The Broken Halo

Earlier, beneath Frostveil Watchtower.

Two enormous masses of stone stood within the blizzard.

The larger shell, nearly twenty metres across, still concealed Sonya. Beside it, the smaller one enclosed Akaza, Virella, and Ammor.

However, the larger shell had begun changing.

Its uneven layers pressed together. Gaps disappeared between the boulders, and the heavy pulses coming from within grew steadier.

With each beat, snow slid from its surface.

Elara watched from her seat of ice.

The Kragh’s aura was no longer surging and faltering. Something inside her was settling into place.

She was attaining a Forged Heart, and she was close.

Elara’s fingers tightened around her staff, but she did not waste another attack upon the shell.

She had prepared something better.

The clearing no longer resembled the place where she had driven a spear through Sonya’s stomach. Thick ice buried the broken road. Above it lay deep snow, soft enough to swallow footsteps and conceal every change beneath.

Several frozen layers shifted against one another whenever Elara moved her fingers. Their grinding sent false tremors through the buried ground.

A blind earth user could not trust what she felt through that.

At least, that was the intention.

Ice pillars surrounded both shells at measured distances. Long blades rested inside their transparent cores, already formed and waiting to be released. Narrow channels linked the pillars to the frozen ground, letting Elara guide her power around the battlefield without rebuilding every attack.

And behind it all stood Frostveil.

Pale light moved through the tower’s formations, feeding cold into the ridge.

Elara had worked between periods of recovery, adding another layer, preparing another weapon, never spending so much that her reserves fell faster than they recovered.

Her ice phoenix rested beside her.

Its upper wings lay partially folded, translucent feathers overlapping above dark-blue spines. The lower pair flickered with pale fire that gave no warmth.

Snow fell from its plumage. New feathers formed in the spaces left behind.

Its golden eyes, each holding a snowflake-shaped pupil, remained upon Sonya’s shell.

The spirit was uneasy too.

Every passing minute made the Kragh’s presence more difficult to ignore. Elara’s instincts kept urging her to end the breakthrough before it finished.

But she had already discovered how useless that advice was.

Instead, she had contacted Frostveil’s officers.

”Prepare Winterspine. Its strongest discharge.”

There had been a brief hesitation.

”The other cannons as well?”

”Hold them ready. But Winterspine fires first, on my signal. Do not wait to see what she does.”

The acknowledgement had come quickly.

This time, the demoness would receive no opportunity to speak, recover her bearings, or demonstrate whatever she had gained.

Elara had made that mistake once.

She would not make it twice.

A distant rumble drew her attention away for a moment.

Darius.

Earlier, his presence had abruptly faltered beneath the one-horned Archfiend’s attack.

For one dreadful instant, she had been certain her brother was dead.

Her fingers had gone numb around her staff.

Darius?

Killed by an Archfiend?

She had almost abandoned the shells and flown toward him. The thought of that demon standing over her brother’s corpse had filled her with a fury that left little room for anything else.

Then a divine pressure descended in the same direction.

The God of War.

Relief had nearly weakened her knees.

Darius was his Chosen. In her panic, she had forgotten what that meant.

A god had entered her brother’s body.

Surely, that settled everything.

The arrogant one-horned demon would die. The other demons invading Earth would follow. With the God of War upon their battlefield, how could the humans lose?

He would help them.

Wouldn’t he?

Elara knew the gods through blessings, prayers, and the victories people credited to them. She had never stood close enough to learn how little those accounts revealed about what a god actually wanted.

For now, her faith remained intact.

Even when Darius’s presence moved toward the rift.

She had followed it as far as she could, growing more anxious until it vanished into the Demon Realm.

But the god was with him.

Whatever purpose had taken them there, her brother was not alone.

Elara forced herself to turn back.

Darius had a god.

These demons had her.

Another pulse shook snow from Sonya’s shell.

”How much longer are you going to hide?” she muttered. ”You’ve wasted enough of my time.”

A crack answered her.

Elara stopped breathing.

It ran down the shell’s centre, splitting through layers that had resisted her phoenix.

