The Sovereign-V1: C17: Blood and Frost

The Sovereign-V1: C17: Blood and Frost

By dusk, the Grand Lecture Hall reeked not of learning, but of profound humiliation, crushed juniper berries, congealing gravy, eye stinging pepper dust, and the acrid, animal bite of noble fear sweat, expensive perfumes turned sour and cloying. The ozone tang of unleashed fury lingered like static after a storm. Temple guards in polished, sweat streaked breastplates grimly scrubbed brown smears from the walls, their expressions stony masks of discomfort and resentment. Others picked glitter from the cracks in the marble floor with the tips of their spears, each tiny, defiant sparkle a reminder of the chaos. Professor Vayne, stripped of his ruined robes and any shred of dignity, ranted incoherently at Priest Gin near the shattered remains of the celestial globe, spittle flying like cometary debris. “HERETICAL BIRDS! SORCEROUS CROWS! EYES LIKE FROZEN HELLFIRE! THEY DID HIS BIDDING! THE DEMON GHOST COMMANDS THE VOID! HE SUMMONED THE MEAT FROM THE ABYSS!”
But Shiro and Kuro were already gone, ascending the familiar, treacherous rust of the ancient access ladder to the central roof. The wind here was sharper, cleaner, brutally scoured of the hall’s cloying miasma, carrying the distant, earthy scent of woodsmoke from Higaru and the ever present, bone deep cold of the approaching Nyxion winter that seeped into the stone itself. The crow circled high above, a black speck against the bruised purple and deepening indigo of twilight, King Ryo’s stolen ring glinting defiantly in its beak like a captured, rebellious star winking against the dying light. Shiro flexed his star scarred hand, the wound still raw and pulsing in time with his heartbeat, a compass needle vibrating with urgent intent against the growing, pervasive chill that seemed to emanate from the very air.
“Demon Ghost, huh?” Kuro snorted, leaning his back against the crumbling, ice rimed parapet, tossing a fig pit out into the vast, darkening expanse beyond the academy walls. The pit vanished instantly, swallowed by the gloom gathering over the slumbering city. “Catchy. Has a certain doomed romanticism to it. Better than ‘Slum Rat,’ aesthetically speaking. More… marketable. For terrifying the nobility, at least. Sounds like something from one of those penny dreadfuls they pretend not to read.” He rubbed his thumb over his own matching scar, the action absent, yet grounding.
Shiro grinned, the wind tugging insistently at his imperious white hair, the fading adrenaline of the chaos still humming just beneath his skin, a low thrum of defiance. “Still prefer it to ‘Black Prince of Blighted Expectations.’ Yours sounds like a bad bed time story. Needs more what’s the word flair.”
“Debatable,” Kuro retorted, pulling another fig from his seemingly bottomless pocket. He polished it briefly on his sleeve. “Personally, I think ‘slum rat’ lacks the necessary mythic resonance Gin’s clearly aiming for. It’s pedestrian. Crude. ‘Demon Ghost’…” He took a deliberate bite, the burst of cloying sweetness a brief, stolen pleasure against the rooftop’s biting cold. “…implies power. Primal fear. Potential for an excitingly tragic backstory involving cursed stardust, vengeful spirits, and maybe a tragic love affair with a sentient icicle.” He swallowed, the forced lightness not quite reaching his eyes, which held a distant, weary shadow. “Though ‘princeling’,” he conceded with a wry twist of his lips that didn't touch the gravity in his storm grey gaze, “uttered by
you
, does possess a certain… venomous charm.
Still cradled by Father? Awwww.” He mimed rocking a baby with grotesque sweetness.
“Adorable imagery, Ghost. Truly heartwarming. Makes me nostalgic for nap time and silver rattles.”
“Fuck off,” Shiro shot back, though the insult lacked its usual heat, softened by the shared space on the cold parapet. He nudged Kuro’s shoulder with his own, a solid pressure against the chilling wind. “Says the one named Princeling, perpetually swaddled in silk and suffocating paranoia.” He bumped Kuro’s shoulder again, a silent offer of solidarity that spoke louder than their banter. It was a language forged in shared blood, rooftop rebellions, and the cold certainty of their path north.
“Touche, touché,” Kuro echoed, bumping back, the brief contact a spark of warmth in the encroaching dark. They sat in companionable silence for a moment, shoulders touching, trading half hearted insults that were more ritual, more lifeline, than rancour. The camaraderie forged in blood and shared defiance was a warmer shield against the encroaching night than any fur lined cloak the nobles below might own. The stars above remained stubbornly hidden, smothered by the thick, suffocating clouds that had rolled in from the Nyxion peaks, a celestial censoring, a dome of oppressive grey.
