— "Pick up your feet! Move faster! If we do not show an iron will and unshakeable faith in this final hour, we will never reach the gates of the Holy Mountain!"
Cara's hoarse, ragged bellow tore across the twilight canyon, slicing straight through the freezing gale as her sunken golden-green eyes blazed with a terrifying, feverish fanaticism.
Up ahead on the northern horizon, piercing through the heavy ceiling of dark clouds and swirling red-stained mist, the colossal dark stone towers stood like silent titans waiting at the roof of the world.
After days of starving, freezing, and questioning their leader's sanity, the sudden sight of those ancient monuments had hit the forty-seven exhausted witches like a shot of raw adrenaline into a dying heart. Girls who had been stumbling in their sleep ten minutes earlier were now weeping openly, laughing through cracked, bleeding lips, and pointing with frostbitten fingers toward the distant spires.
Standing at the very head of the line with one hand pressed tight against her bandaged ribs, Cara didn't give them thirty seconds to catch their breath or celebrate.
— "There is no room for hesitation or resting now!" — the founder shouted, waving her arm violently forward down the steep slope of the glacier valley. — "We do not stop, we do not sit, and we do not light a single fire until the soles of our boots touch the entrance steps of our salvation, which stands glorious right there before our very eyes!"
Twenty paces back in the staggered column, Beatrice stared at the back of Cara's bear-fur cloak and felt the brief spark of relief in her chest turn straight back into cold lead.
Even if those dark stone towers really were the promised land they had bled five years to find, look at how far away they still were across the ice! Between the mouth of this rocky gorge and the base of those structures stretched miles of open, unexplored snowfields—and half the younger girls in the middle of the pack could barely keep their knees from buckling.
Beatrice opened her mouth, wanting to call out to Scroll or Wendy so someone would talk sense into the Mentor and at least let Red Pepper reheat their freezing metal badges before they left the cover of the canyon walls.
Then she caught another glimpse of Cara's bloodshot, manic profile as the leader shoved a stumbling younger witch forward by the shoulder.
Seeing that any logical or rational plea was guaranteed to shatter against the brick wall of Cara's madness, Beatrice slowly lowered her pink head, swallowing her despair dry. Out here at the edge of the world, they had no choice left except to lower their chins and keep dragging their numb, blistered feet through the drifts.
Under Cara's merciless whip, the word halt ceased to exist.
As the ragged column pushed out of the high granite pass and began descending the long, exposed northern shelf toward the distant towers, the eerie quiet that had haunted their morning climb shattered with a vengeance.
Driven out of the lower valleys by the creeping spread of the red mist, two separate, ferocious waves of starving demonic beasts ambushed their flanks over the course of the late afternoon.
Even then, Cara's order remained inflexible: slaughter the beasts on the move and keep advancing.
During the first clash against a pack of gaunt, frost-maddened wolves, Windseeker's compressed wind blades and Catherine's jagged ice spears managed to tear the creatures apart before they reached the non-combatants.
True terror, however, struck forty minutes later during the second wave.
Out of a deep bank of swirling white fog on their right flank burst two colossal, grotesque hybrid beasts—hulking, six-legged abominations that looked like a nightmarish cross between a mountain bear and a scaled lizard, their jaws dripping black saliva as they charged straight toward the exhausted center of the column!
— "Leaf! Bind their legs! Stop their charge before they hit the line!" — Catherine screamed, her own hands already trembling from magical depletion as she tried to form an ice wall.
Stumbling to the front of the gap with her pale face drenched in icy sweat, Leaf dropped to both knees and slammed her bare palms down into the snowcrust, pouring every remaining drop of her Magical Power into the ground to summon the thick, iron-hard networks of roots and thorny vines that had saved the camp dozens of times in the southern forests.
Nothing came up.
Down beneath six inches of powder, the ground wasn't soil anymore; it was ancient, solid permafrost and black glacier ice frozen so deep and dead that not a single dormant seed or root fiber existed for miles.
The frozen wasteland violently rejected her plant magic.
A thin, pathetic sprout of green grass barely two inches long poked through the ice between her fingers and immediately froze solid, snapping off in the wind as the two one-ton hybrid monsters thundered down on her head!
Paralyzed by the sudden failure of her power and the exhaustion draining her veins, Leaf couldn't even roll out of the way.
Only the desperate, last-second intervention of the senior combatants saved her from being trampled into red paste. Throwing herself across the drift, Stone caught the lead monster's snapping jaws against a raised buckler of granite while Wendy, Beatrice, and Red Pepper hammered the beasts from three sides at once, burning through their own dwindling reserves in a frantic, bloody brawl.
