The wind across the Silver Torrent grew bitter, tasting of ancient frost and glacial slate.
Aurelia dismounted from the black mare, stepping to the water’s edge where the gray-green current gnawed violently at the limestone riverbank. Twenty paces behind her, twelve thousand northern veterans stood in absolute, iron-clad silence, their spears upright, their shield-bosses blackened with wood soot.
Across the wide expanse of rushing water, the trumpets of Val-Mora brayed their arrogant challenge from the eastern palisade.
"Archers, ready the incendiary quarrels!" shouted the ducal captains from the far bank, their thirty batteries of scorpion ballistas swiveling toward the bridgehead. "Burn the northern savages the moment their boots touch the stone!"
Aurelia did not step onto the Arch of Twelve Crowns.
She walked straight to the water's edge, sinking her knees into the freezing mud. She unbuckled her twin daggers, laying the horn hilts beside her, and pressed both bare palms flat against the churning surface of the river.
The silver glyphs etched across her skin flared into incandescent, blinding life.
The Veil beneath the riverbed woke with an earth-shaking shudder.
Deep beneath the glacial gravel, the ancestral leylines that fed the mountain springs answered her call, vibrating through the silver tether bound to her heart. The churning gray-green torrent paused—its frantic downward rush arresting in a single, impossible heartbeat—before violently reversing its current.
A deafening roar, like the cracking of a mountain’s spine, rolled up from the riverbed.
The water did not splash; it crystallized.
A wave of absolute-zero abyssal frost exploded outward from beneath Aurelia's palms, racing across the quarter-league river in three seconds. The rushing glacial torrent froze solid into a colossal, three-foot-thick sheet of milky-white, diamond-hard ice that bridged the entire river basin from bank to bank, burying the timber palisades and spiked stakes of the eastern defenses under forty thousand tons of frozen water.
The scorpion ballistas of Val-Mora shattered under the expanding frost, their iron springs snapping like dry twigs.
The arrogance died in the throats of the twenty thousand cavalrymen. Across the eastern plain, horses screamed in terror as the sudden, bone-chilling mist rolled over their lines, their riders staring in horror at the frozen expanse where an impassable river had flowed moments before.
Aurelia rose slowly to her feet, her chest heaving, the silver light in her eyes burning with pure, unyielding majesty.
Behind her, a heavy, familiar presence closed the distance.
Malakor’s large hands caught her waist, lifting her effortlessly from the frozen mud, pulling her back against the scorching furnace of his chest armor. He buried his face in the crook of her neck for a single, stolen breath, drinking in the scent of frost and raw power that radiated from her skin.
"Magnificent," he growled against her ear, his deep voice thick with awe, hunger, and savage triumph.
His hand slid around to rest flat against her stomach, the sovereign fire of his blood surging into her veins to replenish the energy she had poured into the riverbed. The warmth chased away the bitter chill in an instant, setting her pulse racing in delirious resonance with his.
Aurelia tilted her head back, her fingers curling over his wrist, her lips curving into a breathless, lethal smile. "The bridge is yours, my King."
Malakor drew his great sword from his shoulder.
The dark meteoric steel ignited with a blinding column of sovereign golden fire that reached twenty feet into the gray sky, turning the mist over the ice into swirling ribbons of molten gold and quicksilver.
He wheeled toward the twelve thousand waiting northern spears.
"Cavalry, form the wedge!" Malakor’s voice boomed across the river valley, carrying the terrifying authority of an apex sovereign. "Cross the ice! Tear the Archduke's banners from the dirt!"
With a synchronized, deafening roar, the Northern Vanguard surged onto the frozen river.
Malakor vaulted into the saddle of the great roan, hauling Aurelia up behind him with one arm, and spurred the warhorse onto the ice, leading the charge straight into the heart of the eastern empire.