Snow still sifted from the branches when the first scream cut across the trees, thin and high and wrong in a way that made the air feel too tight to breathe. Reid was already moving, teeth clenched against the bite of cold in his lungs, Kaela a dark flicker at his side, Lira vanishing ahead as if the trunks themselves had opened a path. Mara brought up the rear with the steady rhythm of someone who knew what panic cost.
They had put a ridge and a stand of pines between themselves and the broken camp, the glow of its fires smudged to a dull stain on the horizon. The footprints they left behind were shallow from care, never in a straight line, each step laid where wind would take it. It should have been enough. It was not.
A shape burst through the brush to their right, gaunt and too fast, the outline of a man under a rime of frost that crawled as if it were fur alive with fleas. Eyes that should have been eyes had become pale disks with no center. The thing carried no weapon. It did not need one. The air around it warped with cold so deep Reid felt the heat flee his fingers inside his gloves.
Lira met it first. She planted and swept, her knife arcing for tendon, for the places that end movement, and struck something that felt like glass under ice. The blade bit, then sang with a high vibration that set her teeth on edge. The creature staggered, not from pain, but because the ground did.
"Not flesh," she snapped, already peeling back to draw it after her.
"Wraith frost," Mara said, tone stripped to function. "Wrong season."
Kaela was already drawing. "Then it is ours anyway." Her arrow took the thing low, where a hip should pivot, and the shaft rimed with ice in a heartbeat. The fletching cracked. The creature kept coming.
Reid stepped into its path and felt the world tilt. The seam's heat that had lived under the ground all night pulled away like a tide leaving a beach, replaced by a cold that wanted quiet, wanted stillness, wanted every moving thing to end the way a pond ends under winter. The Bond spoke softly just behind his thoughts, not pushy, not mocking.
That one is borrowed, not born. If you return what was borrowed, it will forget it has to stand.
"Plain," Reid muttered, and drove forward. His blade struck the sternum and sank an inch before slowed to a crawl. Frost raced up the steel, spidering across his guard. He yanked free before it could glue the sword in place, pivoted, and cut again, this time across the side of its neck. Shards skittered across the snow like spilled beads. The creature turned with the inexorable patience of something that had never learned speed, and reached for his throat.
Kaela's second arrow hit the reaching wrist and burst. Not with flame, not with noise, but with an abrupt bloom of warmth that smelled faintly of rosemary and old wool. The ice there sublimed to steam in the space of a breath. The reaching hand lost three fingers. The stump smoked.
"Herb rune," Lira said, laughter sharp from nerves. "Grandmother's cure for uninvited winters."
Three more shapes moved between the trees, one to the left, one to the right, one behind. They were not hunters. They were not Council. They were the weather remembering teeth.
"Up slope," Kaela said. "Wind to our back. Make them come heavy."
They climbed. Snow betrayed them in small ways, sliding under boots, packing in the treads, threatening to turn ankles. The cold the creatures brought made every breath feel like a decision. Reid's chest burned. He let it. Suffering that kept him sharp had always felt like an honest sort of payment.
The first of the newcomers reached Mara. She did not wait for it to decide what to do. She stepped inside the reach of its hands, drove her blade up under the ribs, and twisted. The steel squealed. The thing tried to hug her and learned that her elbow had other opinions. Lira arrived low, cutting at the inside of a knee that was more an idea than a joint, and for a second, a small, petty human second, the wraith folded like a man who had been kicked somewhere that men do not like to be kicked.
"Good," the Bond murmured, almost amused. Sometimes you insult a shape back into remembering the rules that hurt it.
Reid did not bless that with a reply. He had no space for the voice's self-satisfaction. He had a hill to take and a line to draw.
The hill's crown was a fan of black rock raised in three broken teeth, snow scoured thin on their windward faces. Kaela took the left tooth without being told. Mara shouldered the center. Lira slid behind the right and peered between a cleft that gave her two lanes of sight.
Reid planted himself in the open. Anchors belong where weight collects. "We hold," he said, and the words steadied them in the way that simple instructions do when the world tries to soften your bones.
The wraiths came on. They did not hurry. They flowed. The air around them glittered with tiny crystals that did not fall, that hung and hummed with a tone too high for hearing but loud enough for nerves. Reid cut the first that reached him at the midline and used the momentum of that cut to pivot and cut again. He did not go for decapitations. He did not go for drama. He went for the places where balance fails.
Kaela's third shot did not break. Whatever she had inked along the shaft decided to remember to be fire at exactly the moment it kissed the thing's chest. The flame was not red, was not gold. It was a white that had been taught to behave by a woman who learned patience at a cost. The creature's chest did not burn. It evaporated in tidy pieces. The rest of it tried to decide if it should keep going and chose poorly.
