"We have waited for you."
The scent of ash deepens around them, the air warming further, as though something long dormant has begun to breathe again.
Colsar does not hesitate. There is nothing left to consider, nothing left to lose.
"Yes." The word tears out of him. "Then do it."
The man steps forward. The dead remain suspended. The circlet lowers and meets his head and the instant it touches him everything breaks open.
Heat drives through him, immediate and absolute, moving through every vein and nerve, every place the cold had begun to claim, forcing change where none had existed before. His back lifts from the ground as his body arches under it, muscles locking, breath breaking as something inside him remakes itself with a force that cannot be slowed or reasoned with.
A sound leaves him that does not resemble anything human.
His hands drive into the snow, anchoring him against something that cannot be contained. The scent of ash thickens. The air burns. The sky above shifts and darkens and something moves through it.
The three figures are gone, the ground where they stood already empty.
Everything slams back into motion.
The wind strikes first, violent and immediate, snow tearing across the open ground. The dead surge forward all at once, their movement resuming with a force that fills everything again.
He does not remain where he fell.
Something rises in him that he does not have a name for, warmth building outward from his chest and moving into his arms and down to the tips of his fingers, into his throat, behind his eyes, until everything burns from the inside in a way that does not hurt so much as demand. His fingers press into the snow, and the snow melts beneath them. Fire moves behind his eyes, bright and alive, pressing against the back of them as though it has been waiting there his entire life without him knowing it.
He does not think about what he does next. He throws his head back. And he calls.
He does not know what he is calling for. He only knows that something in him recognizes what is needed before he does, that the heat in his chest knows exactly where to reach, and so he lets it, opening himself to it completely and pushing outward with everything he has left.
The sound that leaves him is not a word and not a scream. It tears across the open ground and lifts into the sky above the snow and the wind, eerie and resonant, the kind of sound that does not belong to anything that walks on the ground.
Then the sky answers.
They come from above the cloud and the dark, enormous and burning, their bodies trailing fire as they descend. Some burn orange, deep and consuming, their eyes the same bright amber as open flame. Others burn blue, a color that has nobusiness existing in fire, cold and ferocious and somehow more frightening than the rest. Their wings cut through the heavy snowfall and drive it back, and they do not slow when they reach the horde below them.
They hit the mass like a breaking wave.
Fire tears outward from every point of impact, orange and blue blooming across the ground, bodies collapsing where they are caught, the lines breaking apart under something they were never built to withstand. The pressure collapses. The horde fractures. Anything that does not fall begins to pull back, drawn away from the heat and the light and the terrible burning certainty of what has arrived.
Colsar's head drops forward.
The call has taken the last of what he had, and for a moment the world around him comes back slowly, the cold ground beneath him, the sound of fire and the dead and the wind, all of it returning as though from a great distance. He is only half aware of the figure that approaches through it.
Young, with gray hair slicked back and glyphs that run across his skin in light silver. He reaches Colsar without hurry and pulls a cloak across his shoulders with the ease of someone performing a task they have done a thousand times before.
"I am your sentinel," he says. "Arabar." His voice is even, unbothered, carrying no more urgency than if they were standing in a quiet room. "This is easy work," he says, nodding nonchalantly at the hordes of undead now being decimated by the Firebirds shooting from the sky. "Allow me to handle it, Majesty." He steps back and looks at the house. "Go find them."
Colsar lowers his head, his mind returning to reality.
The cloak is warm in a way that has nothing to do with fabric. He is barely aware of it on his shoulders, barely aware of anything beyond the house in front of him and the door hanging open and the silence that has been pressing against him since he last heard her voice.
He turns to the cottage. And runs.
Below the Stairs
COLSAR
The fire holds behind him, pressing outward as he crosses the threshold, heat brushing across his back before falling away the moment he steps inside.
