“Stay with me.”My hands frame her face, forcing her to look at me.“Don’t let it in.”
“It’s not trying to get in.”Her voice is raw, strained.“It’s trying to getout.”
The darkness surges.
And the Khorvath rises.
It doesn’t climb or emerge, it simplyis, manifesting in the space between heartbeats.One moment there’s nothing but cold and darkness, the next there’s a shape that hurts to look at directly.
Towering thirty feet tall at least, it’s hard to tell because its edges keep shifting, refusing to hold one form.Black ice makes up its body, constantly freezing and shattering and reforming.Snow swirls through it, around it,ofit.And its eyes—
God, its eyes.
Pits of absolute nothing.Not darkness, not shadow, butabsence.Places where light goes to die, where hope turns to ash, where everything ends.
The Khorvath.
The ice-devourer.The thing that’s been hunting Tessa since before she was born.
It regards us with those terrible eyes, and when it speaks, the voice comes from everywhere and nowhere.From the wind and the snow and the frozen ground beneath our feet.
“At last.”
The words carry weight that drive me to my knees beside Tessa.Around the circle, I see brothers faltering, even Blade in his massive bear form staggers under the pressure of the voice.
Prophet alone stands steady, divine light blazing brighter as he fights to continue the ritual.
“The warden comes to me willingly.The seal breaks.My prison opens.”
“No.”Tessa’s voice is barely a whisper, but it carries through the sudden silence.“I’m not here willingly.I’m here to end you.”
The Khorvath laughs.
The sound is avalanche and cracking ice and the screams of everyone who’s ever frozen to death.It rolls across the circle, and where it touches, reality bends.Snow falls upward.The air crystallizes into geometric patterns that shouldn’t exist.Time stutters, skipping forward and back in nauseating jumps.
“End me?Little Warden, I am ending.I am the cold that kills, the ice that preserves.I am what comes when all things cease.”
It shifts, and suddenly there is more of it, copies, or maybe just different aspects of the same impossible being.One towers over Tessa and me.Another looms behind Prophet.A third manifests at the circle’s edge, reaching toward the fighting brothers.
“But I am not without mercy.I offer bargains.Deals.Choices.”
The aspect near Prophet solidifies, taking on almost-human features.Beautiful in the way that frozen corpses are beautiful, perfectly still and dead.
“Angel,” it says, and Prophet flinches.“You serve a God who cast you down, who placed you in this frozen waste to watch and to wait and never act.I offer you purpose.Power.The ability to change this world rather than merely observe it.”
“My purpose is service.”Prophet’s voice shakes, but his chanting doesn’t stop.“My power is faith.And I serve by standing against you.”
“Then suffer in your service.”
The Khorvath gestures, and Prophet screams.
Ice forms inside him, I can see it through his skin, crystallizing his blood, freezing his organs.He drops to his knees, the ritual faltering as agony tears through him.
“Prophet!”Blade charges toward him, but another aspect of the Khorvath blocks his path.
“Brother-King, Protector of the Frozen North.You fight to hold your territory, to keep your makeshift family safe.But how many must die before you admit defeat?”
Images flicker in the air around Blade, Kyler’s death replayed in brutal detail, Hannah crying over his body, the clubhouse burning, brothers falling one by one.
