Chapter 10: Red Winter
The wagons stretch on for miles and through the gates of Gemradcurt. Sometimes Taigan mages escort them. Sometimes they’re guarded by Eiganrac riders.
It doesn’t change the fact that the wagons never stop rolling in.
Wheels sink into the snow as they carry frozen corpses to the ever-burning forge district, where Taigan mages command the dead to rise. Wielding once forbidden magic for war, for killing, for much the same purpose as a man might use a particularly sharp rock. Smiths combine copper and arsenic into bronze, forging armor and masks to clad a legion of wights.
We’d stopped back in the city to resupply. Originally, I’d tried counting the corpses, and gave up after the first ten thousand. While snow elves still make up the bulk of our frontline fighting force, more and more reanimated traitors are filling the gaps in our lines. We use desecrated bodies to haul supplies as the horses freeze to death, to dig out the roads the Eternal Winter reburies every morning.
There’s a brief period of thaw in the middle of summer. And that’s when the Tuathak rise up.
We know because we’ve been watching them.
No one hides from the eyes of Gemradcurt.
From a distant map, they might have been hidden. Arming themselves in secret under the guise of the rioting and looting that’s almost become commonplace.
Once, Ishera might have handled this. Now it’s an operation the Taigan Order conducts.
Whatever the case, when the Tuathak finally make their move, we’re already in position to swiftly react.
Galhan Oakgardner escaped the burning of Einnsag. He slipped the noose we tied around Oceansong, but now foolishly reveals himself.
But even tasking my mages to spy on every city, on every house, we’re still caught off guard by the sheer volume of bodies the Tuathak throw at us. We don’t have enough eyes to be everywhere at once, much though we try.
The Everfrost Crusade had been our moment of singing vengeance. We drove Harvestcrown’s crusaders from our homeland, and came to return the favor in Autumn’s homeland.
King Oakgardner of Autumn overthrows the garrison of Raithtal and proclaims a new Hibernal Crusade. A never ending cycle of mutual holy wars of reprisal against each other. It’s ridiculous, in a way. They rise up with battle cries of freedom and revenge. As if they think they have any right to take vengeance upon an act of vengeance.
“Ishera’s work,” Talaran says as we move to retake the city, where years ago Talaran had been so horribly mutilated.
“What do you mean?”
He grunts. “Mercy. You have to wonder how many of Oakgardner’s officers were refugees from old Jhorgashirr. How many were Tuathak we failed to kill after the war because Ishera convinced us to show leniency to a prostrate foe.”
I tighten my fists, looking down into my lap. “You’d like her to be responsible, Talaran.”
Talaran grips the reins of his horse. “
Liking has nothing to do with my job, my Lady. It’s just an occasional perk.”
The brief thaw ends. When the snow falls again, I reach into the cold winds and bid Talaran to send in the army.
Though quarter asked, none be given.
It all comes down to Raithtall itself. We scour the countryside, destroying Tuathak garrisons and supply lines to a man.
Raithtall is much like I remembered it. The old battlegrounds are buried in snow, but the city’s walls and defenses were never fully repaired. We’ve taken this city before. We know the ways inside.
King Oakgardner sallies the last army of Autumn out to face us. The snow falls.
His lancers and infantry crash against our front lines. The snow turns red.
Talaran holds the line. Oakgardner orders a retreat back behind Raithtall’s walls. The snow has frozen the gates solid.
Where once I nearly lost everything, I now take everything from the Tuathak. Their liberty, their king, their
lives.
Choices choices. How I do I make sure this never happens again?
Captain Talaran picks through the battlefield, boots sloshing in the mix of blood and ice. Taigan mages look for the least destroyed corpses to raise while our living soldiers break down Raithtall’s gates to loot the rebels’ supplies for themselves.
Talaran stoops down, still agile despite his age and wounds, and picks up an ornate flute from the ground. He turns it between the fingers of his gloves hands, frowning in thought.
“Captain?” I ask, looking down at whom he’d taken it from. A Tuathak in glittering armor lays massacred beside his massive war elk. A king and his noble steed, slain at the hands of common-born elves.
“This was mine,” he says, holding the flute out to me. Holding it with a kind of reverence. “You gave this to me.”
I stand on my tippy toes to get a better look.
“When you first asked me to serve you, this was your gift,” he says, clutching it in his fingers. “A musical instrument to issue commands and give orders.”
“Why did he have it?”
He cinches it to his belt, replacing the flute he had been using. “Because when the Tuathak thought me dead, they thought it their right to own. Like anything precious to the Snecboth.”
“Spoils of war,” I say, nodding.
Talaran shakes his head. “Sometimes your soul isn’t a complete, wholly packaged thing, my Lady. Something inside you breaks early on before you’ve even grown into your name. And you have to spend the rest of your life piecing that soul back together bit by bit: sometimes in the forms of those you love, sometimes in the treasures you carry. You can’t really kill people like that. You can only steal pieces of their soul.”
I clasp my hands together beneath my coat, thinking of the Everfrost Prince and the Heart of Winter. My eyes go to Raithtall, my mind to Ishera. “And that’s what Harvestcrown’s children would have done to all of us. What we stopped, back then with Jhorgas and now here at Raithtall.”
He nods. “Yeah.”
I understand what I must do.
I undo Ishera’s work in a week of bloody reprisals.
The countryside is cleansed. The Tuathak towns and villages that supplied Oakgarnder’s rebellion are done away with, the land made open to Snecboth settlers like they once did to us. Their holy places are salted and burned. Any who resist are destroyed and raised from the dead to kill their like minded brothers.
I still remember discussing this problem with Ishera on the campaign trail through Iadth to Arakeprun. She was wrong to think we could
ever live peacefully with these bastards. They spent years taking and taking and
taking from us. The moment we give them an inch, they try to take a pound of flesh.
