"When the Harbingers walk, the air forgets its warmth. They do not come to conquer, but to correct. And where their shadows fall, the living remember why the First Reckoning was feared."
—The Book Of Eternal Balance, Fragment XIV
Earlier that same dawn, while the Veilwarden still walked the misted corridors of her tower and the whisper-boy's warning had not yet reached the king…
The East Harbor lay drowned in fog. It was the hour when night had thinned but withheld the sun, when the sea held its breath as though deciding whether to let morning in at all. No bells. No calls. Only the stillness of a world that had not yet chosen to wake. The fog lay thick over the water, dragging close to the surface like a shroud. Not even gulls cried. Not even the tide dared speak.
The watch captain, Harnel Strake, stood beneath the torch post, rubbing warmth into his arms. He was a man hardened by decades on the shore, but that morning his instincts failed him. What he smelled was nothing. No smoke. No pitch. No men. Only the faint, sterile cold of the sea.
"Captain," one of his young guards muttered, pointing into the murk. "There. Look."
A shadow. Large. Steady. Coming from the north. Harnel narrowed his eyes. "Nothing sails out of the northern fog-banks this time of the year"
The hull drifted closer, silent. Too silent. The fog parted just enough for its outline to take shape—a northern-style long vessel, broad-keeled, carved prow, wolf-head ornament. Its mast was bare. Its banner pole was stripped. A shiver crept up Harnel's spine.
"Signal them," he ordered.
The boy beside him blew the small brass harbor-horn. The sound cracked the fog—but no answer came. The ship glided forward, its figurehead emerging first. Its wooden snout was scarred in three long, jagged rakes.
Harnel stepped forward. "Crew of the northern vessel—state your banner and intent!"
Nothing. No movement on deck. No rustle of rigging. No human sound at all.
"Gods," one guard whispered. "It's empty."
But when the ship brushed against the mooring posts, something shifted—a slow, creaking lean, as if bodies just out of sight adjusted their weight.
"Board it," Harnel said, though the unease in his belly begged him not to.
Three guards climbed first. Then two more. The fog wrapped around them like wet wool. Harnel waited, listening.
"Report!" he called.
No answer. Only the groan of wood. Only the soft lap of water.
Then—a sound. Something between a drag and a scrape.
"Strake?" came one voice from the deck. A shaky voice. "Something's wrong with—"
It cut off. A wet, tearing sound followed, a sound of leather being ripped, but wetter. Then a heavy thud.
Harnel drew his blade. "On me. Now!"
They boarded in a rush. The deck was dim, the fog thick as breath. Harnel stepped forward, boots crunching on something slick. When he looked down he realized—ice. A thin, unnatural frost had spread across the planks, and in it, the dark smear of fresh blood.
His men were gone.
"Torches," he hissed.
One flame flickered to life. It revealed a smear of blood across the deck. Another on the railing. A handprint—fingers spread wide, the skin shredded to the bone—dragging downward.
And then—something moved after. A hooded shape, too tall for a man, its edges strangely blurred by the fog. It turned its head toward Harnel, though no face was visible beneath the cowl. A coldness radiated from it so sharp his breath hitched and a layer of frost formed on his beard.
"Identify yourself," Harnel demanded, though he had lost the steadiness in his voice.
The shape did not speak. Instead, it tilted its head, slow and unnatural. Then others appeared behind it. One by one. Five… six… seven of them. All cloaked. All wrong in the way shadows are wrong when they move where light does not.
Harnel took a step backward. "Fall back," he whispered to his remaining guard. "Fall—"
The hooded figures moved. Not rushed. Not charging. Just… arriving, as though the space between them and the guards folded in an instant.
The first guard screamed. The scream was instantly choked off as one of the figures lunged. It didn't strike him; it simply placed a hand on his chest. Harnel watched in frozen horror as the guard's leather cuirass and the flesh beneath it blackened and crystallized, a spiderweb of frost spreading outwards from the creature's touch. The guard's eyes bulged, his mouth open in a silent scream as his torso was flash-frozen solid. The figure then withdrew its hand and tapped the frozen man lightly on the chest. The guard's body shattered, exploding into a thousand glittering shards of frozen meat and bone that pelted the deck.
Another guard, a boy named Finn, shrieked and tried to run. A tall, slender figure glided into his path. From the folds of its cloak, not arms but two long, needle-thin appendages of jagged ice shot out, punching through Finn's eye sockets with a wet squelch. The needles drove deep into his skull, and the figure lifted him off his feet. Finn's legs kicked for a moment, a dying spasm, before the it shook him like a dog with a rat, and his head burst apart, spraying gore and brain matter across the frost-kissed planks.
Harnel stared, paralyzed, as a third figure descended upon the last of his men. It was a hulking thing, and it simply fell upon the guard, pinning him to the deck. The guard's screams were short-lived, replaced by the revolting sound of snapping bone and tearing flesh. The figure forced its hands into the man's open mouth, widening his jaw until it dislocated with a wet pop. Harnel could hear the tearing of muscle and the splintering of teeth as the figure began to force sharpen ice like spears down the man's throat, his body convulsing violently from the inside out before going still, a distended, blood-soaked sack of meat.
Something struck Harnel across the chest with inhuman force, flinging him into the railing. His ribs cracked, the sound sharp and wet in his own ears. The torch he held flew from his hand and rolled across the deck. Through his blur vision he saw one of the hooded figures — stepping out of the fog. It's cloak parted just enough to reveal a limbs too long for any man, pale as carved marrow. The joints sat wrong beneath the skin, bending at angles that defied bone. Frost bled from its shape, hissing where it touched the timber.
Harnel watched it drag the dismembered torso of one of his men across the wood, leaving a thick smear of blood and viscera. It paused, tilting its head as if listening to something deep within the air. It plunged its spined limb — a barbed bone-like tip into the man's chest cavity and stirred, rooting around as if searching for something with sickening patience.
Harnel choked on blood. He tried to crawl, but his limbs refused him.
A shadow fell over him.
The lead figure knelt slowly — impossibly slowly, as though time bent around its movement. No face lived beneath the hood. Only a faint, internal glow, like ice lit from within.
Harnel thought, absurdly, of his daughter's face. The way she had laughed at breakfast. The way she had tugged on his sleeve and said she would bring him bread when he returned.
The figure's hand lowered.
Fingers like frostbitten bone pressed to his cheek.
Agony froze him in place — not pain, but the absence of all feeling, the cold of a tomb sealed shut.
The hood leaned close. The whisper that came was not a voice, but the crack of a lake freezing in winter:
"The gate softens."
Harnel's last breath crystallized on his lips. Then he shattered.
By sunrise, there was only blood on the boards. No bodies. No footprints. No ship.
Only the empty moorings, frostbitten ropes, and a harbor wind that carried the faint metallic smell of cold iron—as if it had tasted the slaughter and buried its hunger deep.