KRAK—THOOOM!
The sound of the colossal stone door sealing shut behind him was more than noise—it was a declaration. A period. Its weight shook the air, and the echo it produced was quickly devoured by a silence so dense and absolute it felt like a tangible substance. The darkness that engulfed Valerius was total, a void of light pressing against his eyelids, as if it were trying to seep into his lungs and smother the flame of life from within.
The air inside felt a thousand years older and far colder than the blizzard outside. This was no natural cold of snow and ice. It was the chill of a tomb, a cold born from the total absence of heat and life, carrying with it a complex stench. He smelled the dust of stone that had never seen the sun, the faint reek of organic decay long past, and most of all, the acrid tang of corrupted magic—magic twisted and rotted into a cancer on reality itself. The silence itself felt alive, a collective awareness in the stone and shadows watching him, measuring each breath.
For a weaker soul, this darkness and silence would have been a final prison, paralyzing the mind in primordial terror before the first claws of ice could ever touch them. But Valerius was no weak soul. He had long since made winter his ally, and darkness, to him, was nothing but a canvas waiting to be painted.
With a terrifying calm born of countless battles and uncountable losses, he raised his bare right hand. His fingers splayed slightly, and he murmured a single word—a whisper nearly inaudible, yet heavy with power.
"Lux."
There was no dramatic flash. Instead, in the center of his palm, light began to bloom like frost flowers on a window. It was a cold, pale blue glow, radiating from a crystal sphere of ice the size of a clenched fist that floated just above his skin. Unlike firelight, warm and flickering, this light was steady and supernatural, emitting a calm, unwavering glow. It did not banish shadows—if anything, it made them sharper, longer, more menacing. The darkness danced across the walls around him like restless ghosts, shifting in answer to his slightest movement.
What his light revealed confirmed his worst suspicions. This was no fortress built by human hands. He stood in a corridor that felt as though it had been hollowed out of the belly of a frozen beast. The walls were neither smooth nor straight but curved at impossible angles, made of the same black ice as the gargoyle sentry. This ice was not dead—it pulsed slowly with a sickly red glow, like capillaries carrying poison deep within. The floor was a rippling, slick sheet of ice that threatened each step. High overhead, lost in the darkness, hung jagged icicle stalactites as sharp as blades, waiting to fall with the slightest provocation.
The only sounds were the faint creaks of the ice expanding and contracting in its ancient, glacial breathing, and Valerius's own breath, billowing white vapor into the cold air before his face. He stepped forward, his thick leather boots almost silent on the floor that seemed to swallow every sound. Every instinct—honed by years of hunting monsters and surviving in the wild—screamed at him. He was being watched. Not by a single pair of eyes, but by the fortress itself.
He followed the winding corridor deeper into the beast's belly. Along the way, he saw twisted signs of life. Veins of purple crystal moss grew in the crevices of the black ice, writhing slightly as if recoiling from his cold light as he passed. He began to hear whispers—voices on the edge of his hearing, speaking in some ancient, long-dead tongue. They did not shriek—they coaxed, slithering into his thoughts, prying at the memories that hurt the most—warm laughter in a summer garden, a smile beneath royal banners, promises that were now ash. It was the fortress trying to unravel him from within, turning his past into a weapon. Valerius ignored it, reinforcing his mental wards and wrapping himself in cold focus.
Roughly fifty meters in, his light fell upon something that broke the monotony of black ice. A figure was frozen into the wall, half-embedded as if the stone had swallowed it whole. It was a knight in full plate armor, the design unmistakably from the Southern Kingdoms, likely two centuries old. The face, visible through the open visor, was a death mask of pure terror. Eyes wide, mouth frozen in a soundless scream, with ice dripping from the chin like frozen spittle. In his gauntleted hands, he still clutched the shattered remains of a longsword. Valerius stopped, cautiously stepping closer. He examined the ice encasing the knight. It was dark, veined with pulsing purple. Necrotic frostbite—a magic that froze and rotted simultaneously. It confirmed his suspicion: the force in this fortress was the sworn enemy of his own pure Eternal Blizzard.
He was about to turn away when he felt a tremor through the soles of his boots. At once, he extinguished the sphere of light, plunging himself back into absolute darkness. From around the bend ahead, he heard a sound that raised the hairs on his neck—the rasping drag of something heavy and the scrape of metal claws on ice, coming closer. He pressed his back into a crevice in the wall, his own freezing aura blending into the darkness, masking his faint heat signature from any supernatural senses.