Their cities, like Raithtall and Malpadh, cannot be exterminated in a night. But this is an object lesson. Something for the survivors of traitors to take to heart.
Their culture, their way of life, will simply have to be done away with, even if Tuathak blood persists.
But that’s a problem for when this war is finally over.
Some take more joyously to this news than others.
I receive news of more and more acts of violence by the Eiganrac, those volunteers who had risen up in my name and act without my authority but in my name. I had thought that little “troupe” in Dungat was all of them. But as I pour over the reports, I learn more and more that Dungat was just one little flair-up in their campaign.
My army is large, but we can’t be everywhere at once. There are too many fires in the snow, and we’d be spread too thin extinguishing each one. Yet, here are the Eiganrac, fighting in my name everywhere I cannot be.
I’m reminded of that night I became this Fey-touched
thing. When my hands were bound and mouth stuffed and I thought I would die before I could finish my work. I had heard Captain Talaran and his soldiers battering down the barricaded door, and felt this strange sense of relief someone had stayed loyal.
Commander “Jester” Ferwylt and his Eiganrac give me that same feeling. People out there are still loyal without needing me to watch over them.
It’s a strangely pleasant feeling. Vindication, in a way, in a sea of opposition and self-doubt.
We’d worried about Arakeprun, at the very edge of our nation. I thought it only a matter of time before it native Selpheregi rose up in opposition to winter as well. Instead, the Einganrac had taken it upon themselves to preemptively pacify the once-greatest city in Eordand and crown jewel of the Spring Court.
My armies cleaning up in the Hibernal realms even see a trickle of elven reinforcements from ethnic Selpheregi who swear to me and the Winter Court.
The matter soon goes from “how do we ensure loyalty” to “how do I pay and supply my soldiers?”
[Immarel moment]
[This is literally just gameplay abuse. You can debase your currency for quick cash, but it causes corruption. And some religions, like the Winter Court, let you appeal to religious virtues to root out corruption. They cancel each other out for free money every five years or so, which is basically the only way my economy is able to function: religious con artistry.]
The solution is little more than lying and cajoling my own merchant class, or at least what’s left that still sides with me. Precious metals are rare. Debasing currency with cheaper metals like copper is an old practice. Most people are wise to the practice.
Once, this would have been Ishera’s domain. She negotiated with the upper classes for me, which is likely why so many of them sided with her. I have our mints cheapen new coins, then demand my merchants and nobles loan me their own money, which I immediately repay with the cheaper coins for a slight profit, and count on them being too afraid to question the less valuable replacements with appeals to their civic and religious duties.
Would that I could abolish money altogether, but that’s not within the realm of any reality. Even if I replaced all my soldiers with the undead, I’d still need to spend money training mages, providing the Order the magical reagents to perform their rituals, and trading gold to equip them. With the core of my military and officers still living snow elves, I need to move food and other supplies too.
Some of the things we need aren’t abundant in Gemradcurt in the quantities this war requires. Bagcatir, which still maintains diplomatic and trade lines with me, is our only connection to the outside world. We buy and import from their merchants.
I thought this trick was pretty ingenious of me.
The noble lords of Gelcolle and old Reotcrab see it as the final step too far.
You bastards, we snow elves are supposed to be united as one, not bickering!
Blindsiding in some respects, utterly predictable in others.
That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. The core of the old nobility, with all of their old money and power, is a threat as grave as Oakgardner. And unlike the garish, pompous Tuathak, we snow elves know how to fight in secret.
Half of this war had been brother-on-brother guerrilla action. It’s not to nail down where their armies are gathered even with the help of my mages. Winter threatens to not be a coherent set of pitched battles like the Tuathak, but a grueling grind in the northernmost reaches of the nation.
I’m in our war camp, which has turned into a mobile city at this point, trying to sort out where to deploy soldiers with my generals and senior mages, when I hear horses outside. I look around for Talaran, but he’s seeing to other business. The tent flap opens as a snow elf with a wide grin enters the room, flashing little illusory sparks as he throws his arms open as if to hug someone.
“My Lady-Mother, I’m so pleased you’ve elected to see the circus during one of our routine circuits,” Commander
Jester Ferwylt says, and takes a bow. The Eiganrac sigils stitched to his arms jingle slightly.
I just stare, looking around my staff and advisors. I half expect to see Ishera sheepishly gesturing for pardon as she explains she invited Jester here. Instead, a Taigan mage takes a hot beverage from a masked servant and drinks deeply.
“You were supposed to wait outside, Commander,” the mage says tersely, exhaling steam over his cup.
Jester gestures for pardon, still smiling. “One does not ask an artist to
wait, Jahainer. The show can stop for no one.” He turns to me, bowing again. “And I knew our Lady-Mother would want to know personally.”
I stand up more rigid, pretending like I have everything under control and am not annoyed. “Commander Ferwylt, thank you for coming.”
He winks conspiratorially at me, despite making no effort to hide the gesture. I tighten my lips.
“The thanks are mine to give, my Lady,” he says. “A little fairy came to me, you see. Seemed to think he knew where certain
art critics may be hiding their food for the winter. The sort of thing no one can resist contesting in a fight, should we decide to hold the afterparty a little early.”
It takes me a moment to grasp. “You know where the traitors’ supply caches are. How?”
Jester puts his fingers to his lips. “Little winter fairies, my Lady. Starving artists have many alleys to turn to when they’re down on their luck. If you know where to go, and my troupe certainly does, you can find all sorts of tasty tidbits. And I’d like to invite her Ladyship to front row tickets to the show, for her and all of her gathered friends.”
“How many of your Eiganrac are available?” I ask.
His eyes light up, ears standing erect. “As many as her Lady requires. Only the best theater for her!”