Then the smaller shell cracked too.

She stood.

Beside her, the phoenix rose, talons settling into the ice. Its four wings opened, sending snow sweeping outward.

Elara lifted her staff.

The cracks widened.

A deep beat sounded from within the larger shell.

Then both structures burst apart.

BOOOOOOM!

Boulders flew outward, but none struck the three figures dropping from the smaller shell. Stones turned aside around them before crashing into the snow.

Ammor landed first.

Akaza came down beside him, his knees bending before he steadied himself. His right arm no longer hung uselessly, though its movements remained stiff.

Virella caught herself with one hand.

They were still wounded.

However, the desperate weakness that had marked their last moments outside was gone. Their breathing was steadier, their auras firmer, and much of their depleted demonic energy had returned.

The shell had smothered Elara’s hold upon the ice long enough for them to break free. Behind its protection, they had used their remaining medicine and hell stones to recover rather than spend every breath resisting her attacks.

Virella’s gaze moved toward the snow hiding Rellis’s body.

But Elara barely looked at any of them.

Sonya hung above the remains of the larger shell.

Her bare feet touched nothing.

The last pieces of the ice spear fell with the rubble beneath her. Through the torn clothing around her stomach, Elara could see unbroken skin.

The wound was gone.

So were the marks around her throat.

Yet the short Kragh’s size and features were unchanged. There was no visible transformation to explain the weight her presence had placed upon the clearing.

Her blind eyes remained as they had always been.

But beneath her, the ground trembled.

Not the ice Elara was shifting.

The earth below it.

A low vibration travelled through the bedrock, climbed into Frostveil’s foundations, and shook powder from the distant battlements.

Sonya’s aura spread without wavering.

A Minor Greater Demon.

Her new heart beat steadily, driving a quantity of demonic energy through her body that made her former strength seem painfully small.

Elara felt the phoenix’s unease sharpen into alarm.

Her own instincts also sent warning bells into her mind.

This demoness could kill her.

The thought came before pride could object.

Elara raised her free hand.

Then she brought it down.

”FIRE!”

Winterspine’s cloudy crystal barrel blazed at Frostveil’s summit.

Light raced through the weapon’s engraved supports. The surrounding formations brightened, drawing cold from the tower and feeding it toward the muzzle.

A blue-white point swelled inside the barrel.

At its centre, something pale gold flickered.

A trace of divinity.

That was what separated Winterspine from the lesser cannons. Its strongest shot carried more than freezing Aether.

The weapon discharged.

KRAAAAAAAM!

A beam of killing cold tore across the clearing.

Snow caught along its path became needles of ice. Elara’s frozen pillars rang, their surfaces hardening as the temperature plunged still further.

The beam was broad enough to swallow Sonya.

She did not move.

Not a finger.

Not even her head.

And the ground suddenly rose.

Dense ice split from beneath. A massive stone forearm pushed upward through the snow, followed by a hand whose fingers unfolded between Sonya and the approaching light.

Only its index finger remained raised.

Winterspine struck the fingertip.

BOOOOOOM!

Blue-white brilliance burst across the clearing.

Elara braced as the shock drove snow against her armour. Frost raced down the enormous finger, spreading toward its knuckle.

But the hand did not bend.

Beneath the surface, its wrist joined the bedrock. The force drove through that connection, opening long fractures across the ice without shifting the finger a single inch.

The beam kept pouring into it.

Frozen chips peeled away from the point of impact.

Fresh stone pressed forward beneath them.

And behind that raised finger, Sonya’s hair barely stirred.

Elara stared with narrowed eyes.

Winterspine’s light thinned.

The pale-gold gleam flickered once, then disappeared as the weapon spent the last of its prepared power.

Silence fell beneath the hissing snow.

The stone finger was still there.

Sonya had not raised her own hand.

Slowly, the enormous palm lowered enough to reveal her face.

She inclined her head toward Elara, her unseeing eyes directed at the human below.

”You covered the earth in ice.”

A small smile touched her mouth.

”Did you think it would forget this Honourable?”