Aletheia nocked an arrow. She braced herself against a white trunk and pulled back the string; her lean arms trembled at the weight, but the enchanted Elven construction did much of the work for her, storing deceptive power within its arms.

Her fingers let slip. No sound followed but the whistling of the shaft through the air. The arrowhead shot out toward the distant Seeker just as she raised her arm to cast some spell. That spell transformed to another as she pulled a gust of mana to the side, tearing the projectile out of the air and sending it barreling into a bank of snow.

That was a manaburn interrupted, Eris was certain. They could not let up the pressure.

The Seeker bounded through the snow. She kept her head lower now and started to cast again. Aletheia nocked another arrow. Robur flanked around one side of the tree while Eris went opposite; the arcane focus brimmed with power now. Aletheia let another arrow fly in the Seeker’s direction but this time she missed and a golden twinkle of mana appeared in the Seeker’s hands as her manaburn finished, eyes still on the girl with the bow in the woods—

Eris released the energy in her arms. She leveled the staff in the Seeker’s direction and, just as in the siege of Castle Korakos, a mass of crackling energy shot outward. This time it was no slow-moving orb of annihilation, but a bolt of white fire, fast-moving lightning that zipped straight to the woman’s mail armor, mostly just the destructive release of energy and heat but intermixed with the flashing currents of Disintegrate. The flash seared Eris’ eyes as a roar cracked across the field. The Seeker was hit by a thunderbolt in the side.

Eris shook her head to clear her vision. The spell blinded her, and as sight returned she saw only the white of the winter-flecked forest. When she could finally make out shapes again the Seeker was gone.

But not from her spell. The bolt seared a path through the snow, melting feet deep everywhere around its course, and impacted dead-on, but her armor had dispelled its destructive elements. The force had hit her in the side and knocked her over, but now she was back up again, and the moment she stood a gust of wind hit Eris in the face.

The frigid air blew down her hood, caught her hair, froze her skin, and knocked her onto her back. The wind was torn from her lungs. As she coughed back upright she saw Aletheia engaging the Seeker; the girl shot one last arrow, and this time it was a hit. The shaft became lodged in the Seeker’s armor, stuck halfway through her shoulder.

But now she was upon Aletheia. She sent out a flurry of magic missiles instinctively from her fingertips, but Aletheia ducked away from some and caught the rest as she frantically drew her blade and leveled its flat in the Seeker’s direction.

With Aletheia now prone, the Seeker sent out a jet of flame from her fingers. Frost receded and snow sublimated around the girl as heat assaulted her—but she was fine, even as she looked forward in horror, staring dumbly, as a red forcefield was placed in front of her.

The flame deflected to her sides. She was unharmed. Robur intervened.

Eris had come to her senses by then. With enchanted armor there was little she could do with magic against this Seeker—a sword was the best way to defeat her, and Eris was neither a swordswoman nor in any condition to be fencing.

But she could make the Seeker vulnerable. Her helmet was mismatched and poorly fitted; Eris could use the arcane focus to tear it off her head. That would be a good start.

Meanwhile, as Eris focused on her task, the Seeker turned toward Robur—Robur, who sustained his forcefield keeping Aletheia alive. She made a gesture with her hand and he gasped—he dropped his dagger into the snow as she choked him with telekinesis, and she prepared to manaburn him while he was restrained—

But he dropped his forcefield. Aletheia jumped to her feet and drove the tip of her sword into the Seeker’s torso. The Seeker jumped back just in time, deflecting the blade with her own, and the two engaged in a duel through the snow.

Aletheia was on the retreat. Eris tried instinctively to grab at the Seeker’s arms, to restrain her with the staff, but such magic was dispelled by the armor—she could only move the helmet. So again she focused.

Aletheia was losing. She took two thrusts to the torso and survived only due to her Elven armor. She parried a cut to her neck, but the Seeker brought her blade around and nicked open Aletheia’s cheek; another clash and Aletheia was cut in the fingers; and finally again in the neck, shallow but painful, still forced backward. The girl landed hits, but she couldn’t make it through the Seeker’s armor.

Eris pulled. She gathered a large breath of mana into the staff and yanked with all the strength of her Essence at the top of the Seeker’s helmet. The strap around her chin snapped and it flew into the air, up to the canopy, before arcing back down into the snow. The Seeker yelped in surprise and pain and Aletheia tried to scramble upward to land a hit, but she was knocked back down to the ground with a spell.

Now Robur came at her from behind with his dagger. He went for her neck, but she saw his shadow and turned just in time; she slashed him upward across the chest. Blood poured from the cut down his winter furs. He stumbled backward, then collapsed.

Eris prepared another spell. Not as powerful, but she wouldn’t need it to be—just to take off the Seeker’s exposed head was all that was necessary. She could aim it with the focus.

