Book One – Chapter 13

Midnight saw everything from everywhere. Her presence saturated the storm, flowing through the very marrow of the Albweiss. The grand male was not yet lost to her. She watched it all unfold: the voltera’s frantic descent, Gorak’s resolute stance, the scattered remnants of the ork horde. Her darkness stretched, flowing like tendrils, tracing the voltera’s fall in grim detail. Every jagged scrape, every desperate gouge in the rock and ice was laid bare before her. The beast’s claws tore deep furrows into the mountainside as he plummeted, dislodging massive slabs of ice that tumbled into the abyss below, sending thick cascades of snow in their wake.

The mountain reacted violently, avalanches crashing down in suffocating waves, hundreds of metres of raw force plunging into the yawning chasm. The cliffs opened up, revealing a vast, terrible canyon — an endless void of shadow and ice. From there, it was a free fall — As the voltera neared this precipice, just meters above that gaping void, his claws finally found purchase in the frozen rock, halting his plunge in a sudden, savage grip. The force of its impact dislodged another cascade of snow, which poured down into the canyon’s depths like a suffocating shroud, but the voltera clung to the cliffside, refusing to yield. His beast’s primal tenacity was palpable, his very will to live an affront to the unforgiving elements.

Midnight’s darkness wove itself into the tension of the moment. She felt it — the air vibrating with a sinister hum, the mountain itself unsettled by something more than the storm. A twisted tremor, a foreboding fracture in the natural order. It was the wizard. His presence was a rupture in the Albweiss, a pulse of magic deeply corrupted. He moved abruptly, leaping from the crumbling ledge with a speed and power his body could not possess —