Mara's opponent learned an old truth about short blades in tight quarters. Lira's learned a new truth about smug thieves who had chosen to be good with a bow this winter. None of the truths were kind.
The fourth wraith reached Reid and reached through his parry for his throat again, fingers an inch too long, nails like icicles. He let it take the back of his neck and then let himself remember that backs of necks are built to bend and let heads go where arms cannot. He slipped the grip, stepped into the ghost of its arm, and cut with a short inside line that parted it spine to sternum. The motion felt right. The blade sang once. The cold receded from his fingers just enough to let him feel how cold they had been.
More movement, lower down the slope. Not wraiths. Men. The elite helmets from before, now rimed with frost along their brows as if the storm had decided to sponsor them. Five of them, moving in a half circle, spears leveled but tips sheathed in leather to keep them from ringing if they hit stone. Professionals coming to collect.
"They'll try to push us while the cold softens us," Kaela said, calm as a list. "They'll assume we're tired from the anchors."
"We are," Lira said, panting. She smiled anyway, because smiling at poor odds had always been a good way to make them nervous.
"Then we let them learn something useful," Mara said, rolling her shoulders once to set muscles to familiar places.
The elites did not charge. They didn't need to. They closed and tested, a jab at Reid's foot to see if he'd move, a feint at Mara's head to see if she'd blink, a half step into Lira's sightline to make her waste a throw. Kaela didn't waste her arrow. She sighted along a line that was not yet a line and waited for a choice to come to her.
The Bond pressed closer, warm as a hand at his sternum. We are better angry. You are better when you don't try to be kind to their bones.
Reid tasted blood where cold had cracked his lip. "We are better when we finish," he muttered. He did not know if he said it to himself, to the Bond, or to the trees.
The elites made their choice together. The center two angled for Reid, the far left for Kaela, the far right for Lira, and the fifth held loose, a floater to exploit any error. Kaela's arrow took the left man's thigh where the plates met and did not stop until it had made an argument with meat and bone both. Lira took a step backward she had planned an hour ago and let a knife happen to the inside of a wrist. Mara met the floater before he could be useful and suggested, with steel and elbow, that the ground would like to meet him.
The center two met Reid. He parried high and low, then high and low again, and then changed his mind and made low into a short cut that robbed one spear of its reach. He stepped into that sudden lack and turned the moment into a choice for the man holding it: drop the weapon or keep the fingers. The man chose quickly and well, and lost only leather and pride.
The other center man tried to pin Reid's blade with his shaft and learned that Reid had never liked to be pinned. He let the attempt happen and used the binding to pull himself through the man's guard, shoulder to chest, weight to weight. The elite was strong. He was trained. He had not expected someone who fought like a problem wanting to be solved. Reid solved him with a knee and a pommel and a slice that saved the man's life because there would be more use in a message than a corpse.
"Down!" Kaela snapped.
A curl of white swept across the hill, thick as breath from a sleeping giant. Reid did not think. He did not argue. He dropped. Lira dropped because she always did what the smartest person in the room said when the voice had that tone. Mara was already on her belly because Mara trusted weather less than people. The frost ribbon passed where heads had been and left a glaze on rock and glove and hair that cracked when they breathed.
"New trick," Lira said between her teeth.
"Not theirs," Mara said. "The wraiths are learning our shape."
The Bond's voice thinned to a thread. They borrow will. Will can be stolen back.
"How?" Reid said, and realized he had spoken aloud when Kaela's eyes slid to him for a fraction and back to the fight.
Heat drawn fast shocks, heat drawn slow teaches. You cannot swing slow. So you steal slow from them while you move fast.
Reid did not have a way to put that into numbers or maps. He had a way to put it into a step. He rose, moved into the next elite's space, and cut in shallow lines that bled heat across the edges of the creature behind the man, forcing the cold to choose what to chase. The wraith tried to take the heat back and found that it had been spread too thin to hold. It faltered, not for long, but long enough.
Kaela saw the falter and put an arrow in the exact place where the cold had forgotten to be. The wraith jerked as if insulted and came apart like frost flicked from eaves.
The remaining elites read the board. One whistled, sharp and ugly, and they started to pull on a line of retreat that would take them downslope and around. Kaela did not shoot their backs. Lira wanted to and did not. Mara let them go because she knew what it cost to take pride when a clean exit offered itself.
The last wraith did not get the message in time. It reached for Reid again. He pivoted and cut the reaching arm at the elbow. The pieces sublimed to vapor before they hit the snow. The stump smoked the way wet wood smokes.
Silence reached up from the ground and took them all by the ankle. It was not peace. It was a waiting that had not decided which way to lean.