We’re right on top of them.
Jester provides far more Eiganrac riders than I had anticipated. Thousands of ordinary Snecboth like him providing their own mounts and lances. He confirms locations of the rebel supply depots hidden in the forests. We double check his information with scrying rituals, and every time he’s correct.
Talaran splits our forces to assault their two main depots and Jester augments us with his cavalry.
“I don’t care for him none,” Talaran says, turning his head to spit. “He ain’t able to speak like a normal person. Like this is all some game.”
“You were like that once when we first met,” I say, watching our forces rallying up for the march. Masked corpses are digging out the snowy roads for a smooth advance north.
“That so, my Lady?” he asks.
“Once you had a sense of humor.”
He sucks on his lips, watching Jester and his Eiganrac mounting up. “Children often confuse laughter for bravery.”
We saddle up and move out.
As soon as we claim the rebels’ supplies of food and armaments, they scramble out of the woodwork to contest us. Instead of their guerilla campaign they must have been planning, it turns into two pitched battles. Their forces are ragtag and not prepared for our ambush.
It’s a slaughter.
Jester is there in the very middle of the bloodletting.
When it’s over, as Talaran is counting our supplies and performing headcounts of our soldiers, Jester is instead strolling across the battlefield. He sings drinking songs to himself in the snowstorm, sometimes pointing at one of his men to help him on the chorus.
“So make sure your old knife is sharp, me lad,” he sings, perfectly in pitch to a tune I do not recognize as he cuts out the eyes of a dead mage. “And ensure your tobacco’s dry. For the world is awash with fools, blood, and gold. And all elves is just waitin’ to die!”
“You never break character, do you?” I ask.
Jester pauses, inclining his head towards me, and smiles. “My Lady, you honor me! Your eyes are everywhere. The performer who ever thinks he is truly alone is not fit for the stage.”
“What are you even doing, Commander Ferwylt?” I ask icily.
He holds up a bloody eyeball. “This is my canvas, my Lady. It wouldn’t do to share it with the likes of the Rat Catcher.” He flicks his wrist with a sparkle of magic and the eyeball is gone. Jester bows. “The crowds we play host to aren’t prone to shouting ‘author, author,’ so we have to make due.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
For the first time since meeting him, Jester’s expression falls, ears going level. He stands up straighter. “No.”
It’s so plain and serious I’m inclined to believe him. “Where did you come upon the knowledge of the northern traitors?”
Jester tilts his head, gesturing for humor. “Agents of the Taigan Order aren’t fond of subtlety, my Lady. You can pick them out of any chorus. My troupe consists merely of regular friends and neighbors who know to whom we owe our lives and love. People very easy to
talk to and let things slip.”
I look across the battlefield. “Can the Eiganrac find me someone in particular?”
He nods. “None may evade your fingers if only you should will it, my Lady. Name names.”
“Ishera Fasacminn,” I say, and my tongue tastes of ash.
Jester’s eyes light up. “That’s a name that’s come up during rehearsals before. I even once met her as a young boy.”
“In what way?”
He pokes his tongue into his cheek. “She was meeting with creatures of power, passing through to provide alms, building schools and temples in your name. Places to teach us proper piety and
thankfulness to our Mother for all she did for us.” Jester looks meaningfully at me.
“What did you think of Ishera?”
He scowls in thought, gesturing for scorn. “She had a head full of stars yet not the good sense to arrange them into constellations. Providence chose her, and she still spat in your face.”
I take a long breath, watching it mist in the air. “She was once loyal. A friend, even. Show respect to those who came before you and fought for this nation.”
Jester gives me a curious look, one ear half-cocked. Like he’s not sure if I’m testing him or not. “Seasons change, my Lady, but people don’t. Some wear the mask better than others.” He reaches down to take the mask off a defeated wight, holding it out to me.
I accept the corpse-mask, rotating it in my fingers. Tapping my nails against the hard surface. “Find her for me, Commander.”
The elf whistles for his horse. “We’ll turn this entire country upside-down in your name, o Lady-Mother.”
The White Terror rides alongside the winter winds.
I clench and unclench my fingers, feeling whatever I can from the joints. The knuckles bend slower than I remember. The feeling isn’t what I thought they should do. I can’t tell if it’s the years in the freezing blizzards of the new eternal winter or something more mortal.
I flex the joints. My fingers are sluggish. Something aches in them.
They feel a little shaky as I read Talaran’s reports.
He stands across from my desk and pretends not to notice anything. “We’ve rooted them all out. We’ve left the northern traitors to the Rat Catcher.”
“
We,” I repeat.
Talaran stares. “Ourselves and the Eiganrac. I dealt with the major cities, but they’ve been running rampant across the towns and countryside.”
“In other words, they’re faster, more agile, and pacifying the places we can’t reach in a timely manner.”
He grunts. “Maybe.”
I sit taller. “Are you jealous, captain?”
Talaran’s eyes go past me, staring at the great magical maelstrom above Gemradcurt. “I’m
offended, my Lady. I don’t like relying more and more on these militiamen volunteers for their support and information networks.”
“Their methods are effective, however. We wouldn’t have been able to so quickly sort out the Northern Betrayal without them,” I say, clasping my fingers before me to steady them. “Surely you don’t suggest we do away with my most loyal supporter during this bloody winter.”
He shakes his head. “No, my Lady. I just don’t like relying on their charity. We have no control over them.”
I think it over. “So take control.”
“My Lady?”
“We can’t do away with them; they’re too useful. You have my permission to offer Commander Ferwylt and his ilk an official commission. Subsume them and their services into the Taigan Order by whatever means available to you. We must support and nurture loyalty like the Eiganrac have shown me.”
They shall serve well as outriders and secret police.
