The Great Hall became an airless vault.
The frost crawling across the flagstones didn't melt beneath the hearth's heat; it thickened, turning a jagged, opaque white that crept up the legs of the heavy mahogany table.
Above them, the flickering candle flames guttered, their golden glow bending and warping inward as if the light itself were being drawn into the pitch-black silhouette towering behind Laurence Bale.
Viscount Horn's knuckles were stark white around the wire-wrapped hilt of his executioner's broadsword.
The veteran commander had faced frontier orc vanguards, broken rebel cavalry charges, and carved his reputation through decades of brutal statecraft.
He knew the biological stench of fear, and he knew how to master it. But as he looked up into the slate-gray, mountainous bulk of the alpha minotaur, every battle-hardened instinct in his marrow screamed a single, hysterical command: run.
