For three full seconds after the frost wall dropped, nobody at the crater's edge moved at all.
The white had come down so fast and so total that Ardhana's guards had thrown their arms up against it out of pure animal instinct, and when the light finally bled back out of the air, what it left behind looked less like a battlefield than a held breath. Ash and rime crusted every stone within twenty paces of the crater. The soldiers who had drawn back at Ardhana's signal now stood frozen in a different way, staring at three shapes half buried in drifted frost at the crater's lip, none of them moving.
"Go," Ardhana said, and it came out cracked, nothing like a king's voice at all. "Go now."
