The border between the Kingdom of New Aethelgard and the Northern Wilds was not marked by a wall, a river, or a line on a map. It was marked by the death of sound.
For three days, the Army of the Broken had marched north, their steam-tanks churning the mud of the fertile valleys, their boots rhythmic on the stone roads Kael had built. The air had been filled with the noise of an industrial crusade: the clanking of gears, the shouting of sergeants, the growling of the Moon-Scarred pack on the flanks. But as they crossed the final ridge of the Dragon-Back Mountains, the noise simply stopped.
Kael Light stood at the prow of the lead steam-tank, a massive dreadnought-on-treads christened The Dawn's Hammer. He looked out at the horizon, and for the first time in ten years, he felt a chill that his "Stable Agony" could not immediately burn away.
Ahead of them lay the Silent Tundra. It was a sea of white, stretching endlessly into a grey, overcast sky. There were no trees, no rocks, no birds. Just a flat, featureless expanse of ice that seemed to absorb the light of the sun without reflecting it.
"Engine output is dropping," Ignis's synthesized voice crackled over the comms, sounding thin and tinny in the strange atmosphere. "We're losing pressure in the main boilers, Saint. The Dawn-Mana isn't combusting. It's... it's fading."
Kael jumped down from the tank, his boots hitting the frozen earth. The ground here wasn't just cold; it was dead. The grass stopped in a perfect line, green on one side, grey and brittle on the other.
Thorne walked up beside him, his breath misting in the air. The old commander looked uneasy, his hand resting on the hilt of his pneumatic sword. "The scouts aren't reporting back, Your Majesty. We sent three Moon-Scarred ahead an hour ago. We should have heard their howls by now."
"You won't hear them," Garret said, loping out of the mist. The Alpha looked smaller here, his fur matted with frost. He was shivering—a werewolf, whose body burned hot enough to survive a blizzard, was shivering. "The air eats the sound, Father. The wind carries no scent. It is the 'White Shadow' the old man spoke of."
Kael stepped across the line.
The moment his boot touched the white tundra, the "Stable Agony" in his chest spiked violently.
THUD-CRACK.
His sternum fractured. Kael gasped, falling to one knee. This wasn't the usual break. The pain didn't radiate heat; it radiated a crushing, numbing emptiness. He looked at his hand. The 'Reforged Sun' ring was flickering. The Star-Core, usually a brilliant violet-gold, was dimming to a dull, bruised purple.
"It's not just cold," Kael whispered, realizing the true nature of the enemy. "It's entropy. The Necro-Ice doesn't freeze water; it halts atomic movement. It stops the vibration of existence."
Suddenly, a scream shattered the unnatural silence.
It came from the left flank. A squad of Iron-Guard soldiers had ventured too far into the white mist. Kael turned just in time to see the lead soldier stumble. He didn't fall like a man; he fell like a statue. As he hit the ground, his body didn't bruise—it shattered.
The soldier had been flash-frozen in a nanosecond. His armor, his flesh, his very blood had been converted into brittle, grey ice.
"CONTACT!" Thorne roared. "SHIELDS UP! FORMATION!"
The Army of the Broken scrambled into a defensive phalanx. The steam-tanks rotated their turrets, the Radiant Cannons glowing as they charged. But the enemy was not a charging horde.
From the white mist, figures emerged. They were tall, slender, and clad in armor made of translucent, blue ice. They wielded no swords, only long spears of frozen crystal. These were the Ice-Wraiths—the villagers who had been taken by the Frost Lords and hollowed out, their souls replaced by the cold.
Behind them stood the Frost Lords themselves. Giant figures draped in furs of white bear and wolf, wearing masks of carved bone. They didn't walk; they glided over the ice, their feet not touching the ground.
One of the Lords raised a hand. He didn't cast a spell. He simply clenched his fist.
The air temperature dropped fifty degrees in a second.
"Fire!" Thorne commanded.
The Radiant Cannons unleashed a volley of Dawn-Mana beams. The iridescent light tore through the air, striking the line of Ice-Wraiths. But the beams didn't explode. Upon contact with the Necro-Ice armor, the light simply vanished. It was absorbed, eaten by the void in the ice.
"It's not working!" Ignis screamed from the tank. "The thermal readout is hitting absolute zero! The boilers are freezing solid! If the water expands, the tanks will rupture!"
