It was time… But not enough time. It wouldn’t stop those determined enough, fast enough, or plain durable enough to simply ignore bonefire burns; especially not the brambleback. Some of its quills burned up, but that was about it. Several more men piled through, each using some means or another to avoid being burned too severely.
Victor’s mind ran at seven leagues a second trying to come up with some clever trick to forestall the foe, only for one of the Heisasons to shout something that he couldn’t quite make out and throw his weird blazewand-staff into the middle of the great hall. Its tip wasn’t just glowing, but incandescent, and a wall of burning light sprung up in front of it. It indeed stalled the foe for some time, but it didn’t cover the walkways. One of the enemy simply leapt up there and, evading the Heiasons, made his way to the other side, hacking away at the staff. It was cut down in three hits, and with its fall the barrier did the same.
What was worse, Victor felt a ping and a message from Zefaris rang out in his head.
“Another... There’s another sled train. At least a hundred strong. Looks like… Buhaug heraldry.”
Suddenly, Victor heard sounds of alarm accompanied by scraping of boot-heels against the ground. Then, he felt it.
An overpowering fount of leyline energy bubbling up from below. Even the monads in the air flowed to that same space, great swarms of them flitting past Victor’s head. So dense were they that they pushed themselves into his vision despite the fact he had been passively filtering them out until now. It was all in the span of perhaps three seconds, like a huge, soundless inhalation that sucked in the Gelum monads from the surroundings. A wheezing, actual inhalation followed.
A familiar voice sounded from behind, each word booming as if a hammer-blow upon a great drum. The ground shook.
“I. AM. NOT. DONE.”
So proclaimed the voice of Jorfr, just as Victor turned to see, opening his helmet as he did.
Dislocated joints popped into their rightful places, cuts and gouges pulled back together and froze themselves shut. As he rose up to his feet, they all saw that the hole in his chest had been filled by ice. A crack-laden heart of glacierglass pulsed within, and his lung, too, had been mended in the same way, ice joined seamlessly to flesh. Ice spread up from his right hand to his chest and even part of his face, his eyes blazing with glacial light.
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“Draugr… Draugr!” came disbelieving cries from a few among the third wave, while the likes of Merete stood in stunned silence. A grin had wormed its way onto Victor’s face as he witnessed Jorfr rise up in defiance of his own mortality.
He drew in a breath and the flames and smoke which swirled about him were consumed, and streaks of blackness as deep as the deepest night appeared within the still-forming icebound armor entombing his form. With his exhalation did hoarfrost spread all across the charred wood, choking out all nonmagical flame save for a few globs of solid CP-T.
From his head sprouted a backswept mane of wiry hair as white as snow all the way down to his waist, and even his flame-charred beard turned that same colour, glimmering in the light as if even his hair was made from ice. An icy-blue light blazed within his eyes, and his aura, it shaped not into a helm, but a coronet with a thrice-upsized form of the Aegishjalmr as its centerpiece. The armor which took shape upon his breast was, indeed, that of Haakon, yet it was shaped into a solid breastplate and pauldrons of great bulk.
He smashed his right hand into the ground, and with a mighty heave pulled out Runar’s Astral Hammer in its physical form. With a gesture it spun out before him. It shredded in half the man who had broken the Heiasons’ barrier before it struck the ground and exploded, throwing back four more men against the walls. Two were dead on the spot. With a stomp as followup, six Wide-wuths rose up from the ground; three of them began to do battle with the surviving enemy, while three more surrounded the brambleback.
Jorfr regarded his father, Merete, Torhild, Rikke, the Heiasons up on the walkway, all those who stood by him, before his eyes landed on Victor.
The two men’s gazes met.
They exchanged wordless nods of understanding.
Dawnwolf’s jaws snapped shut in front of Victor’s face.
Jorfr summoned up another Iceberg Breaker in one hand, and took his own hammer in the other.
“Thank you for safeguarding it,” he said to Gunnar. By some miracle of utterly freakish endurance, Gunnar wasn’t just alive, a single gulp of the Witch’s Vitae Elixir had given him the strength to give a beaming grin of pride and nod back at his son.
The only fitting descriptor for that which followed is carnage.
No enemy blade or magick could harm them, they killed men and beasts alike, and all who stood against them died that day.
Wheresoever Jorfr stepped the ground froze, and whenever a foe so much as approached him, it was as if Wide-wuths and Dragonpiercers sprung up from nothing, without any input or command. He didn’t leap or dash about, steadily and rapidly advancing like an unstoppable force and immovable object rolled into one. More than once he just let an enemy strike him so he could grab them and run them through with half a dozen glacierglass spears.
The bodies of the fallen became fuel for Victor’s magic, though a particular limitation made itself known; he couldn’t easily convert the flesh of anyone of substantial cultivation. For now, something to deal with. For the future, a convenient way to gauge the value of an enemy’s corpse. The fools who took him for a caster found themselves pulverized by his rocket-propelled fist or methodically eviscerated by the Oculus’ razor spearpoint, ever wreathed in terrible bonefire.