The silence of Stonebridge was a raw, open wound. The mundane butchery of the worgs was bad enough, but what we found in the village's heart was a different order of evil altogether. It was a desecration, a violation of nature written in frozen flesh and black blood.
Five figures stood amidst the carnage, their work methodical. They were not beasts. They were Uruk-hai of a lesser, colder hell. Taller than a man, their hides were the color of a day-old bruise, and their armor was cobbled from jagged plates of black iron and the bones of great, unfortunate creatures. Their eyes burned with a sullen, intelligent red flame, and the air around them shimmered with a greasy, anti-warmth that made the lungs ache. In their hands they held not swords, but cruel, hooked glaives that seemed to leech the very light from the air.
They were surgeons of slaughter, and Stonebridge was their operating table.
One of them, its back to us, was methodically—almost reverently—carving the sigil of a stylized, frozen tear into the forehead of a dead farmer. A message. A signature.
Lysander's intake of breath was a sharp, cold sound. The black lines beneath his skin, momentarily quiesced, began to writhe in recognition. This was not mere wild magic. This was a crafted, intelligent malice. A directed poison. And his curse recognized its cousin.
"Stay behind me," he commanded, his voice a low thrum of power that was more than human. He did not wait for acknowledgment.
The duel began not with a roar, but with the silent, terrifying grace of two predators acknowledging a worthy rival.
The lead Uruk, the one with the carver's hand, turned. It saw the Duke, and a guttural word in a black-speech dialect echoed in the square. It hefted its glaive, and the other four fanned out with a discipline that spoke of endless campaigns in frozen wastes.
Lysander met their charge not with a defensive posture, but with an aggressive, perfect incision into their formation. Frostfall met the first glaive in a shower of blue sparks. The impact was not a clang of metal, but a deep, dissonant thrum that vibrated through the bones. He was a master anatomist, and these were his cadavers. He parried a hook meant to disembowel him, rotated on his heel, and his return stroke severed the Uruk's weapon-arm at the elbow joint—a clean, clinical disarticulation. The creature stared for a moment at the spurting stump before collapsing.
But these were no mere orcs. As the second Uruk engaged, the third began a low, chanting dirge. The temperature plummeted. Hoarfrost exploded across the cobblestones, racing toward Lysander's boots, seeking to anchor him in place.
The Duke gritted his teeth. The foreign cold was a key in the lock of his own affliction. The dark lines on his neck pulsed, and a snarl of pure agony and rage was torn from his lips. His counterstroke was faster, wilder, driven as much by the pain of containing his inner monster as by the need to defeat the external one. He was fighting a war on two fronts, and the battlefield was his own soul.
I saw it. The surgical precision was fraying, replaced by a berserker's fury. He would win, but he would shatter in the process.
The Uruk captain saw it too. It smiled, a horrific cracking of its frozen lips, and leveled its glaive, aiming for the Duke's heart as he struggled against the frost and the second warrior.
My mind, cold and clear amidst the horror, made the connection. The Uruks' frost magic. The unnatural winter. The alpha worg. It was all of a piece. A single, concerted attack on the North, using a magic that specifically targeted its Duke's greatest weakness. This was the plot and the side plot syncing into a single, deadly design.
I didn't have iron filings. I had knowledge.
"Lysander!" I yelled, my voice cutting through the chant. "Their magic is a rhythm! A arrhythmia in the world's pulse! Disrupt the beat!"
His storm-grey eyes, flickering with silver pain, met mine for a fraction of a second. He understood.
As the chanting Uruk drew breath for the next syllable, Lysander didn't attack the warrior in front of him. He reversed his grip on Frostfall and drove the pommel into the frozen ground at his feet.
The impact was not physical. It was metaphysical.
A wave of pure, absolute silence erupted from the point of impact. It was the silence of the deepest glacier, the void between stars. It was the anti-sound to the Uruk's dark chant. The magical frost shattered like glass. The chanting Uruk recoiled as if struck, its spell broken, its concentration severed.
In that moment of stunned silence, Lysander moved.
It was the most beautiful and terrifying thing I had ever witnessed. He became a symphony of precise, lethal motion. He sidestepped a thrust, his blade sliding along the glaive's shaft with a shriek of metal, and performed a perfect median sternotomy on the second Uruk—his blade parting the sternum and piercing the heart with one thrust. He spun, Frostfall describing a horizontal arc that decapitated the stunned chanter before its head could hit the ground.
Two remained. The captain and its guard.
They attacked in unison, a pincer movement of hooking glaives meant to shear him in two. Lysander dropped into a crouch, Frostfall sweeping out to amputate both their legs at the knee. They fell with identical, guttural screams. He ended them with two swift, merciful thrusts to the base of their skulls—a medulla oblongata strike, severing the central nervous system.
Then, there was only silence.
Lysander stood amidst the ruins, chest heaving, the terrible energy of the curse slowly receding back into whatever deep vault he contained it in. The black lines faded, leaving him pale and hollowed out, swaying on his feet.
I was at his side in an instant, my medical bag open. His arm, where the glaive had grazed him, was not just cut. The flesh around the wound was blackening, the veins standing out like dark tree roots against his skin. Frostbite. Magical, necrotizing frostbite.
"Don't," he grunted, trying to pull away.
"Be still," I commanded, my voice brooking no argument. I poured a cleansing distillate of fire-berry and alcohol onto the wound. It sizzled, and he hissed in pain, but the blackening stopped its advance. My hands were steady as I began to carefully debride the dead tissue, my focus absolute. This was a field surgery, and the patient was my husband.
He watched me, his breath fogging in the air, his gaze intense. "You called it an arrhythmia."
"I recognized the pattern," I said, not looking up from my work, my fingers carefully wiping away the necrotic slough. "It was a systemic attack, Lysander. The worgs, the unseasonable frost, these… things. It's all connected. It's all designed to stretch you thin, to poke at your curse until you break. This wasn't an invasion. It was a targeted assassination attempt on the stability of the North."
I finished bandaging the wound. My hands were stained with his blood.
He was silent for a long moment, his eyes on the bandage, then on my face. The battle-lust was gone, replaced by a deep, weary calculation. And something else. Something warmer.
"The Uruk captain," he said finally, his voice rough. "It was carving a sigil. The Frozen Tear. It is the mark of a… faction… thought long gone. A sect that serves the ancient cold."
He looked from the dead Uruk to me, his strategist's mind syncing the pieces together just as mine had.
"Someone," he said, the words dropping like stones into the silence, "did not just send these things. Someone rediscovered them. Someone is using a weapon from a forgotten age against me."
The plot was no longer a mystery. It was a declaration of war. And as he reached out with his good hand, his fingers gently brushing a smear of blood from my cheek, the romance was no longer a subplot. It was the vital core, the thing that would either be our salvation or our final, shared undoing. We were two people, synced in mind and purpose, standing together against the rising tide of an ancient winter.