But their own defiance was etched in far more permanent, visceral mediums: blood on skin, stolen ink on parchment, the sharp, stolen laughter that still seemed to hang, crystalline, in the icy air around them, a counterpoint to the distant, fading sounds of outrage and scrubbing from below. The rooftop felt like the prow of a ship sailing into a starless sea, guided only by the cold, throbbing beacon on their palms. The war declared in blood on this very spot was no longer theoretical scribbles on a chart. The first skirmish had been fought, and decisively won, with gravy, glitter, and the potent weapon of fear. The next, they knew in their bones, in the ache of their scars, would demand a far steeper price. Paid in a different currency.
Kuro looked down at his star scarred palm, raw and stinging in the cold air, the lines stark against his paler skin. He traced the raised edges with a fingertip, then lifted his gaze north, towards the storm shrouded peaks, invisible behind the solid wall of cloud, yet a palpable presence, a vast, frozen weight pressing against the horizon. The grin, the mask of arrogant defiance, faded completely, leaving his face strangely bare, vulnerable in the twilight. The lines around his eyes deepened, etched not by laughter, but by the weight of kingship denied and the icy path ahead. "Burn the sky," he murmured, not to Shiro, but to the darkening horizon, the words heavy as glacier ice, scraping raw in the stillness. "Easy to say up here. When it’s just words thrown at the wind. Feels heavier now. Tastes like blood on the tongue and frost in the lungs. A promise…”
He paused, the silence stretching. “…that could freeze us solid long before it ever sparks a fucking flame." The raw admission hung in the frigid air, stark and terrifying.
Shiro saw the shadow cross his face, the uncharacteristic stillness, the immense weight of the unknown pressing down, not just the physical journey, but the crushing reality of challenging a god king and a demon queen. He didn’t speak, didn’t offer false reassurance or hollow bravado. Words were currency they couldn’t afford here. He just shifted his shoulder, pressing it more firmly against Kuro’s, a silent pressure, a solid anchor, a shared axis against the gathering, hungry dark. The twin stars, marked in blood, holding their ground against the coming storm. The wind moaned around the gargoyles, carrying the first flurries of snow like ash from a distant pyre.
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The hallway below, moments later, reeked of panic, stale gravy, acrid pepper dust, and something sharper, darker: the metallic tang of Gin’s fury, thick as spilled blood in the confined air. It mixed nauseatingly with the lingering scents of noble perfumes gone rancid with fear. Gin loomed over the trembling janitor, a gaunt spectre of zealous wrath. His star shaped pendant pulsed like an infected heart, casting sickly, throbbing green light that made the man’s sweat slicked, dirt streaked face look cadaverous, hollowed out by terror. The mop clattered to the wet stone floor as Gin leaned in, his breath reeking of cloying temple incense and the deeper rot of decaying faith. “Demonic crows, you say?” Gin hissed, the pendant’s light intensifying with his anger, casting jagged, leaping shadows across his hollowed cheeks and the damp walls. “Elaborate. Leave nothing out. Every detail is a thread in the tapestry of heresy!” His knuckles were white where he gripped his own robes.
The janitor trembled violently, sweat gluing his threadbare shirt to his spine despite the hallway’s chill. “T…they… they dropped buns, Your Holiness! From the rafters! Like… like falling stars made of meat! Came from nowhere! And…and their eyes…” He gestured wildly, desperately, to the crow still perched implacably on a nearby sconce, its prismatic gaze fixed unblinkingly on Gin, reflecting the pendant’s diseased glow with unnerving clarity. “Watching! Always watching!”
“Eyes?” Gin’s voice dropped to a venomous whisper, laced with a fear he couldn’t entirely suppress, a crack in his fanatical armour. He’d pored over the forbidden texts in the deepest vaults. He knew the lore of eyes like fractured glass, windows to realms where stars died. “What of their eyes?” He took a half step closer, the sickly light washing over the janitor’s face.
“Like… like sorcery!” The janitor whimpered, shrinking back against the cold wall, his voice a terrified rasp. “Glowing! Unnatural! Not of this world! Like ice lit from within by hellfire! And…and the frost! All the fig stems, frozen solid, even deep in the warm kitchens… solid ice inside! Not just cold, Your Holiness! Wrong! And the cold… it clung, Your Holiness! Like ivy made of winter! Crawling up the walls! And the posters…” He pointed a shaking, grimy finger at a nearby wanted notice for a petty thief. Frost, unnaturally white, brittle, and gleaming with an inner light, had spread across its surface, forming intricate, jagged patterns that seemed less like random ice crystals and more like… deliberate claws raking the parchment. “It moves! It grows! Like it’s… alive!”
