pulsing light from the scars. The ancient weapon seemed to hum faintly, a low, resonant vibration felt in the sternum rather than heard, a sliver of the true North Star itself, a fragment of the celestial anchor that once steadied the heavens, bound in unforgiving steel. Its very presence was a tactile memory of a time before the sky was chained.
Haruto, his fine silver threaded blue tunic now a grim canvas of soot, gore, and grime that spoke of their brutal passage, nodded curtly, his aristocratic features set in lines of grim endurance. "It feeds into the lower cisterns, beneath the Black Vaults," he stated, his voice clipped, betraying no fear, only cold calculation. "Forgotten. Mostly. Sealed after the Borderless War tore the Veil and bled Nyxara's frost into the bedrock." He didn't sound convinced. "The Temple wards... they might be dormant, or they might be hungry. Hungry for the light we carry." He glanced pointedly at their scars.
Juro Fujiwara, leaning heavily against the buckling oak door they'd barred, his crowbar braced beneath the iron bar like a pilgrim's staff, grimaced as another muffled THUD vibrated through the wood, sending splinters pattering down like frozen rain. Fresh claw marks on his forearms wept slow, frozen blood that crackled with every slight movement, a grim counterpoint to Kuro's silent corruption. He glanced at Kuro's corrupted arm, the unnatural light making him flinch and look away quickly, as if the sight itself could infect, then at Shiro's pulsing scars. "Resonance," he choked out, wiping frozen blood from his lip. "They're not just hunting us. They're hunting the echo... like frost wolves scenting wounded prey. That raw burst of starlight back there... in the throne room... it lit a bloody great beacon in the dark for every hungry thing in this mountain." His smuggler's pragmatism couldn't mask the underlying dread.
Mira stood eerily still, a pale statue in the gloom, her hood thrown back. Her face was ashen as moon ice beneath a layer of grime and the thin, constant trickle of black, oil like blood from her left nostril, the psychic cost of pushing her crow sight against the Shadow Hounds' unnatural cunning and the Frostway's sentient chill. Her star flecked eyes were rolled back, showing only swirling galaxies of darkness, windows into a vast and terrifying awareness. Her voice, when it came, was layered with distant avian shrieks of terror, the mournful creak of glacial ice, and the chilling whine of wind scouring barren, frozen plains: "Pack Alpha remains focused... here. Beta pack... circling... seeking the weak mortar near the old latrine shaft. Breach... imminent." Her skeletal fingers plucked invisible threads in the frigid air, weaving information from the dying gasps of her feathered spies. "Murder harries... but the Hounds anticipate evasion. Predators... evolved. They taste the fear... taste the light." A single drop of the black blood fell, freezing instantly into a dark pearl on the icy floor.
The cloaked figure moved with silent, unsettling purpose to the narrow arrow slit overlooking the desolate, snow choked inner courtyard. Moonlight, weak and filtered through miles of glacial ice above, cast long, skeletal shadows that seemed to writhe. From within stardust patched rags that seemed to drink the scant light, gloved hands assembled a complex device with unnerving, fluid speed: interlocking brass rings humming with captured frost magic, cradling a core of pulsing blue crystal that cast shifting, cold light on the frozen stone. A high pitched whine began, setting teeth on edge, vibrating bones like the drone of some colossal, frozen insect trapped beneath the world. They offered no comment, no reassurance, only a silent, enigmatic presence that felt heavier than the surrounding stone. The deep hood shadowed their face completely, adding to the profound sense of mystery.
Kuro tried to lever himself up, a choked cry escaping as torn muscles screamed and broken ribs grated. "Then... fight here," he snarled, defiance warring with the all consuming agony and the terrifying cold creeping up his arm. "Better... torn apart... under open sky... than... skulking... waiting... in this... frozen tomb... waiting for it..." He gestured weakly, desperately, at his corrupted arm, the blue light flaring as if in response.
"Fighting here is dying here, princeling," Ryota stated flatly, his voice brooking no argument. His Polaris eyes, blazing like miniature suns fuelled by vengeance, fixed on the hidden door Mira indicated, a low, iron bound portal crusted with hoarfrost that seemed to breathe frost crystals. "That Frostway stench is our only shroud. Move, or be moved." He didn't wait for debate or further protest. With a grunt of effort that echoed in the small space like the groan of the mountain itself, he wrenched the frozen door open. Ice screamed in protest.
