Memories of Ice

'Your escort's arrived,' Whiskeyjack noted. 'We will ask for a detailed report of the journey, mistress — I suggest you stand down until this evening, and leave the details of distribution to your second.'

She nodded. 'Good idea.'

The commander searched for Silverfox. She had resumed her march, the two marines trailing. The blood of the god had stained the marines' boots and the Rhivi's legs.

Across the plain, for two hundred or more paces, the earth looked like a red matted, tattered blanket, plucked and torn into dissolving disarray.

As ever, Kallor's thoughts were dark.

Ashes and dust. The fools prattle on and on in the command tent, a vast waste of time. Death flows through the warrens — what matter? Order ever succumbs to chaos, broken unto itself by the very strictures it imposes. The world will do better with' out mages. I for one will not rue the demise of sorcery.

The lone candle, streaked with the crushed fragments of a rare sea-worm, gusted thick, heavy smoke, filling the tent. Shadows crawled beneath the drifting plumes. Flickering yellow light glinted off ancient, oft-mended armour.

Seated on the ornate, ironwood throne, Kallor breathed deep of the invigorating fumes. Alchemy is not magic. The arcana of the natural world holds far more wonders than any wizard could conjure in a thousand lifetimes. These Century Candles, for one, are well named. Upon my life, yet another layer seeps into my flesh and bone — I can feel it with each breath. A good thing, too. Who would want to live for ever in a body too frail to move? Another hundred years, gained in the passage of a single night, in the depth of this one reach of columned wax. And I have scores more.

No matter the stretch of decades and centuries, no matter the interminable boredom of inactivity that was so much a part of living, there were moments … moments when I must act, explosively, with certainty. And all that seemed nothing before was in truth preparation. There are creatures that hunt without moving; when they become perfectly still, perfectly motionless, they are at their most dangerous. I am as such a creature. I have always been so, yet all who know me are. gone. Ashes and dust. The children who now surround me with their gibbering worries are blind to the hunter in their midst. Blind.

Pale hands gripping the arms of the throne, he sat unmoving, stalking the landscape of his own memories, dragging them forth like corpses pulled from the ground, drawing their visages close for a moment before casting them away and moving on.

Eight mighty wizards, hands linked, voices rising in unison. Desperate for power. Seeking it from a distant, unknown realm. Unsuspecting, curious, the strange god in that strange place edged closer, then the trap was sprung. Down he came, torn to pieces yet remaining alive. Brought down, shattering a continent, obliterating warrens. Himself broken, damaged, crippled.

Eight mighty wizards, who sought to oppose me and so loosed a nightmare that rises once more, millennia later. Fools. Now, they are dust and ashes.