The twilight bled purple and bruised orange across the jagged peaks of the Frostfang Mountains, a fleeting warmth that never touched the permafrost below. In the center of the tribal encampment, a pyre of mammoth bones spat acrid smoke into the wind. Before it stood the Bone Shaman, a walking effigy of fur and skeletal totems.
His voice, a rasp like stones grinding together, cut through the biting air. "The Ice Crow thirsts!"
The tribe, a sea of grim faces and sharpened flint, answered with a guttural roar.
"For an age, the Great Spirit has been restless," the Shaman continued, his staff—a human spine topped with a raven's skull—thumping against the frozen earth. "The outsiders have disturbed the balance. Their presence is a blight upon this land. To appease the Crow, they must face a Trial of Blood!"
The declaration was a spark in a tinderbox. The tribe's roar became a frenzy. They beat their axes and spears against hide shields, a brutal, percussive heartbeat that echoed the savagery of the land itself. From two crude cages of woven willow and bone, Elias and Thorne were dragged into the circle of firelight.
Elias, despite the cold gnawing at his bones and the raw chafe of his bonds, forced a wry twist to his lips. A sharp jest died on his tongue as he saw the faces in the crowd—not of men, but of instruments of a cruel god, their eyes vacant with ritualistic fervor. Beside him, Thorne stood as an unmovable rock, his jaw set, the dried blood on his temple a dark map of their capture. The ex-knight's gaze was fixed on the Shaman, a silent challenge in a world that had long ago stripped him of any other weapon.
The Bone Shaman pointed his grotesque staff toward a yawning pit in the earth, a dark wound in the snow-dusted ground. Its rim was a chaotic fence of jagged ice shards and the sharpened femurs of unidentifiable creatures. "The Maw!" he screeched. "Let the outsiders prove their worth, or let their blood feed the beasts below!"
The guards shoved them forward, their hands rough and impatient. The Maw was more than a pit; it was a sacrificial arena, a hollowed-out cavern half-buried in the tundra. The descent was a steep, icy slide that spat them out onto a floor of packed snow and shadow. The air was thick with the stench of old blood and a deeper, musky scent of predator. All around them, scattered like forgotten trinkets, were the skeletal remains of past victims—ribcages picked clean, skulls staring with empty sockets at the sliver of dying sky above.
From the darkness deeper within the cavern came the sounds that had haunted their cage-bound nights: a chorus of guttural growls and the unnerving scrape of claws on ice. The tribe's chanting intensified, a rhythmic pulse that seemed to shake the very ground. Blood for the Crow! Blood for the Crow!
Two guards appeared at the lip of the pit, holding the meager possessions they'd been captured with—Elias's cherished lute half broken and Thorne's worn longsword. With a final, mocking gesture, the guards tossed the items not to them, but into a separate, inaccessible crevasse nearby. Elias's heart sank. Without his lute, his connection to the spirits was a frayed thread, a whispered word in a hurricane.
Stripped of their weapons, their hope, they were shoved inside. The slide was brutal, and they landed in a heap, the impact jarring their already bruised bodies. The world above vanished, replaced by the howling of the tribe and the gaping, star-dusted sky.
As true night fell, painting the snow in shades of silver and deep blue, shapes began to emerge from the cavern's recesses. They moved with a predatory grace, their forms half-real in the gloom. Snow beasts—mutated wolves, larger than any steed, their fur the colour of bone and their fangs like daggers of frost. Their eyes, a collection of hateful, glowing embers, fixed on the two men.
A primal fear, cold and sharp, pierced Elias's practiced nonchalance. He felt the spirits of the place stir, uneasy and ancient. He closed his eyes, forcing his breathing to steady, and began to hum. It was a simple, sorrowful tune, a half-forgotten lullaby from a life before this frozen hell. A faint, ethereal light, no brighter than a firefly, began to shimmer around his hands. It was a ghost of his true power, a flicker where there should have been a flame. Without his lute to amplify and focus his will, it was nearly useless.
Thorne pushed himself to his feet, his body a canvas of pain. He scanned the pit, his knightly training taking over even in this desperate moment. His eyes fell on a large, splintered ribcage nearby. He wrenched a long fragment of bone free, its edge sharp enough to serve as a crude dagger. He hefted it, testing its weight.
"I fought in the King's War with a broken sword arm," he growled, his voice a low rumble that was almost lost to the wind. "I survived a year in that fucking cell. I will not die in a hole like an animal." There was no bravado in his words, only a grim, unyielding statement of fact. His determination was a shield as solid as any steel.
High above, hidden within the shadows of a rocky outcrop away from the fire-crazed tribe, a third figure watched. Olaf trembled, his small form bundled in furs, his breath misting in the frigid air.
Every instinct screamed at him to stay hidden, to melt back into the shadows and flee. The Shaman's power was palpable, a suffocating blanket over the land. But then he saw the pale, struggling glow around Elias's hands, a light so familiar and now so tragically faint. He saw Thorne, standing defiant with a piece of bone against a pack of monsters.
