Chapter 390: Separation

The world vanished into a roar of white. It wasn’t just snow; it was a physical weight, a suffocating, freezing tidal wave that tore through the clearing with the force of a falling moon.

When the thunder finally subsided, the silence that followed was more terrifying than the noise.

The avalanche had carved a jagged scar through the center of the camp, but the destruction was more than natural. The clashing residue of Soren’s ice spears and Eris’s dragon fire had fused with the slide, creating a gargantuan, vertical barrier. A wall of magically reinforced ice, translucent and shimmering with a sickly blue light, now bisected the forest. It stretched fifty feet into the air, a jagged, impassable monolith that cut the party in two.

On one side, the Emperor stood in the churned-up debris. Beside him, Ryse and Jorel were already pulling guards from the drifts, while Bjorn paced the base of the wall, letting out a high, fractured whine.

Soren didn’t wait to assess the damage. He lunged at the ice wall, his fist glowing with a sapphire intensity that rivaled the sun. He slammed his hand against the barrier, unleashing a kinetic burst of pure, unadulterated power.

The earth beneath them didn’t just shake; it groaned. A shockwave rippled outward, causing the distant mountain peaks to shed fresh plumes of snow. The ice wall cracked, a spiderweb of fractures blooming where he struck, but it didn’t shatter. It was thirty feet thick, dense as diamond, and humming with the dying energy of the golems.

“ERIS!” Soren roared, his voice cracking. He struck the wall again, and again, the vibrations making the teeth of every man behind him rattle.

“Your Majesty, the wall is too thick!” Ryse shouted, grabbing Soren’s shoulder to pull him back before he brought the rest of the mountain down on their heads. “You’re going to trigger another slide!”

“I DON’T CARE!” Soren snarled, his eyes wild, the draconic pupils narrowed to lethal slits. “She’s on the other side! If she’s alone…”

“We need to go around!” Jorel intervened, his voice urgent. “We’re losing light. If we stay here hammering at a mountain, we’ll would be frozen corpses by midnight. We find a path. We meet her on the other side.”

Bjorn began to claw at the base of the ice, his paws bleeding as he tried to dig through the impossible barrier.

On the opposite side of the wall, the air was eerily still.

Eris stood ashen-faced, her hand pressed hard against her chest where the Pyronox was still pulsing like a bruised nerve. Behind her, Thyren was helping a group of guards settle the panicked horses. Half the pack animals were here, along with a dozen soldiers who were all currently staring at the shimmering blue ice wall with a mixture of awe and terror.

Then, they turned to her.

The silence was heavy. In Nevareth, the Emperor was the sun and the stars; without him, the Northmen looked for a replacement. Thyren stepped forward, his breath hitching in the cold. “Empress… what do we do?”

Eris felt the weight of their gaze, the expectation of leadership she hadn’t asked for in that moment. Her heart was pounding against her ribs, echoing the fracture in her seal, but she forced her hands to stop shaking. She looked at the wall. She could hear a faint, distant thudding from the other side, Soren, trying to break through.

“We move,” Eris said, her voice surprisingly steady. “The wall is too dense to melt without me losing control, and his Majesty’s strength is only going to bring the peak down on us. We find a path around. West, toward the lower ridge.”

“But the Emperor, ” a guard started.

“His Majesty will do the same,” Eris interrupted, her eyes locking onto the man’s. “He knows the forest. He’ll head East to the crossing. We’ll meet on the other side of this ridge. Now, move. We have three hours of light, at most.”

Soren stared at the wall for one final, agonizing second before turning to his men. His mind was a frantic map of the Frostspine. He considered using his magic to lift himself over the barrier, to simply fly or vault the ice, but the thought died as soon as he looked at the wounded guards and the grim faces of Ryse and Jorel.

He couldn’t abandon his men. A leader who left his soldiers to die in the snow was no Emperor, and Eris would never forgive him if he arrived alone having left a trail of frozen bodies behind him.

“East path,” Soren barked, his voice tight. “Through the Black Pine thickets. It’s dense, it’s dangerous, but it’s the fastest way to circumvent the slide. If we move at a dead run, we can make the clearing on the other side in three hours.”

