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Chapter 169
The red sky broke at dawn like the shattering of stained glass. From the battlements of Highbarrow, Oliver watched as streaks of fire painted the horizon. Pillars of smoke rose beyond the tree line wide and deliberate. Not the careless destruction of bandits or rogue beasts. These fires were signals. Tactics. A message.The enemy was coming, and they had already begun to burn the land.“They’re pushing from the east,” Elias said, his fingers wrapped tightly around a spyglass. “Fifteen hundred strong, maybe more. No banners. No horns. Just… silence.”“Mercenaries?” Mina asked from where she stood, arm still bound in slingcloth.Elias shook his head grimly. “Worse. Disciplined. Uniform. But not Imperial.”Oliver narrowed his eyes. “Then who?”“Ghosts,” muttered General Berra. She was a hawk faced woman in steel plated armor, her grey braid twisted like a rope. “Those aren’t soldiers. They’re revenants. Risen or reprogrammed. I’ve seen it before once, in the southern barrens. Kaelien
Chapter 168
The final door stood before them like a monument to all Kaelien had tried to forget.No lock. No keyhole. Just a smooth obsidian slab, ringed with runes that whispered as they moved. Ancient magic older than the Glacari, older than the Empire. A language forged in suffering.Oliver placed a hand on it. It pulsed with cold.Mina stepped beside him. “Are you ready?”“I don’t think it matters,” he replied. “It’s ready for us.”The door melted open not shattered, not pushed but surrendered, sliding into the floor like water freezing in reverse. Mist rolled out, thick with the scent of burnt steel and memory.Beyond it lay the heart of Kaelien’s secret. A forge, yes but not one made for steel.The room was circular, cut from volcanic stone veins that pulsed with unnatural heat. In its center rose a great crucible, not glowing with fire but swirling with aether blue, white, and gold. Ghostlight shimmered above it.Chains hung from the ceiling, some linked to iron masks, others to shattered
Chapter 167
The storm hit just after sundown. Not snow this time, but a different kind of cold sharper, quieter, filled with whispers that didn’t carry on the wind but inside it. As if the air itself was remembering something terrible.Mina pulled her cloak tighter as they crossed the frost choked causeway that led to the cliffs beneath Highbarrow. Few knew about the entrance there, and even fewer had permission to pass. But Elias had made the arrangements.This was no longer a matter of command. It was history. And history, as Elias had warned, lived in the Black Archives.The door to the archives was stone and rune sealed, older than the city above it. According to Elias, it had been carved by the mountain's first settlers, back when Highbarrow was only a scattering of firewatch towers guarding against the northern glaciers.A sentinel waited at the threshold half man, half spectral construct, eyes glowing with glacier light. It didn’t speak. Only stared as Elias pressed a copper disc into a
Chapter 166
They left Highbarrow at dawn. No fanfare. No banners. Only silence and the scrape of steel against sheaths as soldiers checked their weapons. The sky hung heavy with ash stained clouds, streaks of pale gold breaking through like a promise too fragile to speak aloud.Forty blades rode with them. Mina led the vanguard on foot, her bow strapped across her back, eyes scanning the narrow canyon road ahead. Oliver rode behind her, Shiveredge at his hip, Twinblade across his back. Elias had lent him a cloak woven with glimmerthreads half shadow, half light. Even under the rising sun, it made him look like something half remembered from a myth.They marched for the Valley Forge. Where the second Iceborn general Korrin Flameshield was said to sleep beneath a mound of frozen earth. Waiting to rise. Waiting to burn.The valley itself had once been a smith town. Ruined now. The Glacari had razed it in their first march south melting the forges with frostfire and binding the survivors into ston
Chapter 165
They reached Highbarrow on the third morning after the battle at Frostline Pass.The journey was cold and silent. Even the wind seemed to mourn. Smoke from the smoldering funeral pyres behind them had followed the group like a second shadow, clinging to their clothes and clumping in their lungs.But Highbarrow stood untouched. A city of stone and stormlight. Carved into the western cliffs, it had been the last true bastion before the lowlands fell into Glacari control. Its outer walls were forged from obsidian black granite, each slab carved with ancestral runes that flickered faintly when touched by moonlight. Twin towers flanked its main gate each housing a guardian bell that had not rung since the last king of Barrow died nearly a century ago.It looked like a tomb. It felt like a warning. Oliver tightened his grip on the reins of his frostbitten horse and turned to Mina. “Ready?”She didn’t answer. She just nodded. The surviving Winter Guard followed behind what remained of a fo
Chapter 164
The first wave hit just after dawn. The sky above the Frostline Pass had turned the color of old blood, streaked with ash clouds that shimmered like glass. Glacari foot soldiers surged forward tall, blue skinned brutes wrapped in bone and frost steel. Their weapons pulsed with black veins of ice magic, leaving trails of frost behind every strike.Oliver stood at the front line, blades drawn. Twinblade of the Crown in his left hand, Shiveredge in his right.Mina was at his back, coordinating archers from the high ridge. What remained of the Winterguard forty three soldiers, half wounded had formed a tight wedge formation at the pass mouth, where the cliffs narrowed and the rocks funneled enemies like cattle into a slaughter pit.They had nowhere to run. But they didn’t plan to. Oliver met the charge head on.The first Glacari screamed something in their tongue words lost to wind and war. Oliver answered with steel. The Twinblade sang in his hand, humming with each strike. It met the
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