The thunder of five thousand iron-shod warhorses striking the frozen expanse of the Black Mere echoed like rolling artillery across the lowlands. Where deep, treacherous bogs had drowned armies for generations, the Vanguard charged across an unyielding plain of diamond-hard glacial ice, completely unobstructed.
Aurelia rode her own mount now, positioned half a stride behind Malakor’s right flank. The silver glow of the unified core still pulsed through her veins, but the exhaustion that had threatened to drop her at the bluffs had receded, transformed by the sheer adrenaline of the charge.
Ahead, the forward defenses of House Mor-Venn were in utter disarray.
Lady Vespera’s skirmishers—accustomed to fighting from light skiffs and ambushing wading infantry from the reed-beds—found their boats trapped in ice, their oars useless against the solid permafrost. The water-callers atop the wooden reed-towers screamed incantations, desperately attempting to melt the ice beneath the charging cavalry, but Aurelia’s celestial frost, anchored by the ancient core, was an absolute zero that mortal fire-weaving could not even scratch.
"Ballistas, fire!" General Kaelen’s command rolled across the vanguard.
Mounted upon wide timber sledges, the heavy siege engines loosed four-foot bolts of forged black iron. The projectiles screamed through the cold air, smashing through the stilts of the wooden watchtowers with concussive force. Timber, reed thatch, and screaming archers crashed onto the frozen mere, shattered into kindling against the icy floor.
Then, the ice beneath them groaned.
A profound, sickening vibration tore through the glacial sheet, vibrating through the hooves of the warhorses.
"Halt the advance!" Malakor roared, raising his black great sword.
The front cohorts dragged their mounts to a skidding halt on the frosted surface.
A hundred yards ahead, where the frozen causeway intersected the deep channel of the Serpent’s Eye, the ice began to bulge upward. A colossal fracture spiderwebbed across the cerulean sheet, followed by a deafening roar that shook the very limestone foundations of the valley.
With an explosion of shattered ice boulders that sprayed fifty yards in every direction, a leviathan breached the surface.
It was the Hydra of Mor-Venn—a gargantuan, amphibious beast revered as a living god by the marsh clans. Its serpentine body was eighty feet of mottled green-and-black scales, slick with toxic slime, and from its massive torso branched four fanged heads, each crowned with curved horns of calcified bone. Its yellow, slit-pupiled eyes burned with ancient malice, and from its dripping maws hissed clouds of green, flesh-melting venom.
"Scatter the cohorts!" Kaelen barked, his veterans frantically wheeling their mounts away from the boiling clouds of corrosive bile.
The hydra’s left head lunged, its massive jaws snapping shut over three mounted spearmen, crunching armor and bone with sickening ease before tossing the crushed remnants aside. Its right head reared back, preparing to vomit a river of acid directly into the center of the Vanguard’s vanguard.
"Aurelia, freeze the joints!" Malakor shouted, his voice dropping into that terrifying, lethal cadence that signaled the unchaining of his full wrath. "Leave the skulls to me!"
"Done!" Aurelia cried.
She vaulted from her saddle, landing lightly upon the slick ice. Channeling the unified core, she drove her twin star-iron daggers into the frozen ground.
Two lances of pure azure ether shot along the surface of the ice like bolts of lightning, racing straight into the hydra’s lower flank. The sub-zero ether climbed the beast's thick, armored limbs, flash-freezing the toxic slime coating its scales into a thick, immobilizing crust of permafrost. The monster roared in fury as its lower torso was locked to the glacial sheet, its mobility violently stripped away.
With the beast anchored, Malakor launched himself into the air.
He gathered the abyssal fire coiled in his chest, allowing the black and crimson flames to completely envelop his body. He ascended forty feet in a single, explosive leap powered by dark ether, his great sword trailing an arc of apocalyptic flame that illuminated the gray sky like an exploding star.
The hydra’s center head snapped toward him, jaws wide enough to swallow a wagon whole.
Malakor met the maw in mid-air.
With a roar that silenced the battlefield, he drove the black blade straight down through the roof of the beast's skull, driving six feet of runed steel into its brain. The superheated abyssal fire detonated inside the creature’s cranial cavity, incinerating its flesh from the inside out and blowing out its eyes in twin plumes of black smoke.
As the dead head collapsed, Malakor rode the falling neck down, ripping his blade free and spinning in mid-descent. His great sword cleaved horizontally, severing the neck of the second head in a torrential spray of black, steaming blood.
The two remaining heads shrieked in agony, their fangs whipping around to flank him from behind.
Before they could strike, Aurelia was there.
She vaulted off a chunk of broken ice, her silhouette framed against the falling snow. In her hands, two spears of pure crystalline frost materialized from thin air. With deadly precision, she hurled them like javelins.
The frost-spears pierced the eyes of both remaining heads simultaneously, the celestial cold detonating upon impact, freezing their brains into solid blocks of ice that shattered under their own thrashing weight.
The gargantuan corpse of the hydra collapsed onto the frozen mere with a bone-rattling crash, crushing its own frozen lower body beneath its immense bulk.
Silence fell across the marsh, save for the crackle of Malakor’s fading abyssal fire and the steady, heavy breathing of the Vanguard.
Malakor stood atop the monster’s severed neck, his chest heaving, his plate spattered with black ichor and steaming blood. He lowered his great sword, his crimson eyes scanning the battlefield until they found Aurelia standing twenty paces away, her daggers still smoking with azure ether.
A dark, feral smile broke across his rugged features. He leaped down from the beast's corpse, his heavy boots crunching against the ice as he strode toward her.
He didn't care about the blood on his armor or the thousands of eyes watching from the ranks. He reached out, his iron gauntlet wrapping firmly around her waist, hauling her violently against his chest in a fierce, possessive grip that drove the breath from her lungs.
"You took their god's eyes before he could even blink," Malakor growled against her lips, his voice thick with raw, untamed hunger.
Aurelia tilted her head back, her hands gripping his armored shoulders, her azure-and-silver eyes alight with the intoxicating thrill of their victory.
"I couldn't let you have all the glory, my lord," she whispered, her lips parting as his mouth crashed down upon hers in a hard, bruising kiss that tasted of iron, snow, and savage triumph.
He kissed her until her knees softened against his plate, claiming her mouth with fierce, uncontested ownership before slowly pulling back, his dark eyes blazing with dark fire.
He turned toward the horizon, where the distant, fortified spires of Vespera’s palace loomed over the frozen reeds.
"The gate is clear," Malakor declared, raising his blood-soaked blade to his waiting army. "To the keep! Let Lady Vespera surrender what remains of her realm!"