The warrior overcommits, momentum carrying him forward as his blade fails, and that single mistake is all I need.
I let go.
Ice rips through me from the inside out.
Bone screams as it reshapes, skin splitting under pressure that has nowhere left to go, and for a heartbeat, the pain is absolute, white, blinding, and all-consuming. Then the power surges past it, drowning sensation beneath something vast and merciless as the dragon tears free of its restraints.
My spine arches violently when wings erupt from my back, massive and glacial, the force of their emergence shattering stone and blasting frost outward in a concussive wave. I feel every inch of them unfurl, joints locking into place with thunderous finality, muscles flooding with strength that makes my human form feel like a fragile lie I once told myself.
The cold is no longer around me.
It isme.
I taste the air as my skull elongates, senses sharpening into something predatory and precise, the world snapping into brutal clarity. Heartbeats thud loud and panicked below. Magic humsand fractures while fear blooms, sharp and sudden, cutting through the battlefield like a scent trail.
I see it on their faces.
The fae closest to me freeze mid-motion, arrogance draining away as understanding crashes in. Their eyes widen, their blades falter. One warrior stumbles backward, mouth parting in a silent curse as my shadow rolls over him, vast enough to swallow the ridge whole.
This is not the dragon they imagined.
This is not fire, fury, and myth softened by distance.
This is ice given will.
I drive down hard, then launch skyward, my wings snapping open with a force that screams through the air itself. The sudden absence of my weight fractures the frozen ground beneath me, spiderweb cracks racing outward as the ridge groans in protest.
Below me, the fae scatter.
Above them, I rise.
My ice dragon takes to the sky.
From above, the battlefield unfolds with brutal clarity. Thirty-two fae warriors move like a living blade below, silver and green flashing between trees, but the advantage of height strips away illusion. I bank low, my wings clipping treetops and showering the ridge in frozen needles as my shadow rolls over them like an omen.
A burst of ice drops from my jaws, not a breath but a focused lance, freezing a cluster of fae mid-stride. They don’t fall, they lock, their bodies seized in motion before gravity claims and shatters them like broken glass.
Then I’m gone again, vanishing into the tree line, the forest swallowing my passage as I climb hard and fast, repositioning.
Below, a warrior overcommits, momentum carrying him forward, but his blade fails, and that single mistake is all Scar needs. He moves like something pulled from a nightmare givenvelocity, a blur of marble-pale skin and crimson eyes that crosses twenty feet of frozen ground in less time than it takes the fae warrior to register the threat. His hand closes around the warrior’s throat with enough force to compress cartilage, and he lifts the being off the ground with one arm while his fangs find the pulse point beneath the jaw with surgical precision. The bite is clean, efficient. Scar feeds with the focused intensity of someone who treats violence as both sustenance and craft, blood spilling dark and steaming down pale fingers as the warrior’s struggles weaken by degrees.
I sweep back in from the east, wings folding as I dive, ice crystallizing along my talons. A fae spear arcs upward toward my chest. I twist, letting it pass inches from my scales, and rake the warrior with a single claw as I pass. Ice freezes him solid from shoulder to hip before the scream can finish forming.
Behind him, Wreck unleashes. The wendigo’s form seems to expand as the battle begins, shadows gathering around his skeletal frame until he appears larger than his physical body should allow, hollow eyes locking onto the cluster of fae warriors nearest the tree line with the kind of focused hunger that makes prey freeze before the killing blow lands. A fae swordsman lunges at him, the blade driving forward with enough force to punch through supernatural flesh, and Wreck catches it between two hands without looking, the metal groaning under pressure that shouldn’t be possible from fingers that look like they’d snap under the weight of a feather.
The swordsman’s fear hits him like a physical blow. Wreck inhales, slow and deliberate, and the warrior’s composure collapses inward as if its foundations have been yanked out from under it. Confidence fractures, then dissolves entirely while the wendigo drinks straight from the source, feeding on the terror that spills from the warrior’s eyes as he’s held close enough to feel it drain away.
I rake the sky again, banking hard while frost sheds from my wings like shrapnel, peppering the ridge and turning footing treacherous.
I land briefly in the trees, clinging to bark thick as stone, and exhale. Ice floods outward, freezing trunks, branches, leaves, locking the forest into a lethal maze that cuts off retreat before I launch again.
The swordsman drops his blade, his hands shake, and Wreck lets him stumble backward, spent and hollow, a shell that will take weeks to recover anything resembling functional courage, before turning his attention to the next target with the same patient, methodical appetite.
I turn and watch as Coil strikes from the south in full basilisk form, twenty feet of bronze and black scales flowing through the undergrowth with a speed that makes a fae warrior’s reflexes look sluggish by comparison. He doesn’t announce his presence, he simply appears, scales rippling when he launches himself at a fae shieldbearer whose magical barrier flickers and flares with defensive energy meant to stop physical threats.
But it won’t stop venom.
Coil’s fangs pierce the shield at the point where magic meets flesh, bypassing the enchantment entirely, and the neurotoxin floods the warrior’s system in a single, devastating pulse. The fae staggers, shield flickering and dying as the poison corrodes the magical conduits running through his body like acid, and Coil withdraws smoothly, already targeting the next threat before the first has finished falling.
