Darius Valek POV
The sky fell.
Not real sky—just the cavern roof coughing ice and bone—but it hammered his shield like the wrath of a very local god.
"Shields!" Darius roared.
He and Brynjar snapped into place, shields overlapping into a crude dome over Elayne and Liora. The first barrage hit a heartbeat later: jagged chunks of condensed frost and stone, ripped from the ceiling by Selithrae's will and gravity, slammed down in a staggered pattern.
Something big smashed into Brynjar's shield with a crunch that made the metal whine. Shards hissed off the rim and bit Darius' cheek.
He held anyway.
When the impacts eased, he risked a glance.
High ledges ringed the basin, crowded with wights. Some raised bows. Others stood in tight knots, hands lifted, catching each surge and shaping it upward into fresh volleys. On one spur of ice, Aevyrion watched like a man at the opera. On the opposite side, Selithrae stood with her staff, soul-fire bright.
Under their boots, every glowing vein of Eternal Winter converged on the knot at the basin's heart.
The anchor's bite.
Darius could feel it now—pressure in bone and scar, the sense that the world leaned there.
"Elayne," he said. "Tell me you're having a brilliant idea."
Between him and Brynjar, Elayne crouched with one hand on the ice, the other braced on Liora's shoulder. Her face was too pale; her eyes were too bright.
"No brilliant," she said. "Just necessary."
"That never means good," Brynjar muttered.
Another volley shrieked down—splinters of ceiling and spears of ice, shaken loose and driven by the curse itself. This time they ducked instead of bracing. Shards bounced off their armour, skittered across the ice.
"We can't stay here," Liora gasped. Blood had soaked through the bandage at her side again.
"We're not staying," Elayne snapped. "We're going forward."
Darius snorted. "Forward into that?"
The anchor-projection wasn't a neat circle. It was a knot of light and ice, constantly twisting and breaking and re-forming. Every deeper pulse sent fresh cracks racing out like fractures in a skull.
"That," Elayne said, "is the only place we have a chance of pulling Whitefall without smearing ourselves across the front."
He stared at her. "Whitefall is for emergencies."
Elayne met his eyes. "Darius. We are in the spine of Eternal Winter being shelled by a lich's duchess. This qualifies."
Another shaped surge hit near them. A chunk of ceiling tore free, smashed into the basin, and exploded in a spray of shards. A spear volley followed, testing their stance more than trying to kill.
The wights weren't rushing. They were squeezing.
Darius breathed once, in and out.
"Fine," he said. "What do you need?"
"Liora's relic," Elayne said. "Your oath. Brynjar's brute force. All three of you touching the circle when I call it. And we need to be close enough to the knot that Whitefall can grab the field without the anchor tearing us in half."
"And the dead between us and that knot?" Brynjar asked. "Smile and wave?"
"Kill what you must," Elayne said. "Don't go looking for more. Every step is forward, not sideways."
Darius nodded once.
"Brynjar, we push on surges," he said. "Liora, you're between us. Elayne, you draw. If you die, we'll hold a very flattering funeral."
"Comforting," Elayne said.
Darius lifted his shield.
"Frosted Rose!" he shouted, voice cracking across the basin. "We move when Tloew breathes out! Brace when it breathes in!"
The curse pulsed under them. Wrong rhythm, but rhythm all the same.
On the next slackening, they moved.
---
The nearest wight line shifted, bracing to receive.
Spears stabbed. Darius turned the first aside with his shield and drove his sword into a ribcage. Brynjar's shield smashed another skull. Liora's light flickered in a narrow beam, knocking a spear a finger's breadth off Elayne's ribs.
"Brace!" Elayne shouted.
The next surge slammed up.
Darius bent his knees and rode it, weight low, shield grounded. Pressure clawed at his lungs, tugged at his boots. He leaned into it like a battering ram into a gate.
When it eased, he snarled, "Forward!"
They gained three more steps.
Above, bows twanged. Arrows pattered around them. One punched into Brynjar's thigh; he grunted and kept moving as Liora slapped a glowing hand over the shaft.
