Her horse shrieked again, and Ana reached for her dagger. “Steady,” she murmured. She spoke as much to herself as she did to her valkryf, gripping the reins tightly to stop her hands from shaking.
Two pinpricks of light appeared ahead—a sickly, pale blue, the color of the dead. They moved too steadily to be torches or anything human.
Wind gusted past her in a howl, and the childhood stories and rumors of creatures that haunted the distant mountains of her empire swept through her mind. Too late, Ana realized what it was—and that her dagger held not even a modicum of use against this type of creature.
An icewolf stepped through the snow.
It towered over her valkryf, carved wholly of ice, its weathered body veined through with frost, fangs of icicles longer than her forearms. Most terrible were its eyes: corpse white and dotted with a tiny blue pupil.
Her valkryf was thrashing desperately against her reins as it retreated. Yet Ana was shaking so hard that she couldn’t move, the muscles in her legs gone soft.
They’d encountered ice spirits before, she and May: harmless syvint’sya that took the form of wild animals and small snow flurries. But there were other places in the world where the gentle magic of the Deities’ Lights turned into malignant spirits that prowled deep within the Syvern Taiga and frozen tundras of Cyrilia. The icewolf was one of them.
The myths said that the only way to defeat an icewolf was to kill the syvint’sya at its core: the pinpricks of glowing blue light in its eyes. The easiest way was by fire.
Ana’s fingers were cold as she rummaged around her pack. She’d run out of globefires; she’d rationed them out over the past few days, and she’d calculated for today to be her final travel day.
No fire. Blade it was, then.
The dagger felt heavy in her hands. Her grip was unsteady even as she raised her hand, the wind pounding at her. In this weather, chances of her aim sticking were slim to none. And her Affinity was useless against a spirit of ice and snow.
But, Ana thought suddenly, therewasa way for her to combine blood and dagger.
She angled her knife toward her own thumb and slashed. Blood began to run; she ran the tip of her finger over the blade, leaving a trail of red that immediately froze over the metal. Her Affinity stirred, the crimson seeming to glow brighter as her power latched on.
A snarl distracted her; she snapped her gaze up. The icewolf watched her with eyes that emitted an untamed and utterly wild light.
Without warning, it sprang.
Ana lobbed her dagger and flung out her Affinity. She closed her Affinity’s grip over the blood on the blade. Focusing on the icewolf’s eerie blue eyes, she pushed.
Her dagger hurtled forward. Its aim was true.
The icewolf twisted in midair and uttered an unearthly scream. When it turned its gaze to Ana again, the hilt of the dagger protruded from one of its eyes. The light had flickered out. Blood dripped from the socket.
Its other eye, though, still blazed blue.
Ana swore as the ice spirit’s growl blasted through the trees around them. Blood—she needed blood—
Her valkryf screamed, and Ana’s world tipped sharply off-balance as her horse bucked her off.
She slammed into the snow and lay there for a moment, stunned and winded. She felt the thumping of paws on the ground as the icewolf broke into a run toward her; heard its snarls, growing closer. The forest around her grew blindingly white. Snow and ice lashed at her from all directions. Frost pressed up her clothes, her shoulders, her neck.
Ana lifted a hand. Her vision blurred; her Affinity wove in and out of her focus as she grappled at the blood that clung to her thumb and wrist in frozen spirals. There wouldn’t be enough for her to make it into any semblance of a weapon to fight with. And she had run out of time.
The icewolf pounced.
Ana screamed.
And the night exploded in fire.
Flames, bright red and searing orange, swept through the snows, arcing triumphantly against the shadows of the frozen pines all around. Ana closed her eyes against the piercing brightness, pressing her face to the ground as powerful waves of heat tided over her. The mountains shook from the impact.
Through the roar of flames, she heard an eerie screaming sound, half-animal and half-phantasmal, followed by the hissing of water tossed into fire.
Ana twisted to look.
Against the night sky, flames coiled serpentine around what was left of the icewolf. The vapor around it was so thick that Ana could only see a shadow of the beast, its howls fading into ghostly moans and, finally, nothing at all.
