Ramses reached the top of the valley, and the slope was laid out in bone-white beneath. Dark shapes came wading forward, having to drag their clumsy, dead bodies against the depth of the snowbanks, half-buried beneath.

The dead - ancient weapons in hand, faces covered by dark rusted helms, souls chained to their bodies by dark magic.

The girl on his back steadied herself, learning to use her knees to stay braced. Lifting the blessed spear ready to strike.

He snorted. The foe was deserving and he was ready, the battlefield’s evil nature held back as the goblin’s spear stole its power, drawing it into a crackling core of lightning trapped inside the blade. The smell of rain and metal oozed from the naked edge.

The beast kicked forward, and his own weight brought him down the slope in huge strides. At first he was building speed, feeling the momentum grow with every bound as he kicked up volleys of snow, but as they reached the turning point where the slope flattened and leveled out, he was digging his legs down - snow exploding around him like a ship cutting through waves - and trying to grind out some control against the black mud underneath.

They hit the base of the valley and he took off again, the girl letting out a wild shriek of excitement and terror. The boney hollows of the enemy’s eyes glinted.

He lifted open his wide mouth and made the sky shake with his roar. Waves of holy power pushed back at the snow, at its unmelting, devouring evil. The sound swept over the dead warriors and the first in line simply shattered into a spray of ice.

The next lost an arm, the magic that kept it together crumbling and causing the bones, the withered skin to fall apart. Before it could reach down and lift its weapon up, Ramses had closed his jaws over its head. A simple twist of his neck and it was torn in two between the grip of heavy snow around its legs and his iron grasp of helm.

Armor and skull splintered as he chomped down, and he spat the fragments out.

A harpoon sailed through the air, and the girl struck it aside, sparks exploding as edge met edge. The rusted metal harpoon gave and spun down to earth in broken fragments. The crystal spear didn’t even take a scratch, but a trace of lightning carved an arc through the snow-bitten air to follow its movements.

“Nice!” She bellowed, her voice choked by the depth of cold in the valley. It was a bitter place, even with the spear’s glow to keep them warm.

Ramses groaned his agreement, and lifted up, raising a foreleg. It came crashing down to break another skeleton and grind the dead thing into the snowbank.

Together they rode forward, the spear whipping out to protect his flanks while the warriors simply caved to the direct force Ramses brought bearing down on them. They were weak, held together with failing spellwork and the lingering hatred of this valley.

But there were always more crawling towards them. Ramses bounded through the sands as a distant light passed above the trees, and his master came spiraling down.

---

The hawk’s triumph was still resonating as we fluttered down, dropping onto Shiny’s shoulders with care not to tear her flesh under our claws. The hawk’s talons were so developed that it could barely hold back its strength; human hands were made for clever works of craft, but these were gore-soaked razors with a single purpose.

Ramses was breaking the snow beneath him, and Shiny’s blade whipped through the air, lightning unfurling for a second to color the snow in with a blinding violet shade each time it made impact against one of the weak things trying to climb aboard. Some carried swords, others…

Others were clearly the people of this village. They wore ragged clothes and had no weapons to bring against us.

They were just sad. Human-shaped things that would never know either life or a quiet grave.

Our wings melted off a rain of ice-water as we entered the spear’s protection. Even those few moments outside had left our body stiff, a sore chill in our muscles, trying to reach the marrow in our bones. It sloughed off us now, the cold fading away.

We leapt off again, sailing for the ruined house.

The snow shifted.

A thing like a centipede mingled with a dragon’s blood exploded upwards. Stretched across its foremost legs - of the hundreds covering its blue-tinged body - was an enormous frill like a sail, meant to build a shallow layer of snow atop to hide the rest. It had huge, segmented eyes, and a jaw forced permanently open by the barbed tendrils of shocking crimson that pushed out from either side, like a boar’s tusks. At the front, two ‘teeth’ extended down from the chitin exoskeleton that covered its body.

A whipping tendril sliced upwards and caught us across the wing. The impact alone flicked us out of the air, into a spiral towards the earth.

But it was so much worse than that. Dozens of thin hairs pierced into our being. They were almost invisibly small but each delivered a tiny bite of poison. The whole wing went limp.

The poison snow was below us. But even before then, the serpent was rising towards us, kicking its upper body off the ground to dart through the air.

Ramses roared and the sound shook the valley. It fell back and we hit the snow, feeling instantly the way it took our life, our warmth, black stains appearing in the white where we touched it.

The hippo bounded forward, and Shiny leaned in, her spear extended across the ground. We grabbed hold and she shouted as she flung us high.

The horrible chill faded again, and we broke into the sky with faltering wingbeats still clumsy from poison. In the distance the surviving bats were closing in.

Below us, Ramses smashed headfirst against the centipede-dragon-serpent, sending it backwards onto the snow. Those horrid legs kicked as it twisted onto its belly and shot along the ground, trying to come at him from behind.

We had to ignore that. We dove through the empty window, into the ruined hut. The crow lay in a thin coating of glittering ice that spread itself across the tabletop, starting to ooze up the tips of his wings.

Our claws seized him with a delicacy that took concentration, and our wings struggled to keep us steady in the air.

As we rose again we saw the battle unfolding.

Ramses was fighting against a foe too quick for him, weighed down by the way his treetrunk legs sunk with every step. Shiny fought to hang on, spear scything at nothing, point whipping blindly about.

The serpent rose up like a tide about to capsize a ship.

Ramses kicked onto his forelegs, and Shiny pushed up, driving the speartip straight for its skull. The exoskeleton broke open in a sickly crunch, blood the color of egg yolk spilling out. Right before it died it let out a piercing thin scream.

A thread of lightning ran from the spear’s base, across the back of her knuckles, and to the crystal point.

The world exploded in violet as a true thunderbolt ripped clean through the beast’s skull, shattering it from within and exploding out in a blaze of purple-white. Individual veins of lightning reached outwards and caught at metal buried in the snow, making a seething knot where they met around the point of the spear and the serpent’s charred body. For a moment the aftershock of it hung in our eyes, seared into our retinas.

The headless corpse fell to the ground.

“Go go go!” She kicked at Ramses flank and the great beast began to turn, even as we dropped our precious cargo, that tiny bundle of still feathers, into her lap. We landed on her shoulder.

And in the distance a roar. A sound like the serpent’s scream in the way an orchestra is ‘like’ a single violin.

The keep on the mountain above simply exploded, ancient brickwork giving away as countless scuttling limbs and a body heavy with armor the color of ice pushed itself through the breach in the old walls. The mother was massive, a river made flesh born on bright red legs. Her mouth heaved out waterfalls of steam, the crimson tendrils extending forward from her jaws long enough to curl around a house and crush it with ease.

In the distance I heard the roc’s cry, and the thundering sound of its wings striking the air. Of that mountainous body lifting up.

We needed to go.

As we ran from the valley, the serpent tried to chase, but long before it made its way down the mountain the roc had arrived, its shadow sweeping over us. The great sky-tyrant came down like a storm of talons, and the serpent rose up to face it.

We heard the first impact a second after we felt it. The trees bent low and snow rained down from the collision of titanic bodies.

By the time we made it up the hill and to the valley’s lip, they were blood-stained, and wrapped by mist so only the massive silhouettes remained. Like seeing the shape of distant mountains through fog.

We kept running.