The Seeker saw. When she locked eyes on Eris, a clarity overcame the battlefield. There was hatred in her look. Eris had rarely seen such focused antipathy.

The Seeker lowered a hand toward Aletheia. She let out more flame without looking. The girl was injured and sluggish and there was no one to protect her now with Robur incapacitated—the fire overcame her armor.

She broke out in screams. Thoughtless, frenzied, panicked, agonized screams, of a kind Eris had heard often from her victims—but never once from the voice of a friend. The noise froze her more than any blizzard.

The Seeker stepped forward. Snow crunching underfoot.

“There’s no man to keep you safe now,” she sneered. “You—”

Eris let out the spell she prepared. The enchanted mail grounded a target, made her impossible to target with spells like Sleep and Disintegrate, but she could still be killed by heat. With a flick of her wrist Eris shot a fan of flame at the Seeker’s neck, burning green and hot. Two more fans followed thereafter.

The first singed her skin and made her stumble backward. The second dispelled against her armor as she turned. The third hit her hair, half-up, and set it ablaze. The Seeker began to scream, just like Aletheia, until fire overcame her head, burning her horribly. Eris let the arcane focus hover over her left hand, handed off her staff, and drew Rook’s sword—awkwardly, for it was very high up on her waist—with her right, and rushed in to finish the Seeker off.

The fire lasted until she was ten or fifteen feet off. Then the Seeker doused it with mana, Eris felt the spell in the air, and she steadied herself, looking forward to Eris, her skin peeling off, her features red and melted like wax.

Eris hesitated. She hadn’t expected this woman to keep fighting after so grievous an injury. She stumbled backward, trying to think of what to do next, but the Seeker charged, screaming—it was all Eris could do to raise the sword and block the down coming blow.

“You only won,” the Seeker screamed, frenzied like a rabid dog, “because he wanted you alive!”

Eris could not fence. Defense alone took so much focus that she could hardly think to use magic while she did so. She led the Seeker in a circle, back toward Robur and Aletheia, trying to think of something.

Her arm was growing tired. The Seeker’s assault never stopped. She made a move—she raised the staff and let out blinding frost, pulling mana from the air and channeling the cold around her in an unfocused stream toward the Seeker’s head. A fog of freezing frost overcame the woman—but Eris had hesitated, and even blinded the Seeker brought a sword around toward the arm holding her staff.

She cut twice. Once to the bicep, again to the wrist. Both sliced down to bone. Eris screamed in pain. She dropped the staff to the ground, and as she doubled over in surprise, a blow from a pommel hit her in the forehead.

The blade of a sword was driven through.

In the numbness of the cold she felt nothing but the dragging of the blade past her collar bone, then the catching of the tip against her cloak on the other side. It hardly hurt at all. She gasped anyway. Strength left her legs.

Another hit to the head. She fell to the snow. The sword was withdrawn from her shoulder. Her arcane focus rolled inert to the ground.

The Seeker shook her head. She wiped frost from her eyes, and where her mailed fingers touched her burned skin she screamed in pain. But she remained standing. Her sword sheathed. She leaned down and grabbed Eris’ staff, looking it over, and then turned back to Eris on the ground.

She put a freezing boot on Eris’ belly. Pushing down.

“You didn’t give death to Lukon,” she said. “Why should I give it to you?”

Eris’ left arm was blinding in its pain. She could think of nothing else. Her other wound was as nothing comparably. Her right hand fought against the heel of the Seeker’s boot, grasping and trying to lift, but to no success.

Sorrow overcame the Seeker’s face. “But it doesn’t matter. We’re all dead now. At least you’ll go free no longer.”

Her sword was placed in line with Eris’ heart. Just a few inches beside where her last thrust had landed. She applied pressure, leaning into the blade—

A gust of wind knocked her off her feet. She stumbled off into the snow, landing on her face, dropping her sword.

“Eris!” Robur cried. He stood now—coated in frozen blood but alive yet. He ran to her. He grabbed her by the shoulders and helped her upright. The pain was terrible, but all in her arm and upper body, and she managed to raise to her feet, gasping for air, clutching her stomach in pain. She scrambled to pick up Rook’s sword again.

“Subdue her,” Eris gasped. “I will—”

But she said nothing else, because then the Seeker rose from the snow. And now the Seeker held the staff. Eris’ staff. A Magister’s staff. The staff of Antigone of Snaiga, which did so much to amplify the magic abilities of its user.

The Seeker held it out and leveled it toward Eris. Eris froze. Then a spell began, and Eris was too sluggish, too disorientated, to do anything, as a beam of violet energy projected from the wooden tip.

But Robur thought fast. He jumped in front of Eris and brought up a shield, red to catch purple, extending his arms outward. The colors clashed over white like lights in the Aether snaking through a cloudy sky.