[The Eiganrac are an “elite” mercenary company that is entirely cavalry available to Gemradcurt. They are cheaper and more dangerous than an equivalent army and have their own manpower pool to draw from. Because cavalry is stronger than infantry, and these ones are extra buffed, the Eiganrac can utterly maul armies twice their size.]
Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I expected some sort of resistance. Even with the loyalty Jester and his soldiers declared, I thought they might have trouble being formally integrated into the Taigan Order and directly into my service.
Instead, Jester readily accepts the offer alongside the money and supplies being part of the government grants him. What I used to think were mostly just local militias turns out to be a wide web of snow elf volunteers equal in scale to my own core army. All Jester needed was the support to organize them. With Talaran supervising him, Jester organizes his disparate militias under a centralized command.
I’d offered him a pick of the upper floors of the Frostspear, somewhere I can keep him close and on a leash, just in case.
“I invite the kid inside,” Talaran says, standing before my desk. “And he just walks away from me, carrying his things. I chase him down to Ishera’s old office—he went straight there, didn’t ask nobody for no directions—and I find him with his boots on the desk and her old paperwork scattered.”
I frown thoughtfully. Instead of demanding that he come to me, I think it prudent to surprise him and see what he’s doing in the office. In his new natural habitat, so to speak.
I find it empty.
A passing clerk informs me Jester is already using his newfound legitimacy to proactively and independently root out resistance. He looks a little disgusted to tell me.
The traitors never stood a chance.
They dispatch the rebels with the kind of sheer, efficient brutality I’ve come to expect from the Eiganrac. Exterminating any strands of insurrection and punishing the villages that supported them. Local leaders are strung up from any tree tall enough to strangle an elf.
This time, when he returns to the city, I am sure to meet with him. Ambushing him in his office while he’s not prepared for me.
“Now is the summer of our discontent, made glorious winter by this storm over Eordand,” he enunciates clearly. I hear him through the door. “Hm. No. Wrong emphasis.
Now is the summer…”
Jester is in Ishera’s office, boots kicked up atop her desk, Gesturing piously as he reads from a script in his other hand. As soon as I enter, he jumps to his feet. “Mother and Lady, excuse me! Had I known you’d be visiting my dressing room, I would have cleaned.”
“I see you have made yourself at home, Commander,” I say, looking around. There’s a mix of Ishera’s old things and Eiganrac paraphernalia: banners, weapons, armor, and a stack of play scripts.
“Home is merely the stage I may best serve you, my Lady,” he says with a bow.
“Hmm,” I hum, hands clasped behind my back to keep them steady. I walk around the room examining his things scattered about Ishera’s old creature comforts.
Jester watches me carefully. “If you’re looking for Ishera’s liquor cabinet, I already found it. And everything else she had hiding in this old place. She left her locks and false drawer bottoms painfully obvious.”
To turn him sharply. “How? I had the Taigan Order turn this office upside down to find everything. How did you figure out where her secrets were when no one else could?”
He tilts his head fractionally. “My Lady and Mother, I am a fool. I recognize my own kind.” He opens a drawer and pulls out a notebook. “She took such good notes. Fine penmanship. Contacts she made. Deals she brokered. How she blasphemed your name. As soon as I found it, I went to investigate.”
“That’s where you were.”
“The guilty hide poorly once named.” Jester holds the book up. “These leads are old, but remain her entire script and cast. She supped with Peitar near Trimgarb, lords of Reotcrab, and village leaders of Autumn in the supposed interests of Gemradcurt. One of these groups yet draws breath.”
“You’re sure of this?”
He looks down at Ishera’s old notebook, flipping to a seemingly random page. One eyebrow cocks, his ears lowering in fascination. “As sure as I am that Ishera taught herself to dance for some reason.”
My fists ball and I take a breath. “Then track down your leads, Commander. I want her found. I want her before me, no matter the cost. Am I understood?”
Jester snaps the book close, grinning. “Yours are the only stage direction I’d ever take.”
It’s quiet but for the occasional flare-ups of civil violence. My armies feel oddly positioned.
I keep my hands buried within my fur coat, rubbing them together, unable to tell if the cold has rendered them numb for now or if it really is the sign of more serious damage to this body. Maybe it’s the years I’ve been outside in this dead winter since becoming a Fey-lich, or maybe it’s just the price of being a flesh and blood elf.
I exhale hot air onto my hands and try not to think of how close I am to fifty years old.
“We’re patrolling the edge of the Domandrod when we should be in cities,” Talaran is saying, arms folded over his chest.
Jester holds his hands out to a fire, smiling. “Obviously the best houses of ill-repute are always off the beaten track. Or are you suggesting
you know better where people have been acting strange?”
Talaran sneers. “‘Strange’? You show up and start burning villages and call it strange when people start running away from you.”
With a twirl, Jester faces Talaran. His spurs jingle. He smiles innocently. “If they run, they’re traitors,
Stitchman. Simple as.”
I watch the two men argue, one sternly rigid, the other flamboyantly expressive. Following reports from the Eiganrac we’d sent our forces down to the border of the Domandrod forest, near the Winter Gate. If the Fey are willing, the Winter Gate can let people in or out of the forest, but they haven’t been willing since the days of King Harvestcrown. Still, Eiganrac agents noted the unusual movement of Peitar and even snow elves around the region, which matched with old notes Ishera made about providing alms to surviving Peitar in the region, and that’s why we’re here.
We’ve been here up until the start of the brief summer. My hands haven’t regained much in the way of feeling. I wonder how much longer I’ll last before I’m compelled to take a new body.
“And those that don’t run?” Talaran asks.
Jester laughs, reaching up to poke Talaran in his breastplate. “Smart traitors!”
