Most people fear me. They should. I’ve given them plenty of reasons over the centuries.
She doesn’t. And that’s either admirable or idiotic, and I haven’t decided which yet.
“The Arbiter’s magic shifts near the eastern gate.” Her voice cuts through my thoughts. “The Arbiter entered through there. We should?—”
She stops. I stop a half-second later, my attention already sweeping the street ahead.
The ice is wrong.
Not the buildings coated in crystalline punishment. The street itself. The ice coating the cobblestones has begun to ripple, undulating in slow waves that catch the fading light.
I’ve seen this before—moments before everything went to hell.
The ripples accelerate. Ice flows upward in defiance of gravity, coalescing into shapes that mock the human form. Too smooth. Too symmetrical. Wrong in ways that crawl beneath the skin.
Ice Sentinels. The Arbiter’s first wave.
Six of them rise from the street. Seven feet tall, humanoid but hollow, their features suggested rather than formed. No eyes, but I feel their attention lock onto me like crosshairs finding a target. Weapons crystallize in their hands—swords, axes, spears, each one forged from the same divine ice that entombs this city.
My dragon rises to meet them. Not fully—I keep that transformation in reserve—but enough that I feel it pressing against my skin, eager to destroy. Eager to claim.
Threats,it identifies.Eliminate.
For once, we’re in complete agreement.
They don’t speak. Their existence is statement enough:You’re noticed. You’re hunted. You will comply.
I won’t.
The first one charges.
I release the power I’ve spent years compressing—it expands outward like a held breath finally let go. The Sentinel’s magic stutters. It swings its ice-blade at my head.
I duck under the strike, and my hand changes.
Scales ripple across my knuckles, obsidian-black and harder than steel. Claws extend from my fingertips—not a fulltransformation, not yet, but enough. I drive my fist into the Sentinel’s torso with the full weight of what I am behind it.
Ice shatters. The Sentinel splits—but doesn’t fall. Divine magic flows through it, trying to reform the damage, trying to force a single outcome: my death.
I refuse.
My power pushes against the divine magic. The reformation stalls. In that heartbeat of hesitation, I strike again—claws tearing through divine ice like it’s rotten wood.
The sentinel explodes into fragments that scatter across the frozen street.
It doesn’t reform. Can’t. I interrupted the magic mid-cast, denied it the resolution it needed to rebuild. The shards lie still, ordinary ice now, stripped of divine purpose.
One down. Five more circling.
The sentinels attack in unison.
They coordinate—each one knows what the others know, sees what the others see. They move as a single organism with six bodies, flanking me, trying to separate me from the witch at my back.
No.
The word echoes through my mind, and suddenly strategy falls away. Something primal and vicious that doesn’t care about logic or self-preservation.
My dragon surges forward in my mind, demanding control. Demanding I shift fully and tear these things apart. I hold it back—barely. Full transformation in a city street would draw too much attention, waste too much energy.