By the time the second hybrid monster finally crashed into the snow with its skull caved in, dark, foul-smelling blood steaming across the white crust, the physical and magical toll on the group had reached the breaking point.
Half a dozen witches were bleeding from shallow claw grazes and flying ice shards. The younger girls were sobbing openly as they leaned on one another's shoulders, their breath coming in ragged, whistling gasps that burned their throats raw.
And as they stood panting over the butchered carcasses on the open slope, a realization far more terrifying than the dead monsters settled over the forty-seven women:
The sky above their heads had turned a deep, bruised slate-black.
While they had been fighting for their lives in the drifts, the short winter afternoon had bled away, and the pale twilight was rapidly being swallowed whole by the approaching mountain night.
Out across the vast white expanse ahead of them, the towering dark structures they believed to be the Holy Mountain were still visible against the northern sky—yet as the light failed and the evening fog thickened, the sharp, geometric outlines of those colossal towers were growing noticeably blurry, ghostly, and indistinct, fading into the gray gloom like ink washing off wet parchment.
Worse still was the ground beneath their boots.
For five long years of running from the Church and surviving the wilderness, one absolute, ironclad rule had been carved into the bones of every witch in the Association: when night falls in the Months of Demons, you must have solid rock walls at your back. You found a cave, a deep ravine, or a sheltered stone overhang where the wind couldn't reach you and where beasts could only attack from one direction.
Yet as the column stumbled down off the last rocky foothills toward the plain where the towers stood, the terrain turned into a wide-open nightmare.
Looking left, right, and ahead through the gathering dusk, there were no granite cliffs. There were no pine trees, no boulder fields, and no narrow crevices to block the gale.
Stretching out before them for miles in every direction was nothing except a flat, barren, completely exposed sea of solid ice and wind-packed snow. Not a single square yard of natural shelter existed anywhere on that plain to hide their battered bodies from the sub-zero night.
If we keep walking out onto that flat ice sheet after dark, the night gale alone will freeze half the girls solid before midnight!
Breaking from the middle of the shivering ranks, Beatrice hurried forward with her frostbitten hands clasped together, her voice cracking with sheer dread as she stepped up beside Cara's elbow:
— "Mentor Cara, I beg you, look at the ground ahead of us—we have to turn around and retreat to the rocky foothills behind us immediately!" — Beatrice pleaded. — "There is no shelter out on this plain! If we ask Scarlett to walk at the point and guide us using the night-sight of her glowing red eyes, we can still follow our own boot tracks back up the slope and reach those granite crevices we passed an hour ago before midnight!"
Around her, Wendy, Scroll, and dozens of shivering girls looked toward Cara with desperate, silent agreement in their eyes.
Cara didn't even slow her boots; her raspy voice whipped back across the line like a poisoned scythe:
— "I ALREADY TOLD YOU NO!!" — Cara snarled, spinning halfway around with her bloodshot eyes wide and wild beneath her stained forehead bandage. — "Listen to what you're saying, Beatrice! We just marched the entire afternoon without breathing, sacrificing our blood and our strength to reach this exact plain! We have already burned through more than half of our magical reserves fighting those beasts—do you really think these girls have the legs left to climb back up a steep mountain pass in the dark?!"
Turning her back on Beatrice's pale face, the founder thrust a trembling, tattooed finger toward the fading, ghostly silhouettes of the towers on the northern horizon.
— "Sisters, the bridges behind us are burned! Our only road out of this cold is straight ahead!" — Cara shouted, her voice echoing hollowly across the flat ice. — "Our paradise is waiting right there in the mist! When we walk through those gates tonight, we will have solid stone roofs over our heads and rest forever! Now keep moving!"
This time, the column didn't immediately surge forward.
For ten agonizing seconds, the forty-six witches behind Cara hesitated on the edge of the ice plain, torn in half over a terrifying abyss of doubt. Every survival instinct they possessed screamed that walking out onto an open glacier at nightfall was suicide, yet the ingrained habit of obeying Cara—and the desperate terror of mutinying in the middle of nowhere—kept their boots frozen to the crust.
And then, right in the middle of that suffocating standoff, Stone raised her head toward the northern horizon and let out a hoarse, strangled scream that shattered the tension into a million pieces:
— "Look... Gods above, look at the sky!!" — Stone pointed a thick, trembling finger into the gathering gloom ahead of them. — "The towers! The city is gone!!"
What?!
At Stone's sharp cry, Leaf, Wendy, Scarlett, and every witch in the line jerked their chins up, straining their tired eyes against the heavy curtain of dark-gray evening clouds rolling across the sky.
