The air did not merely grow cold; it died. The Lich King's power did not crash against the glacier like a storm.
It arrived with the absolute, agonizing inevitability of an encroaching ice age. The atmospheric pressure plummeted, the sudden drop in temperature so severe that the ambient moisture in the sky froze mid-air, raining down across the plateau as a thick blanket of needle-sharp frost.
Arthas raised Frostmourne once more. It was no longer the calculated, combat-ready posture of a death knight seeking an opening. It was a formal, terrifying invocation.
He raised the runeblade with both hands, pointing its jagged tip directly into the roiling, violet storm clouds above. The sapphire runes etched along the steel didn't just glow—they detonated with a blinding, incandescent cold.
The sky itself seemed to buckle, the clouds twisting into a localized vortex centered on the blade as the ancient, necrotic mind resting atop the Frozen Throne poured its full, unmitigated essence down into its champion.
The cold blue fire spilling from Frostmourne flooded the plateau, washing over the stone in a physical wave that calcified the scattered corpses and turned the fallen snow into sheets of solid saronite.
Arthas turned his head toward Illidan, his eyes burning with a brilliant, blinding light that erased any trace of the man he had once been. He moved forward, his stride no longer limited by the physical fatigue of his armor.
Illidan shifted his weight to meet the charge—and his left foot slipped. It was a fraction of an inch. A microscopic patch of glacier ice, compromised by the intense thermal fluctuations of Leylin's prior fire workings, shattered under the demon hunter's clawed heel.
In normal combat, against a normal opponent, it would have been a negligible error, corrected in a millisecond by martial instinct. Against Arthas, infused with the boundless clarity of the Lich King, it was an absolute death sentence.
The Death Knight didn't accelerate; he simply vanished into a blur of blue light and shadow, closing a twenty-yard gap in the space between heartbeats.
Frostmourne cut through the freezing air in a lethal, rising arc, aimed directly for the demon hunter's exposed throat.
Illidan's ten thousand years of instinct saved his life, but only barely. Through sheer, reflexive desperation, he crossed his twin warglaives down to catch the blow.
The impact was catastrophic. The unholy force behind the strike didn't just parry the blades; it pulverized the ground beneath Illidan's feet, sending a shockwave through the glacier that tore a fifty-foot trench in the ice.
The emerald fel-fire sustaining the demon hunter's form was instantly snuffed out. The kinetic force drove him backward, his warglaives clattering onto the frost as his body skidded fifty yards across the plateau, coming to a dead halt against a jagged saronite ridge.
He didn't rise. His chest heaved, dark, corrupted blood pooling beneath his shattered armor as his consciousness flickered on the edge of the void.
Arthas didn't pause to admire the strike. He shifted his grip, stepping over the ruined earth to drive the runeblade down into the demon hunter's heart.
Leylin didn't think. Thought was a luxury for men with time. He crossed the distance not as a man running, but as a stroke of lightning.
He planted himself directly in the execution vector, his palms flaring with two hyper-compressed spheres of raw, unadulterated fire before his boots even touched the ice.
He fired both at point-blank range straight into the Death Knight's face. The super-heated plasma slammed into Arthas's chest, the roaring thermal violence forcing the Death Knight's downward thrust off-course by a fraction of a foot.
The runeblade buried itself six feet deep into the permafrost right beside Illidan's head, the sheer cold of the blade turning the surrounding stone into brittle glass.
Arthas didn't falter. He pulled the blade free in a single, fluid motion and turned his unblinking glare onto the mage.
Leylin didn't try to trade blows on the ground. He slammed his foot down into the cracked bedrock, reaching deep into the structural lines he had been manipulating since the siege began.
The glacier beneath his boots erupted upward, a massive pillar of compressed permafrost launching him three meters into the air in a fraction of a second.
The sudden elevation changed the geometry of the fight entirely. Arthas's sweeping horizontal counter-strike cut through empty air, scattering only the frost where Leylin's heels had been a millisecond prior.
From his vantage point above, Leylin looked down at the Death Knight, his mind working with the cold, absolute clarity of an executioner calculating a drop. He drew back his right hand, gathering every thread of thermal energy remaining in the upper atmosphere.
It was not a ball of fire; it was a falling star. A concentrated, dense mass of super-heated kinetic plasma and compressed stone rained down from above, roaring through the blizzard to slam directly onto Arthas's head.
The explosion shook the entire plateau. A wave of white heat and flying shrapnel blew the snowdrift back a hundred yards, blinding the sky with steam.
When the cloud cleared, Arthas was still standing. Frostmourne had absorbed the core of the blast, its unholy cold smoking and spitting against the thermal residue.
The left shoulder guard of the Death Knight's armor was completely gone, his pale, frozen flesh exposed to the elements, but he continued his forward march with the terrifying, automated momentum of a tide that could not be turned back. He was an entity drawing on an infinite well. He wasn't tiring. He wasn't degrading.
Leylin landed back on the ice, his boots skidding across the slick stone as he re-established his distance. His chest burned, his internal mana channels screaming under the strain of continuous, high-yield casting.
His reserves were dipping into the red. I cannot prolong this fight any longer, Leylin realized, his eyes tracking the dark, pulsing tether of blue light connecting the runeblade to the distant peak of the citadel. I have to break the anchor.
He dropped to one knee. He didn't cast a spell. He didn't draw a rune. He opened his mind entirely to the glacier.
In an instant, he had bended this stone, shattering this ice, feeling the microscopic vibrations of every fault line in Icecrown's foundation. He didn't treat the mountain as an external tool anymore; he treated it as an extension of his own nervous system.
