Glacius Frostmaw's Arc

Chapter 10 of 14

Glacius climbed toward the summit with the dead sword strapped to his back. Wind cut across the open slope. Behind him, Skara and Throk followed. He felt the cold in his hands, the last of the dragon cube's power, waiting to be given back. But that same cold spread past his own body. It wrapped his brother and sister in a thin frost shell that held the killing wind off their skin. He had not meant to shield them. The power did it on its own. Halfway up, Throk stumbled and dropped to one knee. His lips had gone gray. Glacius knelt and gripped his arm. Warmth was not the word. The frost that ran out of Glacius did not heat Throk. It matched the cold outside so the wind could not steal his brother's own heat. Skara crouched close, shaking. "It's keeping us alive," she said. "Your power. Take it off us and this slope will finish what the cold started." Glacius understood the trap. To wake the blade and save the mountain, he had to surrender the frost at the summit. But the moment he let it go, Skara and Throk would stand on bare rock with nothing between them and the wind. He looked up the last stretch. No cave. No shelter. Only ice and open sky. Oskar Drumm waited on the summit stone. The old guardian was small against the wide gray sky, his white beard stiff with frost. He watched Glacius climb the final steps with his siblings behind him. "You brought them into the wind," Oskar said. "You cannot give the cold back and keep them warm. Not both." "Then I bring them inside the cave first," Glacius said. "I climbed this peak twice for nothing before. I won't lose them to save a blade." Oskar shook his head. "There is no time to walk them down. The mountain falls now." The ground shuddered under his boots to prove it. Glacius made his choice. He pressed one hand to Skara's chest and one to Throk's. Then he pulled every thread of frost out of his own body and drove it into them. Not into the summit. Into his brother and sister. The cold sealed over them in a hard shell of ice, thick enough to hold the wind off long after he was gone. The rest of the power left his hands and sank into the stone at Oskar's feet. The shaking stopped. Deep in the rock, something settled. Glacius felt his own body turn ordinary. His skin went bare to the wind, and he shivered like any orc. The sword on his back woke. The dragon eyes in the guard glowed pale blue. The runes brightened. The blade hummed alive at last. But Glacius stood on the summit with no frost left in him, and the wind found his skin like a knife. He had saved his siblings and woken the blade. Now he had to get down the mountain alive.