At the borders of the kingdom, Draven left behind the last vestiges of civilization. The greenery of the United Kingdoms faded, giving way to a merciless land. Before him stretched a mountain range absent from royal maps—peaks so jagged they looked like giant fangs attempting to tear the grey sky asunder.
The journey was a "cold burn."
With every step, the snow swallowed his legs, and the wind shrieked in his ears like lost souls demanding his surrender. This was no mere storm; it was a trial for every ounce of resilience in a body already exhausted by the "Blood Heresy."
Beneath his cloak, the darkness in his veins seethed with a strange intensity. The black pulse fought the freezing air; the harsher the cold became, the more the curse surged, generating artificial heat to keep him alive. He felt his body become a battlefield between an "internal hell" and an "external frost."
Draven stopped, gasping for breath that emerged as thick vapor. He looked at his hands; his leather gloves were cracking from the frost, and through the fissures, he saw a faint black steam rising from his pores. The curse was no longer hiding; it was surfacing, drawn to the white purity surrounding him.
"If my father passed through here," Draven rasped, "how did a man of fire and steel survive this white death?"
The only answer was the howling wind.
Days passed until Draven could no longer distinguish waking from dreaming. He saw phantoms in the mist—images of fallen enemies and faces of departed loved ones. Fatigue gnawed at his mind, but he possessed a silent fury—the wrath of ancient warriors who refuse to fall before reaching their destination. Leaning on his sword like a crutch, he drove the blade into the hard ice to push himself one step further... then another.
On the night that nearly became his last, as his vision blurred and his limbs grew numb, the fog suddenly parted.
He didn't find a summit, but a "Great Chasm" separating two peaks. In the heart of this abyss lay a path carved with terrifying precision into the black ice. It was a passage untouched by falling snow, as if an invisible force pushed the storm away.
At the entrance, Draven glimpsed moving shadows. They weren't monsters, but tall, slender human figures. They stood in the killing cold without shivering, draped in light robes the color of pale ice.
The black pulse in Draven's chest suddenly went quiet—not out of fear, but a strange sense of belonging. He had reached the end of his physical journey, and the beginning of a path that would change the essence of his curse forever.