of a flame-scarred tree, scratching her chin thoughtfully. The wind moaned, peeling back a blanket of smoke.
It was then that she saw the needle-like teeth leering towards her.
She whirled, bow up and arrow drawn, levelling her weapon at the gaping maw that loomed out of the grey. Her hand quivered once, then stayed; the mouth did not move. Instead, the mouth glimmered a shimmering, crystalline blue.
The smoke retreated further, exposing the face that held the teeth, the large black eyes that dominated the face. From behind a skin of ice, the frogman howled soundlessly at her, immobile and unblinking within its azure prison. His spear was held above his head, icicles hanging from the weapon’s tip, the frogman’s muscles frozen and unquivering under a sheen of frost.
‘Well,’ she grunted, ‘I’ll be damned.’
Somehow, the human curse seemed more appropriate for what occurred next.
In a great sigh, the smoke peeled back. A forest of frozen flesh was laid bare before her eyes. They stood in a charge that had no end, mouths open to utter a battle cry that had no sound beyond the cracking of ice in the distance. Dozens of the pale invaders, turned into an expanse of endless blue, rushed towards some unseen foe that they had never reached. Many of them hadn’t even set two feet upon the ground before the ice claimed them.
And now they levelled their hatred, their black stares, upon her.
Kataria, however, had no more attention for them. Her concern was reserved for the emaciated beast that had stridden into battle with them. The Abysmyth’s tracks were not apparent in the frost-kissed earth nor the smouldering black sand. However, one set of footprints did catch her attention.
He, or she, for the tracks were made by slender feet set lightly upon the ground, had stood before the frogmen. The frost radiated from that position in a great arcing wave, staining the ground with ice. From there, this new character had turned about, unhurried, by the looks of its shallow, well-defined footsteps, and traipsed down the shore.
Where it had stopped, carnage was born. Fire savaged the land, sending bodies to the ground as burned husks, barely discernible from the scorched earth. Trees were split down the middle, as though by a great blade.
It didn’t take the shict long to deduce the presence of magic. Even through the acrid stench of brimstone, the stink of wizardry was thick in the air, a foul amalgamation of sulphur and something metallic, with a somewhat lemon-scented after-aroma.
That answered a few questions right away - for what earthly fire could smoulder for so long? What mortal ice could remain frigid even under the sun’s unrelenting warmth?
More questions arose than were answered, however; Dreadaeleon was the only creature she knew capable of the practice of magic, and he was far too frail to wreak such devastation. Besides, he had taken off with Gariath, across to the other side of the island . . . hadn’t he?
The Venarium, she knew from listening to the boy, were the sole practitioners and custodians of magic. They were, she had learned, a secretive and largely boring lot, more content to study and make rules than actually use their powers for anything interesting.
This character, this set of prints, however, was anything but tedious. She followed the trail, noting each shattered tree, each heap of burned corpses, each patch of ice. So intent on the tracks was she that she hardly noticed the Abysmyth when it appeared through the gloom.
She did not start at the sight of the creature. Rather, she was struck dumb by it and its sudden appearance.
It was dark, far darker than she remembered it, wisps of smoke pouring from its gaping maw, an enormous wound in its chest and craters that had once been eyes. An icicle the size of the Riptide’s bow skewered it through its ribcage, holding it aloft like some demonic kebab, its webbed feet barely grazing the ground as they swayed in the wind.
Despite the oppressive heat, Kataria felt her blood run cold.
The Abysmyth had been a definition up until this moment. Despite being a creature of hell, it had existed according to rules: it killed and it could not be killed. The ending of the trail’s story had changed everything. Something had fought the frogmen and Abysmyth, something that left no bodies, only smears of pulsing green ichor.
And amongst it all, someone, a man or woman who strode between infernos and blizzards as casually as one skips through a meadow,