“Fire! Fire! The longhouse has been set ablaze!” panicked one of the branch-family guards.

Fryg silenced him, unconcerned: “Quiet down, we know. It’s just a little curseflame, this longhouse has withstood worse. It’ll die out ere it can cause any serious damage, the true purpose is to choke us out. Take everyone not suited to battle and get everything flammable down to the basement in the meanwhile.”

“I- Yes.”

Meanwhile, just outside the longhouse’s window, a ray of white flashed down, carving a horizontal glyph mid-air. A woman of black dress and white hair careened down towards it, landing on the short-lived platform. She kicked in the window and leapt through, several hurled axes careening past her and embedding in the wall, only to resonate with magick and return to whoever had thrown them. With a flash of light from her left eye she carved a kinetic mirror glyph on the building across the street, a small addition turning it to a literal mirrored surface. One after the next, she set loose a burst of gunfire while she used her Tablet to hoover up anything flammable in her and Zel’s room. An overwhelming majority of this flammable materiel was made up by her own research notes. She was looking for one particular paper, one which, in her mind, presented an invaluable tactical option; a Tactical Supremacy Asset, even.

The only problem was that she couldn’t see it working even with Red’s help.

Fryg and Yvonne.

They were her only option.

She sent the message to Jorfr, carving another platform glyph mid-air. She stood on it, carved another one several meters up, and jumped, repeating the process until she was back atop the roof and firing on anyone she identified as hostile, their masks and incessant attempts at retaliation making it trivial.

At the Immortal Throne’s base, two great statues turned upon their pedestals, uncrossing their spears. The platform which they guarded rose up the cliff-face’s side, racing upward upon a stream of ice-blue leyline energy. Within his throne chamber, the Revenant King had moved a finger; that had been all it took to command the ancient mechanism into motion.

Zelsys had recounted to him every single feat and claim she could conceive, she had laid out the sum of her life’s achievements, and then used it as a weight to lend credence to the accusations she leveled against the Ramdalls, the Buhaugs, the Eisens and Aase.

“I HAVE HEARD ENOUGH.”

So the Revenant King thundered, and rose up from his throne. Zelsys nearly fell to her knees once more merely from his rise. He raised the memory-sarcophagus in hand, regarding it with a scornful glare.

“FIRST… THIS CRIME NEEDST BE UNDONE. COME, ZELSYS NEWMAN, TRUEBORN WARRIOR OF THE MOSAIC SOUL.”

Zel felt outright insignificant in this living relic’s presence, such was the magnificence that the old King exuded in every facet of his being. She followed, and found that the door to which she had walked for minutes on end now opened directly to the keep’s exterior. A huge lift, which she had heretofore not noticed, waited across the iceberg mesa that was the Immortal Throne.

It acted similarly to certain Three Kings Era lifts she’d ridden, traveling downwards at an altogether unreasonable velocity while anchoring the riders to itself and shielding them with a barrier. At the ground level they were awaited by a procession of bearmen, who showed utter reverence for the Revenant King’s impossibly imposing presence while hailing Zelsys as “Worthy One” and “Bringer of the Solstice”.

The Revenant King wasted no time in making his way towards a particular site at the edge of the bearmen’s town, a great stone circle seemingly wrought of half-molten stone, standing looking out towards a particular constellation.

He raised a hand, and thundered forth a mighty incantation that shook the ground and wakened the stone circle’s antediluvian runes to a seething glow.

“DEEP INTO THE STARLIT NIGHT WE SHALL STRIDE, CARVING THROUGH RAGING WAVES OF DEATH AND FATE.”

So dense was the arcane power enshrouding that ancient place of power that it seemed as though a slime dripping off of it towards the sky.

“BEFORE ME NO GATE NOR LOCK SHALL STAND, MINE OWN PATH I CARVE! OPEN!”

There was a sound somewhere between stone grinding and flesh tearing.

A ragged hole in the world yawned open within the gate’s confines, through it visible a twilit realm of muted colour, where the stormy waters of a fog-blanketed sea took the place of the ground.

The Revenant King stepped through, and Zelsys followed in his wake. The world-wound snapped shut behind them.

“FOLLOW IN MY WAKE, LEST THE FOG-SEA’S WATERS SWALLOW YOU WHOLE,” warned the King as he began walking. With one of his steps, the landscape around them flowed forward by a league, and great waves crashed all around them as if not a man’s foot had touched the cosmic waters, but as if an immense boulder had been thrown in. That horrid place, that stain upon the glacier, soon stared down at them with scornful glee as they approached, and the Revenant King held out his hand and once more incanted.

“TO SAFE HARBOUR’S EMBRACE ONCE MORE WE RETURN.”

The Fog-sea’s surface gave out under Zel’s feet. She just barely glimpsed the Revenant King sinking alongside her, utterly unmoved, before the material world returned and she stood upon the bloody stain of the Smoke Witch’s crime.

Beneath the Revenant King’s strides the bloody ice thawed, and up from the rancid, millennium-old blood, many an impedance did come forth. Needlepointed spikes, walls of briars, uncounted terrible beasts and wailing masses of limbs all arose to stand in their path.

The Revenant King switched hands and took hold of the blade which heretofore had remained within its scabbard. With a flick of his wrist, the sword flew forth, its blade dancing enshrouded in a coat of ice-blue magick ten times as long as its physical length. With small gestures of his wrist the Revenant King carved a path to the horrid monument at the stain’s center.