Draven Ashborne's Arc

Chapter 44 of 17

The den's mouth held its new frost, but Glaciana did not rest. Her head turned toward the dark tunnel behind her. Draven followed her gaze. Deep in the mountain, something scraped stone. Slow. Heavy. Growing louder. Glaciana's blue eyes narrowed. "The poison reached the roots before it reached the surface," she said. "It has been down there longer than I knew. And it has fed on something." A cold wind pushed out of the tunnel. With it came a stench of rot under ice. Then the thing appeared. It was a beast that once lived in these caves, twisted now. Jagged ice spikes tore from its black back. Blue and pink light crawled through its veins like cracks in bad glass. Its yellow eyes fixed on Glaciana. On her den. On the queen it meant to kill. "It hunts the oldest thing here," Glaciana said. "Me." She raised her hands. Frost gathered. But she was tired from holding the mountain, and Draven saw it in her stance. The beast lunged before her cold could form. Draven stepped between them and swung his blade. Steel met the icecrawler's shoulder. Fire woke along the edge and hissed against its frozen spikes. The creature shrieked and twisted. Its tail whipped past Draven's face. He ducked, then drove the blade up. The corruption in its blood pulled at his own. His forearm burned. Scales pushed under his sleeve. The beast's poison called to the beast in him. "Draven," Seraphina said. Not loud. Flat and steady, the way she said everything that mattered. "It wants you to change. Don't fight it alone." He held the memory of her voice instead of her hand. The scales stopped short of breaking through. He gripped the sword with both fists and swung for the neck. Fire bit deep. The icecrawler staggered. Glaciana's frost came then, thick and white. It locked the creature's legs to the floor. "Its heart," she said. "The light in its chest. Cut it." Draven saw the pink glow pulsing under the black ribs. He drove the blade into it. Fire poured down the steel and burned the corrupted heart from the inside. The beast shuddered once and went still. Its ice spikes cracked and fell. The pink light died to gray ash. Seraphina knelt and laid her palm on the dead thing. Pale light spread from her hand. The rot in its body faded to clean bone before it crumbled. Nothing of the poison remained to spread. Glaciana stood over the ash, and her face was hard again. "This is what the roots grow now," she said. "Not tendrils. Beasts. My mountain birthed a killer without my knowing." She met Draven's eyes. "If it made one here, in my oldest ground, then the deep roots are already full of them. We did not stop the poison. We only found where it learned to walk."