Talaran’s brows knit together. “This is a feywild chase, then. Who’s to say your Eiganrac rabble are actually being productive?”
“I am to say, and I’ve not provably been made a liar yet,” Jester says with an innocent shrug. “Anyone who’ll speak to the contrary is a prize for the Rat Catcher.”
“Meaningless,” Talaran snaps, taking a heavy step towards Jester, muscles tensed. “Speak normal for once in your life, you little fucking cretin.”
Jester cartwheels back, laughing. “Or what, praytell, old man? You’ve one foot in the grave as-is. If that even is your foot. You’re so covered in stitches it wouldn’t surprise me if you’ve been taking the best parts of those you kill and adding them to yourself just to extend your time on center stage.”
“Piece of fairy shit,” Talaran hisses, rearing his fist back.
I’m about to snap out of my thought to stop them when an Eiganrac rider arrives.
“Jester, you were right. We found them,” the courier says.
Jester just looks at Talaran and grins, all teeth.
First our own people, then the Tuathak, and now the Peitar.
They emerge from the unknowable Feywilds of the Domandrod. Some forty-five thousand elves under the organized leadership of someone called Jahainar Truespear.
We’d all thought there’d be a local insurrection. The Red Winter had been winding down since the Eiganrac put the northern lords to the sword. Instead, a massive, centralized army of Peitar, Tuathak, Snecboth, and even a few Gladewardens have emerged from the impassable Domandrod.
It’s the Gladewardens that make me pause. They’re the Peitar elves who still live in the Domandrod, at the mercy of their own Fey masters. They deny entrance to the forest, spending their time trying to keep local balance and drive back strange Fey abominations.
They’re the Fey’s personal janitors, in a word.
And they make up a solid core of Truespear’s army.
I look around for the Everfrost Prince to ask him his thoughts on the Fey masters of the Domandrod attempting to stop us, but he seldom if ever appears when others are around.
If I put together every Eiganrac, Taigan soldiers, and masked wight under my service together, it equals the strength of this united army of the seasons.
The warriors of balance come to restore the seasons.
But they’re still setting up camp outside the Winter Gate, establishing supply lines and taking accountability of their forces.
No one has come through a Seasonal Gate since the Peitar of Iadth went through to ambush King Harvestcrown so many years ago. That had shocked all of Eordand.
Turespear came from an impossible direction with one of the largest armies in recorded history.
As far as last ditch efforts to stop me go, this might have been the death knell.
Except for Jester and his Eiganrac.
Our armies are already in position to ambush them before they’re ready to fight. We march from Dungat, where these wars all began, near where I was born.
Here is where it will end.
The Eiganrac slaughter them as Talaran holds the front.
Their armies were massive, yes, but still trickling in. They thought they had more time.
They didn’t.
I bend my numb fingers, willing the chill into my lungs, suppressing a cough as I channel the full fury of this eternal winter onto our foes to cover our advance. I’ve never seen a battle so large.
Talaran does what he does best, eschewing fancy maneuvering in favor of pressing the opportunities while we have them. Once, during our war with Jhorgas, he said that he didn’t think so much about big, pitched battles as he did about the smaller things: how to make sure the enemy has the sun in their eyes, and forcing them to skip breakfast.
He does that here. We attack as they’re cooking the first meal of the day, with the sun behind us.
We thought they’d take longer to draw up for battle, letting us take their war camps apart piece by piece.
Truespear is faster at organizing a defense, and uses his great number of trained soldiers, many of them veterans of previous wars against me and Talaran.
For a moment, it almost looks like they’ll overwhelm us.
Until Jester and his Eiganrac sweep in from behind them with lance and magic, charging from all angles on horseback.
In a single day, Truespear invaded Gemradcurt with the largest host in Eordani history.
In a single day, we slaughtered them all.
The killing starts at dawn, and doesn’t stop until late in the night when the first bodies are already frozen solid.
This must never happen again.
Once, we showed the Peitar mercy. We drove them from our homes, but after that?
We let them be where they lived in the old kingdoms of Eighard and Iadth.
It’s not different to the same Tuathak who rose up against me, or the same people who stood against me during the Everfrost Crusade.
Ishera had asked me to show mercy. After refusing Strutmar’s surrender at Dungat, I let her convince me to spare too many of them. We drove them off the land, but didn’t kill every last one of them. We let the Peitar survive when we conquered Harvestcrown’s old dominion.
And it was Peitar we failed to kill who rose up as one and flocked to Truespear’s banner in one final shot at destroying winter itself.
Listening to Ishera years ago had again become the problem of today.
I cannot make that same mistake.
We chase the survivors to their homes. The Eiganrac are good at that.
And once we know where they’re hiding, where their families have sheltered them and their hate, we force them to follow Truespear once again.
And Winter creeps in that much stronger.
Minnorac, where the Peitar killed King Harvestcrown, becomes a charnel pit.
Fathglan, Orachran, Fiscal, and Dorcurt follow in kind.
I stand before a great tree at the edge of the Winter Gate, hands together for whatever warmth my own body can provide them. Looking up at the ancient trees that have stood here since the days of the Precursor elves.
King Truespear and his officers hang from the branches. So many that the great tree sags. So we used the ones behind it. And behind those ones, too. Until we reached as far as we could into the edge of the Domandrod.
Nothing rots anymore. Not in this cold.
I raise a hand and bring King Truespear back to life, his eyes glowing with necromantic dullness. The corpse struggles. It reaches for its neck until it shatters a few more vertebrae.
And it falls limps.
I raise him again.
And I make the Peitar king struggle some more.
Again and again until his neck warms up from the friction of so many broken bones. And he’s finally able to rot, and his organs slush around in his useless, naked body.
The Taigan order repeats this everywhere the Peitar once lived in Winter’s realm.
