The night was cold and dark. The shallow breaths of creeping soldiers hissed into the air as white plumes; boots crunched in the permafrost of the snowy tundra, plunging deep into icy, brittle layers. A hundred thousand soldiers moved in unison, encircling a manor that sat isolated in the frozen wilds. An odd sight, to be sure, like some displaced fragment of civilization cast aside and forgotten. However, in this case, it wasn’t so much the building but the person living inside that the world wanted to erase from its memory.
A general clenched and raised a gauntleted fist, a ripple passed through the separated battalions, and they halted as one, the formation mere feet from a pulsing, transparent barrier. The leader breathed deeply, lungs expanding, then spat the words from his chest with a rush of air. His face was young, framed with deep red locks as his mouth opened and recited some memorized script.
“Seventh Princess, Fyrelle of Raging Winter! The First Prince, Inorix of Champions, requests your aid on the field of battle as part of his conquest against the Empire of Pluav Prea! Be grateful for His Highness’ graciousness and gentility, such that even a disgraced Princess such as yourself may take a place at his side, and promptly accept this offer with due gratitude and humility!”
The army waited with bated breath, heartbeat after heartbeat thumping in their chests, altogether too audible in the dread silence as the words echoed and dissipated with no response. Rivulets of sweat ran down their brows and froze before the droplets hit the ground. Soldiers tensed their muscles, keeping their eyes wide open as they shivered in their sleek metal armor. The general drew himself up, readying to announce their presence again when—
“My, my. What a warm welcome you’ve prepared.”
The woman emerging from the dark entryway was beautiful, stunningly so. Her glossy skin was paler than a full moon; her white hair sparkled like the rays of dawn reflecting on fresh snowfall. Her eyes were the bleached cobalt of a sky heavy with a blizzard on the horizon, irises fracturing, splintering, spinning into infinite fractals like a whirling snowflake. Her plain robes twined and spiraled around her body, but not a single hair on her head was disturbed as if she were the eye of her own storm.
When she spoke, it was punctuated by a sudden gust of wind.
“And if I refuse?”
The general sighed, seemingly having expected this reaction.
“Then I have been instructed by His Highness to neutralize any and all unstable variables.”
Both of them knew who the ‘unstable variable’ was in this situation.
“However,” he continued, voice wavering in uncertainty, “It would be terribly unfortunate if the Seventh Princess just so managed to escape our encirclement, and I was unable to give chase.”
Silence.
“Princess, promise me that you will not interfere with His Highness’ war of succession, and I will let you go. My honor compels me to give you a chance.”
“Please—”
An invisible hand clamped his jaw shut, as the cyclone surrounding Fyrelle grew agitated, churning circles in the powdery white layers that blanketed the ground, silvery strands of hair and threads billowing.
“You know, I was going to let you all go—”
Her dignified facade cracked, a serene glacier giving way to turgid and rough waters. Her voice changed; younger, less mature, more raw. She barked a sharp laugh that rang like the vibrating tines of a tuning fork.
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“—but now that you’ve reminded me of my dear brother, the cause of my exile into these wastes, I think I’ll just kill you all and remind him that I’m no dog to fetched at his beck-and-call.”
Her foe moved his hand, placing it on the gilded hilt of his saber and pulling it from the sheath with a screech of metal. With a jerk of his head, the visor of his red-plumed helmet slammed over his face.
“Then we will stop you.”
“You and what army? Because we both know these soldiers will never be able to kill me.”
In response, lava flowed from the lines on his blade, coating it in blazing flames, the temperature increasing until a twenty-meter diameter of slush was soaking into the dirt. Two fiery pupils shone behind the eyeholes of his helmet.
“Then as Radagon of Solar Corona, I will.”
His first strike split the milky barrier in half, letting a hundred thousand soldiers charge forward into the breach and toward the princess, painting the sky with a brief dash of searing vermillion.
His second strike cut through the pillars of ice that Fyrelle was raising around her for defense, his molten sword cleanly melting through like a warm knife to butter.