Gin stared at the frost. The patterns were unmistakable, horrifyingly familiar, sharp, aggressive lines coalescing into fractured eight pointed stars, mirroring the malignant shape of his pendant, before shattering into chaotic, hungry fractals. It wasn't melting near the sputtering torch nearby; it seemed to be crawling across the stone wall beneath the poster with a faint, almost inaudible sound like grinding teeth or cracking bone. His star shaped pendant flared violently, a sudden, searing emerald burst that scorched the skin beneath his robes with a sizzling hiss and the smell of burning wool and flesh. Gin gasped, staggering back, clutching the burning metal as it guttered violently low, plunging the immediate hallway into near total gloom, the afterimage of that malevolent green star burning his retinas. “Nyxara’s sigil...” he breathed, the name ash on his tongue, cold dread coiling in his gut like a serpent of ice. The texts shrieked the warning: Her frost is her sigil, her hunger made manifest, writing its claim upon the world. The shepherd… the frozen villages… it wasn't just rumour. It was here.
Lady Reina, clutching her ruined silks like a shroud, saw his dawning, horrified recognition. Her own fear, momentarily overshadowed by outrage, surged back, icy and paralyzing. “The northern caravans, Your Holiness!” she interjected, her voice trembling, stripped of its usual haughty cadence. “Weeks ago! They found a shepherd… frozen mid scream! Ice inside his bones, they said… cracking his ribs from within! Bursting him open like a rotten fruit! And his flock… hollow eyes, like the warmth was… sucked out.” She shuddered, the memory staining her voice, making it thin and reedy. “Like something fed on them. Drained them dry before the frost took hold!” She wrapped her arms around herself, as if suddenly freezing.
Lord Takeo Sudo, still flecked with juniper glitter that now looked like a mocking disease, stepped forward, his earlier panic replaced by a colder, deeper dread that settled in his bones. “It’s spreading, Your Holiness! The frost… it’s not natural winter! It ignores fire! It’s her! Nyxara’s breath! Her touch! And the slum rat… he’s her herald! Her claw in this world! Koji saw his eyes glow! Like the crow’s!”
Koji nodded furiously, his jade cufflinks clattering like falling, cursed stars. “Amber! Like a demon’s furnace! Like hot coals in the face of winter! He beat me senseless in the lecture… pure animal fury! Crows appear wherever he is , in the shadows! He brings the frost! Where he walks, the cold deepens! The ice forms!” His voice cracked, the wet stain on his trousers a humiliating testament to his terror.
Gin whirled, his pendant flaring erratically again, casting strobing, sickly shadows. “Enough excuses!” he roared, the sound raw, bordering on hysteria. “Weakness invites the Blight! Doubt feeds her! The Temple’s light does not suffer doubt!” His gauntlet shot out, seizing Takeo’s throat in a vice like grip, lifting the noble slightly off his feet. “You question the Temple’s power? You let this cancerous fear fester?!” Spittle flew from Gin’s lips, landing on Takeo’s terrified face.
“N…no! B…but the frost…” Takeo gagged, eyes bulging, feet scrabbling against the slick floor, his hands clawing uselessly at Gin’s iron grip. “It… burns… the cold… burns…”
“IS HERESY MANIFEST!” Gin roared, his voice cracking with zealous fury bordering on madness. He shoved Takeo away with brutal force. The noble crumpled to the floor, wheezing, clutching his throat. Gin turned his burning, bloodshot gaze on the assembled nobles, their silks stained and torn, their faces pale masks of terror he recognized with chilling clarity as the fertile ground for Nyxara’s hunger. Weakness. Rot. Her feast. He’d read the signs too late, dismissed them as peasant superstition. The frostbitten fig stems appearing like morbid offerings. The crows with eyes like fractured portals. The slum rat’s unnatural defiance, a spreading taint, a catalyst. The texts screamed the warning: “Nyxara’s hunger grows where kings falter, where faith rots.” King Ryo’s grip was slipping, his heir a heretic dancing with shadows, and Gin… No. He was the High Inquisitor, the Purifying Flame. He’d burn the doubt from their bones himself, cauterize the wound before the infection spread. He’d burn Astralon itself to smoking ash before he let her frost take root, before he let the Winter Queen claim his domain. He’d burn it, all right. Starting with the source of this corruption. Starting with the Demon Ghost’s eyes.

V1: C17: Blood and Frost