The Hunt and the Summons
Thane — Flamebound Warrior
The clearing was empty long before Thane admitted it to himself.
He stood in the silence where Ardis had vanished, the frost unmarked except for his own bootprints and the faint curl of disturbed shadow still fading around the tree roots. The last of the daylight had drained from the sky, leaving everything washed in cold blue. His breath rose in quiet, uneven bursts.
He should have moved. He should have signaled his squad, followed protocol, swept the valley, returned to camp.
Instead, he stood ankle-deep in frost with his palms open at his sides as though his hands still expected a shadow to linger between them.
The resonance beneath his ribs pulsed in a steady rhythm—not painful, but insistent. A slow thrum, echoing the way Ardis's magic had wrapped instinctively around his own before its wielder fled.
His shard had never behaved like this.
He tried to shake it off.
He failed.
A twig snapped behind him. One of his soldiers stepped cautiously from the tree line, boots crunching on thin ice.
"Commander? We expected your signal." The young man's voice was too careful, too aware that Thane rarely delayed when danger was near. "Perimeter is secure. We were waiting."
"I'm here," Thane said, sharper than intended.
He looked away from the far edge of the clearing—the same place Ardis had stood, cloak falling in clean black lines, silver eyes gleaming in the half-light. That moment kept replaying behind Thane's eyes in maddening clarity.
The Council's stories had never mentioned beauty.
They had described Shadow Mages as twisted by their craft, hollow-eyed, warped by darkness.
But not like that.
"Anything on your sweep?" Thane asked.
"No Void traces. No beasts. The valley feels wrong, though."
You have no idea, Thane thought.
"Return to camp. Full alert. And keep the men tight."
The soldier hesitated. "And you, sir?"
"I'll finish the upper ridge alone. No sense exposing the entire squad to something we don't understand."
The soldier nodded and slipped back into the trees. The forest quieted again, heavy and listening.
Thane inhaled slowly, grounding himself.
Then he turned away from the camp.
By the time he reached the perimeter, night had settled fully. Frost crackled like brittle glass under his boots. His men straightened at the sight of him, relief immediately followed by scrutiny. He ignored the looks.
Khyren, his second-in-command, strode toward him. The man's broad shoulders and scar-split brow were familiar comforts—Khyren was many things, but subtle was not one of them.
"Commander," Khyren said low, "what happened?"
"Not here." Thane's tone brooked no argument.
Khyren frowned but didn't push further. That alone told Thane how much he'd changed in the last hour—Khyren only backed off when a situation smelled worse than death.
The soldiers clustered around the small fire—small enough not to be seen from afar, large enough that no one lost fingers to the cold.
Reports came in one by one.
Nothing on the southern ridge.
Nothing on the western slope.
Nothing but unusual stillness.
"Commander?" A scout approached, breathing hard. "Tracks. Big ones. You should see."
Thane's stomach tightened. "Show us."
They moved without torches, letting their eyes adjust to the dim. The cold had deepened, turning bark white and making every breath feel thin and sharp. The tracks waited at the edge of a shallow clearing—deep impressions punched into the frost, three-toed with a dragging mark scoring the center of each print.
Khyren knelt beside one, his brows pulling together. "I've seen drawings like this," he murmured. "In the Academy bestiary. Old war-beasts from the northern campaigns."
Thane crouched beside him, studying the gouged edges and the strange pattern of the talons. "Those things were wiped out generations ago. Every record says so."
"Records say a lot of things," Khyren replied quietly.
The frost around the prints had been leeched away, stripped in spirals that looked less like natural melt and more like something had drunk the cold right out of the ground. It left the exposed earth a dull, lifeless gray.
A chill crawled beneath Thane's armor, one that had nothing to do with the air.
Thane didn't answer. His throat had gone dry.
Because he recognized this.
Everyone did. In stories.
Never in life.
The frost pulsed once—sharply—sending a fine crackling sound across the clearing as a ring of ice raced outward.
"Shields!" Thane barked. "Now—"
He was too late.
The ground exploded.
The creature didn't just emerge; it tore its way upward, hurling frozen soil and splintered stone in all directions. Men threw up their arms to protect their faces. The temperature dropped another knife-edge.
It rose higher and higher, unfolding from the earth like something dragged up from a forgotten age.
A Rime-Claw.
Thane knew it before his mind finished naming it. Taller than two men, shoulders armoured in thick slabs of ancient ice fused with dark rock. Frost poured from the seams between its plates. Claws as long as a man's forearm curved into brutal, hooked crescents.