Beyond lay not darkness, but Anti Light. An absolute, suffocating negation of illumination that breathed out a wave of air so cold it seared the lungs on contact, stealing breath and replacing it with a burning vacuum. It carried a stench that hit like a physical blow, staggering even Ryota: the deep, organic rot of forgotten graves beyond time, the sharp, metallic tang of ancient frost older than the kingdom's foundations, the cloying, amplified sweetness of decaying lilies, the throne room's miasma distilled into concentrated cosmic poison. It smelled of entropy, of dead galaxies collapsing, of the absolute zero of the intergalactic void, of Nyxara's hunger. The Frostway. The scent alone was an assault on sanity, whispering of dissolution and endless cold.
The Descent into the entropy began…
Haruto, drawing a deep, bracing breath that crystallized instantly before his face, took point without hesitation. His slender blade, its starlit edge gleaming with a fragile defiance, was held low and ready, casting fractured reflections on the black ice walls that seemed to absorb the light greedily. Ryota motioned Shiro to follow, a curt jerk of his head. Shiro pushed off the wall, every movement sending fresh bolts of agony up his ruined arms. Ryota then positioned himself and grabbed Kuro carrying the fallen prince under his arm like a battering ram despite Kuros cries as the tendrils dug deeper into his flesh unmaking him. Juro fell in behind Ryota, crowbar held like a makeshift mace, his knuckles white. Mira brought up the rear, her star chart projector casting a weak, trembling beam that only deepened the surrounding shadows, making the facets of the ice glitter like a million malevolent, frozen eyes. The cloaked figure slipped in silently behind Mira, a deeper shadow moving within the gloom, their presence felt as a drop in temperature and a thickening of the silence. The frozen crow in Mira's pocket felt like a lodestone of despair, its dead eye a weight of irrevocable finality.
The passage constricted immediately. Juro, brushing against the weeping wall, recoiled with a hiss. "Fuck me... it's not just cold," he muttered, his voice hushed with a mix of awe and revulsion. He held up his hand; it came away slick with a weeping, viscous rime that glistened like frozen ichor under the pulsing light of their scars. It felt faintly warm, yet burned with cold. "It's alive. Like the walls are sweating... fear."
"The Frostway isn't just a path, Juro," Haruto corrected, his tone grave, echoing in the oppressive quiet. He kicked aside a brittle, frozen skeleton half embedded in the ice, its skull frozen in a silent scream, eye sockets filled not with emptiness, but with glittering black frost that seemed to writhe subtly. "It's a scar. A wound ripped into the fabric of reality itself during the Borderless War, when Nyxara's frost bled through the sundered Veil. The Temple sealed it, not with stone, but with blood oaths and woven lies, binding the breach with sacrifices whose names are lost." He gestured at the skeleton. "Their essence feeds it. The ice remembers. It remembers the violence of its birth, the screams of the sacrificed, the taste of starlight. Every step here, you walk through a graveyard of forgotten stars and shattered time, steeped in Nyxara's hunger. It feels. It hungers." His words hung in the air, making the cold feel even more sentient, more watchful.
Shiro glanced at Kuro, whose jaw clenched, a fresh sheen of sweat freezing on his brow. The faint glow of his constellation scar flared momentarily brighter, resonating with the buried pain and ancient screams trapped within the walls. Kuro met Shiro's gaze; a flicker of shared, horrifying understanding passed between them, the weight of walking through a sentient wound inflicted by the very entity that was poisoning Kuro's arm, rewriting him from within. The Frostway wasn't just a tunnel; it was an extension of the corruption consuming him.
The Frostway spiralled downwards, a corkscrew of frozen agony. The ceiling hung low, jagged with dripping fangs of ice that threatened to impale them, glistening with the viscous rime. The floor was treacherously slick, uneven, crunching underfoot with the brittle remains of things best left unimagined. The air remained a physical assault, stealing breath in ragged, crystallized gasps that tasted of tombs, extinguished suns, and the metallic residue of cosmic decay. The silence was profound, suffocating, broken only by the tortured rasp of their own breathing, the crunch of ice underfoot, and the relentless, distant baying echoing within the ice itself, a vibration of pure predatory intent felt in the marrow, a rhythm that seemed to sync with the pulsing of the Frostway's walls. The cloaked figure remained a silent, watchful shadow, their featureless obsidian mask reflecting the pulsing scars like dead stars, offering no comfort, only an unsettling sense of being observed by something profoundly uknown.
Mira's voice rasped, cutting through the dread like a shard of glass: "The crows… they don't just watch. They… remember. Lord Haruto." She paused, her projector beam trembling as if buffeted by an unseen psychic wind. "The scrap… the parchment fragment… it wasn't just a message. It was a warning scribed in a dying star's last breath, carried here by a crow who gave its life to deliver it. Nyxara's frost… it's learning. Adapting. The Temple seals… they weren't merely broken. They were consumed. Assimilated. This place…" Her voice dropped to a whisper layered with distant avian terror, "...it's becoming an organ. A conduit for the cold between stars. It thinks. It hunts."
