The Scarlet Talon cohort was a weapon of pure aggression, and its first swing at Frostveil Spire was exactly as Koronos had predicted: a glorious, suicidal charge up the main glacier approach. Bergian ballistae, hidden in ice caves, turned the shining charge into a slaughter of crimson and steam on the blue-white ice. The Talon's survivors fell back, their rage now directed as much at their new Blue commander as at the enemy.
Koronos let them rage. Then, as dusk bled into the endless twilight of the high peaks, he unveiled his plan. It was not a plan of honor, but of predation.
The Red officers scoffed at the "human tricks." A night raid? Using the pantera as a scout? Sending the "jungle boy" to slither through crevasses? This was not war; it was assassination.
Koronos walked up to the officer and said, 'Let me explain it better,' and headbutted him in the face, knocking him unconscious and sprawling backwards onto the ground. The debate was over.
Shelove's telepathic impressions through the Bond, pressed into Koronos's mind, mapped the sentry posts on the lower cliffs. Daggeroth, moving with a spectral silence that unnerved even the Reds, slipped into those posts and left the guards dead with slit throats, their alarm horns frozen in their hands. Under cover of this new silence, a Talon assault team scaled the "unclimbable" eastern rock face, not to attack, but to secure a ledge. At dawn, when the Bergians manning the outer curtain wall turned to face the expected second frontal charge from below, the Talons on the ledge attacked from above and behind.
It was not a battle. It was a butcher's strike. The outer wall fell in a storm of confusion and blood.
Corvannafax was the tip of that bloody spear. When the Talons hesitated at the base of the main wall, unnerved by the boiling oil and arrows, she did not shout a warcry. She found a crack in the mortar, a protruding stone, and began to climb. She moved like a spider, her crystal sword strapped to her back, her fingers finding purchase where none existed. Arrows clattered around her. A pot of oil shattered against the wall below, splashing her legs with searing heat: her leathers offered some protection. She didn't falter.
She reached the battlement as a Bergian soldier leaned over to hurl a rock. She grabbed his wrist, pulled him over the edge, and used his falling body as a springboard to vault onto the walkway. Then, she was among them.
She became a red demon on the battlements. Her sword was a blur of crystal and frost, shearing through pikes, shields, and flesh. She fought not with the broad, powerful strokes of the Red Malataks, but with the efficient, lethal economy of a hunter who has fought for every scrap of survival. She used the enemy's numbers against them, herding them into each other, using their corpses as shields. To the watching Talons below, she was a figure from a mythic tapestry; a primal fury of their kind unleashed. But as they swarmed up the ladders to join her, she heard the warrior just below her, his face splattered with Bergian blood, snarl to his comrade below him, "See how she twists and darts? She fights like a Blue, clever and cowardly. Why are we even following her? We should just pull her off the ladder and be rid of her."
The words struck deeper than any blade. So, she responded in the only language the soldiers would understand: the next large rock hurtled at her from above, she dodged aside, the mouthy soldier below her didn't and had his face and head crushed. He fell to the ground below as a bloody, pulpy meat sack. She says, "I guess he should have twisted and darted more, talked less." No other Red soldier said any snide remarks. Her transcendent fury curdled into a cold, hard knot in her stomach. She cut down the last defender on the wall section, her breath pluming in the frozen air, and felt no triumph. Only a profound isolation and internal, hot fury.
Higher up, in the labyrinth of glacier passes that fed the fortress's rear postern gate, Daggeroth moved like a ghost. His task was Koronos's command: "Sever the head. Find their officers." He was a shadow against the blue ice, his Samiran arrows blackened with soot, bow in one hand, knife in the other.
He found a Bergian captain in a secluded ice cave, relaying orders via a speaking tube to the walls below. The man was older, his face lined with exhaustion, his blue skin pale with cold. Daggeroth killed him from behind, a single, merciful thrust up into the brain.
As the man slumped, something slipped from beneath his breastplate and clattered on the ice. A locket, on a simple chain. Driven by an impulse he didn't understand, Daggeroth picked it up. The metal was warm from the captain's skin. He pried it open.
Inside was a tiny, hand-painted portrait. A Bergian female, smiling softly. Two children, their skin a lighter azure, looking solemnly at the artist. A family.
The deep cold that had lived in Daggeroth's chest since the Nightlands dungeon, the cold the old woman in Oceanus had named, cracked. Not with warmth, but with a devastating clarity. This was not a monster. This was a soldier, far from home, fighting for a patch of ice, with a picture of his family over his heart. "He should have stayed home," Daggeroth thought, "instead of dying for a stupid rock and a blue emperor that's already dead."
Daggeroth didn't weep. He closed the locket gently and placed it back on the dead man's chest. He stood, sheathed his knife, and looked out at the battlefield below, at the tiny, ant-like figures killing each other for a mountain of rock and ice.
His next kill, minutes later, was not stealthy. It was direct. A Bergian lieutenant rallying a squad at a broken gate. Daggeroth walked into the open, loosed an arrow that took the lieutenant in the throat, and vanished into the resulting chaos before the squad could react. The killing was no longer a reflex of trauma. It was precise, purposeful. A terrible calculus: End this battle faster. Stop the cold from spreading to more fool's lockets.
By nightfall of the third day, the outer defenses were a shattered mess. The main gates of Frostveil's lower bailey were shattered by a Red ram, but the killing zone beyond was a chokepoint of death. Another direct assault would bleed the Talons white.
Koronos gave a new order. "They watch the gate. They watch the walls. They will not watch the midden chute."
A team of the leanest, meanest Talons, those who could stomach the filth and the shame of it, followed Corvannafax as she clawed her way up a frozen waterfall of waste that spilled from the fortress's underbelly. They emerged, reeking and furious, inside the lower bailey itself, behind the Bergian barricades. Corvannafax's signal, a single, ululating Kazar cry, was the trigger.
The final push was a symphony of violence. But to Corvannafax, conducting her part from within the storm, it felt empty. She looked at the Red warriors fighting with renewed, brutal frenzy, but they were following Koronos's plan, his timing, his feints. She was the weapon he had aimed. Even here, at the heart of a people who shared her blood and her fire, she was a tool in another's hand. The ultimate outsider.
Dawn of the fourth day broke over the conquered lower bailey. The air was still, thick with the metallic smell of blood and the sharp scent of broken ice. The central keep, Frostveil Spire proper, loomed above them, a finger of black stone clawing at the reddening sky.
Koronos found Corvannafax at a frozen horse trough, cleaning her sword. She scrubbed at the Bergian blood with a handful of snow, her movements mechanical, her gaze distant, fixed on nothing.
"This victory will open the path home," Koronos said, standing beside her.
She looked up, not at him, but at a Red banner someone had planted in the blood-soaked slush. It snapped and writhed in the glacial wind. "Home," she repeated, the word ash in her mouth.
Home. A word for a place that accepts you. She was spawned from the union of a human and a Northern Kazarian, a rare mix where the offspring takes after one parent or the other. She looked Kazarian. Her siblings looked human. Their family had been outcasts among outcasts, which was why they had fled to the Realm of Koronos: a blue king ruling over humans, seeking, and never quite finding, a place to belong. She had left one exile for another, and now stood in a third, fighting for a fourth.
She sheathed her clean sword. The crystal felt cold against her back. The keep awaited. The path home demanded one more conquest. She would see it done. But the ashes in her mouth told her that no doorway, no matter where it led, would ever open onto a place called home.