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It emerged from the void, a harbinger of chaos.
The avian beast materialised with a fury, its wings thrashing against the storm's wrath as it swept across the Snowtrail, just above him. Where Nagrak had been paralysed by confusion, he now teetered between shocked out of his senses and sheer terror. Too many events collided at once, utter chaos enveloping him. Moments ago, Balthagar had seemingly entrusted him with leading the orks, or so Nagrak believed after their brief exchange, especially with Gorak gone. Now, he found himself fleeing not only from the avian beast, but from the golem, which had obliterated the last remaining warrior and was now in pursuit.
Scrambling along the trail, clawing and climbing through snow, ice, and jagged rock, Nagrak sought for refuge. He wedged himself into a crevice in the mountainside, a narrow space barely wide enough for his slim frame. It was a fissure too cramped for the golem to follow, a gash where fractured ice and mottled brown rock formed a tenuous shield against the storm. It was less a cave entrance and more a rift between the mountain’s face and a fallen rock fragment dislodged by the voltera’s ascent, which had tumbled down the slope and slammed onto the trail. Frost was already fusing the rock and mountain wall together, sealing Nagrak from danger.
Nagrak exhaled sharply, sucked in his stomach and pressed deeper into the confines of the gap, a meter deep at most, with no room to glance over his shoulder. He did not need to. The tremors in the earth and the ominous noise of grinding rock behind him told Nagrak the golem was right there. As he crouched for cover, his hand closed instinctively around the ember embedded in Balthagar's skull fragment. A stray thought cut through his fear-drenched mind, a flicker of clarity amidst the maelstrom. Was now the moment to embrace his magic? Could this be the stone – the one among all those he carried, the stone of all stones – that would unlock his potential? Balthagar had bestowed upon him a legacy, a command to rise as the new krag. Was destiny unfolding at this very heartbeat—
The golem smashed the rock behind Nagrak, obliterating whatever glimpse of enlightenment had flickered in his mind. The moment was shattered, along with the stone, sending Nagrak reeling from his reverie, shrieking as he bolted out the other side of the crevice into the teeth of the storm. The golem’s pulverising blows send shards of stone hurtling towards him. The debris struck with brutal force, knocking Nagrak off his feet, and sending him sprawling into the snow. He scrambled for distance, clawing frantically through the drifts, desperate to escape.
His salvation came unexpectedly, and terrifyingly so — a massive talon descended, claws crashing against the rock, piercing through snow and ice and then snapping shut. He was paralysed, unable to scream or brace for impact. When the claws ensnared not him but snatched up the golem right in front of him, Nagrak was truly, quite literally, scared shitless.
Up close, Nagrak recognised an unsettling detail: the creature possessed not two, but three taloned feet, an anomaly that defied reason. Each claw held a captive. One gripped the avian beast, another the voltera, both pressed tightly against its underbelly, secure among its thick plumage. The third claw clutched the golem, lifting it from the ground with a terrifying ease as it rushed past Nagrak, a giant silhouette against the storm-torn sky.
As the monstrous form swept overhead, the heavens unleashed a cascade of ice shards, a sudden volley shooting out from the storm above. Three massive ice spears plunged into the avian beast, their frigid tips rending feathers and slashing flesh. More shards struck the mountainside, dislodging more stone. In its pursuit of the golem, the avian beast had flown dangerously close to the slopes, where the assault threw it into disarray. Its left wing, battered by wind and laden with ice, smashed into the mountain, tearing wounds that turned the snow below a dark crimson. The protruding rocks offered no purchase; the narrow path provided no place to land.
Another volley of massive ice shards rained down from the storm, their edges slicing into the beast’s back and wings. Though many shattered upon impact, sending plumes of ice crystals into the swirling winds, others bit deep, tearing through feathers and flesh, leaving ragged, bloody wounds. The force of the onslaught sent the beast crashing against the steep mountainside. And now, the mountain came alive and fought, retaliating with icy tendrils that surged forth like the grasping fingers of a titan. They grasped at the beast, ensnaring and immobilising it, freezing its massive form against the slope.
Scrambling, the beast dropped the golem, the voltera, and the smaller avian beast, mere moments before its talons were captured and fully sealed by the encroaching ice. Dislodged, the golem and the smaller avian slid and tumbled down the steep incline, a brutal descent abruptly halted when they collided with protruding rocks. While the avian creature became lodged in an outcropping, its body splayed and trapped, the golem crashed all the way down to the Snowtrail below.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The voltera, with greater agility, found purchase halfway down, its claws biting into the cliffside a hundred metres above the trail. However, the shards that missed the grand avian now slammed into the mountainside, dislodging the very rocks and chunks of ice to which the voltera clung. He was trapped, confined to the icy slope with no cover or foothold to escape the continuing barrage assailing the grand avian beast. The encroaching ice ensnared both the voltera and the smaller avian creature. Scraping heedlessly along the cliffside, they froze.
Midnight's senses flared as she observed the assault that unfolded before her. This was no natural storm — it was magic. Her darkness surged outward, coiling and unfurling past the bending light, weaving through the chaos, latching onto every fragment of movement and every ripple of sound in search of arcane signatures. She moved with purpose, ceaselessly evading the encroaching light while tracking the ice shards, tracing their destructive path back to their origin.