Some sins cannot be forgiven. But for the safety of my people, in the end I know I shall be found faultless.
It’s done. The snow across Eordand is dyed red with elven blood, but they’re destroyed.
I put the Watchers of the White to the sword. I liquidated Harvestcrown’s children for their insolence. The traitorous nobles of the north, I removed them and their bloodlines from this world. And now Truespear is a twitching, rotting mass of organs hanging from a tree with his forty-five thousand best friends.
Except the only person I ever truly cared about is still out there somehow.
As Talaran is executing my will across Gemradcurt ahead of me, Jester steps off his horse.
I keep my hands together beneath my coat and dress, watching him.
His grin is wide, fingers twitching eagerly in half-formed emotions. “The curtains have all come down, my Lady and Mother. There’s just one straggler who refuses to let good art die.”
I stare.
“We found Ishera.”
The last of the White Watchers.
It started as an act of insurrection. It ended in civil war.
The Eiganrac found her as they were chasing down stragglers, survivors, and supporters of Truespear.
Ishera herself, just outside the gates of Gemradcurt, with a last alliance of everywhere who escaped the noose.
“How soon can we get Captain Talaran’s forces?” I ask.
He shakes his head, affecting sadness. There’s a glint in his eyes. “Alas, poor old Stitchman is away executing your will. Only my troupe can reach the white lady with any haste.”
Damnit, no. No. Talaran is supposed to be by my side to help me capture Ishera. So we can… kill her? Talk to her? I don’t even know. Why had I sent Talaran so far away now of all times? This is happening all too suddenly. I look into the gleam in Jester’s eyes and can’t help but feel like I’m being played.
And that I truly don’t have any better options.
“Give me your horse,” I say, and we ride north hard enough that my legs are achy and my thighs chafed bloody by the time we arrive.
A last alliance of the losers and the defeated.
Ishera doesn’t have much left. A strange composite of all of my empire, a cross-section of everyone: sons of old nobles, Tuathak heretics, listless Peitar, and whatever’s left of the organized snow elven resistance of the old order.
I expected some epic final battle. So does she, judging by the way her ragtag remnants attempt to form battle lines.
The Eiganrac don’t care to indulge either of us.
My cavalry breaks through their lines easily, overwhelming them from all sides.
Ishera retreats not away, but towards Gemradcurt itself.
Get. Back. Here. You BITCH!
We ride them down as they run, and I count the banners. Every noble house I’ve ever known. Many merchant houses. Sigils of the Peitar and Tuathak in seemingly random positions.
I expect to crush them against Gemradcurt’s walls.
But Ishera does something. Or maybe it’s last ditch traitors.
The gates fling open. They charge into the city, either to fortify or escape.
Then it occurs to me what Ishera is doing.
The great, magical maelstrom swirling above Gemradcurt, so intimately tied to the Eternal Winter and my soul in equal measure. She’s making a last ditch run for my phylactery, however she knows of it. The only possible means to actually
kill me.
Truespear, Oakgardner, the northern lords—even if we hadn’t strangled them in their cribs, they wouldn’t have known how to stop me. How to end my Fey-touched life, not really. Not for sure. I could have always raised our fallen soldiers and bid Talaran march them again and again into battle until we ground them down.
This is different.
This is the only shot anyone has ever had to truly end me in a single stroke.
And it’s Ishera doing it.
I reach down to the great storm above, and bring the full force of all that is cold onto the city to stop them. To freeze the streets and her rebels. Extinguishing the old Snecboth hearths that keep the denizens comfortable as Taigan soldiers and their undead wights scramble to block off streets and corner her.
Jester howls, cheering the Eiganrac ride through the streets and snow. Slaughtering Ishera’s soldiers. Until the snow and corpses block the roads and we need to find other ways to the Frostspear tower at the heart of my empire.
We corner them at the base of the Frostspear. They fortify the tower, my old offices, and the Eiganrac murder their way through. Lancing the last of Ishera’s soldiers until we realize she’s not here. She’s gone into the tower.
Into the Heart of Winter.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, Ishera, you fucking
bitch! You can’t do this. I’ve won. I killed everyone. I killed
all who resisted.
You will
not stop me when I’ve finally won. Before I’ve finally brought the peace and safety I’ve fought my entire life for.
You fucking
whore!
Jester helps me off my horse and we storm into the Frostspear. I hold ice in my hands, throwing bolts through the throats of whatever rear guard Ishera has put up. Directly on the path to my very soul itself.
And then I’m at the door to the Heart Chamber.
Here where it all ended. I had retraced all of my steps in this Red Winter—Dungat, Fogrim, Raithtall—only to return here. Where my life ended for the first time.
I realize all at once what parts of my body I can feel, and all the pain I wish I wasn’t in. I’m panting, struggling to keep down a coughing fit. My fingers are gnarled with cold. My thighs are chafed and bleeding through my dress. The arches of my feet feel smashed flat. The sweat is freezing to my body, and I shiver uncontrollably.
Two elves try to stop me, wearing battle scarred bronze. Jester flicks his wrist, casting an illusory copy of himself that distracts them enough for him to stab one in the groin and the other through the back of the mouth.
He looks at me, grinning, and gestures grandly to the door.
With a great force of effort, I raise my hands and let the old sorcery tear the door down.
Here where it began. Here where it ends.
Ishera stands there, a book in her hands and a bottle of mead at her hip. As she stares up at the Precursor relics holding together the very Heart of Winter itself. Casting everything in a pulsing blue light. The air stinks of Fey magic. My breath mists.
She turns her head to face me, looking lost. I try to say something, my heart catches in my throat. I remember the little girl in the Taigan Order I used to cuddle up with to stay warm during the worst nights. I remember the woman who promised to stand by me no matter what when I took power in Gemradcurt. She’d made such a funny face when I brought Talaran into my inner circle because I talked to him more than her and because he wasn’t a mage.