Its chest held a pulsing furnace of blue-white light—the legendary frost-core that old histories claimed could stop hearts from twenty paces.
"By the Triad," someone whispered.
The creature's head turned toward them. Ice grated, stone grinding on stone. The hollows where its eyes should have been swirled with volatile frost.
Then it moved.
Every step cracked the ground in spiderweb patterns. The second splintered a buried log. The third brought it down on the squad before they'd fully formed ranks.
"FORM UP!" Thane roared.
Shields lifted, locking. Spears braced. Khyren stepped to Thane's right flank out of pure habit.
The Rime-Claw hit them like a storm.
It swung one clawed limb at Khyren. The blow slammed into his shield with enough force to shatter it, sending Khyren cartwheeling backward into a stand of saplings. Wood and bone protested equally.
"Khyren!" Thane surged forward, flame flickering under his skin.
One of the younger soldiers darted in, ramming a spear at the creature's leg. The metal point struck ice plate and snapped like kindling. The beast turned its attention on the boy.
Its frost-core flared.
"MOVE!" Thane shouted.
The breath the Rime-Claw exhaled was not air. It was death made cold—a wave of frost so intense it flash-coated bark in white and turned droplets of sap into brittle beads. The boy dove, but the edge of the blast caught his arm. Ice leapt up his skin in jagged plates.
His scream sliced the air.
This was beyond any training exercise. Beyond any war-beast Thane had watched go down under disciplined fire.
This was the kind of thing people built myths around so they didn't have to admit it had actually happened.
"Thane!" Khyren's voice, ragged, from where he pushed himself up on one elbow. He clutched his side.
The Rime-Claw's gaze fixed on him again.
It raised its arm for a killing blow.
Thane ran.
Shard-fire burned through his veins, lending speed, strength, heat. He could feel skin prickle beneath his armor as power climbed higher than he usually let it.
He was still too far.
He knew it.
Khyren knew it.
The beast knew it.
It descended with a roar, claws scything through the air.
A surge of freezing wind hit the clearing.
But it did not come from the creature.
Something else moved.
A dense wave of shadow slammed into the Rime-Claw's flank with the force of a falling tree. Darkness hit ice and stone, knocking the entire beast sideways. Frost and rock exploded outward, glittering under the thin moonlight like a spill of shattered stars.
Khyren dropped onto his side, gasping.
A figure stood where the killing blow should have landed, cloak rippling like a spill of ink, silver eyes gleaming, and shadows rising around him in controlled, spiraling arcs.
Ardis.
Thane's breath caught—not just from shock, but from the immediate punch of resonance.
It hit harder this time. No tentative, curious brush. It struck like flint against steel. His shard flared in response, fire bunching in his chest as though it recognized the other man at some bone-deep level.
Ardis's shadows shot out again, lashing thickly around the beast's forelimb. They wedged themselves into the gaps between ice and stone, forcing the limb sideways with visible strain.
The Rime-Claw bellowed, shaking frost loose from the trees.
It lunged for Ardis.
He didn't flinch.
Shadows wrapped his legs and yanked him backward with inhuman precision as the claw struck down. The impact carved a raw gouge in the ground where he'd been standing moments before.
Thane didn't think.
He moved.
Fire burst from his hands, bright and hot, slamming into the Rime-Claw's side. The blast scorched through the outer frost-plate, exposing fractured seams near the beasts core.
The rim claw staggered, chest heaving. Steam and frost rolled off its hide in equal measures.
Ardis darted a glance at him—sharp, irritated, breathless. "You hit it wrong."
"Oh?" Thane snapped back. "And how exactly would you like me to slay the ancient death-beast?"
Ardis's gaze flicked to the center of its chest. "The core. Obviously."
Thane actually barked a laugh, half hysteria. "You think I don't know that?"
"Then aim better."
"You aim better."
Ardis lifted his hand. Shadows surged, thickening around the Rime-Claw's other limbs, anchoring them to the frost. "Fine. Hold your line, bright-boy. I'll keep it still."
"Bright boy" Thane muttered, and threw himself forward.
The Rime-Claw fought the bindings, dragging Ardis a full step ahead. The shadows stretched thin, edges fraying as they dug into the creature's armor.
Thane gathered everything he had.
He dragged his flame inward, condensing it behind his ribs, then forced it down his arms in a narrow, focused channel. It hurt—hot, sharp, like swallowing a brand and then trying to breathe.