A chill deeper than the physical cold, a chill that touched the soul, gripped them all. Learning? The thought of sentient, adaptive frost, cold given predatory intelligence, was a new layer of cosmic dread that tightened every muscle. Juro cursed, a raw sound, gripping his crowbar like a lifeline. The cloaked figure tilted their head slightly, the etched starlight scar on their mask pulsing faintly, as if acknowledging Mira's terrifying revelation.
Shiro stumbled after Haruto, every jarring step sending blinding shards of white hot agony up his ruined arms. The exposed nerve endings shrieked, the pulped flesh screamed, the freezing air bit into the raw bone with teeth of ice. It felt like his arms were being slowly fed into a grinder. The Polaris scar in his palm throbbed like a second, trapped heart, resonating against the oppressive silence, a desperate drumbeat against the encroaching void. He glanced back. Ryota moved like a force of nature animated by an unbreakable aura that seemed to emanate from him, each step a visible torment for Kuro that made Shiro's own pain flare in sympathy. The cosmic frost lace in Kuro's veins pulsed brighter, the sickly blue light now visibly past his elbow, tendrils reaching hungrily towards his shoulder, a living corruption warping his form, making his movements slightly jerky, unnatural. Ryota's hand hovered near Kuro's uninjured arm, a rock of stability to keep him from falling. Juro watched Kuro's advancing corruption with horrified fascination mixed with a doctor's calculating assessment of risk.
The baying grew louder, closer. Not just sound, but a pressure, a subsonic vibration humming through the ice underfoot, scraping against the mind, triggering primal fear centres. It felt insidious, intelligent. The Hounds weren't just chasing; they were running alongside them, separated only by the thin, treacherous veil of frozen reality, pacing them, waiting. The Frostway itself seemed to pulse with their anticipation.
Then, the light changed.
Ahead, where the tunnel curved sharply downwards into a wider, cavernous section slick with frozen runoff, the weak beams from Mira's projector and the glow from their scars seemed to dim and fray. Patches of absolute darkness clung to the walls like malignant tumours, absorbing light and radiating a deeper, more profound cold that made the air crackle. These patches weren't passive; they seemed to throb. The air grew colder still, the stench of decay intensifying to a choking miasma of ancient rot and spoiled celestial matter. The baying ceased abruptly. Silence descended, not empty silence, but a predator's stillness, thick and charged with lethal intent. It was the silence of the void given focus.
Haruto froze instantly, fist snapping up in a sharp, silent command. Ryota reacted with the speed of a glacier calving. He roughly, but effectively, placed Kuro against the nearest ice wall. "Stay." The command was absolute, forged in the crucible of command. Kuro slumped against the weeping ice, gasping, his corrupted arm pulsing against the slick surface, the blue light seeming to seep into the wall for a fraction of a second before recoiling. Ryota stepped forward, planting his massive frame squarely between the group and the yawning darkness ahead, Starbreaker raised high. Its blade caught the failing light, humming louder now, resonating with Ryota's Polaris eyes blazing like furious, miniature suns banishing the gloom immediately around him. Shiro pressed himself flat against the freezing, breathing wall, his heart hammering against his ribs like a caged bird. The Polaris scar flared in his palm, a silent scream against the encroaching anti light. Juro flattened himself beside Mira, breath fogging rapidly. The cloaked figure melted into a deeper shadow beside a jagged ice formation, unseen but palpably present, their stillness more profound than the surrounding dark.
From the clinging, light eating tumours of darkness, they emerged. Not quickly, but with a terrible, inevitable flow.
Shadow Hounds.
Voids given semi corporeal form. They flowed like sentient smoke, taller than Ryota at the shoulder, their passage silent as the grave they embodied. Their bodies were shifting obsidian mist, barely containing a core of absolute cold that radiated outwards, making the very air crackle and frost bloom instantly on the tunnel walls around them in intricate, fractal patterns that seemed to writhe. They possessed no discernible features, only gaping, swirling maws of pure frost annihilation, vortexes of silent nothingness that seemed to pull at the soul. Where their insubstantial paws touched the ice, it didn't crunch; it sublimated, vanishing into wisps of freezing vapour without a sound, leaving behind patches of unnaturally smooth, blackened ice. Their eyes: not eyes at all, but pinpricks of chilling, distant starlight, Algol's baleful gaze reflected in miniature voids, cold and utterly devoid of anything resembling life or mercy, only endless, hungry void. The silence around them was a physical force, a suffocating blanket that pressed down, stealing sound before it could be born, muting even their own passage. It was the silence of the event horizon, amplified, weaponized. Their presence warped the light, making distances seem unreliable, the walls behind them shimmering like a heat haze over frozen desert.