I remember her face at Marathmas, Dungat, Jhorgashirr, the Feast at Daidth, Arakeprun, and Einnsag. Countless times she’d looked at me lost like that.
But Ishera isn’t any of those women anymore. Her clothes and armor are filthy, her face gaunt and starved. She’d lost the ring finger on her left hand. One eye looks a little milky and damaged. And she looks so, so old. A mother who’s outlived her children and their children but can’t find the willpower to die.
Jester chuckles, his voice low and deep.
Hungry. A sound that creeps up my spine until I have to fight not to arch my back. He grips his sword tighter and steps forwards. She looks at him like she recognizes him, hands gripping her book faster and flipping pages.
I hold my arm to stop him, my elbow creaking with the sudden motion. Jester shoots me a look that’s almost hostile, but he makes no further motion.
Ishera face twists suddenly. It does something. She
smiles, soft and sadly. “Hey, Immie. Long time no see. Did you really replace Tally-boy with a younger model already? You’re so shameless.”
“I…” The words don’t come out. I’m suddenly hot in the cheeks. My blood still very much alive and rushing to my limbs. My fingers shake. “No, Ishera.
No.”
She tilts her head, cocking an ear. “No what, Immie?”
“No!” I say, louder. “
No! You don’t get to do this, Ishera. You don’t get to pretend to be my friend! Not after what you’ve done! Not after
everything you’ve tried to destroy. Fucking
no!”
Ishera looks at the book in her hands. Sighing, she closes it. “Is this really the line for you, Immie? Not sacking cities, rejecting surrenders, betraying your allies, exterminating countless thousands, raising the dead to devour their own mothers—
being friendly is crossing the line?”
“That’s not—you’re being unfair. Stop it.”
She gives me a weird look. “Or what, Immie? You’ll kill me? If you’re already here, that means I’m too late to stop anything, and have lost. I made a gamble and lost. Should have known, really. Never could beat Tally-boy. Have you
seen his face when he’s playing cards? It’s like his normal face, but, like, ten times worse somehow.”
I want to stop her. To interrupt her. Instead, I just stand there, everything aching, letting her talk and reminisce.
“You betrayed me, Ishera,” I say weakly. “We were friends. I trusted you. I
needed you! And now you’re trying to kill me.”
Ishera glances back at the Heart of Winter, and tightens her coat. “I am, yes.”
“
Why?” I demand, almost begging.
“Because you’re you, Immie,” she says, breath misting through her teeth. “Once, I thought you were changing. I promised to always be by
her side, the Immarel I grew up with. Who cared for people. Who was passionate. Who did everything she could to protect the people she loved. I was scared after Marathmas, but I understood you. I argued at Dungat, and you ignored me, and I thought you were just angry. It kept happening. Again and again and
again. I thought you were changing. You were getting worse. But that when it was all over, I’d be there for you, and the evil would finally stop.”
She looks away. “I argued with myself. I lied to myself. I kept rationalizing everything you did, that I
helped you do. Time and time again until that night when the snow started to fall and never stopped. And I—” Ishera laughs mirthlessly, a single, hoarse sound. She holds a hand up to her eye. “I realized I was so stupid. Because you weren’t changing, Immie. Because the girl I’ve known and loved since I was a little girl and watched grow up, the one I’m talking to, it’s
you, Immarel. It’s always you. Always been you. Always will be you.”
“What do you think I am?” I whisper,
Ishera sniffles, rubbing her eye. Runs her hand down a gaunt cheek. “I stand before the monstrous, twisted ruins of a good woman who dreamed of a better world, who longed only for the strength to bring it about. And now that she has it, I realize she always intended to pave the road to her dreams with the bones and broken hopes of others.”
I swallow. “I know, Ishera.”
“Do you?”
“You don’t think it eats at me? Do you think I
wanted it to come to this? You think I
enjoy ordering brother to kill sister? Do you think I ever didn’t know what I was doing, and that it would all be worth it in the end.”
Ishera lets out a long, tired sigh. She tries to smile, but her lips quake, and it dies on her mouth. “Self-awareness does not absolve you of responsibility, Immarel.”
“
Fuck you!” I hiss.
She shakes her head, looking down at herself. She reaches for the bottle of mead at her hip and holds it up to me. “Care for a drink? I’ve been saving it for a good occasion: the day one of us finally dies.”
Jester scoffs, and I silence him with a glare.
“Ah, well,” Ishera says, popping the top. “You know a Fey gave this to me? She said it was for my good deeds. A thank you present from the same creatures as the Rat Catcher and your Everfrost Prince. I kept it by my side as I first rallied against you. When I used the Tuathak friends to help Oakgardner. Kept it on my hip when I convinced the old lords of Gelcolle and Reotcrab to stop you. And I held it tight when I met Truespear, telling him the stories of the Fey who warned me about you, convincing him to try to stop your reign of terror once and for all.”
She pulls it back, drinking long and greedily. Chugging the entire thing until she gasps for breath and tosses it aside to shatter on the ground. She’s no longer steady on her feet. “I wanted to do one good thing in my life before I died. I used to think we could do that together, as friends, or something—I don’t know. I’m maybe fifty, did you know that? All that time together, and I’ve not managed to completely do
one good thing in my life.”
“Ishera,” I say warningly.
Ishera flicks her fingers, casting them in the weak light of magefire. Her eyes rove the room, sloshing about her skull. Until they finally focus back on me, and she smiles fondly.
“Who knows, Immie?” she says. “Maybe now’s the first time I win a gamble.”
“
Ishera.”
“I loved you,” she says, throwing her hand towards me.
I don’t think. I just do. And I’m faster than her. The lance of ice shoots out before her arm is even finished extending.