He felt every pocket of pressurized gas, every ancient vein of saronite ore, every fracture his battle with Arthas had carved into the deep earth. He grabbed the entire plateau by its spine and pulled.
The world broke. The glacier didn't just crack; it folded in on itself like a closing book. The massive slabs of permafrost surrounding Arthas—tons of ancient, compressed ice and jagged saronite—erupted inward from thirty different angles simultaneously.
The earth moved like hydraulic jaws, slamming together with a concussive boom that echoed across the entire continent of Northrend.
The mountain swallowed the Death Knight whole. A massive, twenty-foot burial mound of crushed stone and glacial ice sat in the center of the plateau, holding the champion of the Scourge in a vice-grip of sheer, overwhelming mass.
It wouldn't hold him forever. Deep within the center of the mound, a faint, pulsing blue light began to bleed through the cracks in the stone. The temperature of the burial site was dropping rapidly, the ice threatening to shatter from the inside out as Frostmourne's power began to carve its way back to the surface.
Leylin had perhaps five seconds. He raised both hands, his fingers trembling violently as he executed the most complex, dangerous synthesis of his life.
With his left hand, he drew the residual, chaotic fel-fire left behind by Illidan, combining it with the boiling steam of his own spent meteors, compressing the thermal energy into a needle-thin point of pure, absolute heat.
With his right hand, he reached into the deep saronite strata beneath the mound, pulling forth a dense, black thread of liquid metal—the ancient, shock-absorbent blood of the earth itself.
He brought his hands together, fusing the two elemental extremes into a single, localized singularity of molten, enchanted iron.
The blue light burst through the top of the ice mound as Arthas broke free, his armor covered in frost, Frostmourne raised to deliver a wave of unholy death. He was half a second too late.
Leylin released the singularity. The lance of fused fire and liquid saronite didn't target Arthas's chest or his head. It struck the crossguard of Frostmourne at the exact coordinate where the runeblade's physical structure met its internal soul-conduit.
The kinetic and thermal violence of the strike was absolute. The shockwave blew the remaining ice mound into powder.
The extreme heat flash-melted the ancient runic bonds holding the metal together, while the kinetic force shattered the physical grip of the Death Knight's gauntlet.
With a high-pitched, metallic screech that sounded like a dying soul, Frostmourne was violently torn from Arthas's hand. The runeblade flew fifty feet through the air, tumbling through the blizzard before burying its tip deep into a pristine, untouched drift of white snow at the edge of the cliff.
The tether snapped. The vertical pillar of blue light connecting the sky to the plateau vanished instantly. The oppressive, suffocating cold that had weighed down on the mountain lifted like a heavy fog being burned away by the morning sun.
Arthas Menethil collapsed. Without the direct, continuous stream of the Lich King's power flowing through the sword into his veins, the accumulated physical damage of the battle hit his body all at once.
He didn't stagger; he dropped straight onto his stomach, his heavy, ruined armor crashing against the stone with a dull, lifeless thud. His right arm, scorched and broken, twitched once against the ice, but he could not lift his head. The sapphire fire in his eyes flickered down to a dull, dying ember.
The silence that followed was absolute. The endless storm had died down to a soft, whistling breeze. The distant sounds of the corridor battle felt miles away, muffled by the sheer weight of what had just occurred.
Leylin stood alone in the center of the ruined plateau. His hands dropped to his sides, his fingers twitching involuntarily as his nervous system processed the profound, agonizing drain of total mana depletion. His vision swam with spots of dark violet, his legs shaking so violently he had to widen his stance just to remain upright.
He took a long, ragged breath, the sub-zero air burning his raw throat, and slowly raised his head. He didn't look at Arthas. He walked past the fallen Prince, his boots leaving bloody footprints in the snow, until he reached the edge of the cliff where Frostmourne lay buried.
The blade was quiet now. Without a wielder, it radiated only a faint, ambient frost—a dangerous, predatory artifact stripped of its master, waiting patiently for the next fool to touch its hilt.
Leylin didn't touch it. He raised his right hand, using the absolute remainder of his will to command the glacier beneath the sword.
The ice gently rose around the runeblade, folding over the steel in thick, crystalline layers, building a seamless, impenetrable coffin of ancient permafrost around the cursed weapon until not a single inch of metal was visible to the eye.
Once the blade was fully entombed, Leylin unbuckled a magical storage pouch—one that he received from his rewards. With a final, careful manipulation of the ice, he slid the entombed runeblade directly into the storage.
The heavy, mechanical locks on the vessel snapped shut with a series of sharp, rhythmic clicks. The suppression runes along the lead surface flared once with a brilliant, golden light, then settled into a dull, dormant gray.
The sword was secured. The anchor was broken. Leylin clipped the magical pouch back onto his belt, the heavy weight resting against his hip like an anchor of a different kind.
He turned back toward the center of the ridge. In the distance, Illidan was knocked unconscious by Arthas and is still bleeding.
Farther down the slope, the heavy, rhythmic sounds of battle signalled that they had held their ground.
Above them, the thick, violet storm clouds that had shrouded Icecrown for ten thousand years began to part, revealing a single, narrow beam of pale, winter sunlight that struck the cold stone of the plateau.
Leylin stood in the light, his hand resting on the sealed vessel at his side, his eyes turning upward toward the winding, narrow stairs that led to the very top of the world.
The champion has fallen. The blade was contained. He took a single, quiet step toward the Frozen Throne.