A patrol appeared from the bend, and it was far worse than he had anticipated. This was no mere pack of feral ghouls. It was a unit. Leading them was a figure larger than the rest, clad in shards of forged black ice armor covering its chest and shoulders. In its massive hands, it held a great spiked mace fashioned from a giant's frozen thigh bone. Behind it, four smaller ghouls moved with terrifying discipline, carrying crude axes and spears of black ice. The most disturbing was the figure at the center of their formation. This ghoul was thinner, its gray skin etched all over with spiraling runes glowing sickly purple. It carried no weapon, yet it was obviously their master—the Acolyte. It muttered commands in a guttural, rasping tongue, and the others adjusted formation in perfect unison. They were not merely patrolling—they were performing a ritual, touching points on the walls to reinforce the fortress's necrotic energy.
Valerius held his breath. He could defeat them. He knew he could. But the battle would be loud, and it would surely alert whatever commanded this place. Intelligence demanded patience. He remained still as stone, allowing the patrol to pass within a few meters of his hiding place. The stench of death and corrupted magic was so thick it made him nauseous. After they vanished around the corner, he waited a full minute before reigniting his cold light and continuing deeper.
He began to feel something else now—a constant low-frequency hum, a vibration he sensed more in his bones than with his ears. It was the thrum of raw power, pulling him onward like a moth to flame. The farther he went, the stronger the hum became, the current of dark magic in the air growing so thick it felt like wading upstream through an invisible torrent.
After perhaps another fifteen minutes, the narrow corridor suddenly opened into a chamber so vast it stole his breath. A colossal cavern—a cathedral consecrated to despair. Its scale was impossible, the ceiling lost in darkness overhead, beyond even his sorcerous light.
And in the chamber's center stood the source of all horror, the origin of the deafening thrum and the creeping corruption.
An altar.
It was a monstrous thing, a raw obsidian monolith crudely carved, rising three stories tall. Its surface was etched in runes that squirmed and pulsed as though alive, emanating black-purple light so vile it made Valerius's orb flicker and waver. And embedded in the altar's crown like a hideous gem in a demon's crown, was a massive black crystal the size of a wagon. This was the Heart of the fortress, and it beat. Each pulse sent a wave of dark energy rippling out through the entire stronghold, and with every beat, thick black tar-like fluid seeped from fissures in its surface. The liquid trickled down channels etched into the altar's flanks, dripping onto the floor below.
The floor around the altar was a tableau from hell. Hundreds of corpses lay in various stages of transformation—missing villagers from Oakhaven, hapless forest animals, even broken ghouls. As the Heart's black ichor touched a body, the nightmare unfolded. Flesh twitched and spasmed. Skin bleached to ashen gray. Bones cracked and warped beneath taut skin, claws of black ice erupting from their fingers. This was a nightmare factory, an assembly line for a legion of darkness. Valerius now knew where the endless hordes had come from.
And the chamber was not empty.
A figure stood with its back to him, facing the altar, hands raised as if conducting a monstrous orchestra. Tall and impossibly thin, it wore ragged charcoal vestments stained by centuries of dust and decay. It held a staff fashioned from a twisted human spine, crowned by a skull frozen in an eternal scream, its sockets blazing with the same purple light as the Heart above. The figure murmured words in a gurgling, nauseating tongue—a dark litany perfectly in time with the Heart's pulses.
He had no doubt. This was the conductor. This was the mind behind the attacks. He would have to destroy it.
He gathered his will, ignoring the pain already flaring in his soul as he worked magic in such a poisoned place. The air around him crackled with cold, his pure frost gathering in his palm, ready to shape the deadliest spear.
But as the energy began to coalesce, the muttering stopped. The sudden silence was more terrifying than the hum had been.
Slowly, with stiff, unnatural movements like a corpse jerked on puppet strings, the figure turned.
Its face was the embodiment of nightmare. Flesh desiccated and stretched parchment-tight over an ancient skull. The lips were rotted away, baring rows of blackened teeth. There were no eyes—only hollow sockets burning with twin cold blue flames, a perverse parody of Valerius's own. A lich—a sorcerer who had traded his soul for decaying immortality.
The lich stared straight into him, as if it had always known he was there. A terrible, impossible smile cracked the desiccated skin.
When it spoke, its voice was a tombstone grinding over grave dust, rasping with the decay of a thousand years.
"A son of winter…" it hissed, words echoing in the vast chamber. "How rare. You come to reclaim what is no longer yours, frost sorcerer?"
The lich raised its skull-tipped staff, sickly violet light spiraling around the screaming bone.
"This fortress, this cold, even the silence itself… now serve my great and ravenous Master. And you," it rasped, pointing a long, skeletal finger at Valerius, "you shall be the most exquisite offering to this altar."