The massive obsidian blast doors at the terminus of the Imperial Highway groaned on their ancient hydraulic pivots, receding into the bedrock with the shuddering groan of a dying world.
Beyond the threshold lay the Lake of Glass.
The cavern was colossal, spanning five leagues of subterranean hollow beneath the jagged roots of the Dragon’s Teeth mountains. Above their heads, the ceiling was an unbroken sheet of translucent, pale-blue glacial ice, through which the dim, silver twilight of the northern sky filtered down like ghost-light. Below lay the reservoir—a vast, frozen expanse of black water trapped over bubbling thermal vents, covered by a mile-thick crust of crystal-clear ice.
Yet the sacred beauty of the cavern had been desecrated.
In the center of the frozen lake rose the Gorgorath Spawning Spire.
A jagged, bio-organic citadel constructed of calcified bone, black chitin, and weeping pustules, the spire stretched from the lakebed straight up into the glacial ceiling. Thousands of pulsing, translucent egg-sacs hung from the underside of the ice shelf like rotten fruit, glowing with the sickly, rhythmic violet pulse of the Void-Hive.
"Look at the roots," Aurelia whispered, her hand tightening around the wire-wrapped grip of her rapier as she surveyed the horror from the elevated highway ledge.
Tendrils of necrotic matter were boring deep into the subterranean thermal vents beneath the ice. The pure water of the reservoir was turning an oily, iridescent black, thick with necrotic rot.
"They're siphoning the planetary heat to hatch the second brood," Malakor growled, stepping up beside her. His jaw was set in stone, his heavy mantle of wolf fur snapping in the freezing updraft rising from the chasm. "If those eggs drop into the thermal waters, a million void-feeders crawl out into the borderlands by the winter solstice."
"Then we don't let them hatch," Aurelia said, her sovereign crown of woven frost and starlight blazing with incandescent fury.
She turned to Legate Vael-Thur, who stood waiting with his halberd held at salute. "Deploy the twelve colossi along the rim of the shelf. Bring their thermal furnaces to maximum overpressure. When I give the signal, direct their steam cannons into the lower supports of the ice shelf, not the spire."
Vael-Thur bowed his crested helm. "Understood, My Empress. We will drop the sky on their heads."
"And what of the brood-queen?" Malakor asked, stepping into Aurelia's path. His crimson-ringed eyes locked onto hers with that fierce, unyielding intensity that always made her pulse hammer. His heavy gauntlet reached out, fingers gently tracing the hard edge of her celestial jaw piece. "You feel that pulse, don't you? There is a sovereign-tier abomination sitting in the heart of that bone tower."
Aurelia met his gaze, her hazel eyes swirling with the unified power of the Six Shards. "The Matriarch of Gorgorath. She is anchored to the World-Anchor at the base of the spire. She uses the ley-currents to keep the ice above from crushing her nest."
"Then we sever the anchor together," Malakor murmured, his thumb brushing her bottom lip in a brief, burning touch before he drew Void-Reaver. The five-foot black blade sighed with lethal hunger, its dark-matter runes igniting in answer to his bloodlust. "I tear the queen's spine from her throat. You invert the ley-well."
A slow, devastating smile curved Aurelia's lips. "A fair division of labor, my dread lord."
Below them, the twelve bronze colossi moved into position along the subterranean ledge. The colossal iron engines hissed as their core vents opened, bathing the cavern in the roar of molten bronze and superheated steam.
"Colossi—fire!" Aurelia commanded, pointing her silver rapier toward the ceiling.
Twelve blinding beams of concentrated thermal plasma and pressurized steam erupted from the brass cannons of the giants, punching directly into the frozen roots of the glacial ceiling.
The sound was apocalyptic.
The thousand-foot-thick sheet of ancient ice shrieked under the sudden thermal shock. Massive, spiderwebbing fractures raced across the frozen roof, releasing millions of tons of shattered ice and frozen rock into the cavern below. The hanging egg-sacs were torn from their perches, crushed into paste by the falling debris before they could ever hatch.
From the heart of the bone spire, a psychic scream of pure, primordial rage tore through the cavern, shattering the remaining crystal lamps along the highway.
"She’s awake!" Malakor roared over the cascading thunder of falling ice.
"Let her scream!" Aurelia cried, deploying her crystalline wings of starlight.
Side by side, the Empress of the Dawn and the Dread Lord of the Nether-Tribes plunged from the ledge, diving straight into the shattered heart of the abyss to claim the northern rim.