His third strike aimed for her throat, a piercing red-hot extension of his blade shooting for the gaps where her vision was obscured by the wall of bodies, when—
“Radagon of Solar Corona, you say? You’ve got some nerve talking about coronation in front of me.”
“Witness a true queen.”
Snow exploded outwards in a whirling mess and she vanished into the mist. His stab went wide; he tried a haphazard follow-up but only succeeded in cutting apart more of his own men. Drafty winds nudged his attacks off course, but the sudden gale was fading just as quickly as it had begun.
Left? Right? Behind? Thoughts raced through his mind as he turned wildly.
A shadow cast the entire army in darkness, blotting out the light of the moon.
Above?
He looked up, and for the first time, realized why Fyrelle’s Title was Raging Winter.
A three-hundred-meter-tall tsunami fell upon them, an avalanche of snow and ice that swallowed the sky and drowned the earth. The thundering grew, an earsplitting crash of millions of tons of material collapsing. Radagon couldn’t afford to hold anything back if he wanted to survive this attack.
His flames raged stronger and wilder than ever before as he primed for an overhead slash. A blinding white inferno overtook the vermillion. It coalesced, condensed, until it was perfectly contained and tightly bound to the shape of his weapon. Jets of flame shot from vents in his armor with a hiss as the metal began deforming into slag. A shrill whistle chimed as the heat reached its peak and the light flared for a second time. The muddy ground was baked dry, cracking again and again as the pressure roiling off Radagon’s sword bore down on the dirt in unrelenting waves. The glare shone so brightly that it was impossible to tell where the sword ended and where the light began.
“O, Sun. Be thou my blade.”
The impenetrable tidal wave reached its zenith and cascaded downward, rumbling like a predator seeking prey to devour.
Radagon brought the sword down.
The entire blade moved in a perfect cut, tracing a flawless arc from the tip to the hilt. It surged straight toward the falling avalanche, glittering like a phoenix ascending to the heavens. A sonic boom trailed behind, scorching heatwaves washing over soldiers as the air rapidly expanded and exploded.
When the projectile collided with the falling mass, it bit into the ice, flames issuing from the rift as it drilled deeper. Radagon’s wrists bent, his knees creaked, his helmet was melting into his eyes, but he roared ever louder as if to squeeze every remaining drop of strength from his muscles.
The ice cracked.
Fissured.
And split.
The frigid dome parted in two halves, disintegrating. The radiant energy blade, now greatly diminished, soared skyward.
For a brief moment, a sun bloomed in the sable night. The clouds vanished, sundered and boiled from existence.
All around him, Radagon’s soldiers were cheering, celebrating as chunks of slush pattered onto their armor and snow sluiced down their greaves. The man himself was panting, lungs heaving as faint gouts of flame flickered with every breath and his sun in the sky faded. But he was smiling too.
Fyrelle’s voice stopped them dead and pierced their hearts with a glacial, bone-chilling fear.
“Ooh. Good job. Now how are you going to handle the second one?”
And for the second time that night, the moon was swallowed wholly in shadow. Another disaster poured down from high above, twice as large as the first.
Swords clattered to the ground. Grown men fell to their knees and wept. The more stout of hearts glanced at Radagon, begging him to perform another miracle. But he was spent; he could only return their anticipation with a hopeless and empty gaze of his own.
The faintest and most transient of whispers were lost in the wind as the colossal meteor of ice crushed the entire army, blood watering the tundra like the most gruesome of wines.
Monster…
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A thousand and one pillars of ice littered the ground and gouged holes into the earth, glinting like polished gravestones. Fyrelle walked casually amidst the mangled field of corpses, their faces wracked with fleeting death throes, her own smile a rictus of barbaric glee.
“Now, should I pay my dear brother a visit?”
As she strolled barefoot into the wintry wilderness, leaving behind the hellish scene, the moon cast a broken shadow onto the shattered ground.