Emperor Meriel leaned forward on his towering throne of woven sun-gold.

The projected image flickered aggressively as the immense, divine heat of the distant capital tried to push its way down the magical wire.

"The weather," Meriel rumbled, a slow, highly condescending smile touching his sculpted lips.

"You always were an incredibly dramatic boy, Kai."

"You spent your youth reading forbidden void scrolls in the dark while the true princes practiced the spear."

"Now you sit inside my secondary clay keep and call yourself a storm."

"A storm that just butchered your southern vanguard," Kai reminded him, taking a slow, unhurried step toward the floating projection.

"A vanguard of cheap provincial mercenaries and obsolete brass toys," the Emperor dismissed smoothly.

"You have conquered a salt plain and a few yellow clay silos."

"Do not confuse the outer sheep-pens with the throne room, little rogue."

"I am not coming for your sheep," Kai whispered, his glowing starlight eyes shining through the freezing mist.

"I am coming for your skin."

Meriel’s golden eyes narrowed until the projected image hissed with live, volatile plasma.

"You will burn to ash before your horses even smell the capital moats," the Emperor declared.

He raised his right hand inside the distant throne room, thrusting a massive, burning golden scepter directly into his own floorboards.

The massive brass sphere floating in front of Kai groaned under a sudden, catastrophic thermal surge.

The Emperor was forcefully pushing a lethal wave of high-tier solar fire back down the continental leyline to fry Kai inside his own override chamber.

The ambient air in the circular room spiked from freezing to boiling in a single heartbeat.

The frosted stone floor rapidly began weeping hot steam.

Kai did not take a single step backward.

He simply slammed both of his bare hands onto the floating brass sphere.

He opened the internal floodgates of his Level 48 winter core.

"My leylines now," Kai growled.

He pushed a massive, sustained torrent of Absolute Zero directly against the incoming wave of solar plasma.

The two conflicting, god-tier thermal concepts collided in the dead center of the ancient brass conduit.

The resulting magical feedback screeched like a dying leviathan.

The blinding white fire traveling down the wire snuffed out halfway between Sol-Spires and the capital.

The freezing mana kept going.

It aggressively climbed up the magical connection, forcefully freezing the continental data stream into a solid rod of blue starlight.

Hundreds of miles away, the projected image of Emperor Meriel violently shuddered.

The golden scepter in the Emperor’s hand turned zero-degrees white before shattering into a dozen frozen pieces.

Meriel let out a sharp, highly surprised grunt as the armrests of his own golden throne rapidly began frosting over.

"See you in three days," Kai whispered.

Kai forcefully twisted his wrists apart.

The massive, ten-foot brass sphere imploded.

It collapsed inward into a hyper-dense, baseball-sized sphere of pure, frozen leyline crystal that dropped heavily into Kai’s waiting palm.

The golden projection of the Sun Emperor snapped out like a snuffed candle.

[System: Continental Leyline Severed]

[Hostile Scrying Feedback Successful]

[Target: Sun Emperor Meriel suffered moderate mana-pathway frostbite]

[Unique Core Item Acquired: The Frozen Ley-Spark]

[Description: A heavy fragment of stolen continental authority. When deployed, it generates a localized winter singularity.]

Kai tucked the heavy, freezing crystal directly into his inner silk pocket.

He turned around and walked down the sweeping stone stairwell, his dark boots leaving smoking frost prints on the cooling tiles.

Out on the wide clay courtyard, the Southern army was fully assembled and waiting in the biting northern wind.

The seventy-five converted Imperial Dawnguard officers stood rigidly in the very first rank, holding their standard iron Southern spears.

They had wrapped rough woolen rags around their unarmored shoulders to fight off Kai’s dropping atmospheric temperature.

Zara the Unbroken sat atop her black warhorse, her three thousand cavalry formed up behind her in dense, flawless wedges.

Yena stood at the foot of the dais steps, her long ice spear resting against her hip as she watched him emerge from the keep.

"The leyline spire just stopped humming," Yena reported sharply, looking up at the dead, silent clay tower.

"I had to hang up on your former sovereign," Kai replied smoothly, walking down the frosted steps.

"He talks far too much."

Zara laughed loudly, her rich, husky voice carrying across the silent, shivering ranks of the captured officers.

"You genuinely broke an Imperial scrying link?" Zara purred, leaning her sun-bronzed cheek against her horse’s mane.

"Usually that fries the brain of whoever is standing on the receiving end."

"My brain is terribly hard to fry," Kai smirked, swinging his muscular frame up onto his waiting black stallion.

He looked down at the seventy-five silent, converted Northern officers.

"You know the northern tundra roads far better than my rebels," Kai called out to them.

"Take the lead."

"If you guide us into a hidden solar ambush, my cavalry will simply ride over your spines."

The young Dawnguard lieutenant who had been the first to accept the oath offered a stiff, rigid Northern salute.

"The Sun-Way is a massive, raised stone viaduct that crosses the Weeping Bog, my King," the lieutenant reported, his breath misting heavily.