Courage is not the absence of fear, a voice—Elias's, from a night spent around a campfire—whispered in his memory. With a silent, terrified prayer to whatever spirits listened to his kind, Olaf slipped over the edge of the pit. Slowly floating down into a small heap of snow. He crept into the deepest shadows, his own faint glow suppressed to a near-invisible shimmer. He reached out with his mind, not with strength, but with a gentle nudge, guiding the faint, wild spirits of the cavern toward the bard's song, whispering encouragement on the currents of the wind.
High above, the Bone Shaman stiffened. His masked head tilted, as if listening to a dissonant note in the pit's savage symphony. He sensed something moving in the Maw that should not be there—a third presence, quiet and subtle, but undeniably present.
The first snow beast lunged.
It was a blur of white fur and snapping fangs, aiming for Elias's throat. Thorne moved with shocking speed, ramming his shoulder into the creature's flank and driving his bone shard deep into its side. The beast shrieked, a sound of fury and pain, and thrashed wildly, its claws tearing deep furrows in Thorne's arm.
Then the pack descended in a frenzy.
Thorne became a whirlwind of desperate violence. He fought with his fists, with his feet, with the scavenged bone fragment. He slammed a wolf's head against an icy rock, drove his makeshift dagger into another's eye, and kicked a third away as it leapt. It was a brutal, ugly dance of survival, each strike a gamble, each block a victory paid for in blood and exhaustion.
Elias, meanwhile, fought his own battle. He couldn't physically match the beasts, but he could fight with his soul. He poured all his focus, all his fear and desperation, into his humming. The scraps of melody he wove were no longer just faint lights; they were weapons. A sharp, high note became a burst of spirit-light, a blinding flare that sent a charging wolf stumbling back, yelping and confused. A low, resonant hum created a wave of force, slowing a beast's lunge just enough for Thorne to evade it.
And subtly, almost imperceptibly, he felt a new strength flowing into him. The spirits of the pit, once hostile and aloof, now seemed to answer his call with greater ease. When a wolf lunged from his blind side, a sudden gust of icy wind, smelling of ozone and starlight, pushed it off course. Another beast, poised to leap onto Thorne's back, suddenly recoiled, a shimmer of impossible frost blooming across its snout. Elias didn't understand it, but he leaned into it, his song growing stronger, bolder.
Hours dragged on. The moon climbed to its zenith, a cold, indifferent eye in the black sky. The floor of the pit was littered with the dark, steaming forms of slain beasts, their white fur stained crimson. But more kept coming from the cavern's depths, their feral hunger unslaked.
Thorne was flagging. His movements were slower, his breaths ragged, his body a testament to the battle's ferocity. He stumbled after parrying a heavy blow, falling to one knee. Two wolves saw their chance and closed in, their lips curled back in a snarl.
Elias saw it. Panic seized him, but he crushed it down, replacing it with a singular, protective rage. He drew in a deep, shuddering breath and released it not as a hum, but as a single, pure, resonant note. He pulled on every spirit he could feel, every wisp of energy Olaf guided his way, and forged it into a brilliant, blinding flare. The light erupted from him, washing over the entire pit in a wave of incandescent power. The wolves shrieked and shielded their eyes, stumbling back from the pure, holy radiance.
The moment of respite was all Thorne needed. He surged back to his feet, a guttural roar tearing from his own throat, and met the next charge with renewed fury.
They fought until the first hint of dawn threatened the eastern sky. Near exhaustion, their bodies screaming in protest, they stood back-to-back amidst the carnage. The remaining beasts, their numbers thinned, prowled at the edges of the spirit-light, their glowing eyes filled with a new, wary respect. Finally, as if answering an unheard call, they turned and slunk back into the deepest shadows of the pit, conceding the dawn.
Silence fell, broken only by the ragged gasps of the two survivors and the distant, moaning wind.
Above, the tribe was no longer chanting. A stunned silence had fallen over them, which now erupted into a chaotic roar of approval, colored with awe and a healthy dose of fear. They had sent two unarmed men to their deaths and had witnessed a miracle instead.
The Bone Shaman raised his staff, quieting the crowd. His masked gaze bore down into the pit, and when he spoke, his voice carried a new, unsettling weight. "The beasts are slain. The outsiders have proven their strength." A pause, heavy with unspoken meaning. "The Crow is not appeased… but it watches."
A chill that had nothing to do with the cold settled over Elias. He looked at Thorne, who leaned heavily on a rock, bloodied but alive. He understood then. This hadn't been an execution. It had been a test. Surviving the Maw was only the first step. The true judgment, from the Ice Crow itself, had yet to come.
His gaze swept the shadows of the pit and found Olaf, huddled and trying to make himself small, a faint nimbus of light still clinging to him like a halo he couldn't quite extinguish. Elias's eyes widened in understanding. Then, he looked up. The Shaman's skull mask was fixed not on him, nor on Thorne, but on the precise patch of shadow where Olaf hid. The mask betrayed nothing, yet Elias felt the intensity of that hidden gaze like a physical touch. The Shaman's head tilted, just a fraction. And in that moment, Elias was certain.
He knew.