The Seeker leaned forward. More and more mana, channeled into a spell of pure destruction, focused and terrible. With every second Robur faltered. Eris grabbed him by the wrist and helped channel her own Essence into his, but even then he was weak, and so was she, and he would not hold long.

“Do not worry about me,” he gasped, “defeat her.”

Eris gaped. She had no idea what to do. She was weak, injured, her mind unfocused, and she had lost her staff. She couldn’t fight, she—

But her focus was on the ground. She grabbed it, dropping her sword, and activated it once again. The glossy sphere began to turn like a globe and all around its circumference showed a silver, pockmarked surface like the moon on a bright night.

Then she picked up her sword. But not with her hand—with her mind. Her Essence. She reached downward and grabbed it with telekinesis, and with the fine control of the arcane focus she lifted the blade into the air.

It wasn’t light, perhaps three pounds, but compared to countless other things she had levitated, it weighed nothing. Then as the onslaught of violet energy continued their way, as more and more magic burned against Robur’s shield, Eris levitated the sword around, into the air, and toward the Seeker’s bare head.

The red shield flickered. Dimming. Weakening. Then—it snapped. The wall of mana before them collapsed, disappearing in a blink, but Robur didn’t stop channeling his magic. He kept a smaller shield around his own hand, his left hand, and he extended it toward the staff, trying to catch the beam.

“Stay behind me,” he whispered. He took a step to the side to cover her, to make sure she couldn’t be seen.

The Seeker didn’t notice Eris. Didn’t consider her a threat. Didn’t notice the sword. She was focused on Robur now, and she pushed the beam forward. And push it did. Inch by inch. Then foot by foot. The beam ate what it touched, forcing the smaller field backward like a boulder being shoved down a road, and it did so all the way up Robur’s extended arm.

Soon there was nothing left but shoulder and a string of bicep. Robur screamed—and then he collapsed.

His arm was gone. Removed, as if by Disintegrate, devoured by the Seeker’s spell. He collapsed.

But he had bought Eris the time she needed. The sword was positioned behind the Seeker’s neck. Levitating in the air. Eris took a breath and swung it with her mind.

The Seeker’s head did not come all the way off. But her spinal column did.

Wherever Eris sat blood stained the snow. She did her best to wrap her left arm with her right, bandaging her jagged wrist, covering the exposed bone and mangled bicep, but she accomplished little except soaking up her own blood. The bleeding there was not so bad as her shoulder, which soaked her in torrents of quickly-freezing fluid. She shivered unthinkingly.

Aletheia whimpered and cried out in pain. She was burned hideously across her chest. The mail of her armor had been superheated and burned everything it touched beneath. Many of her furs had caught fire. She was dying, but it would likely take days.

Robur’s arm did not bleed, but he was unconscious. Manarashes spread his bare skin. The cut across his torso was deep and likely fatal without stitches, which Eris could not give. He would be dead by the end of the day.

As for her, she could not stay awake for long. She would exsanguinate and die within the hour. That, or the cold would kill her. In truth the cold would kill all of them long before their injures, so the injuries hardly mattered.

That was it. They were dead. All four of them. Rook would never have a son. Eris would never have a life. Aletheia would be nothing more than the twice-corpse. Robur would be nothing to anyone who was living. The story ended there.

She tried her best to rouse Robur. Tried to use Aethereal Voice to call for help in the canopy. Tried to comfort Aletheia, but she didn’t know what to say or how to say it. She did all she could for them.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. First to the boy, then to the girl. She leaned over their bodies and said the words again and again. But it made no difference. Her regret for the other night was not assuaged—and no one heard her anyway.

Then she was ready to die. She clutched her stomach and closed her eyes when she could bandage and treat injuries no longer.

A weight dragged her away into darkness.

A jaw clamped down around her shoulder. Jagged, deadly teeth. The mouth of a killer. An apex predator. Biting her. Dragging her. Only…

Very gently.

Her vision was blurred when her eyes opened. She saw little more than branches passing overhead. Freezing snow dragged against her back. Numbness everywhere. Impossible cold.

A stop. An eternity of chill. Darkness.

Her eyes opened again.

A lion stood over her. Male. Looking down at her. Staring at her. A lion with white fur.

Their eyes met. And even as she was then, delirious and nearly dead, Eris felt a deep, primal, instinctual terror to behold such an animal up-close, that robbed her of her ability to think and made her heart race within her iced-over chest.

An enormous paw came down on her shoulder. No weight. Just the gesture. Almost like…

“Rest, Young Mother,” came an unseen voice in Kathar. “The journey is almost complete. Close your eyes once more.’

Yet the voice wasn’t unseen. The words came like whispered thunder, deep and commanding yet hushed all the same, whispered near her head, and with each syllable, the lion’s mouth moved.

The white lion spoke.

Eris passed out once again.