Ayden Duskwalker's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By morning, Ayden's first soldier was falling apart. He had raised it two days past. Now its arm hung loose. Black rot spread up its neck. Elara stood over it with her shovel, watching the corpse twitch in the melted mud. The thaw Ayden's magic left behind had softened more than ice. It had loosened the flesh too. "Your dead man is coming undone," Elara said. She had dug graves in Quartzrime for years. She knew what warm ground did to a body. "You wanted an army. You've got a puddle." Ayden knelt and pressed his hand to the corpse's chest. His power held it standing, but the flesh would not stop rotting. In warmer lands the cold had kept his dead firm. Here his own thaw destroyed them. He had traded one wall for another. Elara pointed her shovel across the field. A willow grew there alone, its branches laced with pale crystal. Frost climbed its trunk. Even in the thaw, the ground beneath it stayed hard and white. "Nothing rots near that tree," she said. "I've buried bodies under it. Dug them up a year later. Still whole." Ayden walked to the willow and touched a root. Cold bit his fingers. The crystal in the bark held a deep, steady chill, not the killing freeze of the field, but something slower. A cold that stopped rot without sealing the ground. He understood. He drew the runed scythe from his back. The purple blade glowed. He set its edge against a crystal root and cut. The root came away in his hand, still humming with frost. Ayden carried the root to his failing soldier. He drove it into the corpse's chest. The frost spread through the dead flesh. The rot stopped. The loose arm firmed. The black stain faded to gray. The soldier straightened and stood clean. Elara lowered her shovel. "It held," she said. Her voice was quiet. "That shouldn't have held." "It will hold every one of them," Ayden said. He looked back at the willow. Dozens of roots. Enough frost for a hundred soldiers. Maybe more. He had his preservation now. His dead would not fail. Elara did not share his smile. She stared at the tree, then at the field of buried graves. Ayden watched her do the math he had already done. A hundred bodies. A hundred frost-fed soldiers. An army that would not rot, would not tire, would not stop. "When you have your hundred," she said slowly, "you won't need me to dig anymore." She gripped her shovel with both hands. "And you won't need me alive to remember how it was done." Ayden said nothing. The clean soldier waited at his side. Between them, the willow dripped frost, and Elara took one step back toward the tree line, her eyes never leaving his.