"How’s your side, Julius?"

Marcellus didn’t look over as he spoke. His blade was already opening another High Councilor’s throat, the motion smooth enough that he could turn his wrist and let the next beam of light glance harmlessly away from the edge.

The High Council were elite light mages, the finest the church could gather. Under any other sky, that might have been enough.

But they were facing the crown prince and the emperor’s bastard son, two of the most gifted light mages the age had produced, and titles and training meant little in the space between breaths.

"Simple enough."

Julius answered without much feeling. Four councilors already lay at his feet; not one had managed to touch him. In sheer magical power he couldn’t hope to match Marcellus, and they both knew it.

But when it came to the rhythm of a fight, to reading another mage’s intent and turning it against them, there was no comparison.

Julius won by a landslide.

"Three left," Marcellus said, never breaking stride.

The sanctum’s gold had faded to something closer to candlelight. The great sunburst set into the floor was fractured, its rays broken by cracks where stray spells had torn through stone.

At the far end of the hall, the smaller altar still throbbed with that sickly red glow, but the pulse had grown uneven, the ritual’s last faltering heartbeats visible even to those who couldn’t read its weave.

The remaining three councilors had withdrawn to the far wall. Robes hung in tatters; faces had gone bloodless. One, a woman with grey threaded through dark hair, lifted her hands, a gesture that hovered somewhere between surrender and a spell.

"You don’t have to do this," she said. "The Grand Cleric—"

"The Grand Cleric is dead," Marcellus cut in. "Or dying. It doesn’t matter which."

"Then the ritual—"

"Is over."

Julius moved before the thought could finish forming on her tongue. Three long strides carried him across the broken sunburst.

His sword slid into her chest, not quite deep enough to grant a clean, quick death, but enough to crush whatever light she had been gathering.

She gasped, fingers closing around the blade as if she could hold it there and keep the moment from passing. Her eyes found his, wide with something like betrayal.

"You were supposed to be different," she whispered. "Your mother—"

"Don’t."

He pulled the sword free.

She folded to the floor without another word.

The last two councilors bolted, panic overriding training, but Marcellus was already in their path. Light flared from his hands, bright and absolute, and caught them mid-sprint, slamming them back against the wall. Their skulls struck stone with a dull crack that made Julius flinch despite himself.

"Any last words?" Marcellus asked.

The younger of the two, his face still too unguarded to hide the fear in it, tried for a prayer.

"Elion preserve—"

Marcellus opened his throat before he could finish.

The woman beside him, older, her white robe smeared with blood and smoke, didn’t bother to speak. Her gaze stayed fixed on Marcellus, an unreadable blend of grief and loathing.

He killed her just the same.

Silence settled over the sanctum.

The sunburst in the floor had gone completely dark. Its cracks spidered outward like veins of shadow. At the far end, the lesser altar had lost its red glow at last, the light winking out as if someone had simply closed a hand around it.

The ritual was done.

Julius stood amid the fallen, his sword dripping onto gold gone dull and broken. His face had leached of color, breath coming too fast, but his grip did not shake.

"Now," he said quietly, "that leaves you, Grand Priest..."

Marcellus shifted his weight, readying himself to strike the final blow. But before he could lift his sword, another voice cut through the stillness, and a rush of frigid air swept past them, spilling across the stones in a sudden wash of white.

"I still have business with him."

"Jayden? What are you doing here?" Marcellus demanded.

"This won’t take long, Your Majesty."

Frost unfurled over the sanctum floor in thin, branching lines, creeping over the shattered sunburst and up the robes of the dead until they looked like bodies abandoned to some deep winter.

Jayden walked past Marcellus without so much as a glance.

His boots pressed faint tracks into the forming ice. Each breath left a pale cloud before his face, at odds with the lingering warmth in the stones.

The sword at his hip stayed in its sheath. His hands, bare and raw around the knuckles, hung loose at his sides.

The Grand Priest still stood before the smaller altar. No blood had touched his robes; no frost yet clung to them. His mitre sat straight, the jewels along its rim catching what little light remained.

Only his hands betrayed him. They shook.

"You were supposed to die in Berian," he said. His voice splintered on the words, all its practiced thunder gone. "I gave the order myself. I saw the reports. I read the confirmation."

"You saw what I wanted you to see." Jayden stopped a few paces from the altar. "The inquisitor you sent was careless. He talked before he swung. Told me more than enough."

The Grand Priest’s jaw worked, anger warring with fear. "That’s not—"

"Don’t lie to me."

Jayden didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The frost that laced the floor had begun to climb the Grand Priest’s robes, thin threads of ice inching up the white fabric like reaching fingers.

"You sent an inquisitor to kill me," Jayden said. "You told the Grand Cleric I was dead. You hunted me for weeks while she mourned a ghost."

"The Grand Cleric was weak."

"Don’t."

The single word snapped through the sanctum like a lash. Ice burst from Jayden’s shoulders, jagged spines of crystal catching and scattering the faint light.

"She raised me," he went on, softer now, but no less dangerous. "She held me when I was a child and the shadows wouldn’t stop whispering."

"The Grand Cleric was a fool," the Grand Priest said, his voice firming as he clung to scorn. "She believed in a gentle god. She never understood that mercy is weakness, that compassion rots the will."

Jayden’s mouth curved in something that wasn’t quite a smile.

"Good," he said. "If this is all you are, I was worried pulling answers out of you might be a challenge."

He drove his boot into the Grand Priest’s chest, knocking him flat and pinning him there. Jayden’s eyes burned, a hard, glacial blue.

"You don’t even deserve to die."

[Permafrost]

Ice blossomed beneath his heel and surged upward, swallowing the Grand Priest in a sheath of solid frost. Jayden held it there, not enough to still a heart, only enough to bind.

He did not grant him the mercy of an ending.

He left him conscious, entombed in ice for as long as time cared to remember him.

Able to see. Able to feel. Unable to move. Unable to speak.

"Jayden," Marcellus said at last, "what was that about the Grand Cleric?"