Kaela's breath misted once, twice. "We move before the next lesson arrives."
"Agreed," Mara said.
Lira wiped her blade clean on the snow and then thought better of it when the steel squealed. "Hate this weather," she said cheerfully, which was how she admitted fear.
Reid looked down the hill where the elites had gone. He thought of the medallion in his pocket that wanted to be heavy. He thought of the anchors in pieces. He thought of the seam under the world where warmth had a pulse. The Bond warmed his chest as if remembering a hearth from a house that had never been his.
"We keep west," he said. "If this cold is moving where we are, it is because we are close to something that does not want us to arrive."
Kaela nodded once. She reached to adjust the scarf at his throat with a touch that was not unkind, then turned away before Lira could make a face about it. Lira made the face anyway, and then made a second one because the first had been for her own benefit.
They left the hill with careful feet. Behind them, the frost on the black teeth of rock softened and ran in thin lines that steamed before the wind snatched the steam away. The forest closed like a door that preferred to stay shut. The sky decided to hold its snow for a time.
They did not speak for a hundred strides. When they did, it was Kaela who broke the quiet. "Those weren't wild."
"No," Mara said. "They were pointed."
"By who?" Lira asked, because someone had to ask the stupid questions so they could measure how much trouble they were in.
Reid did not say the Council. He did not say the elites. He said, "By whatever came through the last seam that opened and did not close right." He surprised himself by how sure his voice was.
The Bond approved, a pleased rumble. Names are a way of ordering fear. You're learning which names matter.
No one answered that, because no one had heard it but him, and because the trees were listening again, and because the next patch of ground looked the way ground looks when it has decided to keep a secret.
"Watch your step," Reid said. "Something under here has an opinion."
They watched. They stepped. They kept moving west.
The air thickened before the next blow even fell. Reid felt it in his teeth first, a vibration that came from no visible source, as if the forest itself had learned to hum in anticipation. Mara's stance tightened beside him, knees bent, blade angling to catch whatever moved through the dark.
The first figure burst through the snow-laden brush like it had been fired from the treeline. Sigil-marked armor caught the moonlight, every line inked to drink shadows. The weapon in its grip was unlike the others, curved iron with a glassy black inlay that pulsed faintly in sync with the hum. It came in high, fast, and without the hesitation of the outer-ring guards.
Reid caught the arc on his sword's flat and twisted, feeling the force travel down into his shoulder. The Bond surged at the contact, heat licking up his arm. Now you see it, this is the edge worth feeding me for.
He shoved the thought aside and let the momentum carry him into a riposte. The elite didn't give him the kill; instead, the man rolled away with a dancer's precision, snow scattering in a wide arc.
Kaela's arrow hissed past Reid's ear and caught a second attacker mid-lunge, spinning the armored form half-around before it dropped. Lira darted in from the flank, blades crossing in a flash that opened a seam along another elite's thigh armor. No scream, just a grunt and a pivot to guard the weak side.
"Three more closing!" Kaela called, shifting position without breaking her line of sight.
Reid angled toward the largest gap in their perimeter. "Mara, hold that side. Lira, harry, don't commit."
The next fighter in line didn't wait for him to finish. They came low, weapon stabbing for the seam between greave and boot. Reid brought his knee up, catching the haft hard enough to send it skidding off into the snow. The man switched grips without pause, drawing a hooked dagger from his belt.
The hum deepened. This time Reid saw it, the glass inlay on the curved iron glowing brighter, bleeding faint streaks of color into the frost underfoot. Whatever the anchors had been doing, these weapons were built to drink from the same well.
The Bond's presence pressed harder now. If they're drawing from a dead source, the stream is unstable. Push it. I'll break it for you.
"Not here," Reid growled under his breath. He hooked the attacker's wrist, turned it, and slammed the man down onto one knee. The dagger clattered away.
To the left, Lira's harrying cut drove her opponent into Mara's range. Mara's sword came down like a falling tree, precise and final. Snow steamed faintly where the man fell.
The hum wavered.
"Break their toys," Reid snapped, pointing to the weapon that had fallen near his boot. Kaela loosed another arrow before stepping in to stomp the black inlay. The glass spiderwebbed with cracks, leaking a faint heat that died as quickly as it came.
"That's one," she said.
Another elite stepped into the gap with a fresh weapon, identical to the first.
"They're carrying spares," Lira noted grimly.
Reid's pulse was steady, but he felt the tick of urgency against it. "Then we take them all or we make them not worth carrying."
The hum flared again, louder, angrier.
And somewhere beyond the pines, something answered.
The answer came not as a roar, but as a rolling, guttural vibration that seemed to move through the snowpack rather than the air. Reid felt it in the soles of his boots, a pulse deep enough to make his calves ache. The elites hesitated, just a fraction, but enough to tell him they'd heard it too.
