Piotr awoke in his home with a jerk. He shot out of bed and hurriedly looked around before realizing that he was, at long last, Home. He woke the rest of his family with sobs of joy intermingled with jubilant laughter. He held his wife and son close to his body and took over an hour to let go, much to the confusion of his family.

“Katia, my Katia! I’m home, at long last! Oh, the stories I have to tell you!”

As the family sat down, Piotr began to regale his wife and his son the tales of his adventures and actions on Mortis, but fifty minutes into his retelling of his legend the sound of explosions rocked his home. As Piotr scrambled to his feet and by instinct alone tried to draw his non-existent blade, a single artillery shell exploded nearby, and the force unleashed by the explosive shattered one of the walls in the wooden home he and his family dwelled in. As the dust settled and Piotr stumbled to his feet, he saw that his son had been killed almost instantly by a piece of the shell’s shrapnel. His wife lay beside Dimitri, her body punctured in many vital areas by large splinters of wood that rendered her unable to live for more than a few more seconds.

“No. No no no. Nononononono! WHY?! What damned fucker is responsible for this…?”

As Piotr turned around in a rage, he saw the oncoming blitzkrieg that was the opening moments of Operation Barbarossa. While the rage he felt was preventing him from running, it also stopped him from thinking clearly. Grapping a kitchen knife and rushing towards the German offensive with no regard for his own safety, he soon reached a German squad that had entered his village after the artillery barrage had ended.

He cut, and he cut, and he cut, and he stabbed, and he stabbed, and he stabbed, with no rhyme or reason and no concern over the growing number of wounds that he was accumulating. As the red haze lifted from his eyes, a cold and deathly chill washed over him. He looked at his body in the reflection of a shattered mirror and saw a man whose body had been shot and cut many times and whose skin and clothes were dyed red by the blood of his family and foes.

“Why…?”

His voice was faint enough to be called a whisper and his body was too weak to support itself. He fell to his knees as tears rolled down his face. He had only just been reunited with his family, and now he was alone yet again. He found his last thoughts turning to the faith his long-dead mother practiced and, for the first time in his adult life, he called out to whatever God would listen and begged to be sent to the place that his family ended up. He pleaded in his mind and swore that whatever being allowed him to reunite with his loved ones would have his eternal loyalty and his soul.

A shock swept through his broken body, animating the now near-dead Russian as he lay in the ruins of his home. A force both great and terrible seemed to worm its way into every fiber of his being and commanded him to rise to his feet. Around his body the temperature dipped down to freezing and then fell further as the bodies of his friends, family and foes began to frost over. Piotr gulped in a large breath that seemed to somehow fill his punctured lungs and his eyes began to glow an unearthly shade of red, his strength returned, and an overwhelming urge ruled his mind.

“KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL EVERYTHING THAT IS IN YOUR WAY!”

The voices inside of his head screamed at him to rend the flesh from any human that was nearby. They screamed at him to murder any human he found, man, woman and child alike.

“I will… kill! I serve…. Kain! DEATH! COMES! FOR! ALL!”

…

Over the next few days, the Wehrmacht was put on edge due to the actions of a single Soviet citizen. Given the moniker ‘The Frozen Juggernaut’ by the high command, the being that Piotr had become had carved a bloody swathe through every German formation he came across. It seemed as through all the bullets in the world could not kill him, and even when he was set alight by 3 flamethrowers he still pushed on towards the German heartland, slaughtering everyone in his wake. His mad laughter and seemingly unkillable nature led the High Command of the Wehrmacht to use a desperate strategy.

Piotr was lured into a bunker filled with German civilians. Chained up and gagged, the civilians were political prisoners, homosexuals and other people that the Nazis viewed as ‘undesirable’. Inside the bunker with them was over 57 metric tons of high explosives and 100 gallons of petrol. In his mindless undeath-induced fury, Piotr entered into the bunker and the door behind him was sealed shut. The clockwork mechanism tied to the door sprung into action and the stockpile of fuel and explosives detonated with an earth shattering kaboom.

All records of the ‘Frozen Juggernaut’ were burned after his confirmed ‘death’. Lips were sealed by any means necessary and the site of the bunker where Piotr died a third time was lost to history, with the remaining pieces of reinforced concrete and steel rebar having been turned to scrap and other materials. No one ever mourned Piotr’s passing, and there are no records of his existence. The only proof he even walked the world was the testimony of those handful who managed to avoid his gaze or witnessed the aftermath. The mangled bodies that were left in his wake were given no rites and were cremated and dumped in an unmarked grave. The ice-covered towns that he left behind were removed from maps and he was erased from memory.

Piotr died for a final time on Earth merely two and a half weeks after the start of Barbarossa. He left behind nothing to prove he even lived and no one who would willingly remember him not to mention that no one who could remember him would do so fondly. The only trace he left on the world were the myths that could not be explained by anyone who investigated them.

How had so many been killed, and by who or what?

What was so terrible that the Nazis erased entire towns from records to keep it hidden?

Why had entire parts of the Reich frozen over when winter was so far away, and the weather was not anywhere near bad enough to do so?

These were mysteries that would remain unsolved for decades, and only due to a miraculous and some might say apocalyptic event later down the line would the truth be revealed. But that is a story for another day.

…

The soul of Piotr tumbled from Earth back into Mortis and his eyes opened once again. This time he had no eyeballs or eyelids, only shadow-filled, hollow sockets in which small crimson flames burned with an unsettling and ominous glow. Clad in his old armor that had been repaired and then corrupted by Kain’s power and gripping his massive great sword that now seemed to chill the souls of all nearby, Piotr arose from death into the service of the Abominable King as a type of undead that struck fear into even the most hardened ‘Corpse-Busters’.

Piotr had returned to Mortis as a Wight King, and now the title of ‘The Living Ice Age’ was unfit to rest upon his shoulders.

The ‘The Living Ice Age’ was gone, now there was only ‘The Herald of Heat-Death’.