The cold arrived before the boy finished making it.
The dragon felt the first of it come up through the churned dirt under its claws, and the second wave went across the clearing at the height of its shoulder, and the third took the standing water in the furrow and turned it to a white plate in the time it took to blink.
He knew this spell. He had known this spell for longer than any human family in that kingdom had owned a name. Fifty paces of held ground, the cold walking outward while the caster kept it together in his head, and a good human mage could hold the shape of it for the length of a hard breath before the whole thing came apart on him.
That was what it was supposed to look like.
This was not that.
The frost went out from the boy in sheets. It climbed the broken trunks at the edge of the clearing, ran along the underside of the fallen ones, took the moss, took the leaf litter, and kept going past where fifty paces should have stopped it. Ice grew upward off the ground in plates that leaned into each other. The air came apart into white and the white did not thin out.
And above, along the branches that had survived the landing, frost was crawling out to the tips and hanging there in blades.
The dragon turned its head as far as the wound allowed and measured him again, carefully, because the first measurement had to be wrong.
But in the end it was not.
One Star. A young human core, awake for less than a month, sitting in a chest that had nothing else remarkable in it except the thing it had already asked about.
’Impossible.’
The dragon had eaten men stronger than this one. It had watched a Seven Star human hold a domain a third that size and go grey in the face doing it.
’A One Star cannot do this. A human cannot pay this amount for this. A core that small can’t hold that much.’
Adrien could feel his own spell trying to get away from him.
Winter’s Reach did not want to be held. Every part of it pulled in a different direction, and keeping the shape together in his head while the mana ran through it was like holding a door shut against a crowd.
So he stopped being careful about the mana and started throwing it in by the bucket.
The domain steadied. Then it grew.
’Okay. So if I can’t hold the damn thing properly, I just need to throw more mana at it.’
The clearing had gone the colour of a place he had seen once in a documentary at three in the morning, in a flat with no heating, about a Siberian town where the schools shut when it hit sixty below. White air. White ground. Everything sounding wrong because the cold had eaten the noise.
He had not brought a strong spell to this fight. He did not own a strong spell.
What he owned was a One Star lance and a core with no bottom in it.
Adrien lifted the staff.
The first Frost Lance formed at the tip of Umbral Root and went across the clearing into the open flank, into the middle of the wound, and it did what it had done to the shoulder and came apart.
Except this time the clearing was his.
Half again as hard, and the cold already in the meat, and the second lance went in on top of the first before the first had finished breaking.
The third followed it. The fourth. The fifth.
He stopped counting somewhere around thirty.
The dragon moved, and he corrected, and kept throwing. It put the ruined wing across the wound to shield it, and he put nine into the wing until it moved it again. It turned the good flank toward him and he went for the eye instead, and it turned back.
Every time it protected the hole, he made it want to protect something else.
By a hundred his shoulders had stopped reporting to him.
By two hundred the skin across the knuckles of his casting hand had split from the cold coming off his own spell, and he noticed it the way a man notices weather.
[Frost Lance | 1 Star | Novice 100%]
[Mastery advanced: Practised]
The window arrived and the headache arrived with it, a spike straight through from one temple to the other, and Adrien threw the next lance before the pain had finished landing.
The lances were bigger now. He could see it. Longer, denser, and going in deeper before they broke.
Three hundred. Four hundred.
The wound had stopped being a wound. It was a crater with ice growing out of it, and every lance he put into it drove the cold further into the meat and further toward what was underneath.
He was aiming less and hitting more. His hand had learned the throw somewhere around the two hundredth and had stopped asking him about it.
[Frost Lance | 1 Star | Practised 100%]
[Mastery advanced: Refined]
The second spike put him on one knee.
He got up on the staff and threw again from there, and the lance that came off the crystal was nothing like the one he had put into that shoulder twenty minutes ago. It went in a third of the way to the ribs before it came apart.
Six hundred.
His vision had gone soft at the edges, and the white of the clearing and the white in his own eyes had started agreeing with each other, so he stopped relying on his eyes and let Absolute Mana Sense do the aiming.
That worked considerably better.
’Fuck it. I don’t need to hurt the whole thing. I just need to keep drilling that wound until something gives.’
Eight hundred.
The core in his chest was full. It had been full at ten, at a hundred, at five hundred, and it was full now, and there was a part of Adrien that had been quietly terrified since the funeral that he would eventually find the bottom of it.
He was starting to accept that there was not one.
[Frost Lance | 1 Star | Refined 100%]
[Mastery cap reached]
[Core rank insufficient. Sovereign locked.]
’Locked?’ Blood came out of his nose and froze on his upper lip before it had finished leaving. ’Seriously? Fine. I’ll deal with that when I hit Two Stars.’
A thousand.
He did not know it was a thousand. He knew that the light had changed, that his arms belonged to somebody else, that his heartbeat had gone somewhere behind his ears, and that the enormous black thing forty paces away had stopped trying to shield the hole in its side.
The dragon had stopped because there was no longer anything to shield.
It could feel what was happening under its own ribs. The cold had gone past the meat and reached what the wound had already opened, and the mana that had been pouring out of it for a day and a night was slowing down, and slowing was worse than pouring.
It had fought things older than kingdoms. It had been hurt before, twice badly, and both times it had put itself somewhere quiet and waited and come back.
There would be no waiting from this.
’It is going to bleed me out with a beginner’s spell.’
The clearing belonged to the boy now. The ground, the air, the trees. There was nowhere in it that was not his, and the wing would not lift, and every second in that white cost more than the last one.
The maths was simple and it did not take long.
’If I leave, I will die on the way. If he lives, I die here. So at least I’ll take him with me... he can’t be alive with that...’
The dragon dragged its head around, and everything left in it started moving inward.
The mana still bleeding out of the wound turned and went the other way. What was banked in the limbs came up through the chest. The plates along the throat lifted the way they had not lifted in eleven hundred years, and underneath them the black went red, and the red kept getting brighter as it climbed.
Adrien’s talent screamed at him.
He had one full second to understand that a creature which had spent a whole day dying had chosen not to spend any of what was left on staying alive.
Its jaws came open.
...
AN: Add the novel to collections and send (power stones and golden tickets) support if like it ;)