She found him at last. All paths converged on a single figure standing amidst the storm, hidden behind a barrier of reflective ice that rendered him invisible to ordinary sight. To Midnight, he stood in stark relief. His skin bore an unnaturally blue hue, like frostbite made flesh, while deep-carved runes scarred his body, marking him as a one of the rare spell-wielders among ork-kind — an orich.
The emergence of elemental magic among the orks was a twisted evolution spanning the past two centuries. With the cessation of human expansion into the Northlands, ork magic had begun to creep out from its primitive roots. To wizards, it was a shameful taboo, a transgression against established arcane codes, a grotesque violation of the natural order and the sanctity of magic. Initially dismissed as crude manipulations of rock and earth, their magical capabilities seemed insignificant until, a decade ago, patrols in the Albweiss Mountains uncovered the vast scope of the Haraak’s abilities under Gorak's leadership. The reports revealed a powerful elemental magic — calculated devastation realised on a grand scale.
Within the domain of the Albweiss Mountains, that very crudeness became an unassailable advantage. The mountains, wild and unforgiving, with their frozen peaks and jagged cliffs, were hostile to all who dared cross them. Here, the cold itself became a weapon in the hands of the orks, with the blizzard sharpening their every strike and fortifying their defences. The terrain granted them an infinite supply of snow and ice, requiring neither crafting nor subtlety, only the brute force summoned by the orich’s command.
Perched high above the battlefield, the orich’s scar-laden hands moved with an erratic rhythm as they wielded his grand staff. Their gestures seemed to tear at the fabric of the storm itself. Embedded within the staff were gems of glacial blue. They were frosthearts, symbiotic artefacts that served as catalysts and conduits for potent elemental energy. Each was a crystallised fragment of the legendary Mountain Eye, bridging the orich’s will with raw power.
The orich wielded his stones with an uncanny deftness, a skill as much honed by learned discipline as it was founded in an instinct embedded deep his being. His scarred hands moved in a trance of command and control, as incantations slipped from his lips in a language birthed from the mountain itself. The frosthearts responded, resonating with his intent. Their surfaces were etched with runes that glowed with soft spectral luminescence, casting a light that seemed to draw in the cold from the very air. This glow waxed and waned, synchronised with the orich’s breath, each surge sending ripples through the storm and transforming the tempest's fury into targeted blasts that reshaped the battlefield below.
In stark contrast to her wizard's intricate glass magic or the fluid mastery of worldbenders over water, the orich’s ice shards were crude, relying on sheer mass to overwhelm rather than finesse and precision. Yet, beneath their raw surface, there was a savage elegance, a strategic symbiosis of elemental force and primal intent. As Midnight delved deeper, she felt something ancient and vast, recognising the orich’s magic as far more than mere elemental manipulation. Midnight suddenly understood that he could do what she had failed to master; grasping the elusive.
She could feel it deeply through her connection to the Albweiss, through every instinct intrinsic to her darkness — this was deeply rooted mastery. His power carried the weight of centuries of bitterness, the raw resentment of ork-kind, amplified by a mastery of magic that had once been perceived as unattainable. He was a harbinger of a new era of ork magic, one that dared to challenge the wizards' established order and threatened the magical balance of the Northlands.
Though Midnight had not grasped it initially, she recalled the initial upheaval when reports of such abilities first reached Emery Thurm a decade prior. The consensus was that where wizardry drew from the world’s free energies with precision and discipline, ork magic drew savagely, as untamed as the beasts that wielded it. Unlike the refined channelling and convergence of energy through a wizard’s body, ork magic drained the world around the orich. Orks had found a way to tap into external resources, most commonly gemstones such as frosthearts. In realising their magic, both the conduits and the energy sources were irreversibly destroyed, rendering the process one of sheer depletion. Such powers carried a potential for limitless alteration and destruction of nature, rivalling even the most feared witchcraft.
The memory was unsettling in how it shaped her perception of the scene unfolding before her. She watched as each of the orich’s gestures brought waves of ice upon the beast-wizard. The shards expanded upon impact to form a growing lattice of ice, binding him to the mountain, layer upon layer.
There was something fundamentally wrong with all of this. Midnight’s mind was drawn back to her earlier contemplations — lingering at the edge of her mind: the image of the arachnid that had become her concept of existence. In her time spent beneath the earth, she had come to recognise the mountain itself as such an entity. It, too, was layered like a web, each stratum of frost, stone, and snow building upon the last, claimed by the mountain in the same way as the arachnid claimed the threads it spun. The mountain was not the ice, nor was the ice the mountain. Much was thrown off by relentless winds, by beasts and battles, yet everything retained by the mountain became part of it, defining and shaping the eternal frost of the Albweiss.
What felt so profoundly wrong to Midnight was the realisation that the Albweiss Mountains – this intrinsic entity of rock and ice and breath and life – could be controlled by an ork. Midnight felt it. She sensed this with a forbidding certainty, a deep unease threading through all that tied her to the Albweiss. He had grasped the elusive.
He was not simply manipulating the elements, not taking the snow, ice and wind from the mountain to make them forces of the orich. He was not tearing through the layers that defined the mountain. He did not sever the web to steal from all that inherently belonged to the mountain, from all that was of the mountain. No, he left the web unharmed. With his magic, he directed the arachnid to pull the threads for him. And the mountain complied.
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