The enemy crested the slope like a breaking wave—disciplined, silent, deadly. Their breath steamed in the cold, swords drawn, boots crunching against the brittle crust. Among them moved a figure clad in black-stained leathers, a crimson sash around his waist, face bare and pale as snow. His eyes were wrong—deep wells with no color, reflecting none of the wind-swirled white around him.

No one spoke.

Then a shriek—metal through the air.

A javelin struck stone just above Weylan’s shoulder, knocking flakes loose. He flinched, blood trailing from a shallow slice across his cheek.

“Positions!” Telaryn shouted, voice hoarse in the cold.

Eris darted to cover, spear at the ready. Halven knelt atop a ledge, bow notched and shaking. Sari stood apart, hands lifted, eyes closed. Her talismans spun wildly in the rising gale as she chanted—wind-words strung like offerings.

“I call you,” she hissed. “Old winds, snow-bound fathers—answer!”

The wind gusted. The spirits stirred—and turned away.

Her breath caught. “They want a price,” she whispered. “A vow fulfilled.”

Another scream. The first attackers reached them.

Steel clanged as Telaryn met the rush head-on, parrying and driving her sword through a shoulder. Weylan lunged, blocked a blade, slipped, and rolled back behind Eris, who fought like a feral shadow.

Halven loosed an arrow. It struck—but did not drop the man. Another enemy closed in on Alisha—she slashed wildly, slicing a cheek. The man reeled, but pressed closer.

And still the storm spirits would not answer.

The blood-sashed officer strode forward, untouched. A soldier beside him stumbled, wounded—and the officer reached out, hand splayed.

The man's body spasmed. Blood burst from his mouth, freezing midair. His limbs snapped stiff. His life ripped free like steam from a kettle and flowed—red and luminous—into the sorcerer’s waiting hand.

A shimmering veil formed around him—like glass veined with pulse-light. Shielded. Empowered.

“Spirits,” Sari whispered in despair. “They’re... devoured.”

Then the mountain shuddered.

Tuaru stepped from behind the stone.

His cloak flared like torn bark in a storm. The markings carved across his bare chest glowed a deep, volcanic red. His eyes were wide—not in fear, but in surrender.

His skin cracked along his arms, glowing from within like molten rock. Veins pulsed with magma-light. The cords of his throat were drawn taut as he dropped to one knee, his staff of rootwood cracking in half from the heat he now bore.

He spoke in the deep-tongue. His voice came not from his mouth alone, but from the fissures in his body, from the snow beneath him, from the marrow of the mountain.

“Let the rock remember us,” he said. “Let the peaks bear witness.”

Sari screamed. “Tuaru, no!”

He turned to her with a smile like sunrise across a frozen lake.

“This is the oath we were born into, daughter of wind. The line of the Queen must rise again.”

Then he drove his burning hand into the snow and screamed one word—**not in Tul, nor Veyari—but in the tongue of the stone.**

The world cracked.

From above came the grinding roar of gods waking.

The cliff split. Snow fractured. The high shelf collapsed.

An avalanche tore down with furious momentum—snow, ice, stone, roots, trees, bone. It devoured everything in its path.

The officer turned to flee. He stretched his hands to another soldier—and the man shrieked, blood pouring upward in a twisted sacrifice. The crimson shield flared—

And shattered.

He vanished in the fall.

Tuaru’s body collapsed where he knelt, now nothing more than a scorched shape in the snow—charred black, cracked and steaming, veins glowing faintly before they, too, dimmed.

His last breath lingered as a whisper in the wind.

“Let her find the flame.”

The world settled into silence, vast and terrible.

Where once a trail clung to the mountain’s edge, there was now only ruin—mangled stone, ice-crushed pines, a gash torn clean down the slope. Snow still drifted in the air like ashes from a distant pyre, and beneath it, nothing stirred. No banners, no steel, no breath. The enemy had been buried—whether slain or shattered beyond pursuit, none could say. But the path behind Telaryn and her band was gone.

For the first time in days, there was no sound of boots in the snow behind them. No shadow dogging their steps. Only the mountain, vast and quiet again, as if it had never woken at all.