Chapter 389: Avalanche

Eris stood in the center of the clearing, her boots treading upon earth that had been scorched black amidst the white. She didn’t look at the steam or the wreckage of her first kill.

Her gaze was locked on Jorel’s unit, thirty yards to her left. A fourth Thraen was closing in on them, its movements jagged and erratic.

Jorel was shouting for his men to reform, but they were stumbling over the icy protrusions Soren had raised. The golem raised a massive, crystalline fist, the blue light in its chest pulsing with a rhythmic, killing hunger.

She gathered her power again. She didn’t just want to stop it; she wanted to erase it. She reached deeper than she ever had since arriving in Nevareth, pulling from the fire of the Pyronox, the ancient fire dragon soul bound to her own.

Heat built behind her ribs, an incandescent pressure that made the air around her ripple like a desert mirage. It was more than she had ever dared to summon. It was a sun in her lungs.

Then, she felt it.

A sharp, needle-like pain lanced through her sternum. It wasn’t the burn of her magic, it was the sensation of a hairline fracture in a sheet of glass. The Seal. The intricate, magical lock Soren and his mages had reinforced after it miraculously repaired itself to keep her power from consuming her soul.

Crack.

It was a tiny sound, audible only to her, echoing in the hollow of her chest. It wasn’t a total failure, not yet, but for the first time in months, the stability was gone.

Panic, cold and sharp, flooded her veins, clashing with the internal furnace. No. Not now. Not here.

Memories she had spent a lifetime trying to bury surged back with the force of a physical blow: her first life, the smell of burning stone, the screams of people she burned to ash because she couldn’t stop the fire.

The moment the Pyronox had taken over and turned her into a weapon of mass destruction.

Her skin broke out in goosebumps even as the snow melted into steam three feet around her. It’s starting again.

She looked at Jorel. The golem’s shadow was over him. If she stopped now, he was dead.

“Fuck it,” she gritted out through clenched teeth.

She released the magic. A roaring torrent of white-gold flame erupted from her, wider and more violent than before. It didn’t just melt the ice; it disintegrated the Thraen’s upper torso in a blinding flash of thermal energy. The golem didn’t even have time to shriek before it was reduced to a pile of steaming slag.

But as the fire left her, the pain in her chest flared. The crack widened a fraction of a millimeter. Eris gasped, her knees buckling as she clutched at her chest, her fingers digging into the leather of her tunic. The Pyronox wasn’t just a battery anymore; she could feel it stirring, a slumbering beast opening one molten eye.

Soren didn’t see the flash of Eris’s pain, but he felt the shift in the magical atmosphere. The air went from biting cold to a humid, unnatural pressure.

There were two golems left. Strangely, they had abandoned the guards entirely. They were pivoting, their eyeless sockets locked onto Soren with a terrifying synchronicity. It wasn’t a defensive posture; it was a targeted assassination.

“You want me?” Soren’s voice dropped into a register that made the nearby trees shiver. “Then have the whole of the North.”

He was done holding back. He was done playing with bows and spears. He planted his feet and raised both hands toward the grey, heavy sky. The tattoos on his arms, hidden beneath his furs, began to glow with a blinding, sapphire light.

The entire forest responded.

The ground didn’t just shake; it exploded. Massive columns of reinforced, high-density ice erupted from the earth like a forest of spears, rising twenty feet into the air in a heartbeat. Both golems were impaled simultaneously, hoisted off the ground by the sheer force of the tectonic ice.

Soren closed his fists.

The spears shattered inward. The pressure was so immense that the golems’ translucent bodies didn’t just break, they were pulverized.

Their stone cores, caught in the center of the crushing ice, shattered into a million sparkling dust particles.

Silence returned to the clearing, heavy and suffocating. The only sounds were the ragged breathing of the guards and the occasional hiss of steam from Eris’s kills.

The Thraen were gone, reduced to mounds of shattered glass and cooling slag.

Soren didn’t celebrate. He didn’t even look at the carnage. He turned and sprinted across the clearing.

He reached Eris in seconds, sliding to a stop in the slush. He saw her on her knees, her face pale, her hand white-knuckled against her sternum.

“Eris, what’s wrong?” He reached for her, his hands trembling.

She looked up, the molten gold in her eyes fading back to amber, though her pupils were blown wide with pain. “I’m fine,” she lied, her voice a ragged whisper.

