The march through the white hell had lasted for twelve hours, but to Kael Light, it felt like a millennium compressed into a single, unending scream.
The dome of the "Living Sun" was flickering. The violet-gold fire that shielded the Army of the Broken was no longer a roaring sphere of defiance; it was a thin, trembling membrane of exhausted light. Inside the barrier, the soldiers walked in a daze, their boots dragging through the slurry of boiling mud that Kael's heat created. They didn't look at the horizon. They didn't look at the Frost Lords gliding silently in the mist beyond the shield. They looked only at their King.
Kael was no longer walking upright. He was on his hands and knees, crawling.
His grey cloak had burned away hours ago. His tunic was a rag of scorched wool fused to his skin. Every three seconds, a wet, sickening snap echoed through the silence as his curse broke another bone to generate the necessary thermal output. He was a biological engine running on redline, consuming his own structural integrity to keep five thousand people from freezing into statues.
"Just... a little... further..." Kael wheezed, spitting a mouthful of golden ichor onto the snow.
"Saint, you have to stop," Pip cried, his voice cracking. He was walking beside Kael, holding a canteen of water that kept boiling before he could open it. "Your heart rate is three hundred. You're going to detonate."
"If I stop... you die," Kael rasped.
LET US GO, KAEL, the God whimpered, its voice reduced to a thin, terrified thread in the back of his skull. THE COLD... IT IS LOOKING AT ME. IT WANTS TO FREEZE THE SHADOW. I DON'T WANT TO BE A STATUE. I DON'T WANT TO BE STUCK IN THE DARK AGAIN.
"I won't... let it... take you," Kael whispered.
Suddenly, a shout came from the vanguard.
"Structures!" Thorne roared, pointing his pneumatic sword forward. "Twelve o'clock! I see lights! Not white... grey!"
Kael forced his head up. Through a veil of blood and steam, he saw it.
Nestled in a shallow valley between two jagged glaciers was a village. It wasn't the ruin of wood and thatch he expected. It was a fortress of refuse. The walls were built from salvaged iron, stacked stone, and the skeletal remains of what looked like Sultanate machines.
But it wasn't the architecture that mattered. It was the air around it.
A heavy, grey haze hung over the valley, forming a dome of its own. The Necro-Ice of the tundra hit this grey fog and stopped dead. It didn't melt; it simply ceased to advance, as if the village didn't exist in the same reality as the storm.
"Iron," Kael whispered, recognizing the frequency. "Soul-Steel."
"Get him up!" Thorne commanded. "Double time! Get to that gate!"
Garret and two other Moon-Scarred warriors scooped Kael up. He cried out as his shattered femur shifted, but he didn't drop the shield. He held the "Living Sun" for the final hundred yards, his consciousness fraying at the edges.
They crossed the threshold of the grey fog.
The moment they entered the village perimeter, the silence of the tundra vanished. It was replaced by a low, rhythmic clang-clang-clang—the sound of a hammer striking an anvil. The temperature stabilized instantly. It wasn't warm, but it wasn't the life-draining void of the outside. It was a neutral, metallic cold.
Kael let out a breath he had been holding for twelve hours.
"Release."
The dome of violet-gold fire vanished. The "Living Sun" extinguished.
Kael's body went limp in Garret's arms. The "Stable Agony" stopped its frantic breaking, leaving him in a state of absolute, gelatinous exhaustion. Darkness swarmed the edges of his vision, but he fought it. He needed to know what this place was.
"Who goes there?" a voice barked.
A group of villagers emerged from the iron huts. They were dressed in heavy leathers reinforced with plates of rusted scrap metal. Their skin was pale, their eyes hard and suspicious. They held crossbows loaded not with bolts, but with shards of jagged black metal.
"We are the Army of New Aethelgard," Thorne said, stepping forward and removing his helmet to show his scarred face. "We seek shelter from the Frost."
An elder stepped forward. He was a man with skin like weathered leather, leaning on a staff made of a strange, matte-black alloy. He looked at the unconscious soldiers, the steaming tanks, and finally at the broken boy in the werewolf's arms.
"You brought the fire," the elder said, looking at Kael with a mix of fear and reverence. "The Blacksmith told us the Sun would come, but he didn't say it would look so... broken."
"The Blacksmith?" Ignis asked, stepping forward, his mechanical eye whirring. "Who leads this place?"
The elder pointed to the center of the village. "The Iron Ghost. He keeps the cold away. But he demands a price."
They carried Kael to the town square.
In the center stood a monument that defied explanation. It was a massive, twenty-foot anvil made of pure, unadulterated Soul-Steel. It pulsed with a dark, necrotic light—not the blue of the Frost Lords, but the deep, hungry violet of the Void.
Kael's eyes fluttered open. He felt the resonance immediately. It was the same frequency he had fought in the Burning Sands ten years ago.
"Hektor," Kael whispered.
He forced himself to stand. Martha tried to hold him back, but he gently pushed her away. He limped toward the anvil. His legs were healed, but the phantom memory of the twelve-hour march made them tremble.
"Saint, be careful," Ignis warned, reading the energy signatures on his scanner. "That thing is radioactive with Void-Mana. It's eating the ambient entropy."
"That's why the village is safe," Kael realized. "Soul-Steel absorbs magic. It absorbs light. But here... it's absorbing the Necro-Ice. It's drinking the cold."
Kael placed his hand on the cold metal of the anvil.
The world dropped away.
He was no longer in the snowy village. He was standing in a dark, soot-stained forge. The air smelled of sulfur and hot iron. Standing before him, hammering a piece of white-hot metal, was a massive figure in translucent, ghostly armor.
