Dhaakir’s corpse chilled unnaturally quickly in Ranvir’s hands. His left arm, tinted blue and covered in rime, fell off. The limb broke apart like blocks of ice pushed down from the North, unable to resist the summer sun.

The break revealed only further frozen flesh, spiky and stringy, glimmering like gems in the clearing skies. Already, Sansir’s frozen Concept had chilled the corpse entirely. Dhaakir’s face remained still in the pose of his death. Wide eyes dull and hazed over, mouth agape in a scream.

Ranvir hadn’t noticed he was still carrying the body when he’d gone to clear up the skies. His fingers ached from clutching his enemy so tightly. Fingers cinched tight in bone and sinew. The cold seeping not into his soul but attacking his flesh.

Cuts counted by the score ached with each heavy pound of his heart. A headache was rising and he could no longer ignore the dark, filthy environment he’d pushed away. Dark grays, filthy blacks, and stunning ivory white detailed a desolated landscape. Decimated by the anger he’d allowed to run free.

Fingers popping, he let go and watched the slow fall of the corpse. Torn apart between the neck and shoulder. It was not a clean tear, so the two parts did not fall equally. There was a surreality to the fall, it didn’t move quickly enough. That wasn’t what dead people looked like. His remaining arm was spinning so fast. A bone fell out of his torso, flying off into the distance away from the rest of him.

I did that. It didn’t touch him. Not like it should. It was simply another body. Ranvir had a few of those in his past at this point. That made something inside him ache. A pustule ridden red thing, which pushed through the murk of black and gray. In that moment, it seemed not Dhaakir’s blood that stained his fingers, but everyone’s. The man who’d struck him in the face flashed through his mind for a moment.

He grimaced at the texture of his fingers rubbing against the scar on his chin. There was an enemy he’d killed. His entire squad. Yet there was nothing to feel. Not a void to swallow all, but a hollow to contain nothing.

Other faces passed through him as he thought. Sigurd, the smoke master who taken an ill will toward him. They’d fought some. Had he killed him? I should be able to remember. He shook his head.

What was the point? Of any of this? If it left him like this? Vacant. If this continued, would there even be a father for Frija’s next birthday? Or the one after. What would remain of him when Vasso reached his majority?

Looking across the landscape, the dissipating clouds catching the light of the sun, the ground belows. Plains of grass, clumps of forests dusted with white. It was a privileged view. There were artists who would’ve put themselves into lifelong debt to see what he was.

Rich men who would lift the burden from them, just for a repetition.

I wanted to kill him. I wanted to be the reason he died. It wasn’t enough that the threat was ended. It had to be me. He shook his head and closed his eyes. Despite the sun’s light, winter had its claws on the land and would not let go. No amount of light would fool him into feeling warm.

He looked down. The armies had largely separated. Purists kneeling with head bowed. Their faces were blood splattered, injuries unattended, their leaders hanging from swiftly raised gallows. Feet swinging in the wind. The sun wouldn’t warm them either. Blood-clotted extremities, swollen and dark.

Was Ranvir like them? Hollow and cold. Without purpose.

No… he felt purpose. It was failing to fulfill that purpose which stuck on him now. His inability to protect his friends. Seeking release where there was nothing to find. He looked once more to the sun, Perception dimming his view.

There was no heat to gather from the light. Winter had come and taken it. Of course, he couldn’t be anything but hollow. He was hanging on display for all to see, alone and untouchable. An elaborate set of gallows suspending his sentence, swinging dramatically all to see. And they did. Hundreds of eyes, seeking him with regularity. Here he hung from gallows of his own make.

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Air left him in an explosive breath, as if struck by the force of an oncoming horse. Those who did not know how to find heat in the winter would inevitably die from hypothermia flat under the cold light of the sun. So too would he be laid out if he could not correct himself.

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Kirs knelt awkwardly next to Es’ stretcher. Her shirt had been removed, folded neatly beside her. Blood spattered, dirty, and torn. It had been arranged delicately, as she would expect of a store.