Branches far to the right snapped in sequence, each one louder than the last. The treeline bulged as something moved between the trunks, a shadow with weight and a rhythm to its stride. The hum from the weapons bled into that rhythm, syncing for an instant before faltering like a drum losing its beat.
"Form!" Reid barked, already shifting to cover the side where the shadow grew. Kaela slid back to his flank, arrow nocked, eyes wide but steady. Lira ghosted left to cut off any flanking approach, her knives low and ready.
The thing broke cover, taller than any man, armored in plates that looked poured rather than forged, each one etched with runes that crawled like live ink. It carried no weapon. Its hands were the weapon, each finger ending in a curved black talon that reflected no light.
The elites didn't cheer its arrival. They stepped back.
"That's not theirs," Mara said quietly.
The Bond was suddenly a steady, warm weight against Reid's spine. You don't have the reach to kill it before it kills you. But you can make it choose.
The creature didn't rush. It advanced as if certain of the outcome, the frost under its feet turning glassy where it stepped. Kaela's arrow flew, perfect aim, perfect draw, and shattered against its chest plate, the shards hissing into steam before they hit the ground.
"Spread it!" Reid shouted. Mara moved wide, forcing the creature to track two targets. Lira slashed across its left thigh, and the blade sparked, leaving only a shallow mark. It turned toward her, weight shifting, just enough.
Reid went in low, cutting across the inside of its knee. The plate resisted, but he felt something give, a seam, a weakness. The Bond pressed harder. Again.
He did, and this time the plate split, releasing a thread of pale light that writhed like smoke. The creature recoiled, not in pain, but in recognition of danger.
The elites didn't wait. They retreated in silence, weapons held high, melting back into the pines. The creature let them go. It wanted something else.
"You," the Bond said in his mind, voice deep and pleased. It wants you.
Reid tightened his grip. "Then it can have the fight instead."
The thing moved with a deceptive slowness, its bulk giving each step the gravity of a falling boulder. Reid circled left, keeping the black-teethed rock at his back, measuring the weight shifts in its stance. Every time it angled toward him, Kaela sent an arrow into its plating, not to pierce, but to turn its head, to shave the edges off its certainty.
Mara's voice came low, meant only for them. "It doesn't commit unless we overextend. It's reading us."
"Then make it misread," Reid said. His breath plumed white between them.
Lira vanished into the brush, her absence a question mark. The creature's gaze followed her for a beat too long. Kaela caught the opening and stepped into a shot at the side of its helm, the arrow glancing off but ringing enough to make the runes along its throat shift, re-aligning like pieces of a puzzle.
The Bond pushed, heat welling in Reid's chest until his ribs felt tight. It guards the seam in its own shell. That's the only place that bleeds.
He didn't ask how the Bond knew. He trusted the weight of the words the same way he trusted the balance of his sword.
"Draw it high," Reid called, and Mara was already moving, her blade coming in an arc that caught the creature's upraised talon and sparked like flint on steel. The thing swatted, but Mara rode the force backward, boots sliding over the crusted snow, unharmed.
Reid dashed in low, aiming for the split plate at the knee he'd opened before. His first strike widened it; his second drove the edge in deep enough that pale light poured over his gauntlet. The cold there bit hard, as if the wound tried to reclaim its heat by stealing his.
The creature's roar was no sound at all, just a pressure wave that hammered the snow flat around them. Kaela staggered; Mara braced; the trees themselves shook loose powder in a long, shivering sigh.
Lira reappeared at its flank, planting a throwing blade directly into the gap at the knee. It didn't stick, didn't need to. The metal carried ink she'd paid a dear price for, and when it struck, the runes across the creature's chest dimmed a shade.
Now, the Bond urged.
Reid lunged for the seam in its chest plate, not at the center but where two runic lines converged and bent. His blade bit, and for an instant, he saw something beyond the metal: a tangle of white heat and black thread, like veins lit from within. The cut unspooled a breath of warm air that coiled around his wrist and vanished into the night.
The creature reeled back, not broken, but unsettled. Its talons dug deep into the snow, hauling its weight into a retreat that was less like defeat and more like a deliberate withdrawal.
"They don't run," Mara muttered. "Not unless..."
"It marked us," Reid said. He could feel it like a fingerprint burned into the space just over his heart.
Kaela's bow lowered, but her eyes stayed fixed on the dark between the trees where the thing had gone. "Then it'll come again."
The Bond was quieter now, almost satisfied. And next time, you'll know where to cut.
No one spoke on the way down from the hill. The snow underfoot felt different now, not softer, but expectant, as if every step left an echo. Reid didn't like the thought, but he carried it anyway.