Every drop of blood drained from forty-seven faces at the exact same instant.
Up on the northern horizon, where the three colossal, hundred-foot stone towers had stood towering over the mist all afternoon... there was nothing.
Only empty, freezing gray air and flat white snow stretching out into the dark.
The entire city of stone had vanished off the face of the earth between one blink and the next, erased from existence as cleanly as if a giant hand had wiped a charcoal drawing off a slate board.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
A dead, suffocating silence—ten times heavier and more terrifying than the roar of any mutated beast—dropped over the column of witches. All afternoon long, while they had climbed and bled and cried with joy, those massive structures had stood solid and unchanging in the distance; now, the moment the last rays of twilight sunlight died behind the western peaks, the monuments had simply ceased to exist.
Standing beside Wendy in the center of the line, a violent, electric jolt suddenly shot straight through Leaf's exhausted brain.
Like a flash of lightning illuminating a pitch-black room, the healer remembered a quiet evening three months ago back in the autumn forest camp—when energetic little Lightning had been sitting by the soup pot swinging her legs and telling the younger girls wild stories she had heard from old sea captains in her father's port town.
Leaf's thin frame began to shake from head to toe as the brutal, inescapable scientific truth slammed into her chest.
— "We've been tricked..." — Leaf whispered, her pale lips barely moving at first as she stared into the empty sky.
Then, as the full weight of what they had just done—abandoning ten sisters in the snow, burning their last strength, and marching onto a shelterless glacier at nightfall for a ghost—crushed her heart, Leaf's voice rose into a raw, hysterical, agonizing scream that tore across the ice plain:
— "WE'VE BEEN TRICKED!! THERE IS NOTHING OUT THERE!!" — Leaf shrieked, clapping both hands over her temples as her eyes went wide with madness and despair. — "That wasn't the Holy Mountain! What we were chasing all afternoon was nothing except a mirage in the sky!!"
Pure, suffocating panic threatened to snap the young healer's mind on the spot. Her chest rose and fell in violent, shallow gasps of hyperventilation, her knees buckled in the drift, and she buried her face in her hands as ragged sobs tore from her throat.
Before the hysteria could spread like wildfire and send forty terrified women running blindly in forty directions across the ice, Wendy broke formation.
Pushing her own shock and horror down into the pit of her stomach, the maternal instinct that had kept Wendy fighting for these girls for five years took over. Lunging two steps through the snow, Wendy wrapped both arms tightly around Leaf's shaking shoulders and pulled the younger witch firmly against her chest.
— "Leaf! Calm down! Look at my face and draw a deep breath right now!" — Wendy commanded, keeping her voice soft and warm yet anchored with an iron steadiness that cut straight through the girl's panic. — "Don't let fear swallow your head! All of your sisters are still right here beside you. Breathe with me, calm your voice, and explain to us what you mean by a mirage!"
Held tight in Wendy's warm embrace, Leaf gulped down two ragged breaths of freezing air, resting her forehead briefly against the older witch's shoulder before turning her tear-stained face toward the front of the line—where Cara had spun around, her bandaged face paler than a corpse.
— "A mirage...?" — Cara repeated the word, her raspy voice cracking as a genuine tremor of terror fractured her tyrannical mask for the first time. — "What the hell are you talking about, Leaf?! We all saw the stone towers with our own eyes!"
— "It's an optical illusion caused by the cold air, Mentor!" — Leaf cried out, her voice steadying slightly inside Wendy's grip even as tears of anguish rolled down her cheeks. — "Lightning used to tell us about it from old sailors' logs! When freezing air sits under a warmer layer of clouds—either out on the open ocean or across flat, icy wastelands like this—the sky acts like a giant curved mirror when the sun hits it at a low angle! It bends the light from miles away and projects a reflection into the fog!"
Leaf swept a trembling hand toward the empty, darkening horizon where the towers had stood five minutes earlier.
— "The moment the sun dropped behind the mountains just now, the reflection angle broke and the picture vanished!" — Leaf choked out. — "We weren't looking at a city in front of us! The real stone structures could be two hundred kilometers away across the ice wastes—or worse, the sky could have been reflecting ruins from the completely opposite direction!"
At the head of the column, Cara stood as still as a pillar of salt, digging her chipped fingernails so deep into the palms of her hands that fresh blood welled up inside her mittens.
Every word Leaf spoke was a hammer blow smashing the very last pillar of Cara's authority and faith into rubble.