The healer’s hands were icy, yet the light they emitted suffused her back with warmth. One of her ribs had broken, and she had severe bruising the span of her ribs. Though it wasn’t herself she was worried about, but her husband.

A bandage covered most of his face, keeping his jaw closed. The swelling and bruises on the rest of his face had already relieved significantly. The medic had used a needle to poke a trio of hole in each cheek when initially healing him. Somehow he’d drawn the blood out and taken the swelling, then laid a poultice laced with obsidian dust under the bandages and left.

An hour later, apart from the swell of his jaw, he appeared almost whole. Though he still couldn’t speak, and likely would not for another day or two.

But she didn’t need to hear him to see the hurt on his face. The loss, confusion, anger, and fear suspended in the morass of his own self-contempt. Esmund hated his power, hated it for how destructive it was. So much so that he forcibly changed it to the range of his touch, he could no longer fight on the front lines for risk of the flesh-torn pulling him down.

And now those powers, the most deadly element of all tethered, had failed him. Fearing his strength, he’d been forced against a wall he couldn’t overcome.

She squeezed his hand tightly, her breath hitching as the healer behind her prodded at tender flesh.

“How you feel?” she asked in broken Elusrian. The triage tent was perhaps a hundred meters outside the translation field.

“Better, thank you.”

“Welcome. Make shirt on.” She said, then stepped away.

Kirs glanced over her shoulder to see the woman joining another of the Sleeping Sons healers to check on Dovar. That also returned the three newcomers into view. All dressed for court in the capital. With her new senses, the three of them together exuded enough power to almost knock her out, even from such a distance.

She suspected proximity to monsters like Ranvir and Ayvir had made her more stable than the average pre-stage tethered. Her spirit still burned with the effort of awakening two elements in the same day, let alone within minutes of each other.

A disturbance on the other side of the tent caused her to look over. Ranvir was descending. Bare-chested and pants cut and ripped almost to indecency, he knelt next to Ayvir and stroked the idly chattering monkey on his chest. Clotted cuts marked every available patch of skin, concentrated around his arms and less around his wings, which didn’t fold in quite right.

Looking down, she saw Es’ face return to the tent ceiling with eyes closed. Wet stained the corner of his eye.

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Saif stood with others around the corpse.

“He looks old,” Zubair said, offhandedly. “I don’t remember him looking so old.”

“It’s the blood,” Kanaan said.

Zubair exchanged a look with Saif and snorted. The youngest of the three Kanaan hadn’t known Dhaakir long enough to understand just how little those words applied to that man. If man, you could call him. There was so little left of him. Withered away to bone and sinew, even before the toll of combat.

“What was his Concept? Do you know?” Kanaan asked. Sharing an element with him, it was not surprising that the high master was curious.

“Toughness,” Zubair said. “Didn’t exactly make him immortal, but it got him very close.”

“He doesn’t look that old to me. Wasn’t he like three-hundred?”

“Closer to two and a half,” Saif said off-handedly, kneeling down to inspect the corpse. Is this all we come to? Remnants of a once-great country. Saif hadn’t trained Dhaakir, but he’d trained his master. In a way, this man was part of Saif’s legacy. That thought put a bitter twist on his lips. What a legacy that is. Decay and destruction are all that remain. He looked towards the closed off tent, where masters of healing still worked. Perhaps if Pashar survives this day, I’ll still have something left. Something that isn’t a complete failure. A speck of light within my vast shadow.

“Is his chest caved in?” Kanaan asked.

Zubair inhaled sharply and nodded. They all looked toward the healer’s tent. Ranvir knelt next to the smoke-tethered who lay with both arms suspended in layers of restoring ice.

“He fought inside the blackstorm,” Kanaan said, noting the injuries on his arms.

“Tough,” Zubair said dryly.

“Could you have done it? Broken Dhaakir’s chest like that?”

Zubair didn’t reply, which was answer enough.