The Frost Lords advanced. They were draining the heat from the army. Soldiers were dropping to their knees, their skin turning blue, their weapons slipping from numb fingers. Even Garret and his pack were retreating, their regenerative abilities failing as their blood thickened to sludge.
Caspian, who had been hiding in the command tank, ran out. The boy's teal eyes were wide with terror. He pointed at the lead Frost Lord.
"He is drinking!" Caspian projected into Kael's mind. "He is drinking the sun out of us!"
Kael forced himself to stand. His bones were cracking continuously now, a frantic drumbeat of snap-snap-snap as his curse tried to fight the entropy. He realized then that his army—his technology, his soldiers, his wolves—were useless here. They relied on the laws of physics and biology, and the Frost Lords were rewriting those laws.
There was only one thing that generated more energy than the Void could consume.
"Thorne! Ignis!" Kael shouted, his voice straining against the silence. "Get the army behind me! Tight formation! Do not step outside my shadow!"
"Kael, what are you doing?" Martha cried, running toward him with a blanket, as if fabric could stop the end of the world.
"I'm turning on the heater," Kael growled.
He ripped the glove off his left hand. The 'Reforged Sun' was dark, almost extinguished. Kael didn't try to draw mana from it. He fed it.
He reached into the "Stable Agony." He didn't suppress the pain; he amplified it. He visualized the night of the betrayal, the breaking of his legs, the feeling of the obsidian shard in his chest. He took ten years of trauma and compressed it into a single point of density.
"Primordial Art: The Living Sun!"
Kael slammed his fist into the frozen earth.
The reaction was instantaneous.
A shockwave of heat—visceral, wet, biological heat—exploded from his body. It wasn't the clean light of the Dawn-Mana. It was the messy, violet fire of the Blood Weeper. It didn't push the cold away; it burned it.
A dome of violet-gold energy materialized around the army, stretching for half a mile in every direction. Where the dome touched the Necro-Ice, the ice screamed. The silence was broken by the sound of a thousand glaciers cracking at once.
The Frost Lords recoiled. For the first time, their bone masks tilted in confusion. The "Entropy" they wielded was met by a force that generated energy faster than they could erase it. The heat hit the lead Frost Lord, singing his furs and cracking his ice-spear.
Inside the dome, the temperature skyrocketed. The ice on the tanks melted instantly. The soldiers gasped, air rushing back into their lungs. Ignis's mechanical arm whirred back to life as the steam pressure stabilized.
But at the center of the dome, Kael Light was screaming.
It wasn't a scream of victory. It was the sound of a man being torn apart on a molecular level. To maintain a field of this magnitude against Absolute Zero, Kael had to break every bone in his body once every three seconds.
CRUNCH. SNAP. THUD.
The sound was horrifyingly audible now that the silence was broken. Kael fell to all fours, blood pouring from his nose, his eyes, his ears. His skin cracked like porcelain, revealing the blinding light beneath, before knitting back together in a spray of steam.
"Saint!" Pip yelled, rushing forward.
"Stay... back!" Kael choked out, spitting a mouthful of golden blood onto the snow. "If... I... stop... you... freeze."
He looked up at the Frost Lords. They were hovering at the edge of his dome, waiting. They knew. They knew he was a battery, and batteries eventually ran dry. They didn't need to fight him. They just needed to wait for him to burn out.
"We... move," Kael wheezed. "We march... inside the light. I will... walk you... to the Cradle."
Thorne looked at his King. He saw the way Kael's body convulsed with every step, the way the snow beneath his hands turned to boiling mud. He realized the cost of the warmth they were enjoying.
"Form up!" Thorne roared, his voice thick with emotion. "Tight column! The King is the shield! Move!"
The Army of the Broken began to march again, a huddled mass of humanity protected by a bubble of agony. At the front, Kael Light crawled, then stumbled, then walked. Every step was a battle. Every breath was a negotiation with death.
The Frost Lords shadowed them from the mist, silent vultures waiting for the fire to die.
But the fire did not die. It walked. It bled. And it burned a path of black mud through the white hell of the Tundra.
They marched for hours. As night fell, the dome glowed like a beacon in the void, the only light in a world of shadow.
Kael walked with his eyes fixed on the distant peaks. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't rest. If his focus wavered for a second, the Necro-Ice would rush in and kill everyone he loved.
THEY ARE EATING US, KAEL, the God whispered, its voice weak and trembling. THEY ARE EATING THE AGONY. THIS IS NOT A WAR. THIS IS A FEAST.
"Then let them choke on it," Kael whispered back.