And then there’s just a hole where her shoulder used to be. The blood takes a moment to realize there’s an opening.
“Oh,” she says. “That’s no good.”
Ishera dies.
She’s dead.
She is dead.
I murdered my best friend.
Jester tsks his tongue, gesturing for disdain. Twirling a knife as he walks up to Ishera’s body. I’m too busy gripping my heart and trying to breathe evenly to even realize what he’s doing. Until he grabs her blood-soaked hair and yanks her head up.
“Stop!” I command.
He looks up at me, the Heart of Winter—my very soul—swirling behind him. “Do you want her corpse whole to raise for one last show?”
“I—no. Commander,
stop. Don’t touch her body.”
Jester lets go. Ishera’s head limply splashes in her own blood. The man locks his arms behind his back, almost politely. Head tilted like a curious child. He says nothing, but his eyes make my skin crawl.
I look at the scene before me, swallowing a lump in my throat. “You and the Eiganrac will collect her body, in one piece, Commander. She deserves to be cremated where she was born, if nothing else.”
He looks disappointed. “An honorable pyre? Ishera was one of many. There is no dearth of desperate fools in Eordand. She doesn’t deserve to remain whole any more than Truespear or Oceansong.”
“She was my
friend, Commander,” I hiss, fists balling. “My lieutenant, my left hand. She deserves the funerary respect befitting one of such a station.”
Jester doesn’t move. He just stares at me.
“You will obey my commands and burn her with honor, as she wanted,” I say, enunciating everything. “Do I make myself understood.”
“As a fine-written script, my Lady and Mother.”
He makes no motions.
“
Then obey them.”
“Of course,” he says, low and quiet.
There are no more leaders to this civil war.
All of their leaders hang from trees or are cremated.
Talaran and Jester fan out to clean the last isolated pockets. But alone, without any support, they’re easy prey.
The red snow settles at last. After years of fighting, all is still. All is quiet.
Winter is victorious.
And I am alone.
Once, I had a nightmare. Before I made a pact with the Everfrost Prince. I had seen the death and ruin of my people. I had been the
mother of death. And now, as the red snow settles, and the survivors buckle up for another long, hungry winter, I wonder if it came true. If I had truly done the wrong thing.
When I look out the window to the blood-soaked streets of Gemradcurt, I feel someone watching me. I search and search from my tower until I see him, standing on a rooftop. The Rat Catcher raises his pipe to his mask and takes a deep drag of smoke.
I shudder.
For by what right would a witch who feeds on the blood of motherless boys have to whine about having her skull split?
I had made a choice. I had made choice after choice. In the name of vengeance. Of the safety of my people. The selfish pursuit of power to prevent anyone from having to become like me to survive ever again.
I’ve lost count of the dead it had caused.
Self-awareness does not absolve you of responsibility.
I blink hard, trying to shake the memories from my mind. And just stare at my desk. The one I’d stolen from Jhorgas so many years ago.
For all I’ve done, there are still those who sided with me. I’m not a monster, not a true one. Talaran had stood by my side no matter what. And in the darkest winters, normal people like the Eiganrac had taken to arms to stand up for me and our nation.
I have done evil. But it was all for a good reason. And those who still draw breath are the inheritors of that good reason.
I have done so much. But I have done it for
them. No matter what Ishera said, or what people like Truespear fought for, I had done everything for
them. For my people. For my murdered parents. For a nation of motherless boys and fatherless daughters who now have safety and a home.
Once, I thought this would be it.
And then what? Ishera had always asked me. Always needled me about. She had wanted to count stars. Talaran once told me didn’t care to bother his mind with useless hypotheticals.
Maybe he’s still right. People like him and Jester.
I look at my hand in the fire, frozen and gnarled from age and cold. The entire arm shakes. Immarel Winterswrath is a dying elf, too old and frail and weak to be what her people truly need. She didn’t even have the guts to kill a traitor until that traitor raised her hand in anger first.
But I am not an elf. Not exactly. I could live as something apart from them if I wanted. Except, I don’t. I want to be flesh and blood. I want to be one of the people I sacrificed everything for.
“I fear my poor heart will give out before long. How on earth can I protect it, if not by iron?”
“You can’t,” said the Boar King. “A hero must always wear his heart on the outside.”
I close my eyes. My bones and eyelids feel so heavy. I can barely feel anything else but them.
I think about the Heart of Winter. I think about the nature of my immortality, my pact with the Everfrost Prince.
And know what I have to do.
And a Mother takes care of her children, forever and always.
Until my pact is finally fulfilled, and my people are truly safe in their Mother’s loving embrace.
END
Thank you for reading this little AAR. I wrote this all in about 3 weeks after reading too many comicbooks and some dude on the Anbennar Discord was like “Hey, try Gemradcurt; it’s wicked fun.” And it was fun, incredibly fun. I loved the missions, the events, the rewards, the characters. It inspired me to pick up my keyboard and try to interpret the story and tell it to y’all.
What’s that, I hear you say? Why, yes, this entire story, all of the missions and characters and events—that’s barely a
third of Gemradcurt’s content. But a story can only grow in the telling. This is just one way Immarel’s story can go down. To finally complete her journey, that requires
you to do.
If you had any interest at all in this story, download Anbennar and play Gemradcurt and experience it for yourself. (You may need to use the BitBucket version, as at time of writing this nation isn’t on the Steam release.) Post your own playthru for others to see you as you scramble to put out the utter economic dumpster fire that an eternal winter and endless war will put you in. And while you’re out it, give a shoutout to
Takasaki on the Anbennar Discord, who made the mission tree and the events. He’s a great dude.
So thank you for reading this story.
Now go out there and complete it for yourself!
See you around, cowboy.