He planted his feet.
"Again!" Ardis shouted. "Now!"
Thane drove his hands forward.
When Thane's fire struck the weakened frost armor and Ardis's shadows locked around the beast's joints, something happened that neither of them expected.
For one impossible heartbeat, their magics touched—
Not brushing. Not aligning.
Locking.
The world reacted.
The frost-lit clearing brightened with a sudden rush of color—not flame-orange or shadow-black, but something entirely different. Light split the air in a blade-thin line that widened, spiraling outward like the petals of a flower made of heat and night.
Thane felt the snap first.
His flame surged forward—not in obedience, not in aggression, but in recognition. It lunged toward Ardis's magic with a hunger that wasn't violent but inevitable, as if it had been waiting years to find its missing half.
Ardis sucked in a sharp breath as the shadows around him convulsed—curling toward Thane's flame instead of recoiling from it. The darkness brightened at the edges, shifting from coal-black to silvered violet, glowing like moonlit ink.
Shadow wrapped around flame like a closing hand.
Flame threaded through shadow like a spine of light.
It didn't burn.
It didn't freeze.
It wove.
A single, spiraling column of luminous, braided magic burst upward, tearing a scar of brilliance through the cold night air. The temperature warped violently—heat and cold colliding into a perfect equilibrium that hummed across Thane's teeth and made Ardis's vision blur.
The forest bent away from the impact. Branches bowed, frost cracked, the air itself vibrated like a plucked string. For a moment, it felt as if something vast and old had stepped into the clearing and placed its hand over theirs.
The Rime-Claw reeled—its frost-core flickering wildly.
Not because of the flame.
Not because of the shadow.
Because the creature remembered this.
Somewhere deep in its ancient, magic-forged instincts, it knew this force.
Its shriek this time lacked fury, it was fear.
Thane staggered as the flame shot up his spine, fusing with a thread of shadow that pulsed along his ribs like a second heartbeat. He could feel Ardis—not physically, but as a presence threaded through the magic, distinct and undeniable.
Ardis's knees nearly buckled. The connection hitting him with enough force to blur sound. He tasted metal, tasted winter, tasted sunlight—impossible sensations that weren't his and yet flooded him as if they had always belonged.
He felt Thane's flame as clearly as he felt his own shadow.
It was like suddenly discovering his magic had two directions to breathe in instead of one—heat in, cold out, a loop of power flowing without resistance.
The Convergence pulsed around them, cracking the frost beneath their boots. Arcs of color leapt between them—red braided with indigo, gold threaded with obsidian—bright enough that one of Thane's men cried out and raised an arm to shield his eyes.
The combined blast speared through the Rime-Claw's chest, piercing its frost-core in a perfectly clean strike. The beast froze mid-roar, light flaring out through the cracks in its armor like molten lightning.
Then it shattered.
Not in jagged chunks.
In dust.
The Rime-Claw dissolved into a cloud of glittering frost that drifted upward on the last wash of heat, swirling like a dying constellation before fading into the dark.
Silence fell.
Thane gasped as the Convergence snapped apart, stumbling a half-step back. The flames recoiled into him with a jolt; his shard beat against his ribs in a frantic rhythm. It wasn't pain, It was shock. A violent awareness that something impossible had just been dragged back into existence through his bones.
Ardis's breath shuddered. Violet-tinted sparks flickered out at his fingertips as the last of the woven magic withdrew. The shadows around him trembled, alive and unsettled, sliding along his boots in restless tides.
Their magic had not just cooperated.
It had combined.
Khyren pushed himself upright with a wince, staring between the pile of dissolving frost and the two mages still standing. "Commander…what," he rasped. "That was—"
"A mistake," Ardis said sharply.
Several of Thane's men flinched at the sight of him—at the cloak, at the shadows, at the silver eyes. One of the younger scouts whispered, "A Shadow Mage saved us. He fought with us."
"Since when is that possible?" another murmured.
Thane didn't take his eyes off Ardis.
"You came back," he said quietly.
Ardis's jaw tightened. "Your man was about to die."
"It wasn't your responsibility"
Ardis pulled his shadows tighter "This never happened."
Thanes gaze flicked over the men, the shattered ground, the last drifting residue of the Convergence.
Thane huffed a soft, humorless sound. "That's not how this works."
"It is for me," Ardis said. "My Council doesn't like anomalies. They break them down until nothing is left but ash and a policy change."