"It is the only road that supports heavy baggage trains during the winter months."

"Then we take the viaduct," Kai commanded.

The massive iron gates of Sol-Spires groaned open, revealing the sprawling, gray expanse of the northern tundra.

The Southern raiding party marched out in strict, unyielding formation.

Kai kept his Kingdom Core Fragment active, expanding a massive, mile-wide dome of crisp, blue winter air that insulated his eight thousand fighters from the harsh northern elements.

The cracked yellow clay of the highway rapidly turned into a packed, solid sheet of blue ice beneath the horses’ iron hooves.

By the fourth hour of the march, the gray northern sky slowly began to shift.

The cloudless horizon did not turn dark with rain.

It turned a violent, sickening, highly unnatural shade of bright, burning orange.

Yena reined her horse back, riding directly alongside Kai as her sharp amber eyes tracked the unnatural sky-glow.

"That is not a normal sunset," Yena warned, her spear shaft catching the strange orange light.

"The sun is currently three hours away from falling behind the western crags."

A profound, incredibly low, vibrating thrum echoed from the high clouds above them.

It sounded like the beating of massive, multi-ton leather wings.

"Sky-Galleons," Zara hissed, standing up in her heavy iron stirrups to peer through the cold salt haze.

"The Emperor did not just fortify the mountain passes."

"He deployed the Sun-Eaters."

High above the gray cloud layer, three colossal, floating warships broke through the atmosphere.

They were massive, multi-tiered floating fortresses carved from solid white marble and heavy sun-brass.

Massive, burning solar sails propelled them through the sky, trailing long, weeping rivers of liquid golden fire behind them like bleeding comets.

"They are actively glassing the Ashen Flats behind us," the converted Dawnguard lieutenant yelled from the front rank, his voice cracking with pure panic.

"They are cutting off our southern retreat!"

Miles behind the marching column, a massive, continuous beam of divine solar plasma rained down from the floating galleons.

The blistering sky-fire violently struck the yellow clay plains they had just crossed, turning the road into a boiling, impassable sea of bubbling white liquid glass.

The five thousand Southern rebels stopped marching, their collective morale threatening to fracture as they looked back at the apocalyptic wall of fire cutting them off from their desert home.

"We are trapped on the viaduct!" an infantryman shouted. "The sky-beasts will roast us from above!"

"Keep your feet moving!" Yena roared furiously, riding back along the line with her spear raised high.

"Any man who breaks formation gets his boots pinned to the ice!"

Zara rode close to Kai, her bronzed face tight with genuine, seasoned military concern.

"My King, standard ground ballistas cannot fire high enough to pierce the hulls of those floating fortresses," Zara warned quickly.

"If they position those massive solar mirrors directly over our marching column, they will melt this ice highway in ten seconds."

Kai did not look back at the boiling sea of glass burning three miles behind them.

He did not look up at the colossal marble fortresses dominating the clouds.

He simply reached into his silk robes and pulled out the [Frozen Ley-Spark].

The hyper-dense, baseball-sized crystal pulsed with an unyielding, terrifying blue gravity well in his bare hand.

"They are trying to force us to run blindly into the Weeping Bog," Kai analyzed coldly.

"Meriel thinks a wall of fire behind my back will make me panic."

Kai looked over at Yena, offering her a slow, genuinely amused smirk.

"He still does not understand how a blizzard works," Kai whispered.

He tossed the heavy, glowing crystal directly into the air above his stallion.

Instead of falling back down into his palm, the hyper-dense leyline fragment froze solid in mid-air fifty feet above the marching column.

Kai forcefully expanded his internal core, dumping two thousand units of pure mana directly into the floating crystal.

[System: Continental Ley-Spark Overclocked]

[Atmospheric Singularity Deployed]

[Calculating Thermal Absorption...]

The ambient air pressure above the viaduct instantly spiked to a crushing, supernatural density.

The massive, burning solar beams raining down from the floating sky-galleons violently struck the upper boundary of Kai’s invisible winter gravity well.

The divine fire did not reach the ice road.

The intense light beams violently bent inward, forcefully swallowed whole by the floating blue singularity.

The boiling sky-fire rapidly turned zero-degrees white, compressed into massive, floating rings of harmless, frozen solar plasma that orbited the Ley-Spark like frozen Saturn rings.

"He caught the sky-fire!" the young Dawnguard lieutenant cheered wildly, waving his iron spear toward the captured light.

"The King caught the sun!"

Thousands of rebel voices roared in absolute, deafening triumph, the raw terror of the sky-galleons dissolving into pure, unhinged worship.

Kai grabbed his black stallion’s reins, turning his starlight gaze back toward the northern road.

"We do not look behind us anymore," Kai commanded the eight thousand marching men.

"The desert is gone."

"The only way back home is straight through the Emperor’s chest."

He spurred his horse forward into the howling northern tundra storm, leaving the colossal, burning warships trapped uselessly behind his frozen sky-shield.