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In an instant, what should have been a brief formality before a joyous reunion turned into something far more dangerous.

High upon the walls of the Frost Walker’s icy fortress, hundreds of hunters and warriors who gathered for the welcoming ceremony stared in mute shock as the ascendant young lord bared his teeth at the very guests they were here to receive and unleashed sorcery more ominous than anything they had experienced in their entire lives.

Before Lady Nyrielle and Lady Ashlynn’s visit in the spring, Hauke had been something of a tragic figure in the High Pass, envied by many for his iridescent horn and his position as the son and presumed heir of Lord Ritchel.

But until recently, he had been too young and too weak to command respect that outweighed the bitter envy.

All of that changed as their young lord delved deep into the lost arts of the ancestors.

While the Elders who sat on the council were unconvinced about the wisdom of allowing Hauke to carry the horns and lingering spirits of his ancestors, the younger soldiers and hunters standing on the walls now found their bitter envy replaced by growing admiration and genuine respect as Hauke not only gained great strength of his own, but began to share techniques that made each of them more powerful, no matter whether their inclinations were toward snow, ice, wind or water.

The impact he’d had on them was so great that many had begun to look forward to the day that Hauke could succeed Lord Ritchel, believing that they would be part of a new era where the people of the High Pass could fight back against the Tuscans or anyone else who preyed upon them, finally gaining a measure of freedom to travel the world beyond their icy peaks.

And now, their young hero was charging forward, bearing his claws and unleashing icy fury at the supposed ’allies’ who had arrived with Tuscan mercenaries.

No one on the walls knew why Hauke had attacked so suddenly, but many of them began to prepare their own weapons and magics, awaiting their young lord’s order to join the attack!

Heila was the first to react to Hauke’s charge. Her days in the arena had left her with a keen sense of danger, and while her fight or flight instincts might calm given enough time, it had only been a handful of days since her last battle in the arena.

Before Hauke’s feet left the ground, Heila’s hand dropped to the hilt of Snow Fang, summoning a flurry of snowflakes and retreating rapidly away from the charging Frost Walker and his murderous spear.

Ashlynn’s reaction was almost as fast, drawing the darksteel falchion at her waist and charging to meet Hauke’s attack head on.

There was nothing artful or elegant about her movements, and witchcraft was the furthest thing from her mind as she sought to position herself between the strange, dark sorcery at the tip of Hauke’s spear and her closest friend.

-CRACK- -FWUMP-

The sound of a dark steel blade biting into the ice of Hauke’s frozen spear echoed across the mountainside, followed an instant later by a sound like hundreds of pounds of snow falling to the ground all at once.

"Oof," Ashlynn gasped as an unspeakably heavy force slammed into her with a wave of dark, purplish sorcery. Even with the blessings of strength she’d gained from Nyrielle, the impact was so sudden and so unexpected that it knocked her from her feet, sending her sprawling on the ground and gasping for air.

Worse than the physical impact, however, was the dark, oppressive feeling of her magic being smothered, as if it were trapped under an avalanche of snow.

The power of life and growing things was already paper-thin on the bleak, barren mountainside, leaving Ashlynn reliant almost entirely on her own energy like an ordinary sorcerer, but under the pressure of the intense, smothering magic unleashed by Hauke’s icy spear, even channeling that power felt almost impossible.

If the blow had landed on Heila, there would be little the Willow Witch could do to escape the ensnaring magic, but Ashlynn was no ordinary witch.

Drawing deeply on the physical strength she possessed as a result of her bond with Nyrielle, Ashlynn stabbed her darksteel blade into the icy ground beneath her and struggled against the oppressive magic, returning to her feet through an act of pure determination to protect her closest friend.

"Stay down, witch," the deep, unfamiliar voice said as Hauke turned his attention to the fleeing Willow Witch. Across the young Frost Walker’s chest, two of the iridescent horns glowed brilliantly, one a deep icy blue and shadowy purple while the other pulsed with a bright, cold white light.

"This doesn’t concern you," a second, feminine voice echoed from Hauke’s mouth as the young Frost Walker lord reached out with his free hand, gathering swirling white energy as he spoke.

"Do not play with snow before its master, little girl," the cold, feminine voice said moments before the storm of swirling white energy exploded from Hauke’s fingertips, tearing away the cloud of snowflakes that Heila had used to escape.

Heila had only made it halfway back to the wagons and the remainder of Nyrielle’s army when the cloud of snow beneath her cloven hooves dissipated like smoke on the wind, sending her tumbling to the snow and ice below.

Her cloven hooves landed awkwardly on the icy road, sliding out from underneath her and dropping her painfully on her hands and knees.

"Storm of shards!" Hauke bellowed in that strange, deep voice, hurling his spear of ice at the fallen witch. The spear whistled through the air before exploding with a loud -CRACK-, transforming into dozens of shards of ice, each one sharper than a butcher’s knife and all of them raining down on Heila’s exposed back.

"Hauke!" Ashlynn shouted as she struggled against the weight pressing down on her. "What are you doing?"