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As soon as Ashlynn’s hand touched the hilt of the Holy Flame Blade, the world around her seemed to slow to a crawl.

Dozens of paces away, Ansgar and Ines had clearly realized they’d misunderstood her actions. The Mother of Trees had no intention of surrendering the defiler to them, even after seeing her army stuck on the walls and unable to advance.

Certainly, Lord Ritchel’s capture and inevitable death would be a blow against the young Hauke, but it was a trial that the young lord needed to overcome if he was going to succeed his father’s throne and take his rightful place at the head of the clan.

Perhaps, if the young lord watched his father fall to the schemes of outsiders, he would understand why generations of Frost Walkers had restricted themselves to ruling the icy peaks and never bothered conquering the lush lands below, even when they possessed the strength to do so.

More than anything, the ancestors wanted to spend what little time they had left to forge Hauke into the kind of lord who could lead their people back to the place they should hold as the undisputed rulers of the frigid world atop the mountains.

As far as Ansgar and the other ancestors were concerned, Eldritch Lords like Ritchel who lacked an iridescent horn could serve, at best, as custodians for the clan until a suitable ruler could take their place at the head of the clan.

The fact that so many generations had passed without an iridescent lord to rule them explained the clan’s tragic state, but under their guidance, Hauke would soon return the clan to its former glories.

Even Ritchel knew that his time was coming to an end and that Hauke would soon take his place.

And so, as a hostage, the ancestors felt nothing at all about Ritchel’s life or death.

But if the Mother of Trees defied them and took the defiler and her horn knife away.

.. that was a declaration of war that could only be answered with the fury of a descending avalanche.

Ashlynn might not understand everything that went into the calculations of the ancient spirits possessing Hauke, but as soon as she reached for the sword, they began to move, making it clear that the wouldn’t stay their hand for even a moment, despite the fact that Talauia held Lord Ritchel’s life at the point of her needle.

Before her hand wrapped completely around the hilt of the sword, her hand already screamed in painful protest as she pushed her frozen fingers to stretch wide and grasp the thick, decorative hilt.

Clearly the Church had never expected for a woman with such small and delicate hands to wield one of their holy swords, but at the moment, she didn’t care whether or not she could fight with it as a sword, so long as she could channel the power of the blade, it would be enough.

The moment her hand wrapped around the hilt, a different kind of pain surged up her arm as the blade challenged her right to wield it.

Flames wrapped around her gloved hand, melting the layer of frost encasing the glove in an instant, while hot steam seared the flesh of her hand as the frozen sweat in the glove boiled away in the blink of an eye.

"Aaaah!" A startled cry of pain escaped Ashlynn’s lips before she could push back against the blade’s cruel assault.

Within the blade, she could feel not just the searing heat of the Holy Lord of Light’s flames of punishment and judgment, but a hot, seething fury and a deep desire to cleanse the world in Holy Flames that defined the blade’s existence.

"No," Ashlynn told the blade fiercely. "You serve a greater purpose than pure destruction, I know you do!

" Despite the fact that a Holy Flame Blade was more destructive than a Holy Light Blade, in the end, Ashlynn still saw it as one of the greatest symbols of the intentions of the Church.

To protect the people who believed from anything that could plunge their world into darkness and to provide a burning light of hope even in the bleakest, most hopeless battles.

She wanted to push back against the blade’s fury with her own faith, with her pure intentions to use its power in a way the sword itself could accept.

.. but there was no time. She could not afford to meet the struggle offered by the sword in a ’fair’ or ’proper’ way.

At that moment, she reminded herself of Artificer Erkembalt’s words and treated the sword as nothing more than a tool, one that would bow down and submit as long as it was met with sufficient strength.

Here, on the barren mountainside, there were no trees or plants to offer their strength to the Mother of Trees, but there was a deep, virtually endless source of strength of the earth that dwelled in the mountain itself.

"Through stone’s descent and earth’s command,

Let mountain’s will flow to my hand!"

Ashlynn didn’t speak the words but formed them clearly in her mind, along with the image of a giant rolling boulder crashing against the sword’s resistance.

The mountain trembled slightly under her feet as if her action might provoke a landslide.

If she’d had more time to prepare her witchcraft or more experience working with pure, barren earth, there might not have been any risk, but with the ancestors rushing toward her, Ashlynn spared no thought for the consequences and hurled all of her strength at the stubborn blade.

Faced with the power and focused desire of a powerful witch, the sword’s defenses crumbled like a castle of sand facing the tide. The flood of energy was so great that the sword immediately blazed to light, shining like a bonfire in the dark of night.

The wave of heat radiating from the blade was so intense that Ignatious retreated nearly fifty paces away, turning his body to shield Heila’s unconscious body from the heat.

But even as he turned his body away, his eyes remained fixed on the sword that burned with a flame so bright that he momentarily felt like he was in the presence of an Exemplar.

Ansgar also stopped mid charge, holding up the runic blade as though it was a shield and summoning a thick wall of ice between himself and the mad witch who seemed to have lit herself on fire just to break his charge.

Ashlynn’s body shook with the pressure of the heat, and the snow around her melted into puddles before quickly beginning to steam, filling the mountainside with a low, steamy fog.

The blade in her hand burned, drawing deeply on her energy, as though she were nothing more than a pile of firewood, waiting to be consumed.

"You still belong to the Holy Lord of Light," Ashlynn said through gritted teeth. Her muscles screamed at the abuse, and several of her wounds reopened as she moved, but she knew that she had to do something with this power, and quickly before it would consume her. So, even though it hurt almost as much as it had hurt to pull herself from the shallow grave the night Owain’s knights had dumped her body at the border of the Vale of Mists, she raised the sword high overhead and pointed the tip straight at the sky.

"Your light and flames, bring more than fear," she told the blade. "So give them hope and banish the night, burn like the sun and reveal what’s right!"

Part witchcraft and part prayer, her words challelled the storm of fiery energy into a giant pillar of flame, stretching hundreds of paces into the sky.

The column of flame tore through Ines’s blizzard, freeing Nyrielle’s army from its wintery claws and revealing a sight like nothing they’d seen before.

Even on the walls of the Frost Walker fortress, deadly duels paused as both sides turned to look at the battered, bloodied woman holding a sword that burned like the sun and a pillar of flame that turned the night into day.

"Lay down your weapons!" Ashlynn commanded, her voice echoing off the fortress walls and the mountainside.

The earth trembled, and in several places, sheets of ice and snow tumbled from the mountain in a series of sluffs.

"Whether you fight for the High Pass or the Vale of Mists," she added.

"No more blood will be spilled tonight!"

The pillar of flame began to fade as Ashlynn quickly reached her limits, but she’d accomplished the most important part. The battle that never should have been fought had ground to a halt, leaving only one final person standing with a weapon in hand and a furious gaze on their borrowed face.

"That includes you," Ashlynn said, lowering the still-burning sword to point at the ancestral spirits. "Release my friend, or I will tear you away from him and burn your horns to ash!"