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The troll stomped his hooflike front feet, the three ten-inch claws digging into the hard terrain. Boraleashe searched for a spot of vulnerability anywhere on the animal that he could penetrate, but the oversized animal was made up of millennia of packed snow and an unyielding ice exterior. He became frustrated and desperate when more screams and sounds of flesh tearing rang in his ears.
His weapons were useless, and it was taking him too long to kill one. Boraleashe rotated his hands around each other and created a massive force of energy with his wind. He shot his hands out and sent the beast flying backward several hundred feet.
His people cheered for him; some cried out for help.
Boraleashe yelled at the villagers to take cover in the mines nestled in the mountains, hoping he could give them a fighting chance to get there. Though he didn’t know how the fuck he was going to take all those beasts on at once.
It took the one troll longer to recover, but it didn’t stop the others from coming together and charging right for him. The trolls were back far enough that Boraleashe was able to form dozens of ice daggers with the most frigid arctic wind he could conjure and hurled the six-foot-long icicles in the beasts’ direction.
The force of his element behind the blades went straight through the eyes of one troll, a heinous cry ringing out before the crazed animal slid several feet across the ground, his rough hide slamming into the huge base of an elder tree, knocking it over and a couple surrounding it.
It lay there motionless… but not dead.
The remaining three seemed to double their efforts, coming at him with the full vengeance of the Snow Moon.
“Lord Boraleashe! Run! Come with us!” his people screamed at his back.
The only way he could protect them was by keeping himself between the entrance of the cave and the monsters. Boraleashe stretched his arms in a wide arch to create a cyclone, his most powerful weapon.
His energy was waning, his wind taking longer to conjure, allowing the beasts to get closer each time. His retractable spear was made of Cypianite platinum—an unbreakable metal forged by a demigod of Hephaestus lineage and infused with a subzero temperature that could freeze Boraleashe’s enemy from the inside out.
But he could not freeze what was already frozen. There was no weapon forged that could kill these demonic creatures, and Boraleashe feared his army was marching toward a massacre.
Then who would guard Amárach from future threats?
The black fear inside him ignited every cell in his body. The beasts charged at him with their razor-sharp teeth bared, snarling, and slobbering like his death would taste delicious.
Boraleashe didn’t have time to conjure his tornado. Working on pure adrenaline, he hurled a burst of wind, snow, and ice that didn’t even knock the trolls down. Anger flared through him so fast it burned his skin. The moon’s feud was with him; why were his people being slaughtered?
His rage threatened to spill out into screams. He drew his spear one last time, prepared to give these monsters all he had before they took him down, and even then, he wouldn’t stop fighting until he drew his last breath.
Boraleashe grunted and hollered from the effort it took to leap into the air and come down on a troll’s back. He landed a wicked blow from his sword, Weeping Glass, that didn’t do as much damage as he’d hoped.
Throwing caution and technique away, Boraleashe fought mercilessly and with no control, unleashing fury in every direction and at anything that came toward him. He sent small, ineffective bursts of northern energy while his lungs struggled to take in air.
The beast seemed to sense that he was out of steam. They approached him with bloodstained grins, taunting him before they finished him off. The hooves of his army’s Clydesdales pounded the ground in their rush to join in the fight, shaking the earth with their arrival.
If Boraleashe laid his life down now, it would be over. The Snow Moon and its assassins would have what it came for.
A flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye triggered him to turn his head. A child was running lost and scared through the clearing, crying out for his father before he fell face-first to the ground, only to get up and fall again.
Boraleashe heard the child’s cries… and so did the trolls.
Fear burned at the back of his throat, but he bolted into the sky, using every ounce of wind he could muster when he swooped down, hefted the boy in his arm, and got him the last feet toward the opening of the cave.
“Hurry, boy. Run! Quickly!” Boraleashe commanded. The boy was staring transfixed, his feet glued to the spot Boraleashe set him down.
