The village of Stonebridge was not a retreat. It was a tomb in the making.
We arrived to a scene of chilling silence, broken only by the moan of the wind through the shattered palisade. The air, once crisp with pine and hearth-smoke, was now thick with the coppery stench of blood and the ozone-reek of dark magic. Bodies lay where they had fallen—not just guards, but farmers, woodcutters, their forms torn and frozen in attitudes of final, desperate horror.
Lysander dismounted before his horse had fully stopped, his black cloak flaring like the wings of a raptor sighting carrion. He was a study in contained fury, every line of his body a promise of violence. I slid from my own saddle, my medical bag—a relic from my old life, now filled with herbs and bandages from Hilda's stores—a familiar, grim weight in my hand.
"Killian. Perimeter. Survivors to the granary. Now." The Duke's voice was not a shout. It was a low-frequency command that vibrated through the very earth, and his men moved with the precision of a surgeon's first incision.
Then we saw it. The pack had not fled. They waited in the village square, amidst the carnage they had wrought.
These were no ordinary worgs. They were perversions of nature, their forms bloated and twisted, their hides a mottled tapestry of mange and necrotic, frost-bitten flesh. Their eyes glowed with a sickly, intelligent yellow light. And in the center stood their alpha. It was a monster twice the size of the others, with antlers of jagged, black ice erupting from its skull and a maw that dripped a viscous, freezing slobber that sizzled where it hit the ground.
It was an abomination. A thing of nightmare.
The Duke did not hesitate. He did not roar a challenge. He simply drew the great, black broadsword from his back. The blade, named Frostfall in the family chronicles, seemed to drink the light, a sliver of absolute zero in the gloom.
The battle was not joined; it was erupted.
Lysander moved with a horrifying, beautiful economy of motion. He was not a warrior; he was a force of nature. Frostfall was less a sword and more a scalpel in his hands, each swing a precise, devastating dissection of the enemy's form. He severed a worg's limb at the joint, the cut so clean the beast stumbled for three steps before realizing it was missing a leg. He parried a snap of freezing jaws and drove the point of his blade up through the soft palate and into the brain case—a single, lethal thrust.
He was a master anatomist of violence, and the worgs were his cadavers.
But the alpha was cunning. It did not engage him directly. It hung back, its unnatural intelligence clear, directing the smaller beasts to harry and flank. A blade of pure ice, conjured from the very air, shot from its maw and grazed Lysander's arm. The leather of his vambrace froze instantly, shattering under the impact, and a line of crimson welled up, the blood seeming to boil against the supernatural cold.
I saw it then. A flicker across his face. Not of pain, but of strain. The wound was minor, but the cold—the magical, corrupting cold—was a key fitting into the lock of his curse.
The black lines I had seen in the study began to writhe beneath the skin of his neck, visible above his gorget. A low growl, not entirely human, rumbled in his chest. He was fighting on two fronts: the monsters without, and the monster within.
"Lysander!" I screamed, my voice raw against the din of snarls and clashing steel.
He couldn't hear me. The curse was rising, the surgical precision of his combat devolving into something more brutal, more savage. He was winning, but he was losing himself.
The alpha saw its moment. It charged, a glacier given life and malice, its icy antlers aimed to impale him.
I did not think. I ran.
It was insanity. It was suicide. But it was also a diagnosis. The alpha was the source of the corruption, the focal point of the infection. It had to be excised.
As the monster closed the distance, I threw myself not in front of Lysander, but to the side, skidding on the bloody slush. I flung open my medical bag, my hands closing not around a scalpel, but around a pouch of finely ground iron filings and salt—a purifying agent Hilda used for preserving meat, and one the castle scribes claimed disrupted weak magic.
The alpha's head was down, its entire being focused on the Duke. As it passed me, I rose to my knees and threw the mixture directly into its glowing, yellow eyes.
The effect was immediate and visceral. The beast shrieked, a sound of pure, agonized negation. The magical frost around its eyes sizzled and popped, the yellow light sputtering. It was blinded, enraged, its charge faltering.
That single second of distraction was all Lysander needed.
The savage light in his eyes sharpened back into focused, homicidal clarity. He sidestepped the stumbling charge with a dancer's grace. As the massive beast blundered past him, he brought Frostfall down in a two-handed arc that held all the relentless, final gravity of a glacier calving.
The blow did not simply cut. It unmade.
The blade sheared through the necrotic flesh, the corrupted bone, the antlers of cursed ice. It was a clean, terminal bisection from shoulder to ribs. The alpha's horrific shriek was cut off as its body split apart, collapsing into two steaming, twitching halves that immediately began to blacken and rot at an accelerated rate, as if the magic holding them together had been the only thing preventing total putrefaction.
With the alpha's death, the remaining worgs lost their unnatural coordination. They became mere animals, confused and leaderless. The Duke's guards made short, brutal work of them.
Silence descended once more, heavier than before.
Lysander stood amidst the carnage, chest heaving, Frostfall dripping black ichor onto the churned snow. The black lines on his skin were receding, fading back into whatever depths they came from, but the cost was etched on his face. He was pale, trembling with the aftershocks of battle and the suppressed fury of the curse.
He turned. His storm-grey eyes found me, still kneeling in the bloody slush, my hand clutching the empty pouch.
He crossed the distance between us in three long strides. He didn't speak. He dropped to one knee, his hands—one still clutching the terrifying blade—coming up to frame my face. His grip was not gentle. It was desperate. His eyes scanned my face, my body, for any sign of injury, his breath coming in ragged clouds in the cold air.
"You," he breathed, his voice a raw, shattered thing. "You foolish, impossible woman. You walked into the path of a glacier."
"It was a calculated risk," I whispered, my own voice trembling. "The patient was crashing. I had to stabilize him before I could address the primary infection."
A beat of silence. Then, a sound ripped from his throat that was half sob, half laugh. He rested his forehead against mine, the cold of his skin a shock against my own. The smell of blood, ice, and sandalwood filled my senses.
"Your diagnosis was correct, Doctor," he murmured, the word an intimate, shocking endearment in the midst of the slaughter. His thumb, slick with worg blood, stroked my cheek. "The infection is excised."
Around us, the guards tended to the wounded and the dead, giving their Duke and Duchess a wide berth. We were in our own world, a bubble of shared trauma and terrifying, burgeoning need amidst the epic, Homeric tragedy of the battlefield.
He had fought like a Titan from an ancient saga. I had intervened not with a sword, but with the precise, desperate action of a surgeon. And in the bloody aftermath, we were not a Duke and a pawn. We were two survivors, our souls laid as bare as the corpses around us, finding a fragile, undeniable connection in the anatomy of the wound we had just closed together.