The column of black comet-ice supporting Frost-Spire rose six hundred cubits above the ash-strewn snowpack of the valley. Chiseled into its sheer, glass-slick face was the Grand Ascent—a spiraling ramp of petrified frost twenty paces wide, carved without railings over a bottomless precipice that dropped straight into the yawning crevasses of the permafrost below.
At the summit of the ramp loomed the Citadel of Frost-Spire itself, its spires clawing like frozen needles into the bruised belly of the storm clouds. The pale-violet beacon of the Crown of the Void throbbed from the highest tower, casting a sickly, necrotic luminescence down the length of the spiraling ascent.
"Hold the army at the base of the pillar," Malakor commanded, planting the pommel of his great sword into the frozen gravel.
Seventeen thousand soldiers of the Vanguard formed a massive, impenetrable siege ring around the base of the mountain, their shields locked and ballistas trained upward at the cliffs. General Kaelen struck his fist against his breastplate, bowing his head in grim understanding.
"The ramp is too narrow for cohorts," Kaelen acknowledged, his breath pluming white. "If Vane triggers an avalanche from above, an entire legion would be swept into the abyss."
"He will not trigger an avalanche," Aurelia said, stepping to the edge of the ramp.
Her dark hair was drawn tight in war-braids, her starlit eyes reflecting the pale-violet beacon above with cold, predatory clarity. Beneath her dragon-scale brigandine, the three unified shards in her chest pulsed with an aggressive, rhythmic cadence, hungry for the final piece of their ancient crown.
"The ice of this pillar was forged from a fallen celestial body," Aurelia continued, her fingers grazing the glassy surface of the ramp. "It does not answer to mortal gravity. It answers to the core."
Malakor swung up beside her, his heavy war-plate radiating an intense, protective aura of abyssal heat. His crimson-flecked eyes scanned the spiraling ascent, where shadowy figures in silver-and-white plate—the surviving elite paladins of the Solar Concord’s Seraphic Cohort—stood stationed in defensive redoubts along the switchbacks.
"Then we walk the ramp alone," Malakor rumbled, his deep voice thick with quiet, lethal confidence.
He reached out, his iron gauntlet wrapping firmly around Aurelia’s waist, pulling her flush against his armored flank. His head tilted down, his stubbled jaw brushing her brow as his eyes searched hers.
"Are you ready for the final ascent, my queen?" he murmured, his thumb tracing the curve of her hip through her leather tunic. "Once we reach that summit, there are no more armies to shatter. Only the madman and his crown."
Aurelia looked up into his dark, rugged face, her lips parting in a slow, breathtaking smile that carried the promise of an empire reborn. She placed her hands against the hot steel of his breastplate, her cool fingers curling against the contours of the dragon-carved metal.
"I have walked across burning rifts and frozen seas with you, Malakor," she whispered, her voice layered with celestial majesty and raw, intimate heat. "There is no summit on this earth I would not climb at your side."
Malakor’s eyes flared with smoldering passion. He bent down, capturing her mouth in a deep, searing kiss that defied the howling mountain winds and the freezing spray of the precipice. His tongue tangled with hers in a fierce, possessive claim that left them both breathless, their combined ether—fire and starlight—swirling together in a brilliant corona of power that chased the shadows twenty paces from their boots.
When he finally pulled away, his breathing was rough, his crimson eyes alight with savage resolve.
"Let them watch us climb," Malakor growled, turning toward the ramp and drawing his abyssal great sword.
Together, side by side, they stepped onto the Grand Ascent.
The response from above was instantaneous.
From the first fortified switchback, a hundred paces above them, sixty elite Seraphic Paladins opened fire with heavy arbalests loaded with solid crystal quarrels. At the same time, the paladins channeled their stolen radiant ether into a synchronized wave of blinding solar judgment, sending a roaring cascade of white-hot light down the narrow path.
Aurelia raised her left hand, her palm open to the oncoming blast.
The three shards within her chest flared. The blinding solar light did not burn them; the moment it touched her perimeter, the celestial starlight in her veins bent the attack, refracting the deadly beams harmlessly over the precipice into the clouds below like scattered prisms. The crystal quarrels shattered against her frost-barrier, falling as harmless sand onto the path.
"My turn," Malakor snarled.
He surged forward with terrifying velocity, his boots biting into the slick ice with unnatural grip. In three explosive bounds, he bridged the gap to the redoubt.
His great sword swept in a thunderous horizontal cleave. The superheated abyssal fire along the black steel cut through the paladins' heavy shields, their breastplates, and the stone parapet behind them in a single, devastating stroke. The kinetic shockwave hurled twenty heavily armored warriors off the ledge, their screams swallowed by the bottomless fog below.
Aurelia was right behind him.
Her twin star-iron daggers flashed in arcs of azure and silver, weaving through the remaining defenders with lethal, surgical elegance. She moved like a phantom of the high winter, freezing joints, shattering weapons, and breaking conduits before the paladins could even draw their secondary blades.
Within minutes, the first redoubt was cleared, leaving the switchback silent and strewn with broken steel and melting frost.
Malakor paused at the edge of the parapet, his chest heaving, his dark plate smoking in the cold air. He didn't look down at the bodies. He turned back to Aurelia, reaching out to catch her hand, his fingers intertwining with hers in an unbreakable grip.
Above them, the final gate of Frost-Spire stood barely three hundred paces away, its massive doors carved from solid star-iron, standing ajar beneath the pulsing, malevolent glare of the Crown of the Void.
"The throne room waits," Aurelia murmured, looking up into the swirling eye of the storm.
"Then let us go claim our crown," Malakor answered, leading her up the final stretch of the ascent.