— "Wait... even if what we saw in the fog was a reflection," — Cara stammered, her proud, imperious voice suddenly dropping into a weak, pathetic plea as she grasped at the last straw to justify her madness, — "a mirror can only reflect something that is real! That means the city of the Holy Mountain truly exists out there somewhere and hasn't disappeared forever, doesn't it, Leaf?!"
Leaf looked at the broken, desperate woman who had led them into this white grave, and then slowly lowered her eyes to the snow between her boots, unable to tell a comforting lie.
— "Even if those stone towers exist three hundred miles away, Mentor... we have no food, no firewood, and no shelter on this ice," — Leaf whispered in a dead voice. — "Whether it exists or not... I don't know if a single one of us will live to see tomorrow morning."
Before the crushing despair of that sentence could even finish echoing across the silent circle of witches, a far more immediate, blood-freezing horror slammed into the plain.
— "GET DOWN!! SOMETHING IS COMING!!"
The ear-splitting scream tore from the throat of Scarlett on the outer left edge of the group.
Every trace of color had vanished from the gray-haired girl's face, her features twisted into a mask of pure, primal terror as she activated her magic at full throttle—her irises flaring into a bright, luminous golden-orange as her enhanced telescopic sight locked onto the pitch-black gloom three hundred yards off their left flank!
Five feet away, Windseeker pivoted instantly on her heel, dropping into a low combat crouch and raising both hands as wind blades began to whistle around her wrists.
— "Is it another pack of wolves, Scarlett?! How many demonic beasts are out there this time?!" — Windseeker barked, squinting uselessly into the dark fog that normal human eyes couldn't pierce.
— "No... Gods help us, that isn't a beast..." — Scarlett stammered, her voice shaking so badly she could barely form the words as sheer terror forced her boots to take two stumbling steps backward into the crowd.
Through the darkness and the swirling red-tinged mist out on the ice plain, what Scarlett's golden-orange magic eyes had just zoomed in on didn't have four legs, fur, or the rabid, lumbering gait of a mutated animal.
Standing out there in the freezing dark were tall, bipedal silhouettes clad in grotesque, spiked plates of dark carapace and frost-covered iron—creatures with glowing, intelligent eyes and hideously overdeveloped arms that were currently drawing back their shoulders in unison like mechanical siege engines!
— "I don't know what those things are!!" — Scarlett shrieked.
The last syllable had barely left her lips when the darkness on the left flank exploded into motion.
It wasn't the sound of paws charging across the snow.
WHOOOOOOSH—CRACK!!
A dense, heavy shadow tore out of the pitch-black fog, cutting flat across the ice plain with a terrifying kinetic velocity and a high-pitched sonic whistle that rivaled the speed of an artillery shell fired at point-blank range!
Because her magical eyes were still active and zoomed in on that exact vector, Scarlett experienced the ultimate nightmare of a scout: her enhanced optic nerves captured every single millimeter of the lethal projectile spinning through the air straight toward her sternum in crystal-clear detail, while her frozen, exhausted human muscles were ten times too slow to even twitch out of the way!
Death covered the three hundred yards in less than half a heartbeat.
In the blink of an eye, the jagged, whistling tip of the projectile was less than ten millimeters away from punching straight through Scarlett's breastbone and pinning her heart to the ice behind her.
She couldn't dodge. She couldn't scream. Her life was over.
And then—
CLANG—BOOOOOOOM!!
A deafening, metallic crash of pure physical force detonated right in the empty air in front of Scarlett's chest, sounding as though a two-ton iron bell had been struck by a falling meteor!
The sheer kinetic shockwave of that sudden collision in midair blasted a violent ring of compressed wind and pulverized ice outward across the left flank—hitting the front row so hard that Scarlett, Sea, Brynn, and little Lydia were swept completely off their boots, tumbling backward head over heels to land sprawled on their backs in the snowdrifts!
— "Gasp—khhk!"
Lying flat on her back on the frozen ground with her heart hammering against her ribs so violently she thought it would burst through her throat, Scarlett forced her trembling chin up and stared into the air where she had been standing a second ago.
Right there in front of her wide, golden-orange eyes hung the weapon that should have turned her chest into a bloody crater.
It was a colossal, seven-foot throwing spear—a brutal, macabre javelin forged from twisted black wood and a jagged, three-foot head of porous white bone as thick as a man's wrist.
Yet the bone point hadn't touched a single thread of her cloak.
Stopped dead in midair less than a handspan from where her nose had been, the massive spear hung suspended horizontally above the snow—vibrating and humming from end to end with tremendous longitudinal force as its monstrous forward momentum ground uselessly against an invisible, untouchable, and utterly unbreakable wall of solid air.