The cold did not feel natural anymore. It no longer simply bit my skin or stiffened my fingers; it seemed to move through me, as though something inside my bones now understood frost differently. My breath poured from my mouth in thick white clouds as I ran uphill through the snowfields, chains clinking softly against my wrists and throat with each stride. The metal was not restraining, but it was not symbolic either. It was real. I felt its weight against my pulse.
The gateway stood ahead, carved into the mountainside like a wound that had refused to close. Even from a distance I could see its immense arch framed in black stone, rimmed faintly in silver frost that glowed beneath the moonlight. Reaching it meant completion. Survival. Exit. But the Blood Lands were not finished with me. The first snow elf struck from my left without warning.
It was small compared to the beasts I had already fought, barely reaching my waist, but it moved with disturbing elasticity. Its body was malformed long hind legs like a bullfrog, shoulders hunched and sinewed like a starving hound. Its skin was pale and slick beneath patchy fur, mottled white and sickly green. Its eyes bulged slightly, amphibian and unblinking. Its claws were long, hooked, and darkened at the tips with dried toxin. Then seven more emerged from the snowdrifts. They circled.
The wind carried their scent to me sour, damp, and faintly venomous, like stagnant marsh layered over wet dog. My mind still throbbed faintly from the mind realm. There was a lingering distortion behind my vision, as though the world were half a breath out of alignment. They moved together. Not wild. Coordinated.
The first leapt low for my legs while another sprang toward my shoulder from behind. I pivoted on my heel, long blade cutting downward in a clean arc that split the lunging one midair. Warm blood sprayed across my cheek, shockingly hot against the freezing air. The second scraped its claws across my thigh before I twisted and drove my short blade backward into its ribcage. The toxin burned instantly where it touched my skin. A slow, numbing heat tried to creep inward. I did not allow it time.
They attacked in waves of three, always testing angles, always attempting to bait my guard. I slid backward across the snow, letting my heels carve shallow trenches that controlled spacing. I refused to overcommit. Momentum is energy. Energy is survival.
When two leapt simultaneously from opposite sides, I dropped low instead of retreating and cut upward through the underside of one while using the hilt of my short blade to deflect the other's claws away from my throat. I felt a shallow slice across my forearm the neurotoxin prickling immediately like frostbite layered in acid. They were not difficult individually. But they were relentless.
One snapped at my ankle and I felt teeth graze leather. I brought my knee up violently into its jaw and then drove my long blade through the top of its skull with surgical precision. Snow turned pink beneath us. The remaining creatures hesitated for the first time, hunger warring against instinct.
The moonlight reflected off the mountains above us, casting long blue-white shadows across the field. The wind howled low and constant, carrying distant cracking sounds from ice shifting far away. My lungs burned with cold air. My heart thundered violently. Then they rushed all at once. This time I advanced instead of retreating. I stepped into their center, cutting left, thrusting right, using their own proximity against them. I allowed my body to rotate fully, blades moving like extensions of thought rather than muscle. I felt fur part, bone resist, tendon snap. I did not waste motion. I did not hesitate for confirmation. Each strike was final.
When the last one collapsed twitching in the snow, the field fell silent again. My breath came heavy but steady. The rush of heat through my limbs was intoxicating adrenaline burning against cold. The toxin in my cuts prickled but had not spread deeply. I could not afford to rest. The gateway loomed closer now. I ran.
The snow grew thinner as I climbed higher, stone exposed beneath my boots. The wind sharpened, slicing across my cheeks, filling my mouth with the taste of mineral and frost. The chains at my wrists felt colder here, almost vibrating faintly. The mind realm had not fully left me. At the edge of my hearing, I still sensed a faint hum. Not words. Not yet. Something waiting. I reached out. My fingers were inches from the gateway's stone arch. Something enormous crashed into the snow beside me.
I threw myself backward instinctively, rolling hard across ice as a massive object struck the ground where I had stood. Snow exploded outward. I scrambled upright and saw it clearly. The severed head of a giant boar. Its tusks were the length of my forearm. Deep claw marks tore across its thick hide. Steam still rose faintly from the ragged flesh, meaning whatever had killed it was close. I did not need to search long. The air shifted above me.
The sound came first wings. Not feathered flapping, but something heavier, like burning canvas snapping in a storm. I looked up and saw it descending through the moonlit sky. A griffin. But not one from story or banner. This was a creature of nightmare.
Its body was massive, black as obsidian, feathers along its wings burning with faint dark flame that did not illuminate but devoured light. Its beak was curved and serrated, glowing faintly at the edges as if heat radiated from within. Its eyes were molten orange, locked directly onto me. The downdraft from its wings tore snow into spirals around my body. It dove. There was no angle to evade cleanly. Then the ground ruptured.
The serpent erupted from beneath the snowfield like a spear of living ivory, its vast body coiling upward in an explosion of frozen earth. Its scales shimmered ghost-white beneath the moonlight, undertones of pale celeste flashing as it wrapped itself around the griffin's midsection mid-flight. The impact was catastrophic.
The griffin screamed a piercing, metallic shriek that rattled my skull. Its talons dug into the serpent's scales, black fire spreading outward where it struck. The serpent's four eyes flared. Gold. Then silver. Then gold again. They flickered as if undecided.
The two titanic creatures crashed against the mountainside, snow avalanching downward from their collision. The wind from their struggle struck me so violently I nearly lost footing. I froze for half a second. Terror and awe paralyzed thought. Then the voice struck my mind again. "Go." It was not a request. It was pain shaped into command.
My head throbbed violently, vision blurring at the edges. The serpent's eyes flashed once more toward me gold and silver pulsing rapidly, uncertain, unstable. I stumbled toward the gateway, the stone arch now within reach. The air around it felt different thinner, vibrating faintly, as though reality itself were stretched taut there.
Behind me, the griffin's claws raked across serpent scale, sparks of black fire spraying across snow. The serpent tightened its coils, crushing, constricting. Their roars blended into one thunderous, otherworldly clash. I turned once. Only once. The serpent's eyes met mine. Gold. Then silver. Then both.
I did not understand what that meant. But I understood I would not be allowed to linger. I stepped through the gateway. And the Blood Lands vanished behind me.