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The Ice Tomb shook with powerful impacts as the fierce battle between Ashlynn and the ancestral spirits became even more intense.

Ashlynn’s hands felt numb from repeated impacts on her sword, and her body screamed in agony with every move, yet she dared not slow down.

She’d abandoned thoughts of fighting back, and for the moment, she focused only on exhausting her opponents, hoping to wear them down and find an opportunity to counterattack.

Outside the walls of ice, Heila’s presence felt dimmer and weaker than it had just a few minutes ago, and as much as Ashlynn wanted to believe that help was coming for her, she was increasingly worried that her rescuers were running into their own difficulties.

More than anything, she wanted to break through the walls of this prison, to check on Heila and everyone else with the army, but the ancestral spirits had no intention of letting her escape.

The best she could do was to keep one of the icy walls close at all times in the hopes that stray blows would fall on the increasingly brittle ice.

Trapped in his own mind, Hauke allowed himself to hang limply from the frozen chains that bound him as he helplessly watched Ashlynn’s struggle.

Already, a tingling pain had begun to spread through his body as the ancestors pushed his body to its limits, overtaxing his muscles and drawing more deeply on his reserves of magical energy than he’d ever dared to himself.

"Please," Hauke said in a defeated, plaintive tone. "If you keep this up, I’ll die. I can’t keep using energy like this."

"You can, you’ve just forgotten how," Eraric’s gravely voice said.

Ever since handing over the sword he’d crafted, he’d taken a seat on his pedestal, content to watch Ansgar and Ines making use of his work to subdue the young Mother of Trees.

"There’s a reason that even the Fangs of Death once feared those born with an iridescent horn, young Hauke. You’re seeing it now."

"Seeing what?" Hauke asked as he carefully worked to free one of his wrists from the chains.

The more of his energy that Ansgar and Ines spent fighting Ashlynn, the weaker the chains grew.

The links themselves seemed to be melting away, and already they had grown thin enough for him to make small movements that would have been impossible when this madness began.

"Why would the Fangs of Death ever fear us? "

"Ines has been teaching you, hasn’t she?

" Kimsel asked without taking her eyes off of the view of the battle raging in the outside world. Ines blizzard obscured much of what they were able to see through Hauke’s eyes, but it was clear that the Mother of Trees was badly wounded, and her blood stained the snow in several places within the icy prison.

"Witches use the power of the world," the old woman continued slowly.

"Vampires use the power of death. But to think that we are ordinary sorcerers," she said with a dismissive -tsk- noise.

"We build up our power in layer after layer of ice, waiting to be unleashed in a powerful avalanche.

Perhaps we are weak and vulnerable out there in the wider world," she said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of distant lands.

"But on our mountains, standing atop centuries of accumulated power, we will never be defeated. "

"Maybe that was true once," Hauke argued.

"But not anymore. You said it yourself," he said, turning to face Eraric. "We’ve forgotten. No one knows how to use the power you use. But if you use that power to kill Lady Ashlynn, then Lady Nyrielle’s army will destroy us. Instead of saving us by killing Heila, you’ll doom us by killing Ashlynn!

" Hauke shouted, straining against his chains and lunging at the architect who’d used them to bind him in his own mind.

"The fortress is stronger than you know," Eraric countered, sighing at his descendant’s lack of confidence in his own people. "We’ll retreat within its walls and wait for winter. The vampire might be able to survive the cold, but her army is another matter. We will never be driven from our homes."

"You’re wrong," Hauke said, slumping against his chains again and looking even more defeated. Around his wrists, the chains slipped even further, but it still wasn’t enough.

Before he could make another attempt at disguising a mighty tug on the chains, however, he heard a resounding, cruel laugh from the wall that displayed the outside world.

Ashlynn stood in a wide, stable stance with both hands on her darksteel falchion.

The weapon felt like it was colder than the water of the frozen lake and her gloves had grown stiff as the sweat seeping from her hands froze solid around her fingers.

All across the blade, a spiderweb of cracks traced from hilt to point, clustered at the point two-thirds of the way up the blade where she struck the hardest.

"You fought well, witch," Ansgar said, chuckling darkly as he stalked out of the swirling blizzard with his glowing, runic blade raised high overhead. "But now, it ends," he said, bringing the glowing blade down in a powerful arc.

Ashlynn’s eyes flicked over the surface of her darksteel falchion, taking in the web of cracks that covered the blade from hilt to point.

The weapon wasn’t some ancient artifact with a legendary name from the songs that minstrels sang during festivals, but it had been with her since Thane first pressed it into her hands.

Back then, she was barely able to lift it, much less wield it properly.

The nameless blade had drawn her first blood in practice, saved her life against the Tuscan hunters in these very mountains, and stood between her and certain death again and again as she fought off the spirits who had taken control of her friend.

Even when it wasn’t on her hip when she trained in the Briar, she still reached for it any time danger appeared.

And now, she was certain that it would shatter if she tried to block Ansgar’s heavy blow. Perhaps there was a chance that it could survive one more strike, but more likely than not, the ancestral spirit’s runic blade would cleave through both steel and flesh in one unstoppable strike.

"Hauke! Help me!" Ashlynn shouted, making her decision in a heartbeat. Rather than raise the falchion in a futile block, she lashed out in a desperate swing, deliberately loosening her frozen fingers at the perfect moment. The falchion spun from her grasp, flying directly at Hauke’s gleaming, iridescent horn, performing its final duty to buy her enough time to dodge away from the deadly blow.

"Ashlynn!" Hauke shouted, yelling within his mind even though Ashlynn couldn’t hear him. With a powerful tug that felt like it would wrench his arms from their sockets, Hauke threw all of his weight against the chains, hoping to give Ashlynn even a moment of disruption to evade the fatal blow.

Hauke’s desperate act of defiance worked, at least to an extent, as Ansgar felt a surge of pain in his shoulders that mirrored the injury Hauke had just inflicted on himself.

For a moment, the pain was so intense that his eyes misted over, only to reveal a wicked blade spinning at his head the instant he blinked away the moisture.

"Traitor!" Ansgar shouted, slamming downward at the spinning blade with the most powerful burst of energy he could. In an instant, ice encased the darksteel blade, less than half a blink before the runic blade cleaved through it, shattering Ashlynn’s sword like it had been made of nothing but simple, ordinary ice struck by a hammer.

On the ground, Ashlynn scrambled for distance, her hands scrambling at her belt to draw her Severing Knife. Unlike Heila’s blunt tool, Ashlynn knew all too well the pain of being caught without a weapon to defend herself, and the curved bone knife in her hands came to a wicked point.

Against someone as large and skilled as Ansgar, even though he was unfamiliar with Hauke’s body, it felt like a feeble weapon to bet her life on. But, if she could sever the bond between Hauke and the horns strapped to his chest...

A moment later, those thoughts shattered, just like her blade, when a powerful wave of magic slammed into one of the icy walls of the tomb.

The temperature in the icy prison soared, and clouds of steam rolled off the trembling wall as another wave of flame descended on the prison like the light of the rising sun spilling across the valleys beneath the mountains.

Help had finally arrived...