General Hektor. The Blacksmith of the Void.
The ghost stopped hammering. He looked up, his face a mask of spectral scars.
"You took your time, Weeper," Hektor's voice boomed, echoing in the spiritual space. "I've been holding this door open for ten years."
"You died," Kael said. "I watched you melt into the glass."
"Flesh dies," Hektor grunted, putting down his hammer. "Iron rusts. But Will? Will is an alloy, boy. You taught me that. When you broke my cage in the desert, you didn't just kill me. You healed the Void in my steel. You filled it with your 'Agony'."
Hektor walked around the anvil. "My soul was bound to the Soul-Steel. When the facility exploded, a shard of it landed here. I've been anchoring it ever since. Protecting these people. Not because I'm a hero. But because the Frost Lords... they offend me."
"They use the Void," Kael said.
"They use a cheap copy," Hektor spat. "They use entropy. Passive. Lazy. True Void is hunger. True Void is active. It eats. It conquers."
Hektor leaned in close, his ghostly face inches from Kael's. "You want to beat them? Your fire won't work. They'll just drink it. You need to give them something they can't digest."
"What?" Kael asked.
"Me," Hektor grinned, a terrifying expression. "The Soul-Steel in this anvil... it's hungry, Weeper. It's been starving for a decade. If you reforge it... if you turn this anvil into weapons for your army... you won't just be hitting them with metal. You'll be hitting them with a vacuum."
"I can't forge Soul-Steel," Kael said. "I'm a healer, not a smith."
"You are a vessel for a God," Hektor countered. "You break bones to make power. Break the metal. Heal it into a new shape. Use your Agony as the hammer."
The vision faded.
Kael gasped, stumbling back from the anvil. The villagers were staring at him. Ignis and Thorne were at his side instantly.
"What did you see?" Thorne asked.
Kael looked at the massive slab of dark metal. He looked at his army—frozen, tired, and outmatched. He looked at the Frost Lords waiting in the mist beyond the grey barrier.
"We aren't retreating," Kael said, his voice regaining the iron resonance of the King.
He turned to Ignis. "Strip the plating off the steam-tanks. We don't need armor. We need conductors."
He looked at Thorne. "Gather every sword, every spear, every bayonet. Bring them here."
"Kael?" Martha asked, seeing the dangerous light in his iridescent eyes. "What are you going to do?"
Kael looked at the anvil. He rolled up his sleeves, revealing the fresh, pink scars of his recent ordeal.
"I'm going to perform surgery," Kael said. "On the iron."
He climbed onto the anvil. He didn't use a hammer. He placed both hands on the surface and closed his eyes. He reached into the "Stable Agony," finding the deepest, most jagged rhythm of his curse.
CRACK.
He broke his own wrist intentionally. The flare of mana that erupted wasn't released into the air; it was driven straight into the metal.
"Ancient Art: The Transmutation of the Hungry Ghost."
The anvil groaned. The Soul-Steel began to liquefy, not from heat, but from the sheer biological command of Kael's will. It turned into a pool of dark, violet mercury.
"Bring me the weapons!" Kael roared, his voice layered with the echo of General Hektor.
Thorne began throwing swords into the pool. Ignis threw in bayonets. As the steel touched the liquid Soul-Steel, it didn't melt. It was coated. It was infected. The weapons emerged a moment later, transformed. They were no longer shiny steel. They were matte-black, absorbing the light around them, humming with a faint, hungry vibration.
"These aren't just weapons," Kael panted, sweat pouring down his face as he maintained the transmutation. "They are siphons. When you strike an Ice-Wraith, it won't just cut them. It will eat the cold. It will drink the Necro-Ice."
For hours, Kael worked. He broke his fingers, his wrists, his forearms, over and over again, using the trauma to fuel the forge. By dawn, the Army of the Broken was re-armed.
Five thousand soldiers stood ready, holding black-iron spears and swords that seemed to pull at the shadows. The steam-tanks were stripped down, their cannons now coated in the same hungry metal.
Kael slid off the anvil, his arms hanging uselessly at his sides, his bones slowly knitting back together for the thousandth time that day.
Garret stepped forward, holding a new, black-iron claymore. He swung it, and the air whistled with a sound like a sucking chest wound.
"It feels... empty," Garret said, his amber eyes wide. "It feels like a wolf that hasn't eaten in a week."
"Feed it," Kael whispered.
He looked toward the village gates. The grey fog was thinning. The Frost Lords were advancing, sensing that the "Living Sun" was gone. They thought the fire had gone out.
They didn't know that the iron had woken up.
"Open the gates," Kael commanded.
Thorne signaled the Iron-Guard. The barricade was pulled aside.
The mist of the Silent Tundra rolled in. A hundred Ice-Wraiths charged, their crystal spears raised, confident in their immunity to light.
"Charge!" Thorne bellowed.
The Army of the Broken met them. But this time, when the black swords struck the ice armor, the light didn't vanish. The ice shattered. The Soul-Steel drank the entropy, flashing with a violet light as it consumed the magic of the Frost Lords.
The Wraiths crumbled into powder. The Frost Lords shrieked—a sound that finally pierced the silence—as their invulnerability was stripped away.
Kael stood in the square, watching his army tear through the winter. He felt the ghost of Hektor standing beside him, crossing his spectral arms.
Not bad for a healer, the ghost whispered in his mind.
"I told you," Kael thought back, closing his eyes as the adrenaline finally faded. "I'm not just a healer. I'm the cure."