"Stop collecting souvenirs," she hissed.
"Stop walking me into archers," Brynjar rasped.
The wights folded, refolded, trying to wrap around their flanks. Darius kept them tight.
"Edge to edge!" he barked. "We're a wedge, not a pretty line!"
They crushed forward. Slow, ugly, relentless.
"Rosgaard!" Aevyrion called down, amused. "You are walking into my duchess's teeth. Do you plan to die or impress her?"
Elayne didn't look up. "Both if he keeps talking," she muttered.
Darius focused on what mattered: pulse, distance, the feel of the field under his boots.
Selithrae's presence lay over it all, a pressure that shifted whenever she raised her staff. She wasn't just commanding the dead. She was holding the curse's weight.
And she was letting them come.
They reached a point where every surge felt sharper, every slack shorter.
"Here," Elayne said abruptly. "No further. Another twenty steps and the stress will cut us apart faster than I can shape it. I need you to hold here."
"Define 'hold'," Darius said.
"Three surges," she said. "You don't fall. You don't let them break the circle. You don't let me stop casting."
All perfectly reasonable, Darius thought sourly.
He planted his boots.
"Brynjar—anchor. Liora—relic. Elayne—do the thing."
Elayne dropped to one knee, both hands on the ice. Liora mirrored her, palm flat on the ground, other hand gripping the crescent at her throat.
Pale lines of light seeped out from under their fingers, sketching a tight ring around the four of them, symbols forming faster than Darius could follow. The hairs on his arms lifted.
Whitefall.
He'd seen the diagrams. Heard the warnings. If it worked, it would ride their bonds and snap them back to the dome. If it didn't, the anchor would pull harder and break them somewhere between here and there.
He didn't let himself think about the "if it didn't."
He planted himself on the circle's edge.
"Three surges," he said. "Then home or nowhere."
The next surge built.
"Brace!"
It hit like a hammer.
The forming circle caught some of it, sending it around instead of straight through. The rest smashed into bone and armour. Darius' teeth buzzed.
Wights pressed in until their shields scraped his. Spears probed. One slipped under his rim; he twisted, letting it glance off his cuirass.
"Keep them off the line!" Elayne gasped. "If they break it, I start over!"
Not an option.
Darius hammered his boss into a skull leaning too far in. Bone cracked; the wight toppled backward, replaced by another. Brynjar's sword worked in brutal, efficient arcs, taking hands, weapons, the occasional head. Liora's free hand flicked up in short, sharp blessings, dazzling a wight whenever its spear got too clever.
Above, another barrage shrieked downward—chunks of ice and stone shaken loose and driven by wight casters on the ledges.
"Elayne!" Darius barked.
"I see it!"
The circle flared. A thin dome snapped into place over their heads. The falling debris smashed against it, cracking it like glass but not quite through.
The second surge slammed up almost on the heels of the first, out of rhythm now, Tloew bucking at the stress.
It hit Elayne's forming circle and pushed.
Darius felt the field trying to shove their little geometry out of its way. The dome flickered; lines in the circle writhed.
Elayne made a raw sound.
"Stay with me," she snarled. "Liora—more."
Liora's shoulders shook. Light bled from the crescent and down into the lines.
Darius glanced down.
The circle was clearer now—a compact pattern centred on Elayne, connected to each of them by a single thread.
To Brynjar, a thick, heavy arc.
To Liora, a fine, shining line.
To him, something hooked into his chest.
His oath.
He felt it flare: Frosted Rose, Archduke, the line, the names carved on stone. Every promise he'd made, caught and lit like tinder.
Whitefall had sunk anchors into all of it.
He suddenly felt horribly naked.
"Elayne," he said quietly. "If you break my soul, I'm haunting you."
"Get us home," she ground out, "and you can file a complaint."
The third surge rose.
This one felt wrong from the start. Bigger. Twisted. Pulled from every vein feeding the basin. The knot at the centre flared blindingly bright, fractures racing out toward them.
On the far ledge, Selithrae lifted her staff.