Before Thane could reply, the air in the center of the clearing snapped.
A sharp, precise ripple of energy pressed outward. Light—pure and white-gold—coiled into a tight sphere above the churned earth, laced with faint threads of shadow.
Khyren swore under his breath. "What now?"
The sphere unfolded, blooming into a hovering sigil of three interlocking rings, each etched with different runes. Flame, Shadow, and a third older mark entwined together.
Ardis went very still. "A Concord Seal."
Thane's stomach dropped. "Triumvirate," he said, they were the only body with jurisdiction over both their orders, the ones who kept the balance.
The rings pulsed once, bright enough to paint the frost in pale gold.
Two smaller sparks peeled away from the seal, drifting down like falling stars and hardening into sealed letters edged in metallic ink.
One hovered in front of Thane.
The other, in front of Ardis.
No one spoke.
Thane reached out and took his. The wax burned hot against his fingers for a heartbeat before cooling.
He cracked it open.
The words inside glowed faintly as he read.
COMMANDER THANE VAELOR
YOU ARE HEREBY SUMMONED TO THE CENTRAL MAGISTERIUM WITHIN THREE DAYS' TIME
TRIANGULAR INQUEST: CRITICAL BREACH OF ARCANE LAW
PRESENCE MANDATORY UNDER CONCORD DECREE
His throat felt suddenly too tight. He looked up.
Ardis held his own letter open, eyes moving quickly. His face, already pale from exertion, went a shade paler.
"They felt it," Ardis said softly. "Of course they did."
"Not just them," Thane replied, glancing at the still-fading sigil. "All three branches. Flame, Shadow, and Concord."
Ardis folded the letter with careful precision, as if neat edges might keep his hands from shaking. Shadows hovered close to his boots, anxious.
"We're being called to inquiry," he said. "They'll want to know how this happened. Who started it. Whether it can happen again."
"And how to stop it," Thane added.
Ardis's gaze met his.
"We can't talk again before the inquest," Ardis said. "Our Councils will already be on edge. Don't give them more reason to see this as something we planned."
Thane nodded once. "I wasn't planning to stroll into the city at your side."
A flicker of dry humor touched Ardis's mouth and vanished. "Good. I'll go directly to the Arcanum. You'll report to your command. We'll both pretend we don't know how to answer any of the questions they're going to ask."
"They're not going to like that," Thane said.
"They were never going to like any version of this," Ardis replied.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
The clearing still hummed faintly with aftershock. Thane could feel his magic moving under his skin like a restless animal, unsettled. Ardis looked faintly hollow around the edges, as though his shadows were clinging tighter than usual just to keep his balance.
He turned slightly, shadows beginning to gather at his feet, ready to fold space.
"I'll see you there," Ardis said quietly. "At the Magisterium. Don't try to speak to me before the panel convenes. Don't act familiar. They'll be watching for any crack they can wedge a verdict into."
Thane's jaw clenched. "Understood."
Ardis's gaze held his for one last heartbeat.
Then the shadows rose.
They flowed up over his shoulders and head, swallowing his outline in smooth, practiced motion. Silver eyes were the last thing to fade.
And then he was gone.
The clearing felt bigger and emptier in his absence. Thane could feel the resonance tugging uncomfortably at his chest, like a thread pulled taut with no hand at the other end.
Khyren stepped closer, still favoring his ribs. "Commander… what in all the shattered hells just happened?"
Thane looked down at the letter in his hand, Concord's sigil gleaming faintly along the margin.
"Something the Councils thought they buried," he said quietly. "Something they're about to drag us in front of a tribunal over."
Khyren grimaced. "Do we have a problem, sir?"
"We have several," Thane said. He forced his fingers to loosen around the parchment. "See to the wounded. Secure the site. No one touches what's left of that thing until I decide if we're sending a report team."
"And you?" Khyren asked.
Thane exhaled slowly, feeling his shard-flame pulse once, unsettled and aching.
"I," he said, "am going to start figuring out how to tell the Magisterium that I accidentally did something impossible—and did it with a man they've spent years telling me I should never stand beside."
Khyren blinked. "Is there a… diplomatic way to say that?"
"If there is," Thane muttered, folding the letter and tucking it into his breastplate, "I haven't learned it yet."
He glanced once more toward the spot where Ardis had vanished.
Then he turned and walked back toward camp, the resonance still humming under his ribs like a promise he had no idea how to keep.