Chapter 147: The Crown of Ice
Chapter 147: The Crown of Ice
The wind howled like a beast starving for blood.
We stepped through the portal into a world carved from frost and shadow. Mountains pierced the sky like jagged teeth, their peaks lost in heavy clouds. The air was thin, sharp as broken glass, every breath burning in my lungs.
The Crown of Ice wasn’t a place meant for the living.
It was a graveyard built by time.
Our boots sank into snow that seemed to whisper with every step. Not a whisper of nature—but of memory. Faint cries. Echoes of things long buried. Magic had soaked into this land like blood into cloth, and now it waited, half-asleep, eager to wake.
Logan was the first to speak. “This place is cursed.”
“No,” Seris corrected, her voice tight. “It’s haunted. There’s a difference.”
I stepped forward, scanning the frozen ridges. Somewhere beyond this white wasteland was the second gate. Another stone altar waiting for sacrifice. Another tether for the Hollowed One to pull himself into our world.
We couldn’t let that happen.
⸻
We set up camp in the mouth of a glacier cave. The ice glimmered like crystal, reflecting firelight in fractured patterns across the walls. It was strangely beautiful, in a haunting way—like the teeth of a sleeping giant glittering with secrets.
Alec joined me at the cave’s edge, his cloak flapping in the wind.
“We’ll head out at first light,” he said, his eyes sweeping the endless expanse. “The map suggests the gate marker is northeast, past the Shattered Crag.”
I nodded. “You think we’ll find them already there?”
“I’d bet my sword on it.”
I turned to him. “And if the gate’s already active?”
“Then we burn it to the ground.”
⸻
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
Not because of the cold or the danger—but because the land itself seemed to watch us. Like it remembered a time when gods walked among wolves. When magic was raw and wild and terrible.
I wandered to the edge of the camp, drawing my cloak tighter, when a soft voice spoke behind me.
“You’re restless,” Seris said, appearing from the shadows like a whisper.
I nodded. “The land is loud.”
She hummed. “That’s because it remembers power. And you… carry it now.”
I glanced at her. “You think I’ll unlock something else here?”
“I think the Crown of Ice might not be as dormant as we thought.”
⸻
By morning, the sun bled pale light through the clouds. We traveled across the frozen ridges in silence, every step slower, more deliberate. Wind whipped snow into our faces, and the terrain shifted beneath our feet.
By midday, we reached the Shattered Crag.
Massive stone pillars jutted from the glacier like broken fingers. In the center, a monolith had collapsed into itself—its obsidian core cracked, veins of magic still pulsing weakly in the stone.
We weren’t the first here.
Footprints. Recent.
Alec raised a hand. We froze.
Then we saw them.
Black-cloaked figures moving through the snow. Five. No—six.
Fangborn.
“Spread out,” Alec commanded softly.
We moved as one—silent, swift, deadly.
The first two never saw us coming. Logan dropped one with an arrow to the throat; Daria took the other down with twin blades.
But the others fought harder—enhanced by the magic of the corrupted gate.
I faced a woman with frost in her eyes and shadow leaking from her skin. She snarled, conjuring a blade of black ice.
But I had moonfire.
The dagger Kael gave me cut through her defenses like silk. Her scream shattered the air—and the glacier beneath us trembled.
And then, silence.
Only the wind remained.
⸻
We stood before the fractured monolith.
“Is this the gate?” I asked.
Seris knelt beside it, touching the runes with trembling fingers. “It was meant to be. But something disrupted the ritual. It failed.”
“Failed how?” Alec asked.
She looked up, her face pale. “They didn’t finish the sacrifice.”
I swallowed hard. “Which means…?”
“They’ll try again. But not here. Somewhere else.”
She turned to me slowly. “Unless we find the final two gate markers, we’ll always be one step behind.”
Alec placed a hand on my shoulder. “Then we don’t stop moving.”
⸻
As we turned to leave, something glinted in the snow. A pendant—twisted metal shaped like an eclipse, ringed with sharp etchings.
I picked it up, and it burned in my hand.
But not with heat—with memory.
A vision slammed into me. Fire. Screams. A massive gate pulsing with dark light—not here, but somewhere else. Somewhere warmer. Southern sands. Obsidian cliffs. Ocean wind.
The final gate.
My knees buckled.
Alec caught me.
“Evelyn!”
“I saw it,” I gasped. “The last gate. It’s near the coast.”
Seris’s eyes went wide. “How do you know?”
I opened my hand. The pendant was gone.
Vanished like smoke.
But the mark on my palm remained.
And I understood.
The land wasn’t just haunted.
It was guiding me.