“Your Majesty, the terrain there is, ”

“I said double-time!” Soren snapped, his imperial mask momentarily slipping to reveal the raw panic beneath. “No stops. Ryse, lead scouts ahead. Jorel, take the rear guard. We get to them before nightfall. Move!”

On the Western side of the wall, Eris was making a different calculation. The West path was longer, winding through a series of rocky shelves, but it was safer for the horses.

“Thyren, you’re second in command,” Eris said as they began the trek. “If something happens to me, if the seal fails, you take the horses and you run. You don’t look back.”

Thyren looked at her, his expression softening into something like genuine devotion. “Nothing is going to happen, Empress. We’re going to find the Emperor, and then we’re going to find the bastard who woke those golems.”

The guards rallied, the sound of steel clinking against leather providing a rhythmic counterpoint to the howling wind. “Let’s find him,” they muttered, falling into step behind the woman with the fire in her eyes.

The march was a grueling test of endurance.

Soren was barely holding himself together. He wasn’t walking; he was practically sprinting through the knee-deep snow, his cloak snapping behind him like a banner. His internal monologue was a chaotic loop of what-ifs. What if the golems weren’t alone? What if the seal widens? What if she’s hurt and trying to hide it?

“Your Majesty, the men need a moment to catch their wind,” Ryse called out, his own face flushed with exertion.

Soren didn’t even look back. “They can rest when we find her. Every minute we linger is a minute she’s alone in the dark with a cracked soul.”

Bjorn was a silver streak ahead of them, his nose to the ground, tracking Eris’s scent through the chaos of the avalanche debris. The wolf was the only thing keeping Soren from losing his mind entirely; as long as Bjorn was running, Eris was still out there.

A mile to the West, Eris was proving herself in a way she never had in her first life.

She wasn’t pushing her group to the point of collapse. She was leading with a measured, lethal intelligence. When a guard twisted his ankle in a hidden crevice, she didn’t leave him or bark orders; she knelt in the snow, using a controlled, localized burst of fire magic to warm the joint and keep the blood flowing while they bound it. When the path split near a frozen waterfall, she didn’t hesitate, choosing the lower route that kept them out of the wind.

The officers watched her In silence.

“She’s good at this,” Thyren whispered to a sergeant as they navigated a narrow ledge.

“Better than I expected,” the guard admitted, watching Eris help a horse negotiate a slick patch of ice. “She doesn’t panic. She just… acts.”

“Don’t let His Majesty hear you say that,” Thyren joked quietly, a small smile touching his lips. “He still thinks he needs to protect her from the breeze.”

But the North was indifferent to their resolve.

As the sun touched the jagged horizon, the shadows in the deep forest grew long and predatory. The light didn’t fade so much as it was extinguished by the towering peaks. The temperature plummeted, the air becoming so cold it felt like inhaling needles.

Neither group had found the end of the wall.

Soren reached a dead end, a ravine filled with fresh snow from the slide. He stood at the edge, his breath coming in ragged plumes, his hands clenched so tight they were numb. “We have to keep going,” he hissed, turning to the exhausted men behind him.

“Your Majesty,” Jorel said, stepping forward, his voice heavy with regret. “If we keep going in the dark, we’ll walk off a cliff or into a Vargra nest. If we’re exhausted, we can’t protect her when we do find her.”

Soren looked at the horizon, the last sliver of orange disappearing behind the Frostspine. He wanted to scream. He wanted to burn the forest down just to see her. But Jorel was right. He slumped, his shoulders dropping for the first time. “Camp,” he whispered. “Double guards. We move at first light.”

He didn’t sleep. He sat by the fire, staring into the flames, his hand reflexively reaching for a ghost that wasn’t there.

On the West side, Eris sat by her own fire, her hand pressed against her chest. The seal was aching, a dull, thrumming pain that pulsed with every heartbeat. She had set up a defensive perimeter, posted extra sentries, and ensured every man had a hot meal. She was the picture of a perfect commander.

But as she stared into the embers, she felt smaller than she ever had.

“We’ll find him tomorrow, Empress,” Thyren said, sitting across from her.

“I know,” Eris said, her voice barely audible.

She looked up at the moon, wondering if Soren was looking at the same sliver of silver. She needed his ice to balance her fire. And more than that, she just needed him.

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