One flowed towards Haruto with terrifying, liquid speed, its maw widening, the vortex of frost reaching out like freezing tendrils yearning for warmth. The disgraced noble lunged, instinct and honed reflexes overriding primal fear, his starlit blade a desperate silver streak aimed at the heart of the mist. It passed through the shifting darkness, meeting no resistance, the cold intensifying violently around the blade, frosting it instantly bone white, the numbing chill racing up Haruto's arm like a venom. The Hound didn't react, didn't snarl. It simply flowed forward; its chilling maw aimed at his face, promising not death, but unmaking.
Panic, cold and sharp as the Hound's essence, lanced through Shiro. Instinct screamed. He didn't think; he reacted. He raised his bleeding, scarred palm towards the Hound menacing Haruto and pushed. Not with muscle, but with the white hot rage for Aki drowning in her slum shack, for Yuki burning on Ryo's pyre, for Kuro's body being rewritten by ice, for the suffocating despair of the Warrens, all focused into a single point of defiance channelled through the Polaris scar, aimed not just at the Hound, but at the silence it imposed, the void it represented.
THRUM VVVVOOOOOMMMMM!
A visible wave of distorted air erupted from his palm, shimmering like heat haze over a forge but crackling with suppressed sonic fury. Within the Hound's silencing aura, it manifested not as sound, but as a violent ripple in reality itself, a tear in the fabric of quietude. It struck the swirling maw dead centre.
The effect was immediate and grotesque. The semi corporeal form rippled violently, like smoke caught in a sudden, localized hurricane. The chilling starlight eyes flickered erratically, their light dimming. The absolute silence around it fractured. For one horrifying, crystalline second, Shiro heard the underlying sound of its form, a cacophony of a million tiny, frozen screams, the grinding of celestial bones trapped in eternal ice, the soul sucking emptiness of dead space, the hunger of the void given voice. It recoiled, its misty form momentarily destabilizing, pulling back from Haruto with a silent convulsion of pure negation.
Agony exploded in Shiro's hand and arm. It wasn't just the physical wound; it was the Surges recoil. It felt like the trapped star fragment in his palm had detonated, sending molten shards of pure, unfiltered stellar fury burning up every nerve pathway. His vision whited out, replaced by searing supernovae of pain. Bones felt like they were splintering from the inside out, marrow set ablaze. A silent scream locked in his throat, choked by the taste of copper and the smell of his own flesh burning from within, ozone and charred meat. He staggered violently, slamming back against the ice wall, clutching his arm as if to prevent it from flying apart, the pain so profound, so all consuming, it felt like his very soul was unravelling at the edges. Tears of pure agony froze instantly on his cheeks. Readers would feel this in their own nerves, a phantom fire racing up their arm.
Kuro saw the opening through a haze of his own agony and the chilling numbness spreading from his corruption. He roared, a sound ripped from a place deeper than pain, a defiance fuelled by terror of what he was becoming. He pressed his free hand against his shattered ribs, ignoring the grinding protest that threatened to steal consciousness. His left hand, bearing the starlight scars, shot out. His fingers, threaded with the invasive cosmic frost, glowed with stolen, malevolent light that felt wrong, like using poison as a weapon. He focused the corrupting ice magic, the very power consuming him, pouring his terror and rage into it. Jagged shards of black void ice, colder than the absence of heat and sharper than shattered hope, erupted from the weeping wall beside the recoiling Hound. They speared upwards like a macabre, spontaneous portcullis forged from anti starlight, the ice groaning as if in protest at its own perversion, forcing the Hound back further with a silent ripple of displeasure that vibrated the air.
The recoil for Kuro was catastrophic. Using the corrupting power amplified the Surge's backlash a hundredfold. It wasn't just pain; it was cosmic violation. The icy tendrils in his arm thrived, surging upwards past his shoulder with a sickening crackle snap, the blue light flaring blindingly, casting stark, monstrous shadows. He felt the alien cold seize his muscles, creep towards his heart with glacial inevitability, a terrifying numbness spreading alongside the excruciating fire in his nerves that felt like his DNA was being rewritten into frozen crystal. He collapsed against the wall, retching soundlessly, his vision swimming with impossible, non Euclidean geometries, shifting angles that defied comprehension, fractal patterns of infinite cold blossoming behind his eyes. The Frostway seemed to pulse with him, a sympathetic vibration of hungry ice. Readers would feel the invasive cold, the violation, the terrifying dissolution of self.
