The Ironworks district was a cavern of rust and shadows, a place where Veridia's industrial might had once thrived and was now slowly decaying. The skeletal remains of massive cranes clawed at the smoggy sky, and the air was thick with the smell of old metal, ash, and the pervasive, cloying sweetness of the Wraiths.
Kaelen moved through the derelict facility with a predator's silence, his every sense alert. Aris followed closely, her own senses overwhelmed. The scale of the place was immense, a cathedral dedicated to a dead industry.
"The attack was here," Kaelen said, his voice low as they entered a vast, open space that must have been the main forge. The ceiling was a lattice of broken glass and iron beams. "A Greater Wraith. Took three of my men to bring it down."
The evidence of the fight was everywhere. Scorch marks—some the familiar blue of Pyre Guard fire, others a strange, corrosive black—scarred the walls and floor. Shattered machinery lay scattered about.
"Describe it," Aris said, her voice barely a whisper. "The Greater Wraith. How was it different?"
"Larger. Denser. It didn't just project cold; it stole heat from a distance. Metal became brittle. Men... faltered, their strength draining before it even touched them." He pointed his axe to a patch of floor that was still covered in a faint, glittering frost, despite the relative warmth of the day. "There."
Aris approached the spot cautiously. The cold was intense, a deep, biting chill that felt wrong. She knelt, ignoring Kaelen's sharp intake of breath—a warning. She wasn't going to touch it. She was observing.
The frost wasn't water ice. It had a crystalline, almost metallic sheen. She pulled a small, non-magnetic tool Lysette had given her from her new belt and gently scraped at the edge of the frost. A tiny flake came away, and she held it up. It didn't melt. It sublimated, turning directly from a solid into a faint, shimmering gas that vanished.
"Fascinating," she murmured, her scientific curiosity overriding her fear. "It's not a thermal reaction in the conventional sense. It's a localized alteration of the physical laws governing atomic motion. It's enforcing a state of absolute zero."
She looked up at Kaelen. He was watching her, his head tilted. The glow of his eyes illuminated the sharp planes of his face in the gloom. He looked less like a man and more like a statue carved from living embers.
"You speak in riddles," he stated, but there was no accusation in his tone now. Only a deep, focused curiosity that mirrored her own.
"I speak in the only language I know," she replied, standing up and brushing the non-existent residue from her hands. "This thing... it doesn't just make things cold. It makes them still. On a fundamental level. Your fire... it must reintroduce violent, chaotic motion. It agitates what the Wraith tries to calm. It's a counter-frequency."
She walked around the frost patch, her mind building a model. "The Lesser Wraiths are unstable. My crude fire was enough to agitate them. This Greater Wraith... its coherence was stronger. Its 'stillness' was more potent. It would take a much more powerful, focused agitation to disrupt it." She looked at his axe. "Like that."
He hefted the weapon, the fire in the axe-head flickering in response to his grip. "So we just need bigger fires."
"Not necessarily bigger," Aris said, a new idea forming. "But... smarter. If we can find the frequency of their coherence, we could create a resonance. A vibration that matches their own destructive harmonic. We wouldn't need to overpower them with heat; we could make them unravel themselves."
She was so engrossed in her theory she didn't notice how close he had come. He was standing right in front of her, the heat from his body a palpable force against the lingering cold of the forge.
"You see the world through a different lens," he said, his voice a low rumble. It wasn't a compliment, merely an observation. A statement of fact.
"So do you," she countered, holding her ground, though her heart was pounding. "You see a world of magic. I see a world of physics waiting to be understood."
His glowing eyes searched her face, and for a fleeting second, she saw something other than the Commander or the predator. She saw a flicker of something... isolated. A man who carried a terrible power, a man set apart from everyone else by the very thing that made him their protector.
The moment was shattered by a sudden, violent drop in temperature. The air itself seemed to crackle with the promise of frost.
Kaelen's head snapped up, his body tensing. He shoved Aris behind him, his axe flaring to life with a roar.
"Another one," he growled. "And it's close."
The intellectual exercise was over. The deadly reality was back. And Aris was once again a liability, shielded by the very man who found her both frustrating and fascinating.