The newly absorbed essence was still left burning sensation inside Aesa's veins, heavy and intoxicating, and instead of settling it stirred something else.
The exhilaration did not fade. It grew.
Her breath slowed, not from calm, but from control tightening around a rising storm.
The desert heat suddenly stopped.
Cold spread outward from her body in a widening pulse. The hot air shimmered, then thinned, then turned hazy as pale mist crept low across the dunes.
Frost crawled fast over hot sand, swallowing glassed surfaces and cracking them apart with soft sounds.
Aesa's mind slipped backward to a kingdom that she had killed.
She remembered the streets filled with people she once swore to protect with her husband. She remembered corrupted eyes glowing with Zerathul's power and mouths chanting his name as they charged her.
She remembered the moment she understood there was no saving them. Only killing them.
She remembered killing every last one of them with her ice.