Ryota didn't hesitate. He saw the opening bought with his princes excruciating sacrifice. With a roar that echoed Kaya's stolen defiance and his own bottled millennia of fury, he stepped forward, Starbreaker descending. It wasn't a swing; it was the falling of a star fragment, the vengeance of the true North made manifest. The air wailed around it, a sonic boom suppressed by the Hound's aura but felt as a pressure wave. Time seemed to slow, the ice crystals in the air hanging suspended. The heavy, spiked pommel, infused with the shard of the celestial Polaris, the anchor point of the heavens before Ryo's chains, struck not the mist, but the Hound's collar with pinpoint, annihilating force. The weapon itself seemed to blaze with righteous fury.
KRACKKK
The sound was less a crack, more a localized reality tear. A shockwave of pure, Polaris force, the unyielding will of the fixed star, ripped outwards. The obsidian mist collar didn't just break; it disintegrated, unravelling like rotten thread. The embedded star fragments, tiny, desecrated Cassiopeia thrones and chained Polaris points, vaporized into glittering dark dust that hung in the air like cursed snow. The shockwave hammered into the Hound's core of absolute cold.
The Shadow Hound didn't recoil; it unravelled. It imploded inwards with a silent, horrific convulsion that seemed to suck the light from the immediate area, collapsing into a swirling cloud of freezing, lightless ash that rained down onto the black ice, leaving only the acrid tang of ozone, extinguished hope, and the lingering psychic echo of shattered screams. The force of Starbreaker's impact left a spiderweb of glowing cracks radiating across the black ice floor, the fissures pulsing faintly with residual stellar energy before fading. The silence rushed back, heavier than before, but now fractured.
"GO! NOW!" Ryota bellowed, the word raw and ragged, ripped from lungs seared by the Frostway's air. He was already turning, grabbing the semi conscious Kuro under the arms, hauling him upright with a grunt that spoke of immense strain. Kuro cried out, a sound lost in the muffled silence, his corrupted arm pulsing violently. "MOVE!" Haruto was already sprinting down the indicated path, a silver ghost in the gloom. Juro grabbed Mira's arm, practically dragging her forward. Shiro forced his legs to work, staggering forward like a drunkard, his arm a blazing crucible of nerve shredding pain, the Polaris scar throbbing like an exposed, superheated heart ready to burst. The cloaked figure moved last, gloved hands scattering small, wicked frostbite caltrops onto the icy floor behind them with silent, efficient grace. As they turned to follow, the deep hood shifted minutely, and for a fleeting instant, Kuro, through the haze of agony and encroaching numbness, glimpsed within the darkness of the hood. Not a face, but eyes. Eyes that were not eyes, but swirling galaxies, nebulae in miniature, forming a distinct, impossible shape: the Corvus constellation. The Crow. And on one gloved finger, as the hand withdrew, a flash of metal, a ring, heavy and ornate, set with a dark stone that seemed to absorb the light. Familiar... Kuro's pain fogged mind scrabbled. Where...? The thought was slippery, elusive, drowned instantly by a fresh wave of agony from his arm. Illusion... the pain... he dismissed it, a phantom of his unravelling senses, before darkness threatened to claim him again. The figure melted into the gloom after the others.
The remaining Hounds in the deeper patches of clinging darkness recoiled momentarily from the violent unmaking of their kin and the raw, resonant power unleashed, the power of the true Polaris striking a blow against its desecrated image. The silence they imposed wavered, filled now by the harsh gasps of the fleeing rebels, Kuro's pained whimpers, and the ominous crack of ice settling far above, sounding like the laughter of the mountain.
The rebels plunged deeper into the Frostway's suffocating, sentient embrace, leaving the freezing ash of the defeated Hound and the unsettling awareness that Kaya's stolen stars and their own brutal, soul scarring sacrifice had bought them mere seconds. The lower cisterns awaited, a forgotten, drowned labyrinth beneath the Black Vaults, promising only deeper darkness, the relentless pursuit of a king who turned light into chains, and the chilling, adaptive gaze of the Frostway itself, Nyxara's weeping, hungry scar. The cloaked figure's silent presence, the glimpse of Corvus eyes and the hauntingly familiar ring, was a reminder: allies walked in shadow, but the cost of defiance was etched in blinding pain, cosmic corruption, and the terrifying erosion of self. The hunt was on, and the Frostway watched them descend with frozen, intelligent and importantly hunger.