Darius realised—too late—that she was grabbing the same surge Elayne was.
They were both on the same rope.
The world clenched.
The surge hit the circle. Elayne screamed a word that was less a sound and more a jagged hole in it.
Whitefall bit.
Everything stretched.
The basin, the wights, Selithrae, Aevyrion—all smeared outward like wet paint. The threads connecting Darius to the circle snapped taut.
Pain burned up his spine. His vision went white at the edges. His oath blazed so bright he thought he could hear it.
"Pull!" Elayne gasped. "With me!"
He didn't know how to pull on a spell.
So he leaned on the only thing that had never moved: his promise.
He thought of the dome. Of the people who slept under it because he and his order stood in the snow. Of the line on the map he'd sworn to hold.
He leaned his whole self into that.
The thread in him flared, burning back along its length into the circle. Brynjar roared; stubborn, vicious will flooded his own line. Liora sobbed something that might have been a prayer; light surged along hers.
Something gave.
Not the circle.
Something deep in the knot ahead. For a heartbeat Darius felt the anchor-projection as a chain, each link a set of impossible angles. One of those links cracked.
Whitefall lunged for the gap.
The world vanished.
There was no cold, no heat, no direction. Just pressure, and the sense that something huge wanted to keep him while something smaller and meaner insisted on taking him back.
Something snatched at his ankle in the nowhere. He kicked, on instinct. Pain flared; something tore.
Then he hit stone.
Ordinary, blessed, unremarkable stone.
He lay on his back, staring up at a ceiling webbed with ward-lines he knew by heart.
The dome.
Sound came back all at once.
"Get their helmets off!"
"Brynjar's leg—no, don't move it!"
"She's bleeding from… everywhere—"
"Elayne, stay with me—"
Hands grabbed at his straps, pried his shield off his arm. A familiar voice bit close to his ear.
"Lie still, Sir Darius," the ward-physician snapped. "You look like someone used your soul as a bell."
"Feels like it," Darius croaked.
He tried to sit up. Regretted it. The room spun; his stomach lurched.
"Selithrae," he managed. First thought, first word.
Then: "Elayne. Liora. Brynjar."
"Here," Brynjar grunted somewhere to his right. "Leg's broken. Pride intact."
"Also here," Liora whispered on his left. "Maybe missing parts."
Elayne didn't answer.
Darius forced his eyes to focus.
She lay a few paces away, twisted half on her side. Blood had dried in thin lines from nose, ears, eyes. Her chest rose and fell shallowly. A healer knelt over her, jaw tight.
"Alive," the healer said, before he could ask. "For now. Whatever she pulled went through more than her channels."
The ward-physician followed Darius' gaze to the big map on the far wall and went very quiet.
Darius turned his head, slowly.
The front was there in coloured glass and ink: Eternal Winter in cold blue, wards in gold.
Except the blue line wasn't the same.
Near the section marked for Tloew, a jagged bite had taken a piece out of the front. The curse had pulled back there, leaving a crooked inward curve where solid advance had been.
Some of the outer ward markers beyond that bite were dark.
The rest burned brighter.
Behind his eyes, Darius could still feel the anchor pulsing. Slower. Skewed. Angry.
"We did something," he said hoarsely. "Made a bite. Opened cracks. I don't know if it's better or worse yet."
He closed his eyes for a heartbeat.
In the dark, he saw Selithrae on her ledge as the surge snapped, staggering as a link in her leash broke.
She was still out there. Standing on the spine. Holding what was left.
"Sir Darius," the ward-physician said, softer now. "Command will want a report as soon as you can speak without falling over."
Darius almost laughed.
"I can fall over and speak," he said. "I'm very talented."
He looked at his people again—Brynjar with his leg already splinted, Liora grey and shaking, Elayne terrifyingly still.
"We're alive," he said.
For now.
Out beyond the dome, the Land of Eternal Winter shifted its weight, testing the new break.
And somewhere deep inside that wound, a frost wight duchess had just learned the North could reach her spine and get away with most of its pieces.
The war had changed shape.
Again.