Colsar swallowed hard, the taste of blood thick on his tongue.
The injuries she had suffered were severe. It was possible the child had not survived.
But if it had…
The thought struck him with sudden, aching clarity. A small child running across the grass, chasing him with clumsy determination. Asharin laughing somewhere nearby, icing on her hands from the ridiculous strawberry cakes she loved so much.
He imagined climbing into bed at night after putting the child to sleep, listening while Asharin pretended to complain that she would have to endure another night of his snoring.
He still insisted he did not snore.
The image lingered only a moment before reality returned.
The dead closed in. Alarna’s wards shimmered in the distance. His body was already failing.
Colsar drew a slow breath and looked toward Alarna one last time.
Most of his life had been empty. No real friends. Parents who barely tolerated him. A lifetime of wars, battles, and endless loneliness.
If he was going to die…
Perhaps it was fitting that it would happen while chasing the one moment of happiness he had ever found. He wished briefly that he had something to leave behind. A jewel. A ring. Anything Asharin might one day find and know that he had come for her.
But there was no time for that.
Colsar bared his teeth. “Well,” he muttered to himself.
“Fuck it.”
Then he ran.
Snow burst beneath Colsar’s claws as he drove himself forward across the narrow stretch of frozen ground that led toward Alarna, the ice cracking and scattering beneath the force of his stride. The dead surged to meet him almost immediately, their rotting bodies spilling across the white expanse like a tide that had forgotten how to retreat.
The first corpse reached for him with stiff, grasping hands, but it never truly had a chance. Colsar struck it with the full weight of his body, his jaws closing around its skull with a sharp crack that echoed over the frozen water. Bone splintered between his teeth as he flung the ruined body aside and continued forward, the momentum of his charge carrying him deeper into the swarm.
More came at once.
They rushed him in waves, clawing and snapping, their ruined limbs tangling together as they fought to drag him down. Colsar tore through them without slowing, his claws raking through brittle ribs and decaying flesh while his massive body cut a violent path through the center of the horde. One corpse hurled itself toward his throat while another clung to his flank, its teeth sinking into muscle that had already been torn open more times than he cared to remember.
He twisted violently, rolling across the ice to crush them beneath his weight before surging upright again, snow and blood scattering around him in crimson streaks.
The wards shimmered ahead, closer now, though they still felt impossibly far away. The dead closed around him in a suffocating wall of grasping hands and snapping jaws, their numbers thick enough to blot out the path ahead. Colsar’s roar tore across the frozen sea, raw with exhaustion and fury.
Flame burst from his throat.
Fire rolled outward in a blazing arc that swept across the ice, catching the nearest corpses and turning them instantly into shrieking torches. The air filled with the bitter stench of burning rot as their bodies collapsed, blackened bones snapping beneath his claws while he ran straight through the wreckage.
The fire did not stop them. They kept coming. One corpse clamped its teeth into his hind leg and wrenched him sideways across the ice while another hauled itself onto his back, its clawed fingers digging blindly at his wings. Teeth sank into his shoulder, his flank, the torn muscle of his abdomen where the wound had never truly closed.
Pain flared through him bright enough to turn the edges of the world white. Colsar forced himself forward anyway. Snow and blood sprayed beneath him as he fought through the swarm, sometimes dodging the lunging bodies that reached for him, sometimes simply tearing them apart when there was no room left to maneuver. At one point their weight finally dragged him down completely, the mass of rotting flesh collapsing over him as dozens of clawing hands reached toward his throat.
For a terrible instant the sky vanished.
Cold bodies pressed in from every side, their weight suffocating, their teeth snapping inches from his face.
Then rage tore through him. With a roar that seemed to shake the frozen sea itself, Colsar heaved upward, throwing the corpses from his back as he surged to his feet once more. The wards stood close now. He could see them clearly at last, a towering wall of pale light stretching across the narrow bridge that led into the city. Their glow shimmered against the falling snow, ancient power humming through the barrier like a living thing.
Only a few dozen strides remained, but the dead were thickest there. A shadow cut through the storm. It dropped out of the clouds fast and without warning, one moment nothing but gray sky and snow, the next a violent rush of red and black tearing downward. The wind twisted in its wake, the mist ripping apart as something vast struck the horde ahead of him.