“Don’t lie to me!” Soren’s voice was a controlled fury. He gripped her shoulders, his thumbs pressing into her cloak. “Your seal, I can feel the leak from here. You pushed too hard.”

She flinched, pulling away from his touch. “The men were in danger, Soren! Jorel would have been crushed! They needed my help, and I gave it!”

“I told you to stay back!” Soren roared, the fear finally manifesting as anger. “I told you to stay with Ryse! What if the seal had shattered entirely? What if you had burned yourself alive from the inside out? You could have DIED, Eris!”

“I can handle myself! I am not a Southern princess you can lock in a box whenever things get difficult!”

“This isn’t about politics or pride!” Soren yelled, his face inches from hers. “This is about your life! I cannot lose you because you decided to be a martyr for a fight I had under control!”

Eris stared at him, her chest heaving, the argument ready on her tongue, but then she saw his eyes. They weren’t the eyes of an angry emperor. They were the eyes of a man who was absolutely, fundamentally terrified. He wasn’t mad she disobeyed; he was mourning a version of the future where she was ash.

The anger evaporated out of her, leaving only the cold, hollow ache of the fracture in her chest. She remembered why she was so defensive: she was scared, too. Scared of the beast inside her. Scared of the day she would look at him and only see something to burn.

Soren’s fury died just as quickly. He saw the flicker of vulnerability in her gaze, the way she was trembling. He realized she wasn’t fighting him; she was fighting her own nature.

He reached out and pulled her into a tight, desperate embrace. He buried his face in the crook of her neck, his hands clutching the back of her tunic as if he were trying to hold her pieces together. “I know you can handle yourself,” he whispered, his voice breaking. “I know you can fight. I’m just terrified of losing you. I can’t do this without you, Eris.”

Eris let her head fall against his chest, her eyes closing as the familiar, cooling sensation of his presence began to soothe the jagged pain of the seal.

“The seal cracked,” she murmured against his furs.

Soren stiffened, his grip tightening. “How bad?”

“Small. Tiny. But… it’s been stable ever since I came to Nevareth. It hasn’t breathed a word in months. Why now?”

Soren pulled back just enough to look at her, his expression grim but resolute. He kissed her forehead, a lingering, silent vow. “We’ll figure it out. Together. We’ll get back to the mages, we’ll reinforce the bindings, and we’ll find out what woke those golems.”

The argument was over. He couldn’t stay mad at her, not when her heart was beating against his, even if that heart was currently a cracked furnace.

They stood together in the wreckage of the clearing, the guards beginning to tend to the wounded and gather the scattered horses. The tension was finally beginning to bleed out of the air. Bjorn approached them, letting out a soft whine and nuzzling Eris’s hand.

Soren let out a long breath, scanning the ridgeline. “We need to move. This clearing is too exposed, and if those things were hunting, ”

He stopped. The ground beneath his boots began to hum. It wasn’t the rhythmic thud of golems this time. It was a low, subsonic vibration that seemed to come from the mountain peaks themselves.

“That’s not golems,” Eris whispered, her eyes darting upward.

The sound grew. It wasn’t a rumble; it was a roar. A deep, devouring sound that swallowed the wind. Above them, on the steep, snow-laden slopes of the Frostspine, the world was moving.

The battle had been too much. The clashing of ancient ice and dragon fire, the explosion of the stone cores, the tectonic spears Soren had ripped from the earth, it had destabilized the ancient, precarious balance of the mountain.

“AVALANCHE!” Soren’s voice tore through the clearing, a frantic, desperate command. “EVERYONE RUN! TO THE ROCKS! NOW!”

But the mountain was faster.

A massive wall of white death, hundreds of tons of snow, ice, and uprooted trees, came crashing down the slope. It wasn’t a slide; it was a tidal wave.

“Soren!” Eris screamed, reaching for him.

Soren lunged for her, his hand outstretched, his fingers grazing hers. But the avalanche hit the center of the camp like a hammer. A surge of ice and snow slammed between them, a physical barrier of white fury that tossed men and horses aside like autumn leaves.

The group was split instantly.

Eris felt the world turn upside down, a suffocating, freezing weight slamming into her, dragging her away from the light, away from the heat, and away from the hand she had been so desperate to hold.

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