**Five Years Later**
Rias Gremory's tenth birthday arrived with the same fanfare that had marked Lucien's.
Banners.
Celebrations.
Nobles from across the Underworld gathering to witness the young Ruin Princess receive her Evil Pieces.
The family had just returned from Ajuka's laboratory, Rias clutching her box with barely contained excitement—two Mutation Pieces, just like her beloved nephew.
"Not quite Lucien's three," Lord Zeoticus had noted, "but exceptional nonetheless!"
The household buzzed with joy.
Caelan Lucifuge, age fifteen, didn't attend.
No one invited him.
No one noticed his absence.
After that day five years ago—the day he'd received his broken King piece—something had shifted.
Not in the family's treatment of him; that had always been indifferent.
But in their *awareness* of him.
He'd become less than invisible.
He'd become...
absent.
A name on old documents.
A line item in forgotten ledgers.
He preferred it that way.
**The Forest of Beasts**
The afternoon sun—filtered through the Underworld's crimson sky—cast long shadows through the twisted trees of the Forest of Beasts.
A vast wilderness on the edge of Gremory territory, it was home to dangerous creatures that even experienced devil hunters avoided.
Caelan walked through it like he was taking a stroll through a garden.
He'd changed over five years.
Taller now, though still lean—his body had never developed the robust build that devils typically possessed.
His silver hair had gone almost completely pale, streaked heavily with blue that seemed to glow in low light.
His eyes were the color of winter ice, cold and analytical.
His features had sharpened, losing the last softness of childhood.
He looked good, objectively.
Ethereal.
Like a winter spirit given flesh.
He also looked utterly untouchable.
Frost formed on the ground where he stepped.
The air around him shimmered with cold.
A demonic imp—small, vicious, with too many teeth—launched itself from a tree branch, claws extended to tear into his throat.
It froze mid-leap.
Completely.
Instantly.
The creature's momentum carried it forward for another foot before it shattered like glass, fragments of frozen flesh scattering across the forest floor.
Caelan didn't break stride.
His field had grown stronger.
Much stronger.
The sphere of absolute cold that surrounded him now extended nearly three meters in all directions.
Anything that entered it without sufficient magical resistance simply...
stopped.
Froze.
Died.
He'd spent five years perfecting it.
Five years alone in his room, in the library, in forgotten corners of the estate, pushing his control further and further.
Magic couldn't reach him anymore.
Not conventional magic, anyway.
Spells disintegrated as they entered his field, their energy crystallized and rendered inert.
Did he care?
No.
He'd stopped caring about a lot of things.
The forest opened into a clearing where a pack of mutated beasts had made their den.
Six of them—each the size of a small house, with scales like armor and eyes that glowed with demonic power.
Alpha predators that could tear apart low-class devils without effort.
They barked, low and threatening.
Territorial.
Then their hearts froze.
Precision.
Surgical.
Caelan's ice magic lanced out in six perfectly calculated strikes, each one targeting the exact center of a beast's chest cavity.
The temperature spike was so sudden, so extreme, that the organs crystallized instantly.
The beasts collapsed, dead before they realized they'd been attacked.
Quick.
Efficient.
Caelan walked past their corpses without a glance.
He was here for a reason.
**The Barrier**
Three weeks ago, while cataloging the restricted section of the Gremory library—a task no one else bothered with anymore—he'd found a reference.
An old text, pre-dating the Civil War.
A single paragraph about Cocytus—the frozen prison of the Underworld, where the most dangerous criminals and sealed entities were kept.
Most devils knew the name.
Few knew its location.
Fewer still knew its secrets.
But this text had mentioned something:
*"The deepest truths of Cocytus are guarded not in its depths, but in the forgotten places of those who sealed it."*
Gremory territory.
His ancestor—the original Gremory who'd held the Power of Barriers and Affinity—had been one of the devils who'd helped create Cocytus.
Which meant somewhere in this forest, there was a secret.
Caelan had spent weeks searching.
Calculating likely locations based on magical resonance patterns, historical records, geographical surveys.
Narrowing down possibilities.
And now, standing before a section of forest that looked identical to every other section, he felt it.
A barrier.
Gremory magic.
Old and powerful, woven so intricately that most devils would walk right past it without noticing.
But Caelan wasn't most devils.
He stepped forward.
The barrier resisted—ancient wards designed to repel intruders, to turn away the unworthy.
Caelan released his field.
The temperature dropped to zero.
Then lower.
The magical barrier—composed of energy, of heat, of *motion*—began to slow.
To crystallize.
To freeze.
It shattered like glass.
The illusion fell away, and before him stood a tomb.
**The Grave**
Stone.
Ancient.
Covered in symbols that predated modern devil script.
Caelan approached the entrance—a massive door sealed with more wards, more protections.
Someone had wanted whatever was inside to stay inside.
He forced it.
Ice magic finding the weak points in the seal, exploiting them, breaking them down piece by piece.
The door exploded inward with a sound like thunder. Inside: darkness.
Cold—but not as cold as him.
A grave stood at the center of the chamber.
Simple.
Unmarked except for a single inscription in Old Devil:
*"Here lies what must never wake."*
And beside it: a stone.
Not ordinary stone.
This one pulsed with residual magical energy—teleportation magic, specifically.
Ancient but still functional.
Caelan studied it for several minutes, his analytical mind picking apart the spell work.
Complex.
Dangerous.
Designed to activate only once, to take the user to a specific location and then destroy itself.
He cracked the formula.
Rewrote a single rune.
And activated it.
**The Frozen Desert**
Reality twisted.
When it settled, Caelan stood in a wasteland of ice.
Not a metaphorical wasteland.
An actual desert—endless white stretching in every direction, broken only by jagged formations of frozen crystal that jutted from the ground like teeth.
The sky above was wrong—no crimson Underworld hue, but a pale, sickly gray.
This was a pocket dimension.
A prison within a prison.
Cocytus.
The air was so cold it would kill most beings instantly.
Phoenix fire would freeze mid-flame here.
Dragon breath would crystallize in their throats.
Caelan breathed in deeply, feeling...
comfortable.
This was his element.
His home.
He walked forward, following residual magical traces toward a structure in the distance.
Ruins.
Ancient architecture that might have been beautiful once but was now just broken columns and shattered walls.
And at its center: a crystal.
Not ice.
Something else.
Darker.
It pulsed with power that made the air around it shimmer despite the cold. Inscriptions covered its surface—containment spells, binding wards, seals upon seals designed to keep something *in*.
Caelan read them. Old Devil.
Older than the texts in the Gremory library.
But he'd spent five years learning dead languages out of sheer boredom.
The translation made him pause:
*"Imprisoned here: the breath of the first winter. The death of warmth. The end of all things. Let none disturb this seal, for what lies within knows only hunger."*
He stared at the crystal for a long moment.
Then, with deliberate precision, he began dismantling the seals.
**The Release**
The final seal broke with a sound like cracking ice.
The crystal shattered.
And something emerged.
Not a creature.
Not a being.
A *presence*.
Smoke—if smoke could be made of frozen mist and absent light.
It poured from the broken crystal, formless and churning, coiling through the air with predatory awareness.
It circled Caelan.
Once.
Twice.
Then it stopped directly in front of him, condensing slightly into something almost-but-not-quite humanoid.
And it whispered.
Not in words.
Not in sound.
Directly into his mind, his *soul*, in a voice that was the sound of winter wind and dying breath:
***"Warmth... I smell... warmth..."***
Caelan stood perfectly still.
***"No. Cold. You are... cold. Like me. Like us. Like the end."***
The presence circled again, curious now.
***"Why do you wake me, child of ice?"***
"I didn't know what you were," Caelan said calmly.
"I was looking for knowledge about Cocytus."
***"Knowledge.
Yes.
I am knowledge.
I am the first lesson: all things end.
All warmth fades.
All life stills."***
The smoke began to seep into him—not forcefully, but like water finding cracks.
It flowed through his pores, into his blood, merging with the ice that already lived there.
***"You have made yourself a vessel.
Frozen your essence.
Touched absolute zero."***
"Yes."
***"Foolish.
Brilliant.
Suicidal.
Perfect."***
The presence laughed—if that sound could be called laughter.
It was the cracking of glaciers, the death-rattle of freezing lungs.
***"I will bond with you, child. I will give you my power. And in return..."***
"What do you want?"
***"Nothing. Everything. I am hunger without satisfaction. I am the cold that consumes warmth. I ask only that you *exist*. That you spread winter wherever you walk. That you show this world of fire and heat what true cold means."***
Reality snapped.
Caelan found himself back in the Forest of Beasts, kneeling on the ground, gasping.
But he wasn't alone.
He could *feel* it. The presence.
Still there.
Not external anymore but *inside* him.
Merged with his ice magic, with his frozen blood, with his very essence.
He tried to focus, to understand what had happened.
The smoke appeared—translucent, barely visible, dancing around his body like a protective shroud.
And its power...
**The Beast**
A roar shattered the silence. Something massive crashed through the trees—a lizard-like creature the size of a building.
Scales like volcanic rock, eyes burning with demonic fire.
A guardian beast, probably, drawn by the magical disturbance.
It lunged.
Caelan raised his hand—
The smoke *exploded* outward.
A wave of cold so absolute, so overwhelming, that it froze the air itself.
The expansion happened in a fraction of a second, the mist spreading thirty meters in every direction.
The beast froze mid-lunge.
Completely.
Its scales, its flesh, its bones, its fire—all crystallized instantly.
The ice was so perfect, so complete, that the creature looked like a sculpture.
A monument to cold.
Then it shattered. Just... came apart.
Fragments of frozen flesh exploding in every direction.
Caelan stared at his hand.
The smoke retreated, condensed back around him in a defensive layer.
What... was this power?
***"I told you, child. I am the end of warmth. The death of heat. Where I exist, nothing else can."***
"What are you?"
***"I have many names. The First Frost. The Breath of Cocytus. The Hunger That Freezes."***
A pause.
***"But you may call me... Khione's Shadow. The ghost of a goddess who died when warmth was born."***
Caelan's mind raced.
He'd read about Khione in ancient texts—a primordial entity of winter, predating even the Greek pantheon's version of the snow goddess.
Something older.
Primal.
"Why were you imprisoned?"
***"Because I killed. Not for malice. Not for purpose. But because I exist, and existence near me means death. They sealed me here, in the coldest place, where my hunger could harm nothing."***
"And now?"
***"Now I am bonded to you. Your ice and mine are one. Your field and mine are merged. When you release me fully, I can expand—freeze everything within my reach. No magic can survive. No heat can persist. Only cold. Only stillness. Only... end."***
The implications crashed through Caelan's analytical mind.
He'd just bonded with something that had been considered too dangerous to exist freely.
Something so powerful it required imprisonment in Cocytus—a prison designed for entities that threatened the very fabric of reality.
And it had chosen *him*.
Not because of his strength.
But because of his *cold*.
Because he'd already done to himself what it represented: the transformation of life into frozen stasis.
Caelan stood slowly, feeling the presence settle into his core like a second heartbeat—or rather, like the absence of one.
In the distance, he could sense the Gremory estate.
Could imagine his family, celebrating Rias's pieces, happy and whole and completely unaware that something fundamental had just changed. He looked at his hand again.
The smoke danced between his fingers, playful almost.
***"What will you do now, child of ice?"***
Good question.
He had power now.
Real power.
The kind that could freeze armies.
That could make even Ultimate-Class devils pause.
But what did he want?
Revenge?
Too simple.
Too... warm.
Acknowledgment?
He'd long since stopped caring.
Purpose?
Maybe.
Or maybe he'd just walk back to his forgotten room, add this discovery to his notes, and continue existing in the cold, comfortable silence he'd built for himself.
"I don't know," he said honestly.
***"Good. Knowing is warm. Uncertainty is cold. We will thrive in not-knowing."***
The presence settled deeper, content. And Caelan Lucifuge—
age fifteen,
forgotten son,
broken king,
wielder of absolute zero—
walked back through the Forest of Beasts toward a home that had never been home.
The smoke followed.